Microstory 2160: Trust the Wizard

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I don’t have anything to say today. Stuff did happen, but I can’t tell you about it. I’m pretty honest with this blog, but I don’t reveal everything to you. For instance, I’ve never gotten graphic with all of my many illnesses. I don’t talk about what kind of porn I watch either. Lol, I’m kidding, I don’t watch porn, I’m celibate. Sexuality has no place in any universe. Gross, stop thinking about that, you heathens. Anyway, I’m still depressed, but I’m working on it, with my therapist, and my parole officer, and by occupying my time with work and community service. I still don’t think that I’ll ever be happy, but things have been much worse for me in the past, and are presently worse for others in the world. The point is that I have little to complain about. I still miss Cricket and Claire, but when you add it up, it hasn’t been that long. Anniversaries are significant in the bulkverse. I’m sure something good will happen exactly one year after my arrival. Oo, if this were a fictional story, we would call that foreshadowing, but this is all real, so what could I possibly know about the future? I’m not a wizard. Well, I do know some things about the future. I know that I’m going to go to jail tonight. That’s the future, maybe I am a wizard. Trust the wizard. Ugh, I need a break from this site. I’ll be back to you Monday. In the meantime, enjoy a couple of daily social media posts, and whatever else you have going on in your life besides me. I’m assuming that you have other interests, but I guess it’s possible that your entire existence revolves around me, and my life. There is a theory that only one person exists in the universe, and everyone else is just a figment of their imagination, or some kind of extension of their subconscious. I shudder to think. If that were true, every time I picked my nose in private, or watched porn, all of you have been aware of it. I guess in that case, you wouldn’t be real anyway, but it would still be weird. Stay out of my private life!

Microstory 1309: Fish Feet

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Celebrity Interviewer: First of all, I am a huge fan of your work.

Seasoned Actor: Thank you very much.

Celebrity Interviewer: I mean, your performance in Severe was phenomenal; absolutely breathtaking.

Seasoned Actor: I appreciate you saying that.

Celebrity Interviewer: But that’s not why you’re here, is it?

Seasoned Actor: No.

Celebrity Interviewer: You wanna talk about your new project. It’s a pretty big departure from the kinds of things you normally do, correct?

Seasoned Actor: That’s right. It’s called Fish Feet.

Celebrity Interviewer: [Giggles]

Seasoned Actor: [Clears throat] It’s about a fish who dreams of walking on land. One day, he meets The Urchin Wizard, who grants him his wish by making him grow legs. So he goes out to explore the world with his best friend, who’s a crab. It’s delightful.

Celebrity Interviewer: That is not a word I’m seeing in the reviews.

Seasoned Actor: Well, there are millions of words, soo...

Celebrity Interviewer: A critic called it, quote, “unabashedly the worst thing I’ve ever been forced to watch in its entirety. If it weren’t my job, I would have stopped playback after ten minutes. I almost quit the paper because of this.”

Seasoned Actor: Well, that’s just one man’s opinion, from some blog site, I’m sure.

Celebrity Interviewer: It’s from the New York Times.

Seasoned Actor: Look, like you said, it’s a departure from my other work, but that doesn’t mean it’s good—I mean, not good. It doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Celebrity Interviewer: Another critique reads, “the fish’ new legs are probably about two meters in length, so he can walk alongside the humans he meets, but way too skinny. They made me really uncomfortable, and traumatized my four-year-old daughter. For some context, she laughed when that anthropomorphic peanut died. She made me turn Fish Feet off so we could watch Watership Down again. That’s why this article is a day late.”

Seasoned Actor: Okay, yes. I’ve heard these criticisms, but I’m just here to tell everybody that I loved working on this film. The director was amazing; it felt like I had known her for years. It’s supposed to be fun and silly. They made his legs ridiculous on purpose, to make kids laugh, and I think they succeeded.

Celebrity Interviewer: Apparently, there are two separate jokes about pedophilia?

Seasoned Actor: Oh my God, I’m sick of hearing about this. It’s a pun...because the fish has feet?

Celebrity Interviewer: No, no, no, yeah, we get it. That doesn’t make it okay.

Seasoned Actor: We’re done here. I thought you were going to take this seriously.

Celebrity Interviewer: I was to understand the point was that you wanted to stop having to be so serious. But I am sorry. Let’s talk about the movie. Please don’t leave.

Seasoned Actor: No, it’s done. Get this goddamn thing off my neck! We went off the record, by the way. I better not see this footage on the internet later, or your lawyers are gonna wish they had gone to medical school, where it’s less stressful.

Microstory 643: Confirmation of War

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In the wake of the farce known as The Summit for Patience, the conquest was sidelined. The Highlightseers were too busy shoring up our ranks. Besides, our rivals believed us to have agreed to peace, so we couldn’t do anything for awhile. This caused them to lower their guard, so we could develop a strike plan. With all players in place, we were ready to start the next phase of our war for the galaxy. Unfortunately, the gray doorway message from Aurora Meeker was making this endeavor a little bit more complicated than it was before. Meeker was clear enough that we knew we wouldn’t be getting any third chances to stave off some kind of permanent retribution, but vague enough that she could have been talking about her anger over any given Fostean behavior trait. Most Highlightseers agreed, however, that she was probably generally against any form of mass violence; war and conquest included. Though her taikon was prophesied, just like all others, the way in which is was achieved was not expected. There were still many things that would need to happen in order for the entire taikon passages to be realized. Violence could not be taken off the table without dismantling everything we believe in. So the plan was altered to account for this change in dynamic; a compromise, as it were. Strategic military representatives were held in place where they were on every known planet in the galaxy, with reinforcements being quietly channeled in as needed. We then instituted an old practice carried over from the second galactic wars centuries ago. A confirmation of war is not the same thing as a declaration. Technically, we are already in war, and technically it does not need to be confirmed—nor are wars usually. Confirmation is largely an economic and social exercise. Some societies institute curfews, others halt interstellar travel. Some families modify their shopping behavior, others seek refuge in other locations, or even hide out in bunkers. A confirmation of war does not require any fighting, just the expectation that an attack could occur at any moment. We hope this to be enough to satisfy the requirements for this taikon, while simultaneously averting punishment but these mysterious gray overwatchers.

Microstory 642: A Fool Made Intelligent

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Decades ago on Earth, there came about a film media adaptation of book called The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a young girl who ends up in another world, where she meets an eclectic group of people and creatures. Her new friends each have their own problems, and they find themselves working together to those respective ends. A humanoid feline needs courage, a robot needs an organic heart, and...uh, some guy made out of straw needs a brain. Though we in Fostea have our own art to produce and distribute, we do like to keep up on what’s going on in other systems. For defense tactics purposes, mostly. We sometimes even develop our own franchises based on the ones created somewhere else. Lactea is famous for this with their Hitch franchise, which seems never-ending, and is just as a banal as its Earthan progenitor. Even with this overwhelming amount of entertainment, from all corners of the universe, The Wizard of Oz has ended up being a man named Keir Banister’s favorite movie of all time. In fact, he does very little with his life unrelated to the canon. He cosplays the character’s costumes every day, apparently cycling through them in a complex and orderly manner. At one point, he asked his parents to transition his body into that of a humanoid feline. He chose to stop midway through the procedures, remaining in a hybrid form for a couple years before switching back to a standard human form. His parents incidentally got him into the film when he was a child, not knowing that it would basically become his entire life. They were just trying to give him some joy since he was born with neurological problems that prevented him from contributing to the economy on his own, and could not be helped by modern neuropharmacology. Wizard of Oz paraphernalia were his proverbial security blankets, providing comfort in the face of unintelligence. That all stopped as soon as the godlike being, Aurora Meeker finished her gray doorway message to the galaxy. Banister was suddenly one of the most intelligent human beings in the galaxy. He was knowledgeable, eloquent, and sophisticated. He immediately started explaining extremely complicated things about how the universe works, then soon moving on to making previously only theoretical claims about science and progress. It was like they switched him out with an entirely different person who looked exactly like him. It was clear that Keir Banister was helping Lightseers fulfill the forty-second taikon.

Microstory 18: The Half Wish

A wizard appeared and granted me two and a half wishes. When I asked him what a half wish was, he told me that the wish would come true but only sort of. He evidently had no control over the ramifications of the wishes. He was only a conduit to some other awesome power. That power was the one deciding how to interpret the wishes, and for this reason, half wishes were even more unpredictable than full ones. I first asked for a thousand more wishes, as you do. That was against the rules, so I just completely lost that one. One and a half left. I asked him, very carefully, whether it would be okay if I asked for something in multiple parts. He saw no reason why not. “I wish to be the good and loved king of the entire world. This world will have no war, and no poverty. There will be an endless supply of resources.”

“Is that all?” the wizard asked. It was. He waved his arms and the environment changed. I was on top of a hill. Below me was a forest, a lake, and a river. Beyond that was nothing; a void. There were only a few square kilometers of anything. “Oh,” the wizard said solemnly. “You forgot to ask to be the king of Earth specifically, or that it would at least be a full-sized planet, and have other people.”

I thought about it for a very long time, worried what might happen with my half wish. Maybe I wasn't smart enough to come up with something clever and impeccable. Finally, I decided to ask for the same thing again, but this time be more clear. “I wish to be the good and loved king of the entirety of Earth. Earth will have no war, and no poverty. There will be an endless supply of resources for Earth.” The environment changed once more. I was back on Earth, in the city. I looked up to the night sky where I could see the other half of the Earth, floating in its own orbit.