Microstory 2176: And Young

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2, and by Pixlr AI image editor

The thing about the way that I’ve developed my website is that I can sometimes get trapped in my own format. When I started out, I wanted to do really short stories on weekdays, and my permanent story on one day of the weekend. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the other day of the weekend, and I didn’t know how canonical I was going to get with the whole thing. It’s the numbers that make the decisions for me. The numbers dictate all. Once I started doing continuous microfiction stories, I decided that I liked to block them out in batches of 100, but there are roughly 260 weekdays every year, and I don’t like to cross the December 31 border, so I can’t always do the 100 installment thing. I end up with remainders, and the value of each remainder often determines what that shorter series is all about. The reason I wrote exactly fourteen sonnets in 2022 is because I had a remainder of fifteen, and could use one of them for an intro. If the remainder had instead been, say, nineteen, I doubt I would have ever thought to do them. I actually decided to change everything up this year by shifting to a regular blog format, hoping that I would have an interesting enough life for that to make sense. As 2024 approached, and I realized that it wasn’t the right call, I had to alter the plan into a fake blog format. That’s what we’ve been doing every weekday since January 1. And like all series here, I don’t get much of a chance to do something different when the situation arises. But it does sometimes arise, and I occasionally have to briefly put my ideas on hold in order to detour to something else. Something important.

I was running a series in 2020 set in another universe. Each installment was told from the perspective of a different fictional character. But then my grandfather died in real life, and I wanted to say something about him. I wanted to get real with my site, so I hit pause on Reactions, and shared my true thoughts. I’m spending a lot of time explaining myself, but I think it’s important for you to understand what a big deal it is for me to deviate from the structure that I’ve limited myself to. The last time I did it was when I lost a dear loved one. Yeah, I do it during introductions too, but those are strongly dependent upon the forthcoming series. These are true shifts, and come from the real me, rather than the fictional version of me. Though, it was fitting back then, since Reactions was about death, and fitting now for other reasons. Last month, my alternate self was pressured into eating meat, even though he was a vegetarian. I was the one who gave him that diet in the first place, even though I hadn’t mentioned it before when he was first introduced, and that’s because I had become a vegetarian myself since then. I’ve struggled with the idea of harming the environment, and killing animals since I was a child. I just didn’t think that I could get all of my nutrition if I cut out meat, and as it turned out, I was spot on. I’ve struggled with my health and weight since college. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted, and still be quite thin, because I was unwittingly super active. And young. As I’ve aged, it’s become harder and harder to match my calorie intake with activity, and if anyone told me that that would happen, I didn’t listen to them. One thing I didn’t think that much about was that most junk food is vegetarian. Sure, I can have an entire pizza, just don’t put pepperoni or sausage on it. Ice cream? Of course! Pastries, chocolate, all the cheese in the world? No problem. Just don’t give me any meat, because animals died to make it, and I don’t like that. In addition to how much you can eat as a vegetarian before you feel full, you have to eat so much to get the comparable protein. So it was really easy to justify the binging regardless of what the food actually was. I have come to the profoundly difficult decision to press pause on my vegetarian diet recently. I’m going to focus on lowering my caloric intake, and erasing my reliance on comfort food that doesn’t do anything for me except make me feel full, and add fat to my belly. It won’t be forever. I just have to get down to my goal, then I know I can start maintaining. I was so close before, I’m certain that I can get there and stay as long as I stop resorting to garbage. Then I’ll go back to where I want to be, for the environment, and for the animals. I just hope this months-long detour doesn’t end up giving me some terminal disease, or something. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Oh wait, careful...spoilers. That’s it for me. Nick Fisherman IV will be back tomorrow.

Microstory 2133: Sweet in an Alarming Way

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Though the tests suggest that I’m recovering from my infection, I just had a bizarre experience this morning. Prison food is mostly bland. I think it kind of has to be, because that type of food is easier to work with, and you don’t have to worry about people not liking the taste, because everyone hates it. I don’t love that, but it’s been easy to keep down, because that’s all they’re giving me. I’m much better at following rules when I’m being essentially forced to. When I was dieting, trying to maintain my food plan without cheating was really difficult, because I was always only truly accountable to myself. I wasn’t dating anyway, so it didn’t matter how I looked to others. Anyway, the taste was strong with my breakfast, and I can only guess that the fungus is messing with my taste buds. It was just a bran muffin with oatmeal. That’s it. The oatmeal wasn’t even heated up in milk; just water. Pretty boring, wouldn’t you say? No one loves that kind of food, even if they eat that sort of thing all the time. The first thing I noticed was the smell. I can’t really describe it to you. Because of my seasonal allergies, I never developed a good sense of smell, so I don’t have a very good frame of reference. But it was rancid. Still, I ate it, because I didn’t have options. The oatmeal had no smell at all, but it tasted sort of sweet in a really alarming way. There was no flavoring added to it. It was meant to be plain. This all reminds me of a time in college when I thought the pastries I bought had gone bad, but then I realized that I gargled some mouthwash not too long prior, so that was what was weird about it. Still, I remember worrying that the thin fibers in that chocolate chip muffin looked like spiderwebs, so I threw it out to be safe. I feel all right this time, so I don’t think it’s just that the food went bad, or that there were any spiderwebs, but I’m not a doctor. I suppose it could actually be that I was poisoned. Maybe I should be more worried about that possibility. The doctor isn’t worried about it, and just shrugged it off as a fleeting symptom, which should go away when the fungus does. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep working, staring at the wall during breaks, and occasionally hanging from the pull-up bar. That’s as much as I can do. When I was a child, I set the record for the highest number of pull-ups, but now I can’t do even one. To be fair, I’m about three times the weight, and I don’t work out anymore. At one point, I was doing gymnastics three times a week, so my life is very different now, even excluding the whole jail time thing. I refused my lunch today, because I was still freaked out and nervous, but I’m going to have to eat something soon, so I’ll let you know tomorrow if the issue has persisted.

Microstory 2129: Eat All the Things

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Today was a fun day for me, but will make for a pretty boring post for all of you. My new company gave me both a signing bonus, and an advance. I’m not a millionaire or anything, but I have enough money in my bank account to start taking care of myself. After the pre-onboarding paperwork and meetings that I had to go through—which I can’t talk to you about—I went shopping. I bought groceries, as well as other necessary new belongings, like a nightstand to put next to my bed. I got a lot of walking done today, because I don’t have a car, and I had to make separate trips, since I didn’t want to be carrying all of the bags around. For the larger furniture, like that nightstand, and a rug for the dining area, I had to make a whole separate trip each. Fortunately, I’m in a really convenient area, so it’s not like I had to travel for miles and miles to get to these places. I have this problem when I go grocery shopping, especially if I’m starting with very little, or in this case, almost nothing. I buy everything that I feel like eating that day, but that’s too much food, so I have to choose one for my next meal, and save the rest for later. Or I don’t wait, and eat all the things. That’s how I gained so much weight even after leaving college. The way it worked in the dorm cafeteria was that I could eat all the food I wanted every time I swiped my card, and I felt like I had to take advantage of the savings by eating extra, because my parents were paying for it. I thought that this sort of behavior would stop once I moved into an apartment during my last year, but by then, I was used to binging, and couldn’t help myself. That’s never really stopped, even when I’ve been able to lose weight, which is what happened when I became immortal, but it’s coming back now, so I have to be really careful. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t wanna hear any more about my eating disorder and weight issues.

Microstory 2113: Forward to the Food

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

This is it. I’m about to turn myself in for having skipped town after agreeing to report to my social worker regularly. I got in a lot more trouble a lot quickerly than I expected, but I guess I always knew that it would end like this. It’s better than going down in a hail of gunfire, though, right? That was not an implausibility, I’ll say that much. Ever since I came to this world—and let’s face it, the world before this one—I’ve struggled with getting work, holding work, paying my bills, and just standing on my own two feet. A lot of people have been really patient and helpful with me, but it’s really done a number on my anxiety. As bad as jail sounds to me, at least I’ll have a place to sleep at night. As weird as it may sound to you, I’m most looking forward to the food. It’s not that I think it will be good, but I won’t have any other options. That’s where most of my money goes, and where my weight comes from. Carefully portioned...portions, and carefully planned eating times, will actually make life a lot simpler. I remember watching this video online a long time ago where an autistic character starts learning about how strict life is in prison, and decides that he wants to be part of it, because people like us thrive on procedures and protocols. It’s gonna suck in a lot of ways, like all the dangers that come with being around unpredictable and potentially violent people, but there are some benefits to it. As I said before, I’m tired of running anyway, so I’ll take whatever punishment I’m owed. By the time you read this, I’ll have walked into that police station. I may never get to tell you how it went, but don’t imagine the worst. I’m sure I’ll be fine.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 4, 2425

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software

Mateo woke up in incredible pain. There was something jammed into his waist, and up his spine. He tried to reach back there to feel for it, but it was hard to contort his arms into the correct angle. He was face down in the dirt. While it was more difficult to breathe than it should be in this upgraded body, it balanced out to being about normal for a regular human. He shut his eyes and reached out to his team. He could feel them all, and thought they were pretty close by. He struggled to turn his head, and was able to see them lying next to him. Most of them were beginning to stir, and he could finally see what was wrong with them. There were huge weights upon all of them. No, two weights each; literal balls and chains. He should be able to sit up if he just pushed them off of his back. He had to roll them a few times to build momentum, but they came off. Now that he was free, he could start to recover, and rebuild his strength. The sun was coming up on whatever planet this was, so he could use that to refuel his energy.

The rest of the team was able to do the same, and as the sky grew brighter, they gained more information about where they were. It was a desert, with structures scattered about, including what looked like the entrance to a mine. People were gloomily walking towards it with gear. No one was paying the six of them any mind. After an hour, they were strong enough to stand. “How much do these weigh?” Mateo asked.

“Over 200 kilograms,” Leona answered, swinging one around by the chain, careful not to let it crash into her leg. “That’s equal to the mass of roughly three people.”

“Which means we can’t teleport them with us,” Angela noted. Unless there was something special about them, a teleporter could only transport two extra people with them. Some people couldn’t even take that many. It didn’t seem tied to strength, or even the weight of the travelers. It was just kind of a vague arbitrary limit. One could push themselves to carry just a little bit more, but not quite this much more. Whoever placed these belts on them knew what they were up against.

“Okay, but why can’t I just teleport out of the belt?” Olimpia asked.

“It’s fused to your spine,” said a stranger. He walked up to them coolly. “A crude solution, but it works, doesn’t it? We do not have the technology to suppress temporal powers here, so this was our best option.”

“The solution to what problem?” Leona questioned. She made a step towards him. She was strong enough to drag the weights behind her, but it wasn’t pleasant. “What do you have against us?”

The man rolled his eyes. “Ours is a caste-based society. The rich pay the poor to do their work, and if they can swing it, the poor force someone else to do it instead. Over the years, forced labor has gone away after a number of unfortunate slave uprisings. It’s not what you think, though. They weren’t elevated to higher castes. They had to be killed for their ingratitude, but that means there are no more slaves now. Well, there weren’t. Last year, you brought us thousands of able-bodied men and women to fill that void once more. Thank you so much for that. As I believe the Earthans say...no take-backs.”

“Hence the weights,” Leona said. “You know that if we can teleport, we can decimate your system, and free the slaves ourselves without any of them dying.”

He nodded. “We are well aware of who you are, Mrs. Matic. You have all been famous for millennia. As time travelers, you could have shown up at any point in our history, so every child is taught to fear you.”

“The children should not fear us,” Mateo pointed out. “Only the adults.”

“Quite,” the slavedriver agreed.

They were never able to get the chains off the entire day. It appeared that no one wanted anything to do with the team. They just left them to the elements the whole time. No one came by with food or water. They were seemingly trying to let them die without having to get any blood on their hands. They pretty much just sat there with nothing to keep them busy. There was one more hope, and they didn’t even have to work for it. Midnight hit, and the team jumped forward an Earthan year. They left the weights behind. They were bloody and hurt, but the injuries from having the weights ripped out of their bodies would heal. They could not necessarily say the same thing for the people what done this to them.

The Welriosians had to be slaves for yet another year while the team was gone again, but there was nothing they could do to undo that travesty. All they could do was fix it now. It was time to show these people how right they were to fear Team Matic. They approached a few passersby who weren’t dressed well, but also weren’t working, suggesting that they were the impoverished slaveowners that the man was talking about last year. They were all so fearful of helping, so they had to try a few people, but they finally learned where the head of the snake rested. They teleported up to what was literally an ivory tower. Well, it was white, anyway. The guards put up a fight, but they did not have firearms, and the team could always teleport away before their blades could get anywhere close to drawing blood.

The boss of this world was just called The Monarchy. “You have no right!”

“You have no right!” Leona shouted right back to him. “Let them go! Let them all go!” she demanded.

“This is how our system is built,” the Monarchy defended. “You came to our world. We didn’t ask you to do that, but we took you in. All of our slaves are well-housed and well-fed. Now, we understand that you six are special, which is why we have no plans on enslaving you as well, but I will not allow you to interfere with our way of life.”

She pursed her lips to consider their options. She looked over at another man. “Are you second in command?”

The other guy’s eyes darted towards the Monarchy.

“Don’t look at him. Look at me. Are you next in line?”

“I am.”

“I am ordering you to free the slaves.”

“I do not have such power,” he answered with a shake of his head.

“You will.” Leona took the Monarchy by the shoulders, and teleported away. She returned a few minutes later, soaking wet, and smelling of salt.

“What did you do with him?” the new Monarchy asked. “Did you drown him?”

“He’s alive...but he won’t be making any decisions from now on. “I suggest you do not make the same mistakes that he did. There’s plenty of room on that island. I can do this all day.”

Afraid, the new Monarchy breathed deeply. “It’s true, you could do whatever you please all day, but no longer than that. I am willing to free the slaves. I honestly don’t care who does the work, just as long as it gets done.”

“And I don’t care about how your society works. I’m not here to blow up your shit. If you let the Welriosians go, we won’t have a problem. We’ll leave, and you’ll be free to continue on from there.”

“But that’s just it,” the new Monarchy continued. “Perhaps you will one day be able to leave, but what about those Welriosians? I will not live forever. I could lose power tomorrow, and my successor could spend the next year undoing what you ordered me to do. Can you take 11,0000 people with you? I mean no disrespect, I’m just trying to explain the risks here.”

“How far spread out are you over this planet?” Leona asked him.

“Not far,” he replied. “There are a few hundred million of us on this continent.”

“What about on other continents?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. We are all slaves here, who answer to a greater power. It is possible that there are others elsewhere of which we would not be cognizant. Our technology is deliberately suppressed.”

She almost felt bad for him. She turned to Ramses. “You’re better at lasting in orbit. I have trouble seeing while I’m up there. Would you please scout for us?”

“Sure, boss.” He teleported away just after Angela took him by the hand to go along with him.

Meanwhile, Leona tilted her chin, and the rest of the team could tell that she was doing math in her head. “It should only take us about an hour to ferry everyone to wherever they’re going. The only reason we didn’t do that during the evacuation of the bunkers is because there were so many nooks and crannies, and it was very cramped in some places. If we can organize the slaves into one wide open space, this should be easy.” She looked back at the new Monarchy. “You’ll need to do that for us as well.”

“It will take us longer to organize and gather all of them then it will be for you to transport them to wherever it is you decide, sir,” the new Monarchy explained.

“Then you better start now. We’ll give you 22 hours, but earlier would be in your best interests; believe you me.”

“Right away, sir.” They didn’t love that he was treating them with such high regard, because it was clearly because he feared them, but it had to be this way to get stuff done. They were fine playing the part of gods among ants.

Ramses and Angela returned a few minutes later to recruit help from Olimpia and Mateo. They had spotted a sufficiently-sized land mass, but they still needed to make sure that it was safe enough for the Welriosians to live on. Ramses happened to have an edibility testing device with him, so he taught Olimpia how to use it. Over the course of the next half a day, she tested as many fruits and roots as she could in the immediate area, but there would not be enough time for them to check everything available. They would leave it with the refugees so they could take care of it themselves while the team was unavailable. While Mateo and Angela were scouting the immediate area to make sure there weren’t any other dangers lurking, like dinosaurs or unstable ground, Ramses programmed a nanoexcavator to start building the Welriosians a place for them to live that was out of the elements. It was just going to be a really simple artificial cave, but it would take care of them until they could build their own shelters throughout the next year. They were going to take whatever supplies and other resources they needed from the natives too, and just hope that it would be enough.

All of this had to get done in a matter of hours, because Team Matic was going to disappear at the end of today. There was nothing they could do to stop that, but it didn’t look like anyone here had spaceships, or even airplanes, so the Welriosians should be safe...for now. Life wasn’t going to be easy, but it wasn’t easy where they were living before. The real danger came from out there. This planet here was being controlled and used by the empire that reigned over this region of the galaxy. Representatives could arrive at any time in their own ships, and who knows how they would react to this development? Perhaps they already knew, and someone was on their way. The new Monarchy claimed that no one in the Goldilocks Corridor had FTL capabilities, except for the prime world, which no one here had ever been alive to encounter. They were a mysterious super-ruling class which may or may not exist anymore. If Bronach Oaksent was the true master of all, though, his capital planet probably was still in power, but was perhaps, busy with other things.

The team was doing the best they could with what they had, and now that they were completely shipless themselves, that wasn’t a whole lot. They never stopped working, scouting the area, testing the food, building the infrastructure, and coordinating the emancipations. There was so much, and it was impossible to make sure they had everyone in the time allotted. Mayor Merrick was still alive, and in possession of a full town census, but the priority was getting as many people to the new continent as possible. If that didn’t amount to everyone, the rest were just going to have to wait. They weren’t actually gods. “That’s not good enough,” Merrick complained.

“I’m sorry, it’s the best we can do.”

“No, I’m not blaming you, but we can’t just go hide under a rock, and hope that we all made it. We can take a new census while we’re there, but then what? It will be another year until you can ferry the missing, if we can even find them in another day.”

“What else can we do?” Marie asked. She was in charge of the gathering on this end. “You don’t want us to transport you somewhere closer, do you?”

“No. I want you to get my people as far from here as possible.” Merrick paused. “But some of us should stay behind. The strongest fighters, and I will make sure that none of these people hid one of my own somewhere in a basement, or something.”

Marie shook her head. “Far be it for us to tell you how to lead your people, but I’m not sure if I would feel comfortable deciding who has to stay.”

“I’ll get enough volunteers,” Merrick assured her. “I won’t need to force anyone. Sheriff Kamiński!”

The crowd parted so a man could step forward. “Right here, sir!”

“Organize a posse for me. Make it clear that it’s voluntary. I need ten to stay here for a year until the teleporters return. We’ll be responsible for finding any stragglers.”

“You shouldn’t do it,” Sheriff Kamiński insisted. “You need to be there to lead everyone else. Someone has to run a count, and then relay that information to us, so know who’s missing.” Everyone seemed to agree with that, that Merrick should be on the other continent, and they vocalized as much. “I’ll lead the posse from here. We will need a way to communicate, though.”

“We can handle that,” Marie clarified. She tapped on her own communicator. “Rambo, I need two spare comm discs.”

“Coming right up.”

Once the logistics were cleared up, all six members of Team Matic started to teleport the Welriosians once again, two by two. Three hours later, midnight central hit, and they jumped to the future. They were glad that the sheriff’s posse stayed behind. Over a hundred people were not emancipated when they were meant to be. This included Maqsud’s baby mama, Lilac, who was now safe in a building that they had seized. It was now called Fort Welrios. Her son, Aristotle, however, was still missing.

« < » > Table of Contents

Microstory 1587: Nonstop

< > Table of Contents

Prompt

I found a treadmill on the side of the road, and started using it the next day. I could literally see the fat dripping off of my stomach as I was running.

Botner

A dude riding a bike passed me, looked at me, and said, “if you’re on there, you must be a junkie, you can’t be running.” Unfortunately, it took two months of running on that treadmill before my body could actually move again. I was basically incapacitated. I was barely able to stand or walk. But every time I went to the store, or a restaurant, I told people I was a military veteran. That was all I could remember—how to tell people I was in the military and that I had been hurt. People told me I needed to go to the VA for help, and I thought they were right. They were asking me if I was drunk, which at the time I was not. When I went to the VA, they said, “Well, we can’t give you any drugs because you haven’t been diagnosed. You just had your wrist blown off. But if you stop taking the treadmill, you’ll die.” They didn’t know what was going on with my brain. They were just looking at me like, “you’re scaring us. You need to get off of this machine.” That was the most dehumanizing...

Conclusion

...experience of my life, and I felt like crap for lying to people. I had never heard of stolen valor before, but I knew the whole time that it was wrong. I stopped telling the lie, but that wasn’t my most pressing problem. If I spend more than two days off of this treadmill, the fat I lost starts coming back. It comes back fast, like the frost on a windshield when the heater doesn’t work, and all you have is wiper fluid. It doesn’t stop either. When I first tried to take a break, I gained even more weight than I had when I started using the damn thing. Who would do this to me? Who would leave this cursed treadmill out there for anyone to pick up, knowing what it would do? I learn to run twice a day, just to be safe. I don’t have to run several miles, or anything, but I can’t leave it be for too long. It’s like the machine is a pet, and requires frequent attention, or it’ll start chewing up my shoes. I wish that those were the consequences. I would take a closet full of destroyed shoes over this nonstop life of running. The dude on the bike rides back up to my garage during my workout one day. “There’s a way to stop this from happening, you know. You can even keep all that fat off. All you have to do is give the treadmill to someone else.” What is he, the girl from The Ring? No, I’m not doing that, I’m not subjecting someone else to this horror. It ends here. It ends with me. But I’m not running anymore either. I take the treadmill out to the middle of an empty field, douse it with lighter fluid, and set the wretched thing on fire. I hope that ends the curse, but if it doesn’t, at least it won’t be able to hurt anyone else. The next day, the fat starts to return again, and it doesn’t stop. At my peak, I weigh 1,500 pounds. But then a funny thing happens. I start losing the weight again. It just rolls off me, and I have to take it out with the garbage. I’m happy for a while, satisfied that I broke the curse, but then I start to wonder if I did. Maybe the treadmill can’t be destroyed, and some other poor schmuck just happened to find it out in that field.

Microstory 1037: Raymond

< > Table of Contents

Mind if I do my workout while we’re talking? I had to meet my tutor before school this morning, so I’m going to have to double up on my routine this afternoon. My father says that we’re all born with our own gifts. Some people are smart, and some are strong. He says siblings often don’t end up having the same traits, so Wynn got the smart genes, and I got the muscles. That’s not to say I didn’t have to work for these things. I adhere to a very strict diet, and exercise regimen. I’m not one of those people who thinks you should eat all protein, and no carbs, or that lifting weights is the only thing you gotta do. Life is all about balance: balance in food, in activity, and in everything else. Unfortunately, there are still some things that I struggle with since my brother stole all my smarts when he was born. I’m a year older than him, but we’re in the same grade, because I had to take ninth grade a second time. I don’t have a learning disability, like Roy. He has trouble comprehending and retaining knowledge, but I’m just not good at all the other stuff you have to do to learn. You have to pay attention to the teacher, and student presentations. You have to study, and complete your homework, and pace yourself during a test. My tutor hasn’t been teaching me the content so much as he’s been helping me become better organized, and more motivated. Ya see, maybe I could use my physical strength to make money. Maybe I could model in fitness magazines, or play some sport, or become a fitness trainer, but the first two things are unrealistic dreams, and I’m not at all interested in being a trainer. What my father said about natural gifts really got into my head when I was young, and I’ve never truly gotten past it. But I know that I have to graduate from high school if I want a chance at landing a good job. As things are heading, it’s not clear if I should waste my time going to college, but a liberal arts degree from an in-state school probably wouldn’t hurt. It would at least give me four more years to figure my life out, which might be really helpful. I don’t dislike my new tutor, but he’s not as good as Viola was. She made me a better student just by being around. Seriously, she could sit next to me while I did my homework—without saying a word—and I would get hundo-p on it. She had some magical power to make me feel comfortable, confident, and focused. I realized I was gay a long time ago, but I felt a love for Viola that I’ve never experienced before. It strained my relationship with my boyfriend so much that we had to break up. I don’t mind, though, because I needed Viola’s help with my grades more than I needed a make-out partner. Without her, I might have had to repeat my senior year as well, and that would have been even more embarrassing. I’m going to miss her in the worst way.

Microstory 546: Drug Problem Increases; Earthan Psychiatrists Deveiled

< > Table of Contents

Every known planet has eventually learned of drugs that can alter the chemicals in the human body. Each planet, however, has had a different way of dealing with these. A fair amount of research has been done on the history of drug use and abuse, and a few things have become clear. One, we all seem to have about the same drugs. Not literally. Different plants grow in different places, but there is generally an equivalent of whatever effects one has on the body wherever one may go. Some act on endorphins, others inhibit pain receptors. In other words, we tend to all have the same type of drugs, coming from plants with similar properties. The second commonly accepted truth is that there is a negative correlation between the amount of prosperity a culture experiences, and the amount of drugs discovered and used. To put it in simpler terms, if—by some miracle—a particular civilization naturally feels no pain or hardship, they won’t discover drugs. They won’t even consider it necessary. In the reverse, if the civilization is riddled with disease and stress, academics will search for ways to alleviate it. This is taken even further when one accounts for recreational use, and ultimate abuse, of drugs. The more the people need to escape from natural life, the more they will...and drugs help them do that easily.

Unlike most planets in the Lactean galaxy, Earth has experienced a massive amount of adversity and misfortune. Problems with drug abuse are prevalent throughout their history, further exacerbated by their historical rejection of global community. Storms and other natural disasters led their ancestors to grasp at various religions for comfort, and they were less willing to let go of these as time went on. Science and enlightenment were denied, making technological advances difficult to accomplish. While people were discovering all these drugs to fix all their problems, they were met with so much opposition that understanding the difference between recreational and medically necessary was near impossible. By the time governmental regulations created some of these lines, the public had already decided that certain recreational drugs were acceptable, and they were never going to let go of this. At least they haven’t yet. They regularly consume alcohol, inhale carcinogenic stimulants, and eat psychoactives. Earth is noted by experts as having the worse drug problem in the universe, but now they are not alone. And now...they’re the only ones who can help us.

A new drug has hit the streets of The Core called Tremor. It is designed to stimulate the body’s nervous system, and cause violent convulsions. It was borne out of weight-loss experiments millennia ago on Vata. The idea was to vibrate the whole body so that the user would burn calories without actually having to do anything. Of course today we have far more sophisticated ways of promoting health, but records of this drug made their way into the hands of criminals, and the product is now being distributed all over the system. No one knows where it comes from, but that is being handled. The most pressing issue is the addiction. Thousands of people are now addicted to the substance, and health professionals honestly have no idea how to help them. Sure, they can treat the addict’s physical dependence, but a seemingly insurmountable mental component has prevented addicts from ever truly being free of their desire to take more tremor. In order to combat this incredibly rare problem, psychiatrists from Earth have been deveiled, and brought to The Core. They are currently undergoing an acclimation process, but will soon be put to work. It is hoped that their experience in treating drug abuse will help us come up with solutions that our inexperience prevents us from thinking of. With any luck, and a little time, we can all go back to a recreational drug-free environment.

Microstory 346: Weight Control

Click here for a list of every step.
Exercise

As I mentioned before, I’ve developed a binge eating disorder. Weight wasn’t anything I worried about growing up. Other people in my family did, but I was always really skinny. What I was too stupid to understand at the time was that this was because of how active I was. I was working out almost every day. My God, at one point, I was going to gymnastics three times a week. Why was I doing that? I hate competition, so it’s not like I was training for the Olympics. Whatever my reasoning, it all stopped when I went to college. But that alone would have been okay, because I was already starting from a pretty good place. Other things, however, were at play. I’ve always been very money-conscious as well, so when I discovered that the dorm cafeteria was all-you-can-eat, I went overboard. I decided to eat as much as I could each time I swiped my card to get the most out of the money already spent. And this all came out of a lack of education. Your body needs time to digest and process the nutrients and carbohydrates it gets from food. This is why we eat a few meals per day, rather than just gathering all of our calories in the beginning, and saving time. I didn’t know this, so eating two or three burgers at dinner seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution to the fact that I was only allotted so many meals. I’m ashamed to admit that I gained 45 pounds in college. Afterwards, I went through periods of dropping that back down, but I still wasn’t getting much exercise, so it could only take me so far. At this point in my life, I would say that it’s worse than ever. I have a job where I have to keep moving, but that really builds muscle without burning fat. Plus, I’ve recently quit that position anyway. But now that I’ll be making me more money, I need to commit to fixing myself, starting with eating less food at more meals.

Freedom from Persecution

Microstory 345: Exercise

Click here for a list of every step.
Career Integrity

Whenever anyone’s ever talked to me about exercise, they always have some idea of the best way to do it. I’ve also read articles about what you’re supposed to do, and what you’re not. The truth is that different kinds are good for different things. Lifting weights isn’t going to get your heart rate up, but swimming isn’t really going to increase muscle mass. It just depends on what you’re trying to get out of the activity. When I was a child, I didn’t seek out exercise, it was just something that happened to me. I played baseball for however many years long (don’t remember). I started gymnastics very early on because I saw someone on television do what I later learned was a roundoff backhandspring backflip. After eleven years of practice, I was finally able to do that myself. Looking back, it should not have taken that long. Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t trying to stay healthy, especially not when my parents made me join the dive team in high school. These were just incidental, and I didn’t realize how much good they were doing for me until I went to college and promptly stopped exercising. I wasn’t doing anything. I walked to class, but sometimes not even that. My dog still lived back home, so I wasn’t going out with her. I was leading a very sedentary life, and developing a binge eating disorder, but I’ll talk more on that later. It was only a couple years ago that I decided to start hiking again, which was something I had done, again incidentally, through the scouting program. That was one of the best choices I made in my life, and I wish I could do it more. I wish I had the money for a treadmill so that I could multitask with it. But I need to get past my roadblocks and understand that there are ways to exercise without paying any money at all. I hope you’re getting some level of exercise, whether it be yoga, dancing, or even running.

Weight Control

Microstory 205: New Measurements

I realize that I’ve mentioned a few what you must believe to be measurements, but are not completely sure. You see, my stories take place in a universe where such things are part of common knowledge, and very few people can act as “audience proxies”. I try to go over things, but at the same time, I want to organically bring them up, rather than just spell them out. If you were telling a story about Barack Obama, you wouldn’t first explain that Obama was the President of the United States of America between the common era years of 2009 to 2016. Everybody knows that...mostly. But since the secondary purpose of this site is to give you an introduction to my new world, I’m just going to go at it; in this case, giving you highlights of a fictional (or is it?) measurement system. The smallest positive unit of measurement is the yoem. It is equal to 2.442 millimeters. Multiply that by 10 and you get the deam which is 2.442 centimeters. Multiply by 10 and we have a sheam: 24.42 centimeters. Get the picture? Continue to multiply by 10 for a geara: 2.670603674541 yards (8.011811023623 feet); demra: 26.70603674541 yards (80.11811023623 feet); shemra: 267.0603674541 yards (801.1811023623 feet); and nayko: 2.442 kilometers (8,011.811023623 feet). That last one is what my characters use in place of a mile, and naykos per hour are informally referred to as neels. Units of mass follow a similar linguistic and mathematical structure starting with the yoemtra: 2.442 grams; deamtra: 0.86139 ounces; sheamtra (sheels): 0.538369 pounds; gearatra: 5.38369 pounds; demratra: 53.8369 pounds; shemratra: 538.369 pounds; and naykotra: 2.691845 tons (5,383.69 pounds). So the next time someone asks you how tall you are and how much you weigh, after punching them in the face for being rude, you can say something like 7 sheaman and 24 gearatran. Oh yeah, by the way, if you want to pluralize something, you add -an to the end (or just -n if the singular ends in a vowel). Did you not already know that?

Microstory 155: Quang Phan

Click here for the list of every Bellevue Profile.

Like Freeman and Gus, Quang Phan grew up not being aware that he had a special ability, instead assuming that what he could do was a trait shared by all. He had an innate sense of measurement, including length, area, volume, weight, mass, density, temperature, pressure, viscosity, time, speed, energy, force, flow, frequency, direction, and angle. At first, he could just tell the difference between two measurements, for instance knowing when an object was heavier than another. But the more educated he became regarding the human constructs of measurement, the more dynamic his ability became. Instead of only understanding comparisons, he began to see relevant numbers. His eyes adjusted to need, and he was eventually able to literally see numbers and lines superimposed onto the objects they were associated with. He could read in the space between a building and a vehicle, that they were separated by about one geara. If he so chose, he could focus on that measurement, and become more accurate, so that he would know that they were separated by 1.489 geara. His ability increased, and by the time he was an adult, he could even read the amount of space on a digital storage device, despite there being no real-world analog to such a thing. He was fairly young when he left Vietnam to join Bellevue, so he spent a number of years being further educated by the likes of Claude, Mandy, Laurence, Drummond, and Ceres. After he had completed his schooling, he put his ability to use in the construction department as they expanded into a full-fledged city, able to direct progress with no aid of blueprints. Many years later, he and several others embarked on the final journey in search of the missing children. Not only was his expertise valuable for the mission, but he was present for  his friends’ disappearance, and had a personal interest in finding them.