The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
How Precious
10-30-1999

Early in the dream I was at a house on the docks, cleaning it.

Then I was at school. It seemed like school anyway. The building was nothing like any school I'd ever been to before. There were showers in the hallway. Not emergency showers, but real ones, with a little alcove and a drain and everything. I knew some guys who knew a special computer code, so we went to the computer lab one night to get some professor's data. The security was suspicious of so many people in the computer lab at night, and I thought how in undergrad there wouldn't have been anything suspicious about it at all. Eventually we cracked the code and a bunch of charts came on the screen. We saved it to disk as soon as possible.

I made it to the software department where a bunch of my pals worked. Eric P was there, talking to some big lug I supposedly knew as well. They were working on a new computer game, a sequel to "Out of this World". Part 3, actually, though there isn't even a Part 2. It was a very realistic game, for the graphics were overlayed onto the entire floor, with digital people walking around and fake backgrounds.

Something 'bad' happened, though, and we had to get out of there. I ran outside (nighttime ofc) and saw some cop cars closing in. I saw this guy John come out of the building. We ran, with some other guy behind us, across the street to an alley. We stayed there a second. There was another alley running behind the buildings, so I went down it a bit to take a look, and saw another cop car waiting for us. I turned around and bumped into a girl. She'd followed us, too, and it looked like more were on the way. We bolted again, across some lawns, toward a house.

John and I made a running jump into a window, and I thought how noone would ever find us here, until I realized it was just a shortcut up the staircase. The fat guy behind us had to go the long way around. We vigilantly looked out the window. It was now daytime, and other people we 'knew' were converging on this place as some sort of refuge, which meant we had to get out of there. I saw two kids standing at the doorway, whom I supposedly knew as Sneeze and Snot or something else silly like that. Scrubs. I didn't want them hanging around.

We ran again when it was dark, a few more in our band. We came to a fence, and I noted it would be no problem to climb it, but then noticed barbed wire at the top. It wasn't thick, though, and someone else said we could all make it anyway. We did, but I got some gashes on my legs. There was another set of barbed wire fence just on the other side, and we decided to just push the fence over. As we were doing so, we bothered these two hillbilly guys on the other side who were sitting at a fire. A bunch of harsh words were exchanged, and they wanted to kill us. Then more people on 'our' side showed up, including my 'friend' Leslie. I shouted in the hillbillies' faces, "Ha! That's EIGHT of us." One of them looked at the other and said, "What do you say, 10k each? 160k total? (so they were bad at math, too?)" I'd long since gotten the Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and had it behind my back. They charged us with fists. One of them barged into a huge group of us while the other came after me and another skinny kid. The skinny kid got tossed away. He lunged at me, knocking me good, and I drove that knife in his side, then spun around again and nailed him in the face and eyes a few times. He went down. The other guy was taken care of by the others, but Greg was hurt. Everyone had him in their arms as he fell to the ground. "You're gonna be okay," someone said. He rolled his eyes and with a grunt, said, "No, I can feel myself going already." We all clasped his hands as he went, and I could barely control my tears. One girl across from me looked over at me, wishing to understand my pain. I backed away and saw Loi in all the confusion, and wondered how long she'd been with us. I went someplace to be alone for a while.

Greg's body was processed and made into various products, like rope. I ended up back in class. Suddenly Greg appeared. Byrne said that he had cloned him. Greg said, "I know what you may be thinking (ie he's not the same Greg), but I've had an EEG scan."

I followed a young red-robed man into a house. In another hallway, an older, grey-robed man walked by, but who otherwise looked exactly the same. We hid from him. The young man said, "He's a future me. I've seen him before, at the square. He travels backwards in time while I move forwards." From this I understood that the young man would someday become the old man, and that the old man would become the young man in an infinite circle.

He ushered me out, but I spied through a crack in the wall. Two little robed guys like Jawas came out from his robe and start chattering away. He left and I interacted with them a little.

I thought about the events that had happened so far, and recounted them in their entirety to someone else.

I was on a land transport with a girl and Byrne. I was talking to the girl about how lovely the landscape was, and how nice it would look from the air. She asked why I didn't learn how to fly. "All in due time, " I said. "It would cool be to have your own plane, fly it up north for the weekend. Would only take like an hour. My dad does that." (not really). Byrne perked up and said, "How precious!"

We docked in the water by the same shack I cleaned earlier. I was supposed to stay there and help these two guys clean it up. I swept the floor and stuff. Then they left and a bunch of my pals arrived. They noticed that I hadn't cleaned up all these little pieces of wire stapled into the floor, and I said it was because the men didn't want me to, and we thought that was suspicious. I took form of one of my friends, who I named Davy, who scaled the wall around the shack (hanging over the water) to the bedroom window (the bedroom door was locked), and looked inside. There was someone sleeping in each bed. Then I watched through the window as one of them got up and went to the door, just as it was busted down by one of my pals, who blew a big hole in his chest. He killed the other guy, too, who was just waking up.

I took a bucket and started filling it with twenty dollar bills that I found lying around the shack. One guy was operating some flame-powered, money- dispensing device. I put the bucket underneath it and picked up the dollars that flew beyond its scope, thinking about taking one for myself, but instead putting it into the bucket.


posted by Phlegm at 11/25/2003