Microstory 2063: It Was Murder

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I’ve been thinking a lot about my friends, Cricket and Claire. If I never see them again, I would at least like to know that they’re safe and still together. I placed a not-so-cryptic ad in the newspaper, asking if anyone else happens to be from another universe. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Nick Fisherman IV, you’re going to get a lot of crazies who never actually traveled the bulkverse. But here’s the thing, I don’t care. If they’re not lying, then maybe we can figure something out, or maybe we’ll just commiserate together. If they are lying, who cares? I’ve told you how boring this world is. It would be a nice change of pace to meet someone who doesn’t think like everyone else. Hell, they could be a dangerous psychopath, and that would still be better than all this tedium. Welp, that’s all I got for ya today. I’ll let you know if anyone responds to my ad. Just as a little disclaimer, no matter what the autopsy says...it was murder.

Microstory 2062: From Womb to Tomb

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Right. I was going to tell you how I got my name. I might as well. Nothing is happening today. My symptoms are about as bad as they were yesterday. I told you that I have a bad memory, though, so maybe I’m wrong about that. I tried looking for a website or app that helps you keep track of your health and mood, but it doesn’t exist. You’re so uncreative here. I want to call you small-minded, but that’s usually reserved for people who don’t like things like diversity, or can’t see the forest through the trees. It’s more like you don’t do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Could a health tracker app save lives? Maybe. But also maybe not, and it hasn’t occurred to you to try. Anyway, I’m rambling again. My name. Nick Fisherman IV. Why that number? Well, I can’t give you too many details, but the original Nick Fisherman never called himself the first. He just was the first. I don’t know much about him, but in the universe he lived in, he was being monitored by what you could think of as a guardian angel. Except that these angels didn’t guard anything. They only served as observers. They watched your whole life from womb to tomb, and never interfered. These never-called angels had no emotions, nor personal motivations. Or rather, they weren’t supposed to. The one responsible for the first Nick Fisherman developed feelings for his subject, and ultimately decided to adopt the name for himself. Thus was birthed Nick Fisherman II. This story was passed onto me after he accidentally became my observer. I wasn’t meant to ever be assigned one of them, but it happened, and since that was an interesting development, the leadership just let it keep going. Fast forward to my adulthood, I ended up going back in time, and creating a new timeline. I’ve let my other self go by Nick Fisherman III, which leaves me as the fourth. So there you go. There’s the story, as vague as is needed under the circumstances. Keep reading III’s “fictional” stories, and you may learn a little more about it.

Microstory 1750: Wolves in the Woods

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Every night it’s the same thing. I’m creeping through the forest, trying to find a safe place to hide. Even though I dream of the same place every time, I don’t always remember at first what it is I’m running from. Sometimes I’m not even running from anything, but towards something good. Only later do I learn that there are wolves all around me. One is angry, one is sad. Another is guilty, and yet another is hateful. Some of them try to attack me, but mostly they just attack each other, fighting over prey. I try to keep them apart, but that usually only makes things worse. They battle it out, and whoever wins is how I’ll feel in the morning. The wolves do not merely have these feelings themselves, but represent them. It’s not just an angry wolf, but the wolf of anger, and every time it wins, I wake up angry. Of course, the wolves aren’t real, this is just my subconscious preparing me for the day ahead, upon a foundation of the days behind. I’m not angry because my anger wolf won. The anger wolf won because I’m angry. Presumably, I heard The Tale of Two Wolves when I was young, and it stuck with me in a profound way. Everyone supposedly has two wolves inside of them, fighting each other, which determine your personality. The one who wins is the one you feed. I don’t feed any of my wolves. I guess I’ve always considered that their problem. None of them has died yet, I’ll tell you that much, but honestly, the wolf of contentment hasn’t been looking too good these days. I dream of nothing but my wolves. One of my many therapists once suggested I keep a dream journal, because he figured I actually was having other dreams, but I was just so focused on the one that I never remembered the other symbolic stories. He was wrong. It is only the wolves in the woods.

I’m seeing a new therapist today who specializes in hypnosis. I’m hoping she can get into my head, and perhaps take the wolves out. It would be nice if I could dream about something not so bloody on the nose. I mean, the wolves are a metaphor, but it’s so obvious, it makes me feel like such a basic person. My subconscious mind can’t come up with something more clever—maybe something slightly more difficult to interpret? Really? Hell, I’ll take walking into school with no clothes on, or my teeth falling out, just to get some variety, even though those are still basic. The hypnotist sits me down in a chair, but after we get to talking, she decides that hypnosis is not for me. She doesn’t think it’s going to help, but she thinks maybe I can handle the problem on my own. My issue is that I have no control over the dreams, so they consume me. It’s like the wolves are deciding who I am without giving me any say. If I want to interact with them, I have to assume control. I have to learn how to have lucid dreams. She says to restart the dream journal, that it will help me, but also gives me some books which spell out some other techniques. Not all methods work on everybody, so I need to find what fits me. I read the books cover to cover, and formulate a plan. Then I go to sleep, and enter the woods. All of the wolves are in one place this time, sitting quietly in a pack, apparently waiting for my instructions. “All right, wolves,” I say. “We’re gonna do this in an orderly fashion. No more fighting for scraps. We hunt together, we dine together. Everyone gets their fair share.” From then on, I continue to have the same dream, but I’m in charge now. The wolf who wins is the one I feed? If that’s true, then I’m going to try to stay balanced, not even bothering to kill the negative wolves. I’m going to feed them all.

Microstory 1541: Dreaming of Days

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When I was in ________ grade, our ________ asked us to start ________ a dream journal. It was a simple enough ________. Some ________ had more trouble with it than others, because some ________ just don’t remember their ________ as well. I’ve never been one of those people. I remember my dreams vividly, though I wouldn’t call that a gift. They aren’t frightening most of the ________, but they are boring. It was during the other students’ ________ that I realized everyone else dreamed of ________ things, like a world in negative colors, or having ________ for feet, and ________ for hands. I just dream about ________; about regular daily life. I wake ________, drink some ________, go to work at a boring ________, come home, eat alone, and go back to ________. Or sometimes I come ________ to a family, or a ________, or a bird. It’s never the same ________, but it’s never exciting either. I’m not myself in my dreams, but ________ else, and I don’t even think the same someone else, because I keep taking ________ routes to different jobs. Fortunately, I wasn’t the first to do my ________, so this gave me enough time to fib. I made up ________ that were more fantastical and interesting, because no one wanted to hear the true ________ if they were going to be that sad and ________. After that, I moved on with my life, but I would continue this ________ of making up my dreams, instead of relating the real ones to ________. It’s not like the subject came up a lot, of course, but people did ________ ask me about them, and I got used to the lying. I got so ________ at it that when it came to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, being a ________ writer made the most sense. Things were going ________, I wasn’t the most famous ________ in the ________, but I was making a ________ living sending short stories to various ________ magazines. I kind of made it my thing to claim that my work was inspired by my dreams. I don’t think there’s any legal issue with that. I hope not, at least. One ________, I even slipped in one of my real ________, just to see how it would be ________. It didn’t get great ________, but they actually weren’t that bad. There were just fewer of them this time, because fewer ________ were ________ in providing their ________. It was only an ex____, so that’s fine.

Anyway, my critics and ________ aren’t the only people who get a hold of this story. A ________ contacts me, demanding to know how long I’ve been ________ on him. I tell him I’m doing no such thing, that I don’t know who he is, but he’s not ________ it. He starts ________ my latest story, which...whatever, anyone can do that, but then he adds details that I never released to the public, because they’re even more ________ within the boring. He mentions the ________ of his briefcase, and the look of the novelty clock in the ________. This ________ was somehow in my dream, and I have to find out how the hell he did it. So against my better ________, I agree to meet him at his apartment two ________ over. It’s not just familiar, it’s exactly the same ________ I saw in my dream. He takes me back down____, and down the ________, and all the way to where he ________. I’ve seen it all before, this is from my dream. We continue on our ________ through town, trying to work out what’s going on together. I start to realize everything feels ________. All of my dreams, though no two are the same; they all apparently take ________ in this same town. I think at any ________ I will wake up, and this will also turn out to be a dream, but I never do. I go back ________ to consult my ________ journal, and I start mapping out the ________. Then I return to this town to meet other ________ whose lives I’ve borne witness to. They all exist, they’re all ________. Then we go deeper, and check the ________. I’m not just watching other people’s ________, but events that would not happen to them for another ________ days. I can see the ________, but only in this one town, and that’s what makes it the least impressive power I’ve ever heard of, because the more time I ________ here—as fascinating as the ________ itself is to investigate—the more bored I become.

Microstory 1174: Juan Ponce de León

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Famous explorer, Juan Ponce de León lived in the late fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. But he also lived in an incalculably high number of other time periods. When he arrived on the Florida coast, he was surprised to find another apparent westerner waiting for him there. The woman spoke of the Fountain of Youth, which up until that point, Juan had never heard of. Still, he was curious, so he broke from his crew, and set about on a journey through the wilderness. Upon reaching what was supposedly his destination, he discovered what appeared to be a dried up river bed. At first he was discouraged, not in disappointment for having missed out on a magical elixir that could make him immortal, but because he felt a fool for having believed it existed in the first place. Just to be safe, however, he decided to dig, but did not intend to go very deep. Perhaps the water was deep underground. He just kept thinking that he only need scoop out one more handful, and water would spring forth. It never did, but he did eventually come across a compass. It must have been buried there for a long time, but it was in pristine condition. Curious, he started fiddling with the device, and after awhile, a rectangular light appeared before him, as if he had created it. Curiouser still, he pushed forward, and stepped into the light, where he found himself face to face with a bus. The bus was not moving, so he was in no danger, but he had no clue what this magnificent structure was. He looked around, and discovered there to be dozens of other buses like it, all in a row. He walked a little farther, until he came upon the road, where similar vehicles were ferrying their passengers to various destinations. He continued to do what he does best, and explored this strange new world, quickly learning this to be hundreds of years in the future. He only stopped when he finally encountered a library, where he could learn almost everything he wanted to know about what had happened to the world after he’d left it.

When he wasn’t studying the books, Juan was studying his new compass. Over time, he learned to navigate this special time object, and moved all across time and space, meeting all sorts of interesting people. Other time travelers started calling him The Navigator, which he had to admit, he quite liked. He learned several languages, beheld beautiful things, and witnessed terrible tragedies. He kept fairly detailed journals of his experiences, but even he didn’t quite know how long he had been gone from home. The possibility of a Fountain of Youth continued to nag at him, and he felt compelled to learn more about it. Certain other travelers believed it to be real, in some form, but even they thought the immortality water was just too difficult to procure. Yet he persisted in his search. Many times, some of the ingredient waters were in his grasp, but he had to give it up, to help others, or because he wouldn’t be able to find all of the ingredients in time. Each one was in a different place and time, and would go bad if they weren’t all found before the timer ran out. Following what must have been years from his perspective, Juan decided to create a map. He sought out each ingredient independently, but did not take any. Instead, he simply confirmed its authenticity, and then moved onto the next, until he had a clear picture of everything he would need. Then, he got a good night’s rest, tied his sweet kicks, and set about on his journey. He literally ran through the continuum, opening portals like a pro, and never stopping until he had checked off the entire list. His efforts proved fruitful, when he drank the waters, and became truly immortal. So now, Juan Ponce de León could never be killed, but that still left him with a terrible conundrum. He hadn’t seen his family in many years, and once he returned to them, would have to watch them die. This he could not have. He got his hands on something called a homestone, which delivers its user directly to when and where they first were when they first started traveling through time. He went back to his family, and his life. Then he frequently ushered everyone he cared about through his compass portals, and along the route towards the immortality waters. His whole family, sooner or later, became just like him. Now the only question that remained was, where in the world could they possibly live?

Microstory 1161: Ida Reyer

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After the death of her husband, Ida Laura Pfeiffer decided to fulfill her dream of becoming an explorer. She went all over the world, from Brazil to Persia; Australia to Oregon. She also jumped through time. In 1851, she found herself in Kansas City when it was still in its very early infancy, and there she met a woman named Holly Blue. Holly Blue was from the future, and after a weeks-long relationship, sort of accidentally admitted to Ida who she really was. Ida asked her to take her with her on trips throughout spacetime, but Holly Blue refused. At this point in her own personal history, she hadn’t yet discovered a way for nontravelers to safely travel through time. Certain people were capable of it, while others would experience terrible medical issues. She later overturned this decision, but it was long after Ida had left Kansas City, and returned to her life. Holly Blue went back to eleven years before they were meant to meet, and rewrote her own history—and Ida’s. She bequested Ida one of her newest, and most valuable inventions, which she called The Compass of Disturbance. Holly Blue disappeared without giving any explanation for why she chose Ida for this give, presumably not wanting to repeat their unfortunate breakup. The compass turned out to be a powerful tool. Its main purpose was to seek out, and stabilize, natural tears in the continuum, which would allow a user to travel through them, even if they wouldn’t otherwise be able to survive the trip unharmed. It had other functions as well, but it took months of trial and error to understand them all. And so Ida began to lead a double life. She spent part of her time exploring the world in her own time period, but part of it elsewhere. She particularly enjoyed going into the far, far future, because life there was just so fundamentally different. In her travels, she encountered others, but they were born to manipulate time, and did not require technology to do so. She learned of special places with unusual temporal properties, and of other objects that regular humans would be able to utilize. She even discovered that there was a way to live forever, given the right ingredients. Unlike her successor, Juan Ponce de León, Ida had no interest in finding immortality water, or in living forever. She wanted to live a full life, partially in the future, and partially in her own time, and she wanted to write about her travels. The reason she kept exploring her own world was so that she could publish her adventures, and build a legacy. That was her way of living forever. She knew it wouldn’t be safe to author her time travel stories, but she kept a fairly detailed diary in the internal memory of the Compass of Disturbance itself. A few years in, she met someone who recommended she go ahead and publish those works, so they could be distributed to people who had the permission to see them. She took her up on that advice, and eventually ended up with a full series on her life that most people in the world would never see, yet it made her more famous than would have been without the books. The woman who suggested she do that was known as The Historian, and anyone wishing to read her work, or those of others like her, could find copies in the library section of her museum on Tribulation Island.

Microstory 389: Acknowledgement

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As I’ve said about a million times here, I have autism. I honestly didn’t know if I was going to mention it here. Actually, no, the thought didn’t even cross my mind. I had no intention of bringing myself into this site except in the usual “write what you know” kind of thing. I was diagnosed as an adult, but even before I knew, I knew. In fact, I can go back to a journal entry I wrote in either middle school or very early high school where I admit this to myself. Basically the deal with autism is that, whatever other kind of psychological problems you have going on, they’ll really just be part of that. Because autism is not a disease. It’s an array of conditions found, to a certain degree, in a quantifiable fraction of the population. Ultimately, I have a neuroatypical brain, and you have a neurotypical brain, but they’re both just human brains. This is the way I am, it’s integral to my identity, and though I do want to become a better person, I don’t want to get rid of it. That would be lobotomy, and no one wants that. Before I understood all this about myself, and even since then, I’ve been “the quiet one”. Those who don’t know me can be confused by this. People have actually been pissed off that I don’t engage them in a stupid goddamn conversation about the meaning of the temperature today being one degree different than yesterday. Man, stop talking about the weather. I really need you to let it go. Anyway, here’s the kicker. Those who do know me know that I prefer to be quiet, so they let that happen. They go about their conversations and leave me out of it, because I usually don’t want to contribute. But sometimes I do, and how am I supposed to get their attention? This is a very literal example of what I’m saying here, and I can confirm and not deny that I told this story so I could stretch out the next few entries. The first step to being an accepted and respected member of a group or society is acknowledgement. People have to first realize you’re even there, and only then can you possibly get them to hear what you have to say.

Attention

Microstory 137: Posie McKenna

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Posie McKenna was born in Bloomington, Indiana to a fairly wealthy family. She had a pretty happy childhood, and worked at a number of jobs as she grew up, always interested in learning a multitude of skills. After receiving her college degree in psychology, she took out some time for travel, and to find her purpose in life. After a couple of years, she decided to return home and expand on her psychology background by going to licensure school so that she could earn her certification to be a paramour. Though sex-based therapy was a preexisting profession, Posie was a pioneer in her field, and innovated a number of special techniques that were published in journals and adopted by her contemporaries. As far as being an anomaly went, she had the ability to store her own and other people’s memories, along with any other data, in everyday objects. Like Upton Starr’s and Patience Cooney’s stones, the data wasn’t actually being stored in the objects themselves, rather they served as focal points to artificial dimensions. Her ability would later help advance computer systems as a whole, but in terms of her personal life, she found no use for it. In line with her nomadic tendencies, Posie agreed to join Bellevue, continuing her work, but now as the in-house paramour. She would later be put in charge of records and archives, but that never took up much of her time.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 23, 2016

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The time jump caused Mateo Matic to wake up. He heard footsteps running up the stairs. His father, Randall burst into the room. “Oh, thank God you’re back.”

“Has it been another year?”

His mother, Carol appeared in the doorway. “It has. This is not going to stop on its own. We already have an appointment set up for you. I don’t want to spend what little time we may have together at the hospital, but—”

“I know it has to be done,” Mateo interrupted. “We’ll have all the time in the world if we can figure out how to stop it.”

The appointment wasn’t until eleven in the morning. So after eating fourth meal, Mateo went up to the attic to look through some of the family belongings passed down through generations. He sat up there for hours, combing through everything he could find that had anything to do with his biological family tree. Most of the journal entries were mundane, and it wasn’t like his family kept records of absolutely everything they did. He had just gotten to a journal written in the mid-19th century by his great great great great grandmother when Carol called him down for the appointment. He stalled her, needing to learn more. The journal talked about when she first met her husband. He had appeared out of nowhere one day, dressed in outdated attire. Carol called him again, and he was forced to put the journal away for another time; perhaps for an entire year.

He spent the rest of the day undergoing medical tests. They drew blood, put him in machines, and asked him a lot of questions. Of course, he couldn’t reveal to them why these tests were so desperately needed. In the end, there was no conclusion. None of the preliminary results showed anything abnormal. It would be a couple weeks before they had all the information, which meant that his parents wouldn’t be able to discuss it with him for a year.

He was sitting in the waiting room for urgent care while his parents confided in a family friend who was a nurse in that department. A teenager came in with her father. He set her down in a chair across from Mateo. “Sit here while I check you in. Maybe you won’t drink after tonight.” The girl looked completely miserable. She was holding a plastic grocery sack, clearly filled with vomit. She was dry heaving and moving her head up and down, trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t exist. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were teared up, probably from the strain.

“First time?” Mateo asked.

She massaged her forehead. “No, but he was right. It’s probably my last. I think a guy put something—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Vomit rolled out of her mouth and into the bag. On the other side of the room, a guy vomited into his own bucket, as if it were a response to her. Illness was trending. As the girl tried to cough up more, the bag slipped from her grip and fell to the floor, spilling its contents. She instinctively pulled her head away from it. “Oh my God!” Before she could do anything else, though, more came up suddenly, much of it landing in Mateo’s lap. She just stared at him in horror, having no idea what she could say to him. After several days, and many years, it would turn out to be their meet-cute.

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