Microstory 2217: He Only Watched

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We’re at the hospital today for a check-up. There’s a lot that I can do for him. I can take care of his basic needs, help with physical therapy homework, and draw blood or run an IV drip. There are still things that a nurse or doctor needs to perform, though. He’ll probably be at the hospital about once a week from now on. While I was on their website to make sure we would park in the right lot, I found out that the hospital was putting on a little talent show. It wasn’t this grand, expensive affair, but the staff like to keep their patients active and in high spirits, so they do things like this sometimes. No one was being judged or ridiculed. Some of the talents were unimpressive by most people’s standards, like one elderly woman who just sort of slowly twirled around while she was looking up at the ceiling, waving her arms around occasionally. One of the radio techs beatboxed. It was a safe environment for people to be themselves, and maybe forget about why they were there. I don’t think that it worked for Nick, but it was worth a shot. He only watched, of course. There was no way I was convincing him to get up on that stage. He says that he wouldn’t have done anything like that on his best day. He’s not much of a performer, and has hated having to do things like that in the past, like for school. Lots of teachers told him that he would get used to it the more he tried it, but that never happened. Evidently, in his world, the culture assumes that everyone can do anything if they work hard enough at it, and obviously, that’s not true. This site was his way of reaching out to the world, and when I pointed that out to him, it actually seemed to resonate, so I’m hoping that means he’ll soon decide to inject his own thoughts back into it, even if that means he dictates what he needs me to type for him. One can hope.

Microstory 2172: Better If I’m Flexible

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I had an appointment at the hospital today. I was going to see the doctor, but he was busy, so a couple of nurses just took care of it. They measured my vitals, and took notes. They also took images to have analyzed by a radiologist. I’m recuperating about as well as should be expected given the extent of my injuries. There’s nothing that I should be particularly worried about. They want to see me again in a few weeks just to be sure my x-rays continue to follow the healing pattern. While I was still in the appointment, I got an email back from CauseTogether.hope. They say that the campaign to raise funds for my bills doesn’t violate any of their policies, so they’re unable to take it down for me. If I want, I can further appeal the decision, but I shot off a quick text to my lawyer, who thinks that probably nothing will come of it. I’m actively advertising my medical condition to the general public. My only legal argument could have been that the page interferes with my sense of privacy, but I’ve already let that ship sail. My therapist told me that my decision to be brutally honest here would come back to bite me in the ass. Well, not in so many words, she said it. Anyway, my lawyer said that we could try to take legal action against them, but I’m still on the other side of a completely different legal battle, though one which is also about the transparency of my posts. Do I have a problem? Am I just making my own life worse? Should I be changing every thing about what I do with my time, and how I do it? No, that’s crazy. This site saved a kidnapped girl, and gave me a job. I can’t just ignore those benefits because it has also come with consequences. As they would say back on my world, the invention of the ship was the invention of the shipwreck. That doesn’t mean they should never have invented the ship. Where would we be without them? Isolated, monolithic, or maybe even wiped out.

I did receive some good news, though. A subscriber slid into my DMs with an idea for a position that could be on my new consulting team for the jail. They think that we should hire a Reentry Specialist. While our work will mostly focus on what to do with the guests while they’re staying with us—and for this first job, for people who only come in intermittently—we would still benefit from hearing from someone with experience in helping the formerly incarcerated adapt to life on the outside. And anyway, we’re hoping that this is more of a pilot program, and less of a one-time thing. We may branch out to other facilities if we can prove the method effective, or even inspire others to come up with their own ideas around the country, or perhaps the world. The subscriber who suggested this job says that she has experience in this sort of thing, and she would be willing to move here from Wyoming if we offered it to her. Of course, we’re not there yet. I’m still doing a little work for my original job at this company, but I’ve written it down, and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Speaking of my current job, it will probably be over tomorrow. I’m just putting the finishing touches on the transition, and won’t need to be involved with any of that stuff for much longer. I think I’m just going to take a few days off of work, both to continue recovering physically, and to sort of reset my brain. My new friends for Homes for Humankind want to get together for a meal if I’m up for it, so I may do that. Their schedule is ever-shifting, but immovable once it does shift, so it will be better if I’m the flexible one. Hopefully we can get something on the books before I get back to the grind.

Microstory 2171: Not Gonna Happen, Buddy

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I’m feeling a lot better today, but I’m still taking it easy. It doesn’t take me five minutes to get from the bed to the bathroom anymore, so I call that a win. I have a follow-up appointment with the doctor tomorrow. They don’t technically have to sign off on me going back to work fulltime, but my employer will expect me to heed their advice, whatever it is. I won’t be starting my new contract work for the jail until next week either way. I’m currently in the middle of making sure that all of my work is being done by others on my team. They already had the pick up the slack while I was hurt and completely unable to, so it’s not like I have to spend hours training them. It’s protocol for us to share accounts so that we can fill in for each other as the need arises. We go on vacation, and it’s not like I was the first person in the company to take sick leave. So they know what they’re doing, and they’ll be fine without me until management can find a replacement. They’re probably going to be hiring a lot of people, both to fill out this new department that we’re building, and to backfill the jobs that become vacant from internal movements. They’re talking about hiring an assistant for me. They may only be a temp while I’m having trouble moving around in a physical sense. I don’t think that I need that, but at the same time, if they are willing to pay for it, who am I to say that this hypothetical future person doesn’t deserve the work? Back home, my sister was an international music teacher, who lived all over the world. It was often customary for her to have a housekeeper of some kind, not because she was suddenly in the one-percent, but because people needed jobs, and she could spare the money.

In my free time, I’m trying to come up with some initial ideas for how my new team will work. We’ll all meet together in one room, but I’ve broken them into four categories. The biggest one is for the counselors, like the behavior psychologist, and an experienced jail counselor. We need people on the technical side, like a computer expert, and a logistician. We’ll have legal too, like a criminal lawyer, and even a correctional officer. I’m thinking about including an immigration lawyer, because it may be necessary for some of the guests, but I don’t know about that yet. I don’t believe I’ll be putting a law enforcement officer on the team, though that could change in the future. Nothing has happened yet, and it’s not like we can’t hire new team members after the initial team is established. Lastly, there’s the social aspect, like a social worker. That might sound like it should be in the Psychology subdepartment, but I feel like there are more I can put in there who will deal more with community involvement than mental and emotional support. Obviously, all of this has to be approved by whoever my new boss ends up being, and the jail. Well, the jail can’t be involved in the hiring of the specific people, because that would constitute co-employment, and that is illegal. But they can give their input for what kind of positions will be on the team. After all, they’re the ones paying for the consulting. If we try to hire, say, an investment banker, or a surgeon, well...we may somehow find value in their contributions, but they get paid too much, so the jail would have the right to say, “not gonna happen, buddy.” They may decide that they only want one psychologist, or ask us to not hire a correctional officer, but let a current employee join our meetings. We’ll see. Let me know in the comments if you have any other ideas. I can’t spare the money for you, though.

Microstory 2170: Twist in My Life

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Oh man, big news today. I got a new job, sort of. I wasn’t looking for a new one, but it fell into my lap, kind of literally. The warden came by to inform me that he and the governor had been in talks with my employer for a special new contract. He gave me the paperwork while I was sitting in my recliner. I’ve yet to tell you who I work for, or what I do, and I still won’t give you specifics about it, but this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve loaned employees out to other companies for this sort of thing. They’re a consulting firm, and while I didn’t actually work as a consultant myself prior to this, I’m getting a sudden promotion into it for an entirely new sector of the industry for us. This new department will be helping other organizations who need to manage large groups of people. We’ll help them figure out how to sort them in the best way to be productive and healthy. They call it Team Dynamics. I may not be explaining it right, because I’m not in charge of that. I’m not the head of the department as a whole, just the first team. They’ll give me a new boss once they figure out who that’s going to be, whether they promote someone else internally, or hire from the outside. Until then, I’ll be officially operating out of the jail, but I can work from home when my team doesn’t have to meet in person, especially now in the beginning, before I’ve gathered the team in the first place. Which is good, since I’m still in recovery. My future superior may have different ideas later, but that’s the plan for now. This is all moving so fast, it’s crazy. I mean, we were talking about the prospect of this sort of thing, but I didn’t think that it would actually happen.

This is a huge opportunity for me. I’ve been in leadership positions before, but never formally. When I was a teenager, my scout troop started letting us join a second fake American Indian tribe. I don’t want to get into all that, but we were primarily in the “competing” tribe, so for this second one, I was one of the older boys. I helped the younger ones figure things out, even though we were all new. I started managing a team of new recruits when I volunteered after a huge hurricane when I was only eighteen, just because someone caught wind that I was good at computers (even though it was just about being young enough to be familiar with them) so I already had the list of volunteers in a spreadsheet, and all the real supervisors were away from the shelter when the newbies showed up. When I worked for a tax prep company, they put me in charge of the seasonal temps, even though I was also a temp, because the permanent employees didn’t want to have to do it. So I’ve never been a real boss before, and I’m pretty nervous about it. It will be my job to figure out, not only what kind of people need to be on the team, but also to locate the specific professionals. I’ll have to interview them, and make a hiring decision if they end up being a good fit. I don’t mind admitting that I don’t super know what I’m doing right now, so my first order of business is finding an advisor. This is what I naturally know how to do. I recognize talent in others, even if it’s not in a field that I’m familiar with. I assigned those other scouts to various jobs by recognizing their strengths, and also noticing what they weren’t very comfortable with. I’m nervous, but I’m hopeful. My sentence has been officially commuted by the governor, at least in terms of the jail time. I’ll still be required to finish my community service, and report to my parole officer weekly. I don’t have an issue with either of those things, though. I’m excited and hopeful about this unexpected twist in my life.

Microstory 1883: Air Band

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I was just playing around at a college party once. Somebody put on a record with a song that, in my day, we called my jam. I started pretending I was playing a guitar to the music, and since I knew the track so well, people got really into it. Pretty soon I was up on the coffee table, entertaining everybody. I, by no means, invented the air guitar. I did, however, do it my first time without having seen anyone else do it before, nor even having heard of it. Either way, I had no intention of turning it into a career. It was just for fun. I suppose it snowballed into it when I found myself at party after party, being asked to do it. I started having to bring my own records, so I would be better prepared to make it look real good. Not long after that, I was practicing in my apartment; all for the chance to please a few kids who would laugh about it while it was happening, and then go back home to not give it much thought anymore. During one of my weird and fun performances, a guy jumped up on the counter next to me, and started lip-syncing the vocals. It was a particularly voice-heavy song, which was my bad, so I was relieved he went up there to keep the energy up while the guitar wasn’t going. I would normally just keep dancing on my own, but it felt great to have a partner. After we were done, we left the party together to talk. He told me about his life, and I told him about mine. We both loved music, and were enamored by rockstars, but we weren’t musicians. Like, we were both really bad, there was no hope for us. Or rather there was, because as it turned out, there’s money to be made in pretending to play an instrument on stage. No joke.

This story does not involve a down-on-his-luck talent agent who discovers us at one of our not quite impromptu gigs, and decides to take us under his wing, even though his contemporaries laugh at him for it, but he believes in us, or truthfully, he believes in the cash that’ll be coming to him if he plays this right, so he gets so greedy that it nearly destroys us, but we come back stronger than ever, and go down in history as legends, and eventually end up in a sensationalized documentary. No, none of that happened. But we did start a band. We found ourselves a drummer—who was an actual, real drummer, by the way, so we never totally understood why he walked this path with us when he could have joined a legit band. We even got someone to pretend to play bass. It was my job to dance around and look pretty, while he always stayed lowkey. It sounds kind of stupid, but we made it work, and he was a pretty big draw for some of our crowds. And we did have crowds. Our rise to fame was shockingly parallel to what real bands go through. We started with small audiences, which grew bigger and bigger, until we were nationally famous, and then internationally so. Big in Japan, as my air vocalist liked to say. It still amazes me that any of this went anywhere. I guess it happened during the perfect time period. It was late enough for rock to be loud and showy, but before internet video, which might have saturated the market too much for us to make a name for ourselves. I don’t think we had much of a hand in developing the art form. Plenty of others were doing the same thing as us, though mostly as solo acts. We were just kind of this niche act that only made us enough money to keep doing it, but not do anything else with our lives, at least for as long as it lasted. The novelty wore off within a decade, and we each had to find real jobs. We remained good friends, though, and even played a final reunion gig a year ago before our bassist died. Yep. It was a wild life.

Microstory 1844: Extra

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People often ask me what made me want to be an actor, but I can’t point to anything. There wasn’t a moment when I was enthralled with a character on screen. There wasn’t an emotion I had never felt before. I don’t remember the first three years of my life, but it was that version of me who made the decision for the both of us. As far as I know, I have always been an actor, and I never could have been anything else. I begged my parents to move to Los Angeles, but they refused. I honestly believe they would have agreed to it if we had lived in, I dunno, Tennessee, or something. They were so supportive of my dreams, but we were in New York, so I guess they looked at it as a lateral move. “If you want to act, you can do it here,” my mom would tell me. I didn’t want to do stagework, though. I wanted to be on the screen. I wanted to shoot something once, and have anybody in the world be able to see it again forever and ever. As the years went by, I didn’t let my living situation get in my way. I went to auditions for things that were shooting in the area, and while I didn’t get any roles, I think I gained a lot of great experience. That’s how I saw it. Every failure was just a step towards success. Then I got the audition that changed my life. I can’t remember what the role was exactly. I think I was a little too old for it, but the casting director was handing out little flyers calling for extras. There were going to be huge crowds in the movie, so they were trying to fill out the streets. It was an alien invasion, so we had to run from spaceships flying down to kill us. I thought, all right, it’s just more experience, right? It was so great, being on set around all those people. We were all there for the same thing; to support the main cast, and we all understood our jobs.

I had to join a talent agency to get more parts like that, and I found myself preferring it. I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to be an actor. Yeah, that’s how I got started, but I ended up enjoying staying in the background. I wasn’t getting noticed, but I met a lot of really cool people, including celebrities, and it was always fun. It was pretty steady work too. Film crews always needed people like me to make it look like their story took place in the real world, instead of a snowglobe, like Waiting For Godot. Then my career changed again. I was in a movie about a demon who could possess recently deceased bodies. In one scene, he was having a menacing conversation with the hero on the battlefield, so there were plenty of fresh bodies to possess. Several of the extras were elevated a little bit to actually say a few lines before crumpling to the ground, and making way for the next possession. Luck of the draw, mine was the last body used before the protagonist realized how to kill the demon permanently. So instead of just falling down like the others, I had to pretend to die. I was given no direction for this, I had to figure it out myself. Everyone on set was extremely pleased with my performance. We nailed that thing in one take, and the audience received it well. People were talking about it online, trying to figure out who I was, because I wasn’t credited for it. This was my big break, and I didn’t even see it coming. Talent agencies started reaching out to me, hoping to book me auditions for speaking parts, and I ended up choosing one out of L.A. By then, I had enough money to get out there on my own, and get back to what I originally wanted. I die today with 56 titles on my résumé, the last of which will have to be released posthumously. My agent says she’ll get me a dedication credit.

Microstory 1428: Waterloo

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A great many people turned out to compete in the second vicennial Mage Selection Games. There were now four separate towns on Durus, with a fifth one in the middle of being built, and a sixth one in its planning stages. Knowing that these, as well as two more, would require mages to protect them by the time the next competition could backfill their ranks, the source mages selected a great many winners. Each town was thusly being protected by about fifty per cent more than they figured they needed, with further excess being sent off on other missions, like dam repair, and exploration. Most of the new mages wanted to be assigned to one of these other things, because it gave them a chance to get out, and look around. People otherwise didn’t generally go anywhere. They didn’t even travel to each other’s towns all that often. Being a mage, in some ways, meant more freedom and agency. Rumat Dunn was particularly disappointed when he was sent off to work in Splitsville. There was nothing wrong with this town, but it was the least coveted role, because it still maintained a lot of its border protection through the use of technology. The mages stationed there knew there wasn’t much work to do. Many were perfectly happy with that, being the backup force in the event the power grid suffered some kind of failure. Still, there were not enough of these volunteers, so some just had to accept their positions. It wasn’t like they would be stuck there for the entirety of their twenty-year contract. Transfers happened all the time; they just weren’t known to happen at a town mage’s request. It was something the source mages, and their advisors, decided, using whatever protocols they had in place. It was all a delicate balance that involved placing people where their work would do the most good for the community. For instance, temporal anomaly detectors—which were capable of sensing when a time monster was near—were great for any town to have, but no town really benefited from having more than one. So if there were only four of those, they would necessarily be placed separately. A new town mage spent two months in extremely intense training after being sourced, during which time their powers, their skills to use those powers, and their other talents, would be assessed. So when the source mages told Rumat that he belonged in Splitsville, that meant he belonged in Splitsville. Unfortunately, Rumat never accepted where he was assigned, and spent a lot of his time trying to prove that he was worthy to be transferred somewhere else. He was specifically interested in helping construct the as of yet unnamed fifth town, which was being built by a single construction crew, in realtime. It was located nearest to the broken portal that was sending the time monsters to their world, so Town Five was notably more dangerous than the other four, and required some pretty powerful mages to protect it. Rumat was good, but he wasn’t the best, and either way, Splitsville needed him, and in the future, others would too.

He had the power to open what came to be known as filter portals. No object of significant size would be able to pass through, so it wasn’t like normal teleportation. The best application of this ability was irrigation. He could instantly transport fluid from anywhere on the planet, to anywhere else. For now, Splitsville was located the farthest from Watershed, so it benefited most from this power, but the people in charge of planning Town Six were interested in choosing a site that was even farther away. Rumat didn’t care about any of this, and didn’t have the patience for delayed gratification. He thought he could use these powers to attack the monsters, if the authorities simply gave him the opportunity. They wouldn’t, so he grew angry, and lashed out. He flooded Splitsville from within by portaling massive amounts of water into its borders. They wanted him to irrigate, so he was gonna irrigate, and they weren’t going to be able to stop him. Well, they did stop him, and he didn’t like the way they did it. Now that he was contained, however, there was a problem. They didn’t have any clue what they were going to do with him. The source mages had never come to a decision of what to do about someone with powers who caused problems such as this. They had a jail, and forced labor, but neither of these things would be able to keep Rumat down. Some suggested exile, but that wouldn’t work either. Durus was a very, very small planet. It might even have actually once been a moon. The only reason the surface gravity was comparable to Earth was because it was so dense. There were no oceans or islands, so there really wasn’t anywhere to exile anybody. They might have made him go to the broken portal, but that would be a death sentence, and capital punishment hadn’t been legal here since the Smithtatorship. The source mages only had one option, and they were saving it for such an occasion, because they didn’t want people to know they were capable of it until they had no choice. They stripped Rumat of his powers completely, which few people were aware was possible. This changed everything about the Mage Protectorate, and how people viewed the sources. The good news was that their plan worked, and Rumat would go down in history as the first and last criminal mage ever.

Microstory 1427: Hardtland

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By the year 2048, there were over 4,000 people living on Durus. Some were in Springfield, some were in Splitsville, and some were in the still new town of Parade. There were pretty evenly divided too, which seemed to suggest to people that there was some kind of population standard for a town. Maybe there ought to be about a thousand to twelve hundred people together, and no more. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily true. Everyone could have easily lived in the same area, and any further space they needed, they could have found simply by expanding outwards. Still, a lot of people alive in the middle of the century remembered what it was like to be on Earth. The Springfield they could remember was a small town, and most of them chose to move, or stay, there for that reason. By building more towns, they were better simulating what life should be like for them. They wanted to be able to live in one place, but visit another, instead of just having everyone and everything within reach at all times. It just made sense. So they founded a fourth town, which they called Hardtland, in honor of their late leader, Councilwoman Hardt. Calling it a town, however, was a bit of a misnomer. It was more of a rural sprawl, as buildings were spread out, and only placed inside natural clearings in the wooded area where it was located. This was a major operation, which required the cooperation of a lot of people who were not even planning to move there once it was finished, which they hoped would be within a year. They chose not to expedite the process with temporal powers, like they did with Parade, instead relying on dozens of independent construction crews. They now had plenty of mages to protect them while they worked, and planning was so detailed that they easily managed to complete the project according to schedule. The first families officially moved into their new homes in the summer of 2049, and town mages were temporarily assigned to keep guard. Now that there was an entirely new border to protect, plans would have to be adapted, so that enough mages were selected in the next Mage Games, but some realized that it couldn’t stop there. This development also prompted an overhaul of the whole system. Experts did some math, and realized they even needed to be thinking further in the future than that. The next competition would be held in a year, and the next one after that wouldn’t be for another twenty. By the time that rolled around, the number of towns would likely double. This was a truth they confirmed with two separate seers, who knew a little about the future of the Durune population. If more people were going to be selected as mages than ever before, the source mages would have to reexamine their criteria for acceptance. More importantly, they decided they needed to help people prepare for this time, so they weren’t only depending on natural talent. They quickly threw together a training regimen, so hopefuls would already have an idea of what would be expected of them when the contest was held. Worried it wouldn’t be enough, this contest was also pushed back three months. People would later say that it probably should have been delayed a year, though, because of what happened.