(The Fabulous Lives of ) Beings NOT UNLIKE YOURSELF
or The son of the sun

Stories by George Dalphin

HOM and the STORYTELLING ANDROID

THE WILDMAN AND THE KING
About friends and risks

THE THIEF AND HER SON
About role modeling and transcending example, and the emptiness of belongings

THE DISENCHANTED
About getting lost in your own impressions, and dealing with fear and father issues
           
MARTIN THE ARTIST
About the beauty of doing what you are inspired to do

DMITRI WOMACK (the man who stole from himself)
About irony

SINGS TO CROWS
About the possibilities of greatness

THE STORYTELLING ANDROID
About meaning and everything

Hom sees the Sun land behind some distant trees and goes off to see if he can find it.  It turns out to be the Android’s ship, landed, and the Android greets him.  They talk, and the Android introduces himself and where he’s from – Earth.  He explains that he is a wandering storyteller, as his people are no longer around.  Hom asks some questions, which the Android answers.  Hom explains some about his life at the moment – about his family and his friend who tries to convince him to go against his father.  The Android asks if he’d like to hear a story, and proceeds to do so.

1 – THE WILDMAN AND THE KING

My first story takes place a long time ago, when the people who made me were still halfway between animal and civilized, with no precedent of technology or culture to focus their imaginations.  They roamed the forests and the plains of Earth hunting animals and gathering the fruits of the plants of our planet.  Many times, in scattered incidents, some early versions of what we would later recognize as society arose and then fell before it found the places where it could thrive. 
A long time ago, when giant axe-beaked birds still skulked the plains and vicious cats the size of six humans slept in the branches of the trees, a young wild boy from the forest lost his family to wolves in the night and awoke alone with their remains.  After a few days of mourning, he wandered into the forest in a direction he was unfamiliar with, toward the plain, to find what destiny might be left for him.
For forty cycles of Earth’s moon, the boy wandered the forest with no idea where he was going.  He grew hairy and thin during this period, which he assumed was because he had also become a great forest hunter like the dagger-toothed cat whose tactics he learned to mimic.  He forgot the words he used to share with his family and spoke only in bestial growls and grunts to the animals of the forest around him, in what seemed to be their language.
Then, one dark early morning, the boy followed a river to a great waterfall where the forest ended and the land became vertical, plummeting down toward

The Wildman has a nebulous catastrophe in his village, and must flee into the forest. 

A Visit From the Sun
1

            Hom was ten years old when he first met the Metal Man.  His baby husk still mostly covered the vestigial wings on his back.  He was using all four arms to carry two full skulls of water across the Omblian rock swamp to refill his father’s bath back home when the sky above the treetops suddenly split.  The clouds swirled and then flew apart, and what seemed to be a greenish Sun passed between them, coming down from its celestial perch to enter the world.  There was a deafening rush of the wind spirits, who it seemed to Hom must have come down invisibly ahead of their great lord to arrange things how She wanted them, and so from that assumption Hom stayed perfectly still amongst the whirlwinds rather than get in their way accidentally as they organized the world for the Sun.
            Strangely, the Sun continued on its slow journey down until it passed behind the horizon of trees about a mile to the east across the swamp.  Hom looked back up at the sky, which was suddenly dark again without the Sun.  A few stars had become visible in the east, where the Sun had gone, and there was still a slight sunrise glow in the west.  It seemed to Hom like it had just been daylight a minute ago.  It could have just become dusk without his noticing as he carried these heavy skulls of water home.  But Hom had seen the Sun fall from the sky, at what seemed like an intentional pace, and it had seemed to land somewhere in the east, just past those trees.
            Hom put down the skulls next to a scraggly white tree, the only one around amidst the tiny islands of stone and mud and their surrounding canals of black water.  He was sure he would be able to remember it here.

THE WILDMAN AND THE KING

A long time ago, when the people who made me knew little beyond a life of hunting and hiding, a little boy was born in a cave on the side of a mountain.  His parents were simple people who spoke a simple, ancient language and had no more seen a word than a hut.  They lived like animals, with no examples to follow but of the creatures around them, and yet they had nearly the same sort of reasoning brain that you do.  So they wore these animals’ skins and ate their meat and drank from their rivers and imagined themselves to be just like the rest of the beasts who lived in their forested mountain valleys. 
They taught their young son the ways of the forest, how to hunt the deer and rabbits and birds who perched along their rivers.  The boy’s father taught him the squeaking language of the deer, and how to deceive them into moving into a trap.
Around a fire at night, the young boy’s mother would tell him stories about her favorite goddess of the forest,  who had once been a young girl like herself but was taken by

INTRO

            We really die when it seems we are born.  We are taken out of a more real, more important world where everything is beautiful and balanced and pulled into this evil world of fear and madness.  It is evil because our distance from the real world makes us confused and eventually insane.  But Man is the closest to the real world among the animals.  The gods listen to Man sometimes because Man says things.  Things that really mean something.  Because even though we are not in the real world, we can see it in our minds.
            I was born in a cage of wood and bones (a home, it is called, I am told).  I wept at my loss, freshly exiled from the real world.  My parents had frowns on their faces.  The wrinkliest one behind them took me from my mother and carried me a long way outside, up a steep, rocky area to a cave where water came out of the stone.  He covered me with blue powder and then washed my whole body, all the while humming in that deep voice that I have craved my whole life since.  Then he left me there, by the fountain in the rock, and when the bright sunlight bent its way into the cave some time later I remember rolling into a pool of water by the spring and learning to swim.  My young parents and the old man arrived later that day, after I had climbed back out of the water and was sunning myself on the rocks.  My mother cried and held me against her body for a while before handing me to my father, who held me in a firm grip and gave me my first tattoo – this phoenix on my back.  It has grown with me, I’m told.  I’ve never seen it.
            They had some strange idea about me being important, having been some specific person long ago in a previous form, but I never quite understood what they were referring to.  They said I knew things I had never been told, but they were all things that seemed obvious to me.  Things about the real world, where madness was the sleeping thing.  I didn’t understand the difference between the hidden things and the visible ones, or why only some things appeared in the world.  The old man told me that I must not have meant to be born, that I must have slipped and fallen.  I remember that; I remember his laugh when he said that.
            I remember more about the day that the village was burned, than I do about all the peaceful years before it.  I was still very young; perhaps ten years old.  I can’t be sure how many passed before I began keeping track, but I had recorded only eighty cycles of the moon at the time I fled my home.  The demons came when the moon was fully submerged in the sky, invisible, no doubt for cover of darkness.  Their skin was pale as if they were all very ill, yet they moved as swiftly as snakes and had no mercy.  I was in the forest, not far from my parent’s house, pissing on a leaf.  When I heard the first scream, I started toward the house, but several screams came from within and I stopped, uncertain what to do.  Then I saw, in the village center, two of them emerge from the old man’s house with the old man’s head held by its hair.  The old man’s head looked at me and shouted, “Hide!”  More of the demons appeared, all white skin covered with red blood.
            I fled into the forest, and did not look back.  I ran to the cave where I had been taken as an infant and remained there while the moon rose again out of the ocean of sky and then dipped back down into it.  Only a sliver of it remained the night I heard the demons approaching my cave.  Before they could find me, I made the decision to flee forever, to keep walking and never return to this forest.  Some men in my tribe had once described the desert beyond the hills to me.  Other men, peaceful men like ours, supposedly roamed the sands there on the backs of huge beasts.  I would go there and live with them if they’d suffer me.
           

            After three cycles of the moon traveling alone through the forest toward the place where the sun entered the earth at night, away from the direction of its and my own birth, the first human being I found was, as I had been warned, sitting on the back of a large four-legged beast like a huge hornless deer.
            I called out a greeting, and tried to explain that I understood that he might not understand my words if he had never heard my language before, but the tall, bearded man did not seem to listen to me.  He stared hard at me with reddish eyes and then commanded in stammering but understandable words that I should kneel and sing to him.  He held a slender black staff the length of a man’s full leg with a black stone somehow adhered to one end.  With it, as his animal kicked and strutted, he pointed at me, and then at the ground.  He wore a brown cloth tied at the waist, with at least six visible small blades fastened there, most appearing to have originally been cat teeth.  I had seen such blades before.  And the man’s nose looked like a man I had seen before, but could not remember where.  I wondered if he might be somehow related to a man of my tribe, and I had just recently become lonely; so I knelt in the leaves and looked up at him.
           
           

            He meets up with an early fire mage who is in the process of burying his earth mage wife (she was killed because in their tribe, only men were to be magi). 

            Then they get to the desert and are told of the city, four days across the desert.  The mage convinces the boy to travel with him to it, but is killed along the way by violent nomads who the boy then kills.
           

Mathematica

When Martin was seventeen, his father sold him into slavery.
Keep in mind, of course, this was the seventh century.  That means there had only been seven centuries so far.  This is like the thirty-ninth century, or something.  That gives you some idea how little they knew.
It was a crazy world.  No one had figured out a way to verify truths for posterity, or even conceived anyone ought to.  So you just couldn’t know what made sense and what was bullshit, and every ignorant asshole’s assumptions about what was going on and what shit meant counted equally, at least among their peers within a powerful and ancient hierarchical class structure that is probably some kind of remnant of our animal days for all the sense it makes. 
So when Martin’s father, already a father of three boys, found the owl-shaped red mark on his baby’s back, his terror and confusion could not be calmed until some guy who was just passing through the village convinced him that it was a terrible sign of the devil, and that the boy was cursed and evil, and need only be made taboo.  Thusly Martin was never spoken to, was ostracized to a tiny abandoned shed on the far side of his father’s bean field, and was used like a pack animal and beaten into submission whenever he would try to speak or begin to cry.  He was fed and watered with the chickens and ruthlessly hunted in vicious games invented by his brothers.  Then, in a time of hunger, when he was thirteen, Martin was sold to a cruel traveling magician for a single piece of gold.

Uncle Roger

Uncle Roger was a genius, and I always loved that about him.

(about the boy who goes to the moon with his uncle, who is chosen by some future temporal sculptors trying to save something, who chose him)

The Great Debate

At Karakorum, between religions, witnessed by a voyager who sets a fire there and burns the whole tent city to ashes, then proclaims, “It was I.”
(to be obviously a fiction)

RAY NULSWOR – Producer of The Histories.  Flamboyant, a risk-taker.

JAY LUCKNEW – Ray’s assistant, and an associate producer on the show.

OMA McANDREWS – The statuesque young Tutsi exec put in charge of the show’s

The Histories, the Complete First Season

Summary:

0 – Ray Nulswor pitches the show to financiers, explaining the idea and expositing the state of time travel and temporal dynamics.  Time travel was discovered three years earlier and has recently become a popular vacation method and is also used for historical study, but because of the way that the machine brings the traveler back to their own timeline, it is impossible to affect the present.  So the timelines can’t really seem to be fucked with. 

1 – Episode one : The Golden Brazier of Persepolis.  Ray nervously directs his crew through the process as their first contestant, Ted Ulrich, is prepped and filmed deciding what to learn and bring with him.  “It’s all about the editing,” Ray keeps reminding his crew.  He also demands that this first contestant survive, so that the show will not be seen as too dangerous to participate in.  Ted chooses to learn Wilderness Survival 1, Sword Combat 1, and Jujitsu 1.  The gadget he brings is a waterskin (makes water). He then ends up being sent back to Persepolis, where his mission is simply to break into Darius’ palace and bring back a certain idol (which keeping will be his prize if he wins).  This whole time, Ray and his coproducers are back in the studio, interacting with him and running this side of the show.  The guy barely makes it, but does end up winning.

2 – Ray is interviewed about the success of the show, during which he discuss some of the evolutions of its premise that he is considering, such as leaving cambots behind to create long-term goals.  He also butts opinions with a guy who doesn’t think time travel is real, and Ray promises to bring the guy’s dead wife back from the past, at the day that the guy met her.  He gets Herodotus on the way.

0

            “Okay, shot: A guy is clambering up a hill…”
            “Clambering?”
            “Clambering up a steep, rocky hill in the bright sunlight of the fucking Ancient World, okay?  He reaches the top of the rise and on the other side is the fucking Battle of Thermopylae, or ancient Alexandria or Babylon!  Title comes up: The Histories.  That’s the name of Herodotus’s book, the first history book.  Creative, right?  The guy invents history but can’t invent a … clever …”  Ray laughs too long, stuck momentarily in a self-effacing thought loop (nerves), then finally reacts to the money man’s stone gaze by continuing his description.  “And so this guy has a mission, whether it be to fight in the Battle of Thermopylae or steal into the medieval sultan’s harem or just live in Crocodilopolis for a week.  And we’ve got four cloaked cambots filming him.  Live.  It’s the new History Channel.  It’s an alternate-reality show.  Because the way time travel works, as we all now know, it doesn’t matter how you fuck with the timeline because you’re still gonna come back to where you left from – here.  That timeline, who cares!  But the entertainment potential there…”
            “Crocodilopolis?”
            “It was an ancient Egyptian city, center of the worship of the crocodile god Sobek.  See, and this is why I’m the guy to make this show, because I’m a history enthusiast-slash-expert…”  Ray attempts a cool flex of his shoulders.  “I’m a buff.  You know, no degree or anything, but, trust me – I know more than you.”
            “About history.”
            “Yeah.  And trust me also about this too – the history most people think of is probably some boring stuff, right?  But the places I am going to send people, the stories I will rocket them right into the middle of – there are stories … out there … in the ethers of time, of all the moments that have happened on this Earth – buddy, I am telling you the ancients didn’t play.  I mean, like, they did not play.  Archimedes, in the ancient times of Greece and Egypt and all that, built a giant wooden claw that came out of the walls of Alexandria and was able to actually pick up sea vessels, the triremes and quadriremes, and then drop them onto other ones and fling them around.  You know, similar technology to our modern construction giants but back then, and just this one dude did it once, but I know this shit and I can send people there with fucking cambots.  Stealthed cambots.”
            “Stealthed?”
            “It means that they will be effectively invisible to human sight.  Not entirely invisible, but mostly.  You’ve seen the invisibelt technology?”
            “The invisibelt.”
            “It looks a lot like that – like your basic moving cloak.  That, of course, is so the cambots don’t film each other and so the residents of the ancient world, our ancestors, don’t see the cambots floating around our hero, who ideally will have some chance of maybe actually fitting into the culture at least to some extent, as a fellow human.  Though they often wouldn’t as well, to hilarious results.  See, each contestant, as it’s planned right now, will be given five different possible missions ahead of time so that they can study as they see fit, be it by learning languages or attaining skills through notransference or…” Ray chuckles, “…by reading books or whatever.  It’s their three days.  And that also gives us a chance to introduce the contestant and film them for a few days.  Regular people – you, me, your mother, your neighbor, your plumber.  The president?  You see the variety I’m thinking?  So we’ll get to know them and we’ll watch them choose what to learn and take and then we’ll have them say their goodbyes to their family and let the audience get nice and attached, and then we bring ‘em into the studio and throw ‘em in the ol’ time machine and zap ‘em right back to … one of the five options they were given.  And they have to find out when they are and where they are and figure out what that means they have to do.  And, of course, the whole time, they’ll have audio connection to our time thanks to Meltronia’s new mic that allows for the energy translation between timespheres.  So we’ll have a host – we’re talking to the Schwarzenegger’s head people – joking – constantly interacting cleverly with the contestant, and the contestant will be able to make comments back to his own time, allowing also the ability to request a mission abort.  At the utterance of a word, the contestant will be instantly mothered back to our time safe and sound.
            “Or, they could also die in the past.”  Ray claps his hands and laughs hard four times.  “It depends on how they do.  You know the modern American World doesn’t mind a little gravitas anymore.  Well we’ll be oozing with it, I promise you.  Gravitas-comedy.  Reality.  Alternate reality.”
            “Where’s the money?”
            “Well, advertising for one.  They’ll bring products along with them to help them on their journey.  What sells through depicted use better than survivalism equipment?  And you know people these days are into make-it-yourself.  Well, ancient world stuff is all like that!  Plus, there’ll be a chance for gadgetry, the other thing that sells best with depicted use.  Sweet gadgetry in the ancient world?  How can you not be fully on board with me yet?”  Ray grins open-mouthed and holds his hands out.
            The very old bank man, Mr. Emery, pulls a pack of cigarettes out from the drawer of his desk and lights one up, takes a slow drag and then looks at Ray.  “I just can’t believe it’s already now.  I grew up a long time ago, Mr. Nulswor.  The Twentieth Century, if you can believe that.  The Nineties.”  He coughs a sad laugh to himself.  “I lived through the Sad Tumult.  Now here I am, I’m an old man, and I can smoke cigarettes again like I’m twenty goddamn years old.  New lungs.  And here you are, wanting money for a time machine reality show.  How much are time machines, anyway?”
            “Four billion dollars,” Ray says.  “And I’ll need two to start with.  Our fundamental concept and other investors demand two machines.  They think it won’t be efficient enough with only one person in the past at a time.  We need to two channels running at a time, due to the costs.  We have numbers to show that it’s worth the initial cost.  If we can get even B-level advertisers for this thing, which we absolutely should be able to get because this thing is going to be fucking brilliant, then we’re supposed to break even after only twelve months.  If we can keep it going that long.  It’s in the bag.  This will be a hit.  I promise you.  Look inside your heart, Mr. Emery.  You know it to be true.”
            Mr. Emery folds his hands on his desk.  “This is your brainchild?”
            “Brainchild?”
            “You came up with this?”
            Ray laughs and says, “Brainchild is an amazing word.  I have never heard that before.  And the answer is yes, this is my brainchild.  My wife and I haven’t been able to afford a historical vacation since the technology became available, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since April Twenty-ninety, when Burtzkramer released his findings on temporal dynamics.  Have you gotten to the past?”
            “I was there once as a child,” Mr. Emery nods with a subsurface wry grin.
            Ray stares blankly, then laughs.  “You were a child in the past.  Yeah, well, in the real past.  I mean, have you ever ridden in a time machine?”
            Mr. Emery shakes his head no.
            “No one I know has.  It’s too expensive.  Everyone wants to, but who’s got a million dollars to blow on a vacation?  Nobody.  Why should the superrich and graduate students be the only ones who get to go to the past?  It’s like people think all the past is there for is the prove what happened.  We may not be able to change this timeline by going into the past, so why not fuck around a little back there?  You see what I mean?  What’s your favorite period of history?  Mine is the ancient world.”
            Mr. Emery nods and leans back in his chair, puts out his cigarette in an ashtray on the windowsill behind him.  “I like the Victorian Era,” he says when he finally looks back up.
            Ray laughs and snaps his fingers.  “They were some interesting people doing interesting stuff, weren’t they?”
            Mr. Emery coughs a little laugh and looks away from their eye contact.
            Behind Ray, the door to Mr. Emery’s office fades open, revealing Ray’s assistant, Jay Lucknew, who whispers, “You’ve got about one minute left, Ray – good luck!” then slips out of view to the side of the doorway as the door fades back into place.
            “Nice door.  How do they make it do that?  Where does the door go, again?  I don’t get that.”
            “Mr. Nulswor,” the bank man says with gravitas-comedy in his voice, “I am strongly getting a sense from you that any project under your command will fail epically, and yet each of the autosprites that I’ve been given are indicating you to be a sure financial bet, so I can only imagine that the two are related.  Somehow, your loss in this endeavor will make the Memes I work for a great deal of money, and they are certain of it.”
            He looks into Ray’s eyes, man to man.

1

            “Are you ready to make History, Ted?”
            The studio audience (all robots designed only to appear human and attend studio audiences) applauds on cue, and their manufactured excitement reflects in genuine tones on Ted Ulrich’s face as he looks down the long stage at all their faces.  He grins at the cameras and wrings his hands in front of himself.  Beside him, lovely-if-cyberyoung Dakota Fanning, host of The Histories, smiles at the contestant and says, “Then get on into that portal and let’s get this show on the road!”
            Again, the studio audience roars.  Ted is led nervously into the

2

            Ray looked at his watch, not actually to check the time, as he had already done so less than a minute previous, but merely to indicate as clearly as possible his boredom.  His two fellow ‘experts’ on the panel show he was on – an attractive young temporal phyisicist named Koko Eleanora and a doubly-spectacled (one for eyesight, one for information-enhancement [cheap]) Skeptic man – both frowned at him tactfully.  Ray looked to the studio audience for sympathy, forgetting for a moment that they were all robots, then laughed softly to himself at his mistake.
            “Mr. Nulswor,” the robot moderator began as a starry night of tiny red recording lights appeared between the larger, sparser bright white ones that lit the panel.  No warning; the show had begun.  Ray hated being on these fully-automated talk shows, but he new it was necessary for exposure, so he tried to perk himself up internally, adjusting the way he sat and looking the moderator in the eyes.  “You are the creator and producer of the new hit show The Histories, wherein contestants travel back in time in order to participate in historical events and/or challenges created for the show.”  The moderator finished speaking abruptly and stared at Ray blankly.
            The Skeptic started talking out of turn with a skeptical scoff.  “Well first of all I’d like to point out…”
            “That you’re an interrupter,” Ray interrupted.  “He asked me the question, if you don’t mind.”
            “I didn’t hear a question,” the Skeptic retorted, “I heared a statement and a pause.”
            “Neverthless,” the moderator moderated, “let us continue.”
            Ray groaned and slouched back in his chair.

            “So you just flat out don’t believe in time travel, is what you’re trying to say,” Ray clarified.  “You think it’s some kind of unbelievably elaborate hoax?”
            “You got it, buddy.  You said it.”
            Ray just laughed.  “I guess you think the Moon landing was a hoax, too?” he sniped sarcastically.
            Mr. Kiplinger leaned forward with a serious look at Ray and said, “Fella, I was born on the Moon.”  Then he pointed and said, “But I wasn’t born there yesterday,” as he leaned back confidently.
            Ray nodded and smiled down at his own folded hands.  “I see.  And so your opinion is just somehow valid.  What about the time mines, sir?  Where did all that new oil come from?  Have you forgotten the seventies, and how the time miners brought back this lovely world of excess we get to share right now?  Where, tell me, where else could all this oil possibly have come from?  I mean, there is no rational argument for what this guy is saying, for anyone who is not ignorant to the past fifty years of history.  Seriously, why is this guy even here?  Why not have me debate with just a full-on insane person?”
            “Previously untapped suboceanic reserves kept secret since Eisenhower,” Mr. Kiplinger recited like it was his personal tagline.
            “Okay.  Eisenhower kept secret oil reserves that Freemont just kept shut through the whole Oil Crisis.  You have a colorful answer for everything.  And I guess you still think the Flying Spaghetti Monster really created the universe?”
            “Come on, now,” Mr. Kiplinger objects.
            “Alright,” Ray concedes, looking away.  Then, in a eureka moment as he was looking into the high bright lights and the tiny red ones below, knowing that the robotic studio audience was behind those lights though he could not see them, Ray conceived of what felt like a perfect marketing stunt.  He spun dramatically to face Mr. Kiplinger again and said, “Who do you want me to bring back from history?  Name me anybody who you know, who you could confirm was from the past in some way that you would be willing to accept, and I will go and capture that person and bring them back here to you, to prove to you that we really are going back in time.  We can do it on the show.  Who should I bring back for you?”
            “How about my wife?” Mr. Kiplinger said with a stoic frown.  He and Ray shared a long, silent moment of frozen eye contact, he in his confident frown, Ray in his mid-shrug, wide-eyed showman’s plea.
            “What is she, dead?” Ray asked with a touch of a comedic tone, not thinking.
            “Yes.”
            “Interesting,” Ray said, and thought for a moment.  Then he pointed melodramatically at Mr. Kiplinger and said, “Alright, sir, you fucking asked for it.  Your dead wife it is.  What age?  As a child?  The day before you met her?  The day of your wedding?”
            “Jesus,” Miss Eleanora gasped, and put her thin hand to her mouth.
            “There was no Jesus, Miss Eleanora,” Ray said with a vicious snort as he leaned back away from them both.  “Time machines proved that for us unequivocally.”
            “The day before I met her,” Mr. Kiplinger said quietly, tears welling up in his eyes.  He seemed to realize he had been looking sadly into space and so closed himself up, sat back in his chair and looked down.  “No, Mr. Nulswor,” he said, “you see I wouldn’t want you to bring me back my dead wife.”
            “Because it would feel somehow artificial and blasphemous or something?” Ray asked the man.
            “Because I had gotten over her, you thoughtless punk,” Mr. Kiplinger grunted, and suddenly Ray felt a little guilty for a moment.
            Ray stood up and took off his microphone.  “I no longer approve of my association with this program,” he said with frustration.  “I just made a little bit too much of an ass of myself.  Sorry, Eleanora.  Love the show.  Continue without me.  Where’s that kid who took my coat?”  Some producers brought Ray his coat and took his microphone.  The robot audience applauded.
            “Ray Nulswor, ladies and gentlemen, no longer with us.”
Thaddeus intercepted Ray on his swoop through the backstage area.

5

A particularly entertainingly dischordant father and son team on Channel Seven-Oh-Nine clambered up a rocky hill together in just robes and sandals.  The ancient Egyptian sun beamed down on them from near zenith.
            “I swear to the Pharaoh, you are my slave from now on.  If we run into anyone else, not a word from you.  You’re my Nubian slave child.  I bought you in Timbuktu.”
            “I can’t be Nubian, I’m white,” the child retorted shrilly.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about and everyone here knows it.  I should make use of my force shield while the war is still being prepared!”
            Sitting below the screen that Channel Seven-Oh-Nine was playing on, Ray’s brunette call girl crossed her legs and ignited a self-illuminating cigarette with a kiss to the tip of its holder.  “The child seems to know more about what’s going on than the father,” she remarked in a Southern accent.  “Where do you get these contestants, anyway?”
            “Lottery,” Ray replied as he sat down next to her and handed her a tissue.  He picked up the remote and muted the screen.
She wiped a spot of cum off her lapel, then handed him back the tissue and said, “It’s not ruined.  Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Ray nodded, putting the tissue in his shirt pocket.
“Make me an Arch Stanton’s Grave?” she asks with half a smile and the same turn of her chin move that she had pulled just before blowing him. 
Ray smiled and went to the bar, poured her an Arch Stanton.  As he did, he explained, “You know the red card high stakes lotto?  The one you have to sign off on?  Yeah, well, there’s a lot of people playing those things and most of them have no idea what some of the things could happen to them are.  Some medical experiments, on some of the lotteries.  But also, on a number of them, you could potentially become a forced contestant on our show, with the chance, of course, to earn money, which is how we get included in the process.”
“Wow.”
“It’s in microscopic print on every ticket; all they gotta do is read it,” Ray chuckled.  “But, so, yeah.  That’s where we get our contestants.  The mediocre and ignorant.  And, I mean, there are also of course the people who want to be on the show, but honestly we end up using lotto winners more often than beggars, which is what we call the people who send us their tapes.  After all, we want compelling drama in ancient times, not self-aggrandizing doofi.”
“I believe the plural of doofus would be doofuses.  Like mooses.”
“No, it’s Latin.  Second declension, masculine.  Trust me.”
The phone rang, and Ray picked it right up.  “Hello?  Yes, I know.  That’s what’s making it interesting.  They don’t have to work well together in the project to work well together as entertainment for our viewers.  Yeah, well, that’s why you have me in charge of these things.  Don’t listen to your wife.  No, then shut the door.  Yes, I’m telling you – I promise – the kid won’t die.  We won’t let the kid die.  I know how Xerxes is.  Trust me.  Alright, peace.”  He hung up and grinned down at the seated call girl as he pulled a joint from his shirt pocket.  “Our money man.  His wife is worried about the little boy on Seven-Oh-Nine.”
“He seems to be in better shape to deal with the situation than his father,” she replied dismissively.
“Yeah, that’s her concern.  Your Arch Stanton, my dear.”  He hands her the bluish drink.
“Thank you, Mister Nulswor.  You gonna offer any of that?” she asked, indicating the joint he was lighting.
“Please,” Ray says, kneeling in front of her to kiss her knee, “call me Emperor.  And no, I’m not going to.  But I’ll blow it on you if you like.”
“Oh my god,” she whispered, out of sight of him as he kissed softly further up her leg, toward the edge of her short skirt.
“Am I too reckless, darling?” he asked with a grin as he looked up into her eyes, but when he did so he noticed her horrified gaze upward, and darted his own gaze in that direction just in time to see the little boy being snatched up out of the grasp of his pathetically mediocre father by a mounted nomad dressed in flowing black robes and wielding a long, curved sword in his other hand. 
As soon as Ray was looking, the sword came down on the father’s shoulder, nearly chopping off the arm.
“Ouch!” the brunette gasped.  “His arm came off!”
“Use your force shield, boy!  This could still be good television!  Use your force shield!” Ray shouted at the screen.  His phone began to ring, and he shouted at it, “Shut up, Thaddeus, let it play out!  Be a hero, boy, use your force shield!”
At that moment, on the screen, all of a sudden the nomad in black burst apart, his torso shattering in all directions like a bomb, his head shooting upwards and both arms flailing off in either direction as a shimmering blue sphere spread near-instantly outward from the boy to a radius of three feet.  The camel was knocked to its knees by the force of the impact, and the boy tumbled to the sand, which sizzled into glass in a circle around him.  He instantly curled into a ball and began to shake.
“Holy Elvis, yes!” Ray shouted out, then grabbed his phone and said firmly into it, “Thaddeus!  Yes!  Get him back here and give him a million dollars!  We’ve given America a beautiful moment today.  No, man, be proud.  Alright, tomorrow morning.  Laters.”  He hung up confidently, with a grin to the call girl.
His phone instantly rang again.  “Psch,” he sighed, “I am trying to not waste this pleasant brunette’s expensive time, here.  Jeez.”  He tried to make a comically annoyed face for her, then answered the phone again, “Hello?” 
The shrieking, with a distinct wailing sob in the background, caused Ray to cringe and hold the phone away.  “The boy’s alive.  People die.  The boy’s alive!  He’s going to get a million dollars.  He’s already gotten free expert upgrades.  He’s set.  Come on.  The father; people die.  People die on TV.  I’m not going to talk to you like this.  Calm down.  We’ve made good TV today.  We’ll talk tomorrow.  Alright, peace.”  He hung up.
            “Now, was that excellent or what?” Ray asked the call girl, who was watching

            After they start doing the long-term-effects challenges, there is one where they try to get to a certain advance as quickly as possible, often bringing the whole of the Earth into the idea of this game-show-as-religion that is happening, with this goal they have.  Although some of them just get destroyed.

Sings to Crows

The fifteenth Dalai Lama, fifty-seventh President of the United States, seventh Consul of the Free Noosphere and first Savior of the Moon, Sings to Crows was born in the small town of Turkeyturn on an Oneida Indian Reservation in the New York region of North America, Earth, in the year -66.  He was born in a world very different from ours, before Emergence, before the Noozone, at the end of the Sixth World, and times were hard in America.  Everything was changing.  But if it hadn’t been for the young Oneida boy from Turkeyturn, who knows what we may have become.
The Great One’s mother was an aspiring actress named Beatrix Sidewinder who had been born in Turkeyturn.  She left the town for New York City after high school, hoping to break into theater, only to return after four unsuccessful years.  At twenty-three, she met Crowfoot, a twenty-eight year old itinerant electrical engineer originally from Pittsburg, and the two married after only four weeks together.
Sings to Crows was the third of three boys (brothers Cable Repairman and Good Gloves), with a little sister following soon after him (Isis Jane).  He and his siblings all spoke with tenderness and nostalgia of their early years, growing up in Turkeyturn with their parents.  Good Gloves dictated to Garfield Gravely for his memoir Turkeyturn Mornings:

My older brother would inevitably end up holding the antenna out the window with one arm while he read a book or sewed a stitch with his other hand – which is why to this day Cable has one fine arm and one huge one – just so that our father could pick up the Underwaves on that old twentieth century black and white television set.  He just had to hear the Lou Reed News Hour every Saturday at six, which meant Cable Repairman had to hold the antenna out the window, which meant I had to always refill Cable’s glass of Diet Coke because he had to stay there in his chair with his arm out the window. 
Well one time I had the big idea to make a Clarence Thomas reference, because our father had just told us about the whole Anita Hill trial thing back in the late twentieth century and we had been laughing about it the previous night.  So, being young and foolish, I put one of my pubic hairs onto the ice cube in his Diet Coke when I was refilling it, and when I brought it to him, as he was drinking it I said, “Is that a pubic hair in your Coke?”
Unfortunately, he had already gone to take a sip, and didn’t hear me I guess.  So Dad and I were laughing really hard, and he just swallowed and said, “What did you just ask me?” with my pubic hair clearly stuck to his upper lip, and he kind of licked at it, and then went at with his fingers, going, “Was there a hair in there?” 
Dad and I were rolling.
Then, out of nowhere, STC came in with a plate of cookies he had just made.  He was always baking, that kid, from five on.  We’re pretty sure Isis Jane taught him how, but no one knows who showed her, because she was only four.

Isis Jane, only a year younger than Sings to Crows, was the Great One’s closest friend growing up, and the two would remain near inseparable until her early death.  It was she who coined his given name one day while watching her brother hum to a tree full of crows in their backyard that looked out across a long-dead crop field that Crowfoot tried for years to bring back to life.  Those three were supposedly her first words, and upon her utterance of them, the Great One (then but a toddler of three years) ran inside to tell his parents that his sister had named him.
“Isis said my name!  Isis said my name!”
Crowfoot was working on soldering one of his gadgets, and rubbed his boy’s head gruffly without looking up.  “Oh yeah?  So what’s your name?”
“It’s Sings to Crows!” the little man yelped happily, clutching his hands together.
Crowfoot looked up at his young son

“I will be reborn as pure thought, in the Noosphere.”

 
Dmitri Womack
                                        was awakened suddenly one night by the sound of his cat, Chester, yowling and a raspy voice near the window cursing, “Damn it, Chester!” 
There was a crash, another sharp yowl from Chester, and then the pawthumps of Chester’s obese cat body dashing out of the bedroom.  Dmitri caught the briefest, vaguest glimpse of a hunched human form lumbering out the open bedroom door, toward the living room, as he was opening his eyes.
Dmitri’s heartbeat rose up into his brain and an awareness of where he was came suddenly upon him.  His eyes darted to the open window across his bedroom, where the big Queen flag that he used as a curtain to mask the fire escape was torn down inward.  He sat there staring for a long second, then snapped out of it and shouted, “Hey, who’s climbing into my apartment?”  He threw his feet into his leather slippers.  Nude but for tightey-whiteys, he walked out into the living room of his apartment.
“Chester?” Dmitri called out when he found the dark living room empty.  “What are you doing, Chester?”  He held one hand up to feel his nervous heartbeat through his chest.  For a moment, the image of the lumbering human dissipated as if it had been a dream, and he began to calm down. 
Dmitri shook his head to himself and walked into the small kitchenette, where he poured himself a glass of water and sat down on a stool at the kitchenette’s bar.  The living room (basically the same room as the kitchenette, but viewed from the opposite angle) was small with off-white carpeting, walls and ceiling.  The walls were largely bare other than Dmitri’s Blade Runner poster.  A big TV faced an old black futon with a leopard-print blanket on it.  Stacks of DVDs and old console gaming systems littered the floor.  Everything seemed in place.  Dmitri decided he must have been dreaming.
Then a scratching sound at the closed bathroom door made Dmitri’s heart suddenly fall, and he felt instantly awake, because he specifically remembered having left the bathroom door open the last time he used it.  And now it was closed, and Chester was scratching at the door to be let out mere moments after he had awoken Dmitri by yowling in the bedroom.
Dmitri was no sleuth, but he knew that the available evidence implied that someone who had just sneaked in his window was now probably in his bathroom with Chester, with the lights off. 
Dmitri looked around himself quickly, thinking of that scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis is searching for a weapon to save Ving Rhames with, but the only possible instrument of defense that Dmitri had was a fake wooden katana that rested on top of his TV.  He raced to it and grabbed it, then very slowly approached the dark bathroom door with the katana held in something like various stances he had seen in Kung-Fu movies.
Though his terrified heart did everything it could to keep him from doing so, the courageous Dmitri very slowly turned the knob on the door and then pulled it open very fast, scrambling at the wall to turn on the light as Chester raced out between his feet. 
But when the light came on, the bathroom was empty.  No one was in there.
“Huh,” Dmitri said.

“What,” his friend Eggman said the next day, after being told the story.  “You just shut him in there, man.  He woke you from the bathroom, yellin’ ‘cuz you shut him in the bathroom.  How much you like it if I shut you in a bathroom?”
“I promise, man,” Dmitri assured Eggman with absolute certainty, “I left the bathroom door open.  I saw a lurching…”  Dmitri holds his arms up to his chest and lurches in his seat.  “…figure, man.”
“But there wasn’t anyone there,” said Eggman.  “So where did he go?”
Dmitri had no answer.  He just chewed his sandwich and shrugged with his hands.  Then something occurred to him.
“What, did they not take out all the bacon?” Eggman asked in regard to Dmitri’s expression.
“No, I just realized that, if I’m right, the disappearing intruder knew Chester’s name.  He said, like, kinda raspy, ‘Damn it, Chester.’”
Eggman sat picking something out of his teeth and looking at Dmitri, considering.  Then he said, “That was just the end of your dream or whatever,” and took another bite of his sandwich.
Dmitri sat pondering the whole thing, unable to keep eating his sandwich.  He put it down.  “No, man, you know?”  He paused a while, nodding to himself, while Eggman ate his sandwich.  “There really was someone in my place last night.  There must have been.  I’m certain I saw someone.  And they must have at least shut Chester in the bathroom.”
“It was a subterfuge,” Eggman proposed with a raised eyebrow.  “To make you think he was in there with Chester, when really he just shut Chaz in the bathroom and then hid himself in the shadows or some shit.”
“Perhaps,” Dmitri nodded.  “That’s scary, huh?  The idea that whoever was in my apartment last night was fuckin’ ninja enough to, like, hide-in-shadows my ass?”
Eggman laughs.  “Word.”
“What, though…” Dmitri stuttered, “…what was he doing there?  I don’t think he took anyone.  I mean anything.”
“He or she,” Eggman noted, raising both his eyebrows, then took a bite.  Then, with mouth full, he added, “Could be some female-type.  You never know what they’re gonna do.”
Dmitri didn’t laugh.  “This is serious, dude.  I know it wasn’t a dream.  So what the fuck happened?”
“If you’re sure that you saw someone in your place last night the way you say, then it must be the ninja answer,” Eggman said matter-of-factly.  “The guy ninja’d past you and … maybe he or she was in the wrong place or something.  And it must be someone who knows you.  Or at least knows Chester.  Maybe he has another family he goes to.”
“Who also call him Chester?”
“Maybe they know you.”  Eggman bit his lip, just staring Dmitri down.
Eggman continued to be little help.

At work, Dmitri could hardly focus on the questions that his computer was asking him.  None of them seemed to have anything to do with his conundrum.  He sat in his cube with his headphones on, listening to Plimelimelo loud, his feet propped up on the minifridge under his desk, sometimes clicking through the questions like his input didn’t matter, other times getting stuck on a single one for half an hour.

Is it cool to drive a truck?

“Is it cool to drive a truck,” Dmitri shouted over his headphones, then pulled them down and leaned around the edge of his cube to repeat it to Uli, the guy in the next cube.  “Is it cool to drive a truck!  This is the question I’m asked.”
“These questions,” Uli nodded in befuddled agreement.  “What’s with ‘em?”
“I know!  Is it cool to drive a truck?  Who gives a fuck?  That’s what I’m gonna respond.  Who gives a fuck.”  Dmitri typed it and hit ENTER.
“You know what I saw today on my way to work?” Uli asked Dmitri from out of view as a new question came up before Dmitri.

Do plants think?

“What’d you see?” Dmitri asked, typing in NO.
“A robin,” Uli replied.
“What’s that, a bird?” someone else from a cube across the aisle asked.
“Yeah, it’s a red-breasted bird,” Uli said.  “She flitted from one building to the next outside my train car.  It was very elegant.  I felt like I was out bird-watching in the woods somewhere, but there wasn’t a tree in sight.”
“How do you know it was a she?” someone else asked.
“’Cause,” Dmitri responded, trying to time it comically, “he saw her red breasts, obviously.”
Unfortunately, only Uli laughed.  Also he said, between laughs, “It didn’t have breasts.”

Where was the Parthenon?

While there was a lull in the conversation again, Dmitri slipped his headphones back on.  He entered EUROPE, then opened a new window on his screen and googled FLOWERS.  After much searching, he found a build-a-bouquet site and collated a big, red-heavy bouquet for his mother, then entered his financial information to purchase it.
To his astonishment, Dmitri’s bank account numbers were declined.  He tried inputting them again, certain that he had just gotten paid and that he must have mistyped something.  But he was declined again.
“Where the fuck is my money?” he asked the air with frustration.  “It’s declining me.  I can’t afford a simple bouquet of flowers?”
“You’re not trying to buy real flowers, are you?” Uli asked him.
“Of course not!  I’m just trying buy regular old fake flowers for my mother, and it says ‘insufficient funds,’ which is bullshit.”
“That happened to a friend of mine the other day,” someone else in a cube down the aisle chimed in.
“You must just be broke for the moment,” Uli suggested hesitantly.  “The banking system is set up not to fail.  Can’t have it failing.”
“Well it’s fucking up right now,” Dmitri assured him, unable to calm his growing frustration.  “I’m going to the bank.  I’ll see you guys after lunch.”
Dmitri gathered his palm computer, keys, soda and jacket and stomped off down the aisle of cubes.

The Guy Who Was Raised By the AI

“It turned out the problem was we had been thinking in whispers,”