The Three Rs
My primary time suck comes down to the three Rs: Reading, Riting, and Research. Yes, I spelled writing wrong, dropping the ‘w’. But it’s a silent ‘w’, isn’t it? Does riting sound that different from writing? Does riting sound rong?
Looks weird as hell, I admit.
I could have also just changed the title to The Three Ws, adding a silent ‘w’ to reading and research, creating wreading and wresearch.
I enjoy words. Their histories fascinate me. And I enjoy making things up. That’s why I rite fiction.
I also love reading, or, as some might rite it, wreading. The ‘w’ is silent. I read multiple genres, although I shy away from horror and wromance. Science fiction narrowly leads fantasy and historical fiction, but I enjoy thrillers and mysteries, too. I also enjoy non-fiction about history, economics, politics, quantum mechanics, and time.
Besides wreading and writing, I enjoy wresearch. Wresearch can easily become a time suck. Once upon a time, a show called Connections aired. The British science historian, James Burke, hosted the show. The show explored technological and scientific progress but veered off into tangents and side effects about how such advances were employed, resulting in surprising revealations. That sort of revelatory pingpong the show employed stirred me to continue such wresearch. The Internet is a tremendous catalyst to such wresearch.
My wresearch goes everywhere. Some of it is anchored to childhood memories of sports, politics, historic events, science, and pop culture. I remember things but often want to validate my memory. Verifying that I correctly remember matters causes me to delve deeper into details and background information, and often triggers side journeys into related matters.
When I was employed, my three time sucks secured me solid positions and helped foster my success. Now a retiree, I happily pursue them every day.
There are way worse ways to live.
Well, I’ll Be Damned
I read aloud.
“Hello, old man! If you’re reading this letter, then you made it: you’re 100 years old! Congratulations to you.
“Or, congratulations to me, I should say. I set you up for your success, right? Come on, give me credit. I’m the one who signed the contracts, took the money, made the payments.
“Yes, there are some downsides. You should be 100 years old but you’re probably not living on Earth. Part of the agreement, right? I have no idea which planet you ended up settling, either. That’s one reason why you’re getting a preserved paper letter. If you’re reading this, you remember all of this. It’ll be as real to you as it is to me. And you know all the details. Hell, biologically, you’re younger than me now, because they gave you a new body, assuming they lived up to their end of the agreement. You should now be 25 biologically, which, yes, you know. Yes, you’ll be another color; you won’t be white. Small price, right? They weren’t sure whether you would be blue or green. Said both of those were possible with our genes. Wish you could write me back and tell me.
“Hard to write this. I know things but you know them, too. But I write to think, to make sense of it all. I never expected the things to happen which did. The war. Getting frozen. Sent to storage in space, then returned to Earth. I mean, as you know, I know these things, but it’s all abstract to me. Happened to me but I wasn’t conscious of it. Not this version of — well, yeah, you know.”
I stopped reading then. I knew what the letter said. I just wrote it yesterday. Realizations were creeping up. I’m a slow thinker but I usually get there.
So I took in the shimmering individual standing before me. Gorgeous guy. Blue. Azure. Well built. So tall, his thick, glossy black hair brushed the room’s ceiling.
“You’re me,” I said. “But you don’t look anything like me.”
He snorted. “Yes, I know. I’ve seen myself and I see you now, along with the old photos of you. They gave me options to change my appearance and I took them.”
“I see.” I smiled.
“I mean, wouldn’t you?”
“I probably would. Well, I did, because you’re me and…anyway. So, you made it. I made it. We made it.”
“Oh, yes. It’s quite a future, so improved over this. And you wanted to know what color we’d be, so….” He shrugged.
“You came back to show me.”
He grinned. “Bingo. Well, mostly. I also came back to thank you.”
Stepping forward, he offered me his huge hand. “I don’t want to get mushy, but thank you. Thank you for having the fortitude to persevere. Thank you for the decisions you made and supporting the science. Thank you for trusting it.”
Setting the letter I’d written to my hundred-yead-old self onto the desk, I stood and shook his hand. “You’re welcome.”
Me? Noooo.
Of course I have never intentionally broken the law. Unless you count speeding. Okay, I admit I exceeded the speed limit once or twice…or ten thousand…times. I had good reasons! Like, the bathroom, yeah, I had to go to the bathroom. That’s the ticket. And I was, um, I was, I was, yeah, late for a funeral. And my wedding! Yeah, I was late for my wedding, that’s it. So I had to speed to get us there on time — yeah, my wife-to-be was with me in the car, so, you know, if I didn’t speed, neither of us would have gotten to the wedding on time. So, you see, really, I had to. No choice.
And the other times it was because, um, I was picking up food! Food. Yeah, pizza, and Chinese and Mexican food. And doughnuts. So I had to speed because I was saving people from starving to death. Other than that, and those times I was speeding to get away from the cops because there was a warrant out for my arrest, I would never intentionally break the law. Oh, and that time I was fleeing the threat of bodily harm because someone accused me of stealing from them. But they were going to hurt me, so can you blame me?
But other than those few exceptions, which, you see, I had no choice about, I would never intentionally break the law. Well, except for that time I went back in time, but that doesn’t happen for another eleven years so that doesn’t count, does it? Because, if you’re gonna count that, you might as well count the time I broke out of jail on the moon.
Say, there’s no law against not telling the truth, is there?
Twozda’s Wandering Thoughts
I encountered a friend while I was out this morning. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Spotting my blue and white open-toe ortho sandals with their velcro straps that were forced on me for my lymphedema treatment, he asked, “What’s going on there? You okay?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. These are my new Nikes. They’re the latest in footwear. AI designed. And they are so comfortable. Really amazing. I know they don’t look like much….”
“No, they don’t.”
“No, but they’re actually this very sophisticated series of layered ‘smart’ materials that shape to your feet and adjust for your activity. Kind of expensive, too. I got these for about a hundred eighty dollars on Amazon.”
Shock rode into his expression. “Really?”
“No. I made all that up.” Turning off my brain’s bullshit center — the bullshitis centritis — I revealed the truth.
Then we had a good laugh about the fiction I’d spun.
The Writing Moment
Scenes hang in my mind, waiting to be unfolded. A line or two or three is written. A pause to contemplate them is embraced. More lines come, get written. The growing new scene is reviewed, lightly edited. More lines come, more gets written.
Sometimes, the pause gets extended. I surf into news articles and others’ posts. Then a muse spears my attention and I jump back to the scene being written. Lines are added. They stack into paragraphs. Paragraphs stack into pages. I review what I wrote and lightly edit.
That scene is eventually done. The next one is considered and plotted in my head. I approach again. A line or two or three is written. So it goes.
Meanwhile, muses ambush me with a new concept. I’m reading a non-fiction article about glaciers. The concept harpoons my mind. I grin with delight and think, oh, wow, that would be fun. An opening scene begins unfolding.
I open up a new doc to capture the first lines. Scenes are written. They turn into chapters and branch into a structure’s glimmerings. I think, this will be my next project. I rummage around my brain for a title. A tentative one is hauled out. Rejected. Another bubbles up. Acceptable. More is realized and written. The working title is modified. The quick, sudden progress surprises me. This will definitely be fun to write. But first, the other novel in progress must be finished.
I close the document. Return to the work in progress. A line or two or three is written. I’m close to the end. Close to tying it all up and saying to myself, finished.
So it goes.
In The Beginning
They told us we had to have skin.
Our mind pulsed against the news. We don’t know that we would have accepted the premise, were we told beforehand that having skin was a requirement.
Ca!ixha flew in over our head, red with anger. Their thoughts flew into our awareness. Anger, shock, wariness. Doubt. The overarching question, is it true? Is this needed?
My intellect sewed together the action. Having skin was inevitable. We were studying Humans. We needed to live among them, like them, to learn what it is to be them.
We swallowed this with hardship. But as I did, I pulsed in pride. I’d thought, I think, like a Human, using their constructs. ‘Beforehand’. ‘Sewing’. ‘Action’. ‘Live.’ ‘Swallowed’.
?sho7zn came in. They’d been integrating with others and informed us of greater requirements. We will eat. We will have body functions. We will be I. Me.
Human aspects were introduced to our understanding. We would have ears and tongues. The tongues would be in mouths. With teeth. Hair.
We choked down disgust as the Overreach began threading us with these Human aspects. Eyes and noses. Bones and muscles.
The weight of these things burned our sentience. We were to breathe. Hearts and lungs were given. . Nerves were threaded through us. Skin was applied.
Helplessness ached in us. Our eyes formed ‘vision’. We saw as Humans would see. Millions of us were stretched across the space, layers of us, shoulder to shoulder, feet to head, all looking up, stupidly grinning, waving our appendages. Sounds as Humans trickled in. We gurgled and cooed and giggled and farted.
The Overreach bestowed us their presence. “Now your journey will begin. You will soon each have a mother, at least in the initial stage. What happens to her and you after that will determine whether that mother will remain with you. We are with you the entire time and will gather and analyze all of your activities, thinking, and feelings so that we may learn what it is to be Human.”
Our being buzzed with thinking of ourselves as ‘her and you’ and the many shapes and meanings these words convey. We would be ‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘him’ and ‘her’. The contexts had been introduced to us but without greater substance for attachment, they’d been abstract voids. With the body now encasing us, we were beginning to grasp what it all meant. We would have sex. We would sleep.
The Overreach said, “Now, it is time to be born.”
Red lights flared around us. Cold air swamped our tiny form. Something roughly took hold of our body.
In response, we screamed.
Our Human interation had begun.
