Josh Conviser's Blog, page 41
July 22, 2012
July 21, 2012
F-22 Raptor refuels off the east coast.
F-22 Raptor refuels off the east coast.
July 20, 2012
Dreamscape #2
I’ve been jotting down my dreams recently. They’re...
Dreamscape #2
I’ve been jotting down my dreams recently. They’re not stories - not in the logical beggining-middle-end kind of way. Honestly, I’m not sure what they are but Freud would certainly have a field day. So here’s Dream #2
I’m on an alien planet, bashing through lush vegetation, rainforest thick but different - skewed. The trees looming over me jag at haphazard angles, their leaves hexagonal. The dirt under my feet has the silken, loose consistency of a low-gravity world.
The planet was discovered by Rebecca, the woman who now guides me. She was also the first to be infected by the grubs. Microscopic organisms, they invade the blood, borough cell-deep and alter their hosts at a genetic level. Maybe I’m a doctor, here to help, but she doesn’t seem sick.
Rebecca is tall, lean, still humanoid but stronger, her movements that barest fraction faster than they should be. There is other within her that can’t be defined. I see it in her gait, the shake of her head, a side-long glance. I’m attracted to her one moment, repulsed the next.
“No,” she tells me as she slips through the trees, “it’s not like that. It’s perfect. They are perfect.”
Her body moves beyond fast, her mind whips from thought to thought but, through the whirlwind, her eyes remain passive. Void.
“It’s like…” she shakes her head, then finds the words, “couple years ago I took this hallucinogen. I was on a beach and when the drug kicked in I could see each grain of sand, one rolling over the next in easy flow. With the grubs, it’s like that for everything. No filters.”
Her mind is open, she tells me, her intelligence capable of ingesting reality whole. Contentment flows through her, deep and cold. Is that what makes her alien? Can one be human and so complete?
Before us, the jungle yields to a shock-blue lake. This is where the grubs spawn, and where my guide was infected, afflicted, awarded, anointed.
I walk the lake’s banks, finally reaching the far side, a thin ridge dropping off into an immense cliff. I peer over and vertigo’s hammer-fist wallops me.
A low hum pulls me back. I whip around to the see the lake boiling with grubs. The water slithers with them, teaming sludge. The slop bursts the banks, washes over me and cascades down the cliff in a perfect sheet. I watch its leading edge fall away. At a single instant, that edge phase-shifts into vapor. A cloud begins to form. Fed by ever more water, it billows out, thousands of feet below me, becomming a cumulous sea that will shroud the world.
Terror wells in me. I look to Rebecca, but the depth of her peace remains an impenetrable barrier between us.
Insight flashes through me, rising, I suspect, from my own gestating infection. The grubs will infest everything, live in everything, through everything. This will be a symbiont planet. The grubs are spacefarers. They enter a world, colonize it, become it, and with their new hosts, they travel on.
They will parasitize the universe. Inevitable. I want to fight, to rebel. But what is there to rage against? What more could I want? Rebecca looks down on me, lost in cool enlightenment.
“Accept it. There is no downside,” she says.
I grow stronger, smarter but something deep in me begins to slip.
No downside…
I will never age. Never die. I don’t want this.
NO, downside.
Rage pierces the chill, driving up through the ice. For one final moment, I exist. But I can not hold. My will flash-freezes.
Then, there is only peace.
No downside.
Bird Land: Chrysler, by Kim Joon
Bird Land: Chrysler, by Kim Joon
Hockney-style pic of my office, playing around with...
Hockney-style pic of my office, playing around with Photosynth.
Love how the desktop image escapes its bounds.
