The World is Watching Me

       I’m one of those people who knows the truth behind the pictures we see every day. I know that people are stretch, pulled, undone and redone, until the person you see staring back at you looks nothing like the person they originally were. Grandmama always claimed that the world had always been like this, and it was considerably more humane to use AI to turn human into grotesque abominations than to force the transformation on them unwillingly through makeup, drugs, or surgery. Now, people only change when they want to change, and they do it of their own volition. Anyone can be who they want to be, for the world will never see them as they truly are. 

      I didn’t want to study science. I’m a mage at heart, but nobody sane believes that magic exists. I studied because it made money, but whenever I’m away from the lab I’m drawn to tarot cards, rune stones, candles, and other items of hidden lore. I also grab non-magical items that speak to me, somehow, most of them bird themed. A bird shape whistle, a ceramic robin, a plush owl, pair of budgies to look after. Ever since I was small I had a fascination with birds, and my favorite activity after work is to go to the park and feed pigeons. I feel safe among them somehow. 

     I am not living in a world where reality is crumbling, I’m living in a world where it died long ago. I wish I could grow wings strong enough to fly me away from this planet to a world where AI never happened. Most people my age wish that was possible. We’ve had rockets for close to two-hundred-years, yet we’re far from building the safe haven that was promised to us. Instead all we have is dead eyed, soulless beings staring back at us every time we go outside, and science that’s increasingly doubtful of the basic premise of our world. Physics, it seems, is nothing more than an illusion. 

     I’m not one of the ones doing the experiments. My job is to process the data, make it seem like it says what it’s supposed to be saying. The algorithm comes to a conclusion, I run the data to make sure it matches. It’s a slow, boring job, one that I don’t like, so I spend all of my time on forums dedicated to magic. All of them talk about the stories that reality is crumbling, or may not exist. I can’t say that they’re wrong, only that the data is inconclusive. Privately I wonder what’s taking us so long to admit the obvious; magic is here to stay. 

     My boss says my methods must be wrong. My parents, the one’s who pushed me to a stable career, tell me not to make waves. My friends at work ask me if I did it right, then ask the others in my crew if they did it right as well, then check the models to see what went wrong. My friends online tell me they know I’m fighting an uphill battle, and that I have to be careful. I’m a scientist in a world where reality is crumbling. Every time I look in a mirror, I see someone staring back at me, looking like she wants to say, “Meggie, seize the moment.” I know she’s right. Now is the time to tell the world the truth. But I’m scared. The world is watching me, and I don’t know what it wants from me. 

     If the Democrats are in favor of genocide, what does that mean for the millions of people in the United States the Republicans want dead? As an Autistic woman, I feel that's a rather pressing question. 

The Laws of Physics

 Remember 
What you believe in.

Remember
That you live in a world
Bound by physics,
That what goes up must come down.

Remember
That the sun will rise tomorrow.

Remember
That in order to exist
You must obey
The laws of physics.

Remember
That your world could vanish
In an instant,
So grab onto it
With both hands,
And don't let go.

Remember
That it's not just you
Who has to believe in the Universe
In order for it 
To exist.
Every atom,
Every molecule,
Every star,
Every planet,
Every galaxy,
Everything in our Universe
Is choosing to believe in it
In spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Never forget
That this world is yours.
All you have to do
Is take it. 

     I'm sure most people don't feel this way, but years of living under Fascism has taught me that if you want to persuade people to take a side, you don't meet them where they are. You show them where they ought to be, and then refuse to move until they come to you. I've seen reasonable discourse fall on deaf ears more times than I can count, but words driven by emotion seem to move people every time they're spoken. So I refuse to be reasonable about the world. I refuse to pretend that there's a reason Israel decided to bomb Gaza out of existence. I refuse to justify our Presidents decision to pretend Israel's actions were motivated by anything other than the purest form of evil known to humanity. I will not pretend there is any neutral decision one could make under these circumstances. I will make sure that everyone who sees me knows that there is no morality in saying that you stand with Ukraine while you support Israel. That does not make you a moral person. It makes you the worst kind of hypocrite. 

      When President Biden said that America Stands with Israel, he was lying. I don't stand with Israel. I don't see how anyone could stand with Israel. I'm appalled at the neutral stance of our media towards what could only be termed a genocide. This is not the time to reach across the aisle. This is the time to act with pure outrage, anger that someone would think that killing an entire country worth of people would ever be justified. If I were to ever be pushed to the point where I decided I wanted an entire group I opposed to die in the most violent manner I could think of, I would hope that the world would be horrified by my actions and that the people around me would do whatever they could to stop me. I see now that is not the case. I see that I will be forever in charge of stopping my anger, because I can't trust those around me to put up the walls I need in order for my words to not touch the innocent. How can we claim to be moral when we can't even do the bare minimum it takes to be decent people? How can we claim that, underneath all our flaws, we're good, when we watch in silence as people die needlessly? 

The World

        Other Infinitelists state that the total obliteration of our shared reality was a terrible thing for each and every person on earth. As the only son of a church pastor, I disagree. The loss of reality was an amazing thing for religious figures of all sorts. Good or bad, honest or corrupt, if you claimed to believe in something it was a boon time for you. It was also, of course, a good time for scammers, and my father was both of those things. He constantly talked about seeing God when he slept, and always showed people pictures he’d found on his desk after he’d woken up. For my entire childhood, I remember the days when papa would rush into the room holding a sheet of paper of a young man with olive skin, wearing slightly different outfits. I never questioned the truth until I was old enough to learn about the AI modelling industry and realized that the pictures always resembled the models closely. I didn’t say anything, though, not until Blandco. took my father to court for unlicensed use of the Cameron Walker model. It ruined us so badly that my father shot himself in the head not long afterwards. My mother never recovered from it, and to this day she remains an empty shell of the woman she once was.

      I now run a different church. It’s the only way I know to make money, but I’m not very good at it. I also give seminars on Infinitelism. I care deeply about it as someone for whom their religion was never anything more than an elaborate lie told by their parents, but I’m not very good at selling it either. I just get on stage and repeat points I’ve heard others go on about. I don’t know what else to do.

      If I’d been born a hundred years ago, I’d have a thousand options for ways to make the world a better place, but I didn’t get to grow up in such a world. Neither did my papa, which is why he felt he had to lie. I say that because I can’t live with the idea that my father only ever wanted to lie to people, but the alternative worries me just as much. What if I have no choice but to lie in order to keep my church alive. I opened it up to everyone, just as my papa did,  but I don’t have nearly as many followers as he did. I’m not a showman.

     I wish that I could live in the world of my dreams, one in which we live in harmony with one another and there are no great highs or lows. I’m told the humdrum way of life was pleasant if you could get in rhythm with everybody, but that’s not always something I could manage. I hide it pretty well, especially since there isn’t a good way to tell what’s normal anymore, but I always wonder what it would be like if I could just silently follow everybody’s rhythm. It would only work if we had one mind, but I do think many people, especially those who just want to blend in, might prefer that. Many would not though. I know because one of them started the philosophy I now subscribe to. I just have to remember to express my will to the world. Easy, right?

    Someday I'm going to write a book that I'm proud of. Until then, I'll just keep writing short stories until I find one I halfway like. 

Children's Dreams

      Emerald Elementary was a strange name for a school. To the students the name suggested grandeur, wealth, and stability, all things missing from their lives. There was little of that to be found inside of the school. The building had, it was said, held thousands of children when it was first opened in the middle of the twentieth century, but a century and a half of age and decay, coupled with declining enrollment, meant that the school was nothing more than a relic of the past, and a dismal one at that. The only thing that shone about such a place was a plaque out front, telling of how the community had come together twenty years before to save the school from destruction when the government wanted it torn down. Going above and beyond, they’d turned the school into an exact replica of what it would have been in the far off and beautiful year of 1957, when it had first opened. 

      The three hundred children who went to this school were less students than they were historical actors. None of the subjects they talked about covered topics relevant to the world they lived in. Math, science, literature, none of these topics were things children were meant to care about. The only time they learned anything useful were the daily computer classes, where they learned how to use the internet, and recess, where they learned how to interact with each other. In a school as shabby as this one, even recess didn’t have much to teach them. With four playgrounds the children could run away from one another, even if the equipment hadn’t been maintained as well as the rest of the school had been. The children learned about each other in kindergarten, and they kept that knowledge all six of the years they were allowed to stay at this dismal school.

     Five inmates sat on asphalt at one edge of the playground. Recess time had been doubled for them today, because their teacher didn’t want to teach them. She was a woman from the community, working for a small amount of money, but she lacked passion for her work. They didn’t realize this though. None of the teachers they’d learned under knew much about their craft. In the distance, they heard children from their class screaming, running, enjoying unearned leisure time. None of them felt like playing. They were fifth graders, and they felt they’d had enough of school, but they still had several months to go before the bell rang one final time. 

      Renee, the eldest of the girls, looked solemnly at the tattered flag flying above them. “The American flag doesn’t even look like that anymore.” She thought, having seen the most recent one online. Admittedly, they did look similar, but the newer version had far fewer stars. “How long ago was that flag put up?” She wondered. It looked like it could have come from the twentieth century, but it could just as easily have come from the twenty-first. 

      Renee turned to Anne, her cousin and best friend. “Why don’t they just close down the school?” She asked.

      “I don’t know.” Anne replied. “I think it’s just to torture us.”

      “I’ve seen pictures of schools in big cities.” Said Rosemary, another cousin. “They don’t look anything like this. They’ve got special devices that let you see holograms and all of their computers come outfitted with programs that let you interact with artificial humans.”

      “Mom says that the AI powering artificial humans will be the death of us.” Clara said. She was the youngest of the bunch. Even though she was almost out of school, she still carried her favorite stuffed rabbit in her backpack with her everywhere she went. 

      “Who cares about AI?” Heather said. She was Rosemary’s twin sister. 

      “A lot of people do.” Rosemary said. “They think that AI will make it so that nobody is poor anymore.”

      All of the girls looked at their school building. The faded paint, the worn out roof, the play equipment that was showing signs of rusting way to nothing. It was a school for poor children who lived far from a city, children who still needed parents to raise them. 

     “I wonder what it will be like when we aren’t poor anymore.” Clara said.

     “They’ll still send us to school. Mom says that she can’t find work because we’re too poor, but the moment she finds work she’ll make me go to full days of school instead of half days. She won’t be at home all of the time.” Renee said.

     “My mom says that if we had enough money, she’d hire a private tutor. She says the way they teach kids here is atrocious.” Anne said.

     “I wish we had enough money for a private tutor, or even just a few virtual classes.” Heather said, glumly. “I hate staring at a book all day trying to figure stuff out for myself.” 

     “There’s lots of helpful tools online.” Clara said.

     “Not if you can’t pay for them.” Heather said.

     “I think it’ll be nice to be rich.” Rosemary said. “We could go out to eat whenever we wanted and have beautiful clothes. Once I saw a pretty necklace at the toy store, but mom said we couldn’t afford it.”

     “Don’t your parents get food stipends?” Anne said. 

     “Yes.” Rosemary replied. “They say those don’t go far with two children.”

      “If we do become rich,” Renee said, “I’m going to be one of those influencers on Fantasy Instagram who has a million followers.”

     “In this day and age?” Anne said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Mom says nobody has over a hundred thousand unless they head a community.” 

     “Well, I’ll change that fact. I’ll have people in to interview every day, and I’ll have my name and face shown on every website in existence.”

      “Like Cameron Walker?” Clara asked.

       Renee gave her cousin a withering look. “Cameron Walker isn’t real, Clara.” She said.

       At that moment, they heard the bell ring for the end of class. Apparently, their teacher had decided not to teach them anything at all. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this, and the girls heard rumors that the principal was going to fire her soon if she didn’t improve. “I wonder when we’ll get a new teacher.” Renee thought to herself. 

     I really need to practice writing more short stories. I can do all of the individual elements of writing well, I'm just not very good at combining them. 

The Dreamworld's Curse

 If you wish to create a dreamworld,
Be warned.
No dreamworld can be created
Without understanding
The world 
It was built 
On top of.
To understand the Dreamworld,
You must understand reality.
And to understand Reality,
You must understand the Infinite.

There is no understanding the Infinite.
There is only knowing that anything born
Of a finite Universe
Cannot understand 
The Infinite.
To know the Infinite
Is to know
That reality as we know it
Isn't real,
And that it never was.

If you want to create a dreamworld,
And you are unwilling to accept
That reality 
Isn't real,
Then turn back now.
Only by knowing 
That you wield power
Whether or not you 
Want to,
Will the power granted
By seeing the Dreamworld
Not bring doom
To all who follow you.

To know the Dreamworld
Is to know the Infinite,
And to know the Infinite
Is to bring doom 
To reality
As you once knew it.