Microstory 2265: Be One Small Part of It

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I’m glad that I waited, because what I’ve learned is that I’m not really allowed to tell you hardly anything about what’s happening with my upcoming interview. I can’t even tell you the date that it’s happening. All I can say is that the local part of the local talk show is going to be stretched pretty thin for just the one episode. Well, stretch is a bit of a stretch. (Ha, that’s funny.) They’re just not going to be local at all. Apparently, the whole station is part of some kind of group of dozens of other local stations. They call it a Regional Network Cooperative, and while I can’t totally explain what they do, it’s not that they’re owned by a parent company, but they do enjoy some kind of collaborative relationship. I think the biggest benefit of this is that, if one region comes up with a certain segment—say a fun game for their guests—another region can use it too, and even call it the same thing, without worrying about a legal issue. They may negotiate advertising deals too, though don’t quote me on that. Anyway, they would like to try something new with the episode that I’ll be on, which involves simulcasting it in other, or maybe even all, regions in the cooperative. If this pans out, it’s going to take some time to coordinate, because other regions may have special segments that they’ll want to include. It’s not like I’ll be on there for several hours on end. I’ll still only be one small part of it. Obviously, this only puts more pressure on me, but who am I to decline? I’ll just keep practicing with my interview specialist, and hope that I don’t screw this up. Or if I do, hope that I can leave this world eventually, and escape from the humiliation. Whew, that kind of sounds a little like suicide. Sorry, I meant that I might literally leave this world, and travel to another, which I’ve done before. No violence here. Carry on. I’ll tell you more about the thing when the legal department says that I can.

Microstory 2029: Michigan

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Papa’s bosses must have heard me from the past, lol, because they ended up taking one of their submarines on a trip. They took a ferry to get to that island in Connecticut, but they didn’t do it like that when they all went to Michigan. They worked in Chicago, which is on the southern part of Lake Michigan. I don’t know if it was a new sub, or what, but in 2011, they all crammed into it, and took it all the way up north, to the other side of the giant lake. They ended up in a city in Michigan called Mackinaw City. It was the first time anyone had done anything like that. That wasn’t the point of the trip, though. They actually wanted to get to the city. Well, they were outside of the city. It was for something called a corporate retreat. It was summertime, so once they landed at the docks, they took cars into the woods. That’s where they played games, and learned how to work with each other. At that point, the company was over ten years old. A lot of people wanted to work there, so there were new workers who weren’t there before. Most of the people at the retreat didn’t know each other very well. A company built the camp to help other companies’ teams work together better. My papa was in charge of it for his team, but he also participated in the games and exercises. When it was over, most of them just flew back home, but papa got to go back in the submarine again. He stopped at other cities in Michigan along the way, because he had always wanted to see them. Then he took it back to the submarine base, and went home.

Microstory 1270: The Bird and the Cat

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When a cat’s owner first brought home a new pet bird, the cat was hungry. He eyed the bird up in her cage, and dreamed of chomping down on her meat. The bird showed no fear, but did not antagonize the cat either. Over time, the bird and the cat became friends. The cat always had plenty of food to eat, and there was no need for them to be enemies. She would sing him sweet songs, and he would tell her fun stories. The cunning cat even figured out how to open the bird’s cage, so she could fly free when their owner was not home. One night, the owner left some chestnuts to roast under the fire. “Oh, how we would like those chestnuts,” tweeted the bird.

“They would be mighty tasty,” purred the cat. “But we could never get them.”

“You could,” the bird said to him. “You are quick and sly. Pull them out one at a time.”

“They are too hard for my teeth,” the cat lamented. “The owner cracks them open for me, and lets me have a little every year.”

“If you get us the chestnuts,” suggested the bird, “I will crack them open for us.”

“You promise to share?” the cat asked.

“I promise,” said the bird.

And so the cat reached into the fire, and retrieved the savory nuts with his fast paws. As he did this, the bird cracked them open with her mighty beak. All told, they were able to secure nearly two dozen chestnuts between the two of them! The bird ate eleven, and the cat ate eleven. They then buried the remaining nut into the rug, hoping to spring a new chestnut tree, because they were animals, and they didn’t know any better. But they were full animals, and happy, and together.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Monkey and the Cat.

Microstory 1187: Joanna Zegers

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Joanna Zegers wasn’t the only person who could be invisible, but she was the only one who couldn’t turn visible. She was a normal baby at birth. Her parents took fine care of her, and had no reason to believe something was wrong. When she was six years old, she thought her family was playing a trick on her when they started acting like they couldn’t find her. She kept hopping around and laughing, trying to get them to see her, but they couldn’t. They, in fact, thought someone was playing a cruel trick on them, and had perhaps hidden little speakers around their house. They could hear Joanna’s voice, but not see her. She never got over this affliction. In this universe, invisibility did not bend light, or form illusions. All it did was take take a snapshot of a region of space, at some point in time, then overlay that in front of what people should be seeing when Joanna was standing there. To explain another way, even when an individual is standing in front of a box of tissues, that box still exists. It doesn’t get removed from reality just because no one is observing it. What Joanna’s power—if you could rightly call it that—did was show what the table and tissue box would look like if she weren’t blocking its view. The Zegers didn’t know what they were going to do with her. The library didn’t have any answers for them. There were no publicly-known cases of something like this having happened. They couldn’t send her to school in this condition. They couldn’t even take her to any medical professionals. Doctor-patient confidentiality might not have extended to a transdimensional alien robot from the future, or whatever she was. Instead, they kept her home, claiming to neighbors that she contracted a disease that prevented her from being able to go out in the sun. It wasn’t entirely untrue anyway. Then the world changed, and they gained access to a whole new resource.

Somebody invented this technology called the world wide web, which allowed them to seek information from all over the globe; as far as they knew, anonymously. Most of the info out there was garbage. People thought they were just making up an unoriginal story. Others played along, just to troll them. There was one man, however, who knew what they were talking about. The leader of an intelligence cooperative named Demcov Sands reached out, and made every effort to prove that he was legit. He said that he could help Joanna understand what she was, and lead a healthy life. He couldn’t promise he could figure out how to make her visible again, but he would help in anyway possible. There were no other people in the Interagency Alliance Commission who had time powers, but Sands had knowledge of the future, and knew it one day would. He took Joanna in, and helped her continue her studies in a safe environment, surrounded by people who specialized in keeping secrets. Her parents were worried about letting their daughter live at a spy agency headquarters, but Sands promised them she would never be in danger, and that he was not intending to groom her for spycraft. It was the best place for her to be at the time, but once she grew up, she could decide what she wanted to do with her life, just like everyone else. True to this promise, the IAC taught her everything she would have learned at a normal school. She didn’t want to become a spy; a decision everyone knew she would make. She did want to help, however, so Sands started teaching her about the world of salmon and choosers. He introduced her to some friends, and made the entirety of time and space available to her desires. She chose to move to the future, where she worked as Head of Security at Beaver Haven Rehabilitation Center. She became responsible for the daily ongoing safety or hundreds of prisoners from all over spacetime, and those whose lives they would threaten.

Microstory 498: Provider

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The Provider, as you would imagine, is known for being incredibly generous. He spends most of his time worrying about others, and making sure they know that he’s available for them. He has leadership qualities—and is, in fact, placed in a position of power for the team—but chooses to have little to do with actual decision-making. Instead, he finds himself roaming from unit to unit, offering moral support and spiritual advice. He does not feel that he knows more about cooking than anyone else but gladly contributes in that area, ensuring everyone’s needs are met, both physically and emotionally. Think of him as a stereotypical bartender, pointlessly wiping down the bar...listening intently to your problems. He treats the people around him very much like The Counselor in that way. One thing that makes this easier for him is his excellent social memory. He never forgets a name, and never forgets a face. Nor is he likely to forget anything someone told him about themselves, no matter how insignificant. He’s the guy who asks you about your neighbor’s once-ill pet years after you mentioned it in passing during a brief conversation. He is very concerned with the quality of the group’s dynamic. Though they don’t really have any downtime, he sort of forces upon them his agenda of team-building and cooperation. With all these different types of people trying to work together, he understands the necessity of creating a healthy and well-balanced work environment. His life has not always been so great and fulfilling, though. His desire to provide for people was stunted while working at a dead-end sales job for a large corporation. He felt disgusting selling people things that they didn’t need, and eventually generated enough courage to quit and try to make something good out of his life. People were surprised when he joined the military, but he saw no greater service to his convictions. It is perhaps his actions that make the greatest impact on the future of the galaxy.