Microstory 75: Kjirygenos

Thousands of years ago, Earth was a fairly advanced planet. We shared technologies with a race called the Kjirygenos. We taught them everything they knew. We lifted them up from obscurity so that we could together be the two most powerful forces in the galaxy. At some point, we fell out with the aliens. It is unclear exactly what happened, but we believe that it had something to do with an Earthling King’s son, and a Kjirygenosian peasant boy. The feud lasted for many years, ending with the aliens plunging Atlantis, our mightiest nation, into the depths of the ocean. Over the course of the next several centuries, our planet recovered. We built monuments and tributes to those we lost in the Kyrij War. Every single fountain you see that’s larger than a common land vehicle represents the life of one who was lost in Atlantis. But we also built other things. The Egyptian Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Eiffel Tower, and the The Vice President's Residence & Office, among a few other things, were all created with intent. They are a mathematical message to the Kjirygenosian peoples that we cannot read, but is quite clear to those who truly need to see it; a great big architectural middle finger to the douchebags who sunk our island. Eff you, Kjirygenos!

Microstory 74: Artemis and the Stag

Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. She was often seen with bows, arrows, deer, and hunting dogs. She was also very beautiful. One day, she was bathing in a sacred spring when a human hunter named Actaeon accidentally came upon her. As Actaeon was a rival of Artemis’ father, Zeus, she felt particularly slighted for this invasion of privacy. As punishment for his transgression, Artemis turned Actaeon into a stag. Actaeon’s hunting hounds fell into a frenzy, and began snapping and barking at their master, not knowing that it was he who was once in charge of them. Actaeon began to run, and Artemis led the pursuit of him with his, as well as her own, hounds. They say that the chase lasted for days. When he could finally take no more, and stopped to rest in a clearing, his hounds caught up to him. They circled him and waited for instructions, until one of the dogs stopped. She sniffed at the stag, and licked his nose. She looked right into his eyes, realizing that it was Actaeon, and not prey. The clever hound relayed this new information to the rest of the pack, and they turned their attention to the Artemis and her pack. When the pack arrived, Actaeon’s dogs attacked them, fiercely protecting their master. As a result of their loyalty and love, Actaeon shifted back into human form. He called his hounds back from the fight and apologized to Artemis who walked away a bitter and unsatisfied deity.

Microstory 73: Salmon Doctor

There is an unknown number of people in the world, being moved throughout time and space, each with their own missions to carry out. One such of these people is a medical doctor by the name of Baxter Sarka. Born in the 21st century, he was first pushed back to the year 1926. He was met there by the middle management of salmon, one whose responsibility it was to set other travelers on their respective courses; and to ensure that they stay on task. Every salmon will, at some early point in their journey, meet this manager, and he will point them in the right direction. Likewise, every salmon will run into some medical issue at least once. If contemporary medical assistance is not possible, or logistically impractical, Dr. Sarka will be deployed to provide treatment. He carries with him a bag of highly advanced medical paraphernalia, capable of treating virtually any injury or condition. Upon meeting him, the manager gave him a pager of sorts that he referred to as the scheduler. On it are his upcoming appointments, including dates and other pertinent information. Despite having no foreknowledge of salmon, or any other form of time travel, Dr. Sarka took to his mission immediately. It was his instinct to help those in need, whether they lived in the past, or otherwise. I tell you this because the salmon Mateo Matic is soon to be introduced to Dr. Baxter Sarka for the first time.

Microstory 72: Aglets of Conversation

The other day, my shoelace broke. I pulled it out and tried relacing it, but found myself doing it horrifyingly wrong. How I managed that, I will never know, but it reminded me of the concept of aglets of conversation. An aglet is a small piece of plastic that is fitted around the end of a shoelace to keep it from fraying. You’ve seen them. You know what I’m talking about. Much like a literal aglet, an aglet of conversation is something that is very important to one that owns it, but means very little to others else. It is a story, or a piece of information, or a musing that is only relevant to the person who expresses it. A certain microblogging social media service is full of these. We all have our own aglets, but the trick is to keep them to ourselves. Every time you try to bring other people into your aglet crisis, you will lose them. Let’s say you try to tell a story about how your shoelace broke. In the middle of it, you realize how disinterested the person you’re talking to is. That’s because it’s your shoelace, and it must remain yours alone. Don’t bring up your aglets in a conversation. Don’t talk about aglets of conversation, because aglets of conversation is an aglet of conversation. Can you imagine an entire paragraph that talks about nothing else but aglets? Why, it would be no better than a paragraph with only a few words, repeated over and over and over and over and over and over.

Microstory 71: The Address

There has been a dip in applications to work at the postal service after a package bomb killed everyone in three houses. The supervisor tells me that I’m hired, but she looks more grateful for me than I for them. It’s the first day on my route, and I’m so excited that I forget my headphones. They tell me that it can get really boring, so pretty much everyone has music. But that’s okay with me. When I was a child, I would write short notes to my family and deliver them on a wooden horse. Call me crazy, but I’ve always wanted to work at the post office. As I’m about to head out, one of my new coworkers asks me if I’m doing the Purple Rose route. When I confirm, he chortles a bit and says ominously, “just go through the gate.” Things are going well, until I find a letter with an address that doesn’t make any sense. The houses on Purple Rose Lane start at 4200, then on to 4204 and 4208, but then the next house is 4400. The address I’m looking for is 4256. I cannot mess up on my very first day, so I pull out the map, but it’s completely unhelpful. I seem to be on the right street, on the right part of town, so where is it? Then I see it. A gate. Between two houses. Exactly where the discrepancy lies. I laugh, because my coworkers are clearly hazing the new guy. Which is awesome since it means they already accept me. When I walk up and open the gate, I find myself in a pocket dimension. There is an entire slew of houses that are invisible from the main street, waiting for their mail. That makes more sense. I just hope that I can easily get back out when I’m done. The last time I was in a pocket dimension, I had to solve a riddle before they let me leave.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 1, 2025

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Mateo was under the impression that when he returned to his regular pattern, he would find himself back in the Snow White coffin; under automatic quarantine. But he was wrong. He was standing up, but it was pitch black, so he had no idea where he was. He could be thousands of miles from home for all he knew. His father was quite obviously a time traveler, but they had jumped through so many years that there was no way to know whether they had also moved through space or not. He waved his arms around, looking for a lightswitch, but accidentally knocked a glass off of the counter.

When the light came on, the room looked familiar. He was almost completely certain that he was in his mother’s new house in Colorado. He turned around and found confirmation. His mother, Carol was standing in front of him. He tried to get away from her, but she quickly wrapped her arms around him.

“Mateo, you’re back! My God, what happened to you?”

He pulled himself away from her. “We both need to be quarantined. Separately.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been infected with a virus of some kind. I’ve probably already passed it on to you, but we have to try.”

She stared at him for a few seconds before showing determination. “Get into the room at the top of the stairs and to the left.” She left for her own room. “I’ll call Duke. He’ll know how to do this.”

Professor Duke Andrews came over with Leona. Together, they constructed barriers with plastic sheeting. It freaked him out a little. He knew it was for everyone’s protection, but there was a television character years back who would build rooms like this in order to kill people without leaving evidence.

Once they were all finished, Leona came back in with her hazmat suit. “I’ll need to take more samples.” She got to work.

“Leona.”

She looked annoyed with him.

“I didn’t run away this time. I was thrown into the future. That’s where I got this virus.” He waited for a reply but nothing came. “Leona, I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what happened,” she finally said.

He went about explaining everything he went through in 3118; from the dome to the robot, to the self-destructing message, to his father. She then relayed the information to Duke and his mother.

She shook her head. “The files were corrupted. We received almost no data from the machine, except for a series of unfinished equations regarding hyperspheres. But we didn’t think that meant it did something to you. When you didn’t come back a year later, we thought...we figured that you were dead.”

“I’m here now.”

She stopped working for a second and looked him in the eye. “Yeah, but for how long. I’ve always known, but with each passing year it sinks in more that you and I are destined for failure.”

“Well, maybe we can stop it. Tell me about the data. What’s a hypersphere?”

“We believe that the powers that be exist within five dimensional space. That allows them to see time all at once,” she explained. “Or so we think. Like I said, we didn’t get much from it. Which makes sense now that we know the way it disrupted your—what did he call it—pattern?”

“How would someone be able to see time all at once?”

“Imagine a beetle, crawling on the ground,” she began. “You pick up that beetle with a sheet of paper, and you carry it somewhere else; maybe hundreds of miles away. You set the beetle down, and what does it do? It just keeps crawling. It knows it’s moved, but that doesn’t matter. It has no choice but to keep going with its biological imperatives: to find food, and a mate. That’s what the powers that be are doing with you, your aunt, and your father. They’re picking you up and setting you down somewhere else. The difference is, since they see time from an outside perspective, they can move you back and forth within the timestream.”

“So we’re just game pieces to them? Moving us around on a board. For what reason?”

“If these people have any motivations, they would be so far beyond our comprehension that no analogy would sufficiently account for them. Again, it would be like the beetle trying to guess why you moved it from its original spot.”

Mateo nodded, knowing that if Leona couldn’t fully understand what was going on, there was no way for him to. He would have to surrender to the idea that this was his life now. There was nothing he could do about. Trying to figure it out would be impossible without access to the people controlling it. He decided to change the subject, “hold on. Is it April first?”

“It is, why?”

“Happy birthday.”

“That is yet to be determined.”

“Come on, don’t be like that. It’s gonna be okay.”

Professor Andrews entered the room without protection and directed Leona to stick Mateo back behind the zipper. “He needs to stay in there, but it’s pointless for you to wear that. We’ve all been exposed.”

“Leona took off her headgear. “What’s that now?”

“It’s a quick little bugger. It began spreading through the air as soon as Mateo arrived.”

“Oh my God,” Mateo said. “I’m here to destroy the world.”

“I don’t think that it will destroy the world,” Duke argued.

“The robot in the future called it a pandemic.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you are a surprisingly effective delivery system. Whoever designed this thing had access to genetic data that we are nowhere near achieving. But my guess is that it was deployed on a massive scale, using some kind of weapon. You’re just one guy, and the virus has almost certainly mutated since then.”

“Mutations should be worse,” Leona said. “If anything, the strongest attributes have survived while weaknesses were stripped away.”

“Normally that would be true, yes, but you said that this was first created decades before your arrival?”

“That’s what the robot claimed,” Mateo confirmed. “He played it pretty close to the chest.”

“Like I said, this was designed with a very specific purpose,” Duke continued. “It was likely extremely aggressive on the outset. But once everyone was infected with it, the virus no longer had a purpose. There were no more hosts to attack; no more cells to hijack. But it didn’t die. So, it just sat there, quietly and slowly degrading and losing some of its attributes.”

“Are you saying that the virus would have eventually just disappeared?” Leona asked. “It seems like they would know that, and didn’t have to bother with Mateo.”

“They needed a cure for the virus because it caused infertility. If it ever died off—and I can’t be sure that it would, without more data—humanity might have died off before.”

“Please tell me you’re saying that it’s less dangerous to us,” Mateo begged.

“We have made great strides in medical technology since you’ve been gone, my young friend. It cannot yet predict the future, but it can come damn close. I suspect that the world’s gonna get sick. But it will survive. You have not destroyed us.”

He stayed behind quarantine for the remainder of the day, but the four of them still celebrated Leona’s 25th birthday together. Andrews was correct that the virus Mateo introduced did not destroy the world. As it turned out, it spread like a flu. A heavy majority of the population showed fever, sweating, cold flashes, and a loss of appetite as symptoms. But nobody became infertile as a result. In fact, Duke hypothesized that Mateo had immunized the entire human population so that, if it were ever to be created in the future, it would do little to no harm. Only a single person died from the infection; Mateo’s mother. He shouldn’t have hugged her.

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Seeing is Becoming: For Food and Raiment (Part II)

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“How do you know that we’re on another planet?” Vearden asked.

“Don’t you feel lighter?” Saga asked in return.

“Yes.”

“Either the wormhole creates some sort of gravity disturbance, or we’re experiencing the pull of a different planet entirely.”

“I thought you were a photographer.”

“I am. I’m one of those smart photographers you hear about.”

“Well, what made you think that closing the door would cause it to disappear?”

“You’re not the first person I’ve encountered here. A couple others have shown up, but they’ve all been killed by those things, except for one guy who managed to get back inside his door.”

“It sounds like they were mistakes. The people controlling this were probably looking for me, but found other people accidentally instead.”

“Not a bad assumption, but why is either of us here?” There was a howl in the distance. Saga closed her eyes in frustration. “They never stop coming. I lose them for an hour or two, but either the one chasing me finds me again, or another one. It feels like a sport to them. I literally haven’t slept in over a day.”

Vearden nodded then went over to pull the sword out of the ground. “Let’s go find a cave or something.”

It didn’t take them too long to find shelter in a recess on the side of a mountain. While Saga got some much needed rest, Vearden stood watch.

Night came and went. “How long have I been out?” Saga rubbed her eyes and yawned.

He looked at his empty wrist. “Over twelve hours, I would imagine.”

“You’ve been up this whole time? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“For obvious reasons. Where were you when they brought you here?” They spent a few minutes catching up with each other. She had done with her life what she promised she would. After interning at a nature magazine for a while, she made a name for herself and was given the freedom to travel pretty much anywhere she wanted, taking photos of whatever she wanted. He, on the other hand, didn’t do one thing right since graduating from university. He should have read the signs and not gone for a degree in journalism. There weren’t any jobs out there. He tried starting his own blog a few times, and finding other online sources to work for, but nothing came of it. He had spent the last several years finding nothing but temp positions and other jobs with no security. He hadn’t worked at the same place for longer than eleven months since high school. Before falling through the wormhole—or whatever it was—he was on his way to a summer camp. The deal was that he would have a job as a counselor if he went through the program once beforehand, to see what it was like. His younger sister had worked it out with a friend of hers, but Vearden was always disappointing her. It was ironic that, after finally being determined to follow through this one time, he was unable to for reasons that were legitimately out of his control.

“What do you think we should do?” he asked of her.

“I’ve gathered energy from sleep, but I haven’t eaten in a while either,” Saga replied. “It’ll take us 24 hours to run edibility tests on anything we find here.”

He opened his bag. “I have some food with me.” He pulled out one of those boxed lunches that were designed for kids, a single serving of yogurt, a can of vienna sausage, a piece of pie from a fast food restaurant, two half-filled bottles of water, and a loaf of bread with four or five slices left.

“What the hell is this?” she asked. She sorted through the food. “What is this strange medley of random items? Did you just open the cupboard with your eyes closed and brush down everything in the first row?”

“That’s ridiculous.” He pulled out a slice of bread and started eating the crust first. “I would never put vienna sausage and bread on the same row.”

She shook her head. “What happened to you, man?”

He shook back. “Nothing happened. A great big pile of nothing.”

She ate the sausage and boxed lunch. He offered her the yogurt, but she couldn’t make out the expiration date, and she wasn’t going to risk it. Not when it was coming from him. He was a stranger to her now.”

Just when they were starting to feel energized and comfortable, they heard a ruckus above them on the mountain. Men were shouting to each other and banging on the rock. There was also this sort of zipping sound, and they were getting closer. All of the sudden, a figure appeared from above, holding on to a rope, and stopped when it saw them. They were staring into the eyes of a humanoid alien. It was covered in fur, except for the head. The eyes were big and bulging. What skin was showing was tightly wrinkled into neat and straight folds. All of its teeth came to a point, like canines. They were markedly different than the intelligent creatures that had given chase before. Despite all this, it looked kind and honest. They assumed it to be male. He tilted his head inquisitively and tried to speak to them in a foreign tongue.

“Sorry,” Saga said. “We don’t understand.”

He leaned his head back but kept his eye on them before calling out to one of his mates. Another alien swung over with his own rope and looked at them with the same curiosity. The two of them talked to each other in their own language. Of course, Saga and Vearden still couldn’t understand them, but it didn’t seem like they were planning on eating them, or hurting them at all, for that matter. Once they had come to some kind of conclusion, the second alien addressed them, “human.”

Vearden nodded his head. “Yes.”

The aliens nodded their heads and smiled, apparently proud of themselves for having guessed correctly. They each cupped one hand upwards and pulled it towards their chests, indicating that they wanted the humans to come with them. Vearden and Saga obliged, because what else were they going to do?

As they stepped out from under the rocks, they could see other aliens rappelling down the side of the mountain. Some ignored the newcomers, but others smiled and waved. One called out to them in what sounded like Chinese, and unlike their own language. They were probably not the first humans to have traveled there if enough of them were familiar with two of Earth’s languages.

Once they reached the bottom of the mountain, they gathered in a crowd. The first two aliens—which, come to think of it, weren’t the aliens since this was their planet—appeared to be introducing the visitors. A third native walked through the group and took command, giving the others formal instructions. Afterwards, he pulled the humans aside so that they could speak privately. “My friend over there tells me that he smells Gondilak blood in you.”

Vearden looked down at his belly. He had changed into his spare shirt, and since the wound had closed up, there was no evidence of the struggle. “Yes. I was...contaminated by something; must have been a Gondilak. They attacked us, and stabbed me. I was forced to kill them, but some of their blood leaked into me, so I guess that’s why I healed so quickly?”

“You killed a Gondilak?”

“Two of them.”

“Two of them. Impressive. We’ve not seen a human do that before.”

“What are they?” Saga asked.

“Not important,” the native replied. “Not anymore. Not now that you’re here with us.” He patted them both on the back. “Come. We will take you to the city so that you can change into visitor garbs and sample our victuals.”

“You’re not going to hurt us?”

“No,” the native laughed. “Not yet.”

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Microstory 70: Cow Wedding (based on a true story)

When I was a child, my grandfather planted himself in front of me and asked, “did I ever tell you about the time that I witnessed a cow wedding?” No. “I was driving along on the highway in rural Kansas. There weren’t any other cars around. To the right of me, I saw a group of cows sitting under a tree. It took me a few moments to realize that there was something off about the gathering. I promptly turned around and got myself a better look. Over a dozen cows were sitting on the grass in fairly neat and tidy rows, all of them looking in the same direction. Two cows were standing in front of them, looking towards each other. A third cow was standing between them, but off to the side, looking towards the crowd. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen. As I walked closer, most of the cows looked over to me with disinterest before putting their attention back to the matter at hand. The cows didn’t say anything, as you would expect. But the betrothed did occasionally moo at each other. When it was over, the cows sitting in the audience mooed in unison, and then they all dispersed.” When I asked him if that was a true story, he leaned in real close, gave me his most serious face, and said “every word.”

Years later, I was driving in rural Kansas, and saw my own cow wedding, just like he had described it. He really hadn’t been lying.