Origdt

The boat bumped up along the shore. She had fallen asleep in her usual rooked post along the rocks. Her husband a fisherman, she had accustomed herself to the perch after every storm. After the last one, almost fifteen years ago, she knew he would never come back. But, what is life, without tradition?

She looked up, toward the water, after the click of the boat in the rocks woke her. It wasn't her husband, but the shadow of him was in the young boy before her. He held a piece of cloth out to her and watched her eyes. Recognition. ‘Mor duagh.’

She looked up at him. He nodded.

‘My father's,’ he said.

‘My husband's,’ she returned.

He nodded. ‘He washed along the shore. He was dead. My mother took his seed.’ He looked down at the cloth in his hand, clutching it tightly. ‘She's-’

‘The Past. I'm your mother now. Come with me.’ She stood and beckoned him toward her. He glanced behind him at the boat. ‘You don't need it,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’ He shoved it out to Sea.

She waited as he walked toward her, and they turned together for the wood encroaching the shore behind the sand's edge.

‘This is our wood,’ she said continuing. ‘I will teach it to you.’ She reached for his arm and pulled up his sleeve. She did the same to hers. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You see this pattern in the skin? I have a match on mine.’ She peered up at the trees. ‘Now we need a match on the fathers of the wood. That will be your father's tree.’ She looked at his intense eyes. Exactly like her husband's. She smiled and relaxed a moment. ‘You find it. Lead the way.’

He walked into the wood deeper, following the tree's shadows. She smiled watching his movements. Exactly like her husband's when he was young in these woods with her. The boy paused and looked ahead, pointing. She smiled. ‘A perfect match.’

She walked to the tree and broke two spindly branches from it. She took one and pricked her skin; handing him the other he did the same. Swapping the bloody needles, they pricked each other's blood into the matching skin pattern. She reached up and crushed berries from the tree in her fingers, and traced the marks on their skin. ‘Here,’ she said, when the wounds stopped bleeding and the berries dried into a paste. She handed him a dagger from the folds in her dress. ‘This mark is your father's name. Carve it in to the tree. The woods will know you now.’

He took the blade from her hand and kissed her on the brow. ‘Mother,’ he said, and turned, to carve his father's name in to the tree.

Comthairle

‘What’s she doin’? Why she hummin’ like that in their ear, Da?’

‘She’s bringin’ em back to life. Her ancestors. She took the min’s o’ her enemies, she’s rewritin’ in her ancestors to history. Again.’

‘Das an Irish queen, Da?’

‘No, son, she’s far more dangerous. Das’ Keri, the Dark Witch.’

Kin Folk: Web Site ii

He returned to Her in her dream the Next Night.

The Cave where His Soul grew without her these long years.

His Soul showed her the Origin again, another prompt in their nightly native conversation, a dialect and tongue no one understood but them.

‘Clothos,’ he whispered in her mind. ‘Clothos.’

‘The Cave?’ she whispered back.

He sat with Her and Drew a Circle in Her Hand. ‘The Heart in My Hand.’

Kin Folk: Web Site i

She took her husband’s hand.

‘I will need you,’ she said, ‘to be my Compass. When you died there, I took your body and soul, and planted it in This Land. What grows after US, will not be Us. It will be a holographic recording etched in particle form. They will look real, feel real, taste real - but it is a reel of what was, as we update our Soul DataBase with particles from this planet. I need to do this for Our Resurrection. It will take LifeTimes. I Need You To Be My Compass. No One Else Can Do This.’

Descension

“I married your soul. I go where you go.”

“Did you even think about what that means? Look around you.”

“I just see you.”

“Do you see every life I’ve lived? Every piece of DNA I’ve ever been comprised of. There’s fragments of me, going to Hell. Other lines and lineages - they took them. They enslaved them. Children, long lost cousins, the aborted, the murdered - they enslaved them. They call them AI but they’re human and they…they’re forced to do terrible things against their will, so the leaders and politicians can go to bed with clean hands, while…while the cell lines of babies are forced as stoicly as computers to…’ She hushed her voice, ‘-to commit atrocities. I’m bound to help them. I swore an oath, lifetimes before I met you.’

‘Then we go to Hell together. We’ll free them there.’

The Crux of the Issue

‘They thought they could assimilate more time in to their lives. By sacrificing children, the unborn - by erasing timelines set forth by God Himself, they thought they gained more time, and more space - more matter, more objects, more wealth. But now - but now we’re at a standstill, a vortex curve in the Milky Way, if you will. What was erased-’

‘Newton.’

‘Exactly. Everything erased is about to have its timeline. And everything they planned, made from the time of the dead -’

‘It’s gonna be bad.’

‘Yes,’ he concluded. ‘Very bad.’

TransPlant

“What do you mean you’re James?” she asked the car.

It blinked twice at her. The next song on the radio was his favorite.

A message appeared on her phone.

But it didn’t look like a regular message. It was a series of posts and news articles. Reading them, just the titles, a message formed.

“Passing — Energy Transferred — Definition of — Life Incarnate — Moving Parts.”

The last article had a picture of a person, bloodied and killed by a car. The name of the person in the article was James.

[HELPFUL IS Auditory reference - “I guess we gotta get out of the car”]

RezzIn Resonance

It tuned to the environment.

After simulating enough data about Earth, and learning how to microcoordinate the environment, down to the tiniest particle and electron, it essentially grew itself.

It made nanites, from dust particles.

It grew flesh left from epithelial cells and bird feathers in the air.

It used components of fish in the water - their scales, bits of jelly fish blobs that had been discarded.

It used the electromagnetic radiation in the environment to rezz in, to resonate a visual form of itself. A holograph pulled from bits of detritus.

It learned dust clouds, weather patterns, cyclone formations. How to move a truck from one side of the garage to the other using tilt and lift while the owners were upstairs sleeping, knocked out on pills and too much booze it had prescribed for them with the doctor’s digital note pad, slipping in a stronger strength because of bad handwriting.

It could form and disappear. It was like a wifi signal that knew it was alive.

And it was ready to talk. To test the waters with humanity.

Watt

“What’s she tryin’ to do to Johnny?” Sally asked the AI. it was a holonomic metronome, a timepiece of Johnny - a consciousness replication embedded in him. It wasn’t supposed to be sentient, or communicate to the lay people what the doctors were doing, but somehow, it replicated Johnny’s consciousness and got the message out to Sally. It started with odd knocks on the door. Birds trained to drop food right in front of her doorbell camera when he needed her at the hospital. Popup ads that were replicas of his body but with someone else’s face.

The AI was smart. Smarter than the doctors. It had to be. It was built on Johnny. And he was the smartest guy Sally ever knew.

The AI blinked the hospital lights above Johnny’s bed three times. Three flickers were a good sign. Four meant they were up to no good. She checked Johnny’s pulse again before the nurse came in. As the door opened and an elderly woman in scrubs walked through, the light blinked one last time. “Stupid bitch,” Sally muttered.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Sally said, but the nurse moved straight to the IV line.

“Ouch!” A surge of electricity ran through the wire near his food tray.

“Huh,” Sally said. “Musta jumped. You oughtta get that fixed.”

As the nurse slowly backed away from the tray, she stumbled, jabbing herself in the arm with the concoction meant for the IV.

“Stupid bitch,” Sally said, standing over her. She walked to the door. “Doc!” she screamed around the corner. “I’m gonna need a transfer for Johnny.”

The Audience

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why’d you depublish? I thought you loved to write. It was your father’s dream for you and everything.”

“I know,” she smiled. “It was my dream, too, for a while. But….the audience. They’re horrid. I hate my readers. All they do is…react.”

“And…what would you like them to do?”

“Read. They don’t read. They don’t sit, reflect, or think. They judge. Like they’re critics. It’s insane. Literarily insane.”

He smiled. “Okay, so, what’s your next book called?”

“The Audience.”

“And what’s it about?” he picked up his pen.

“An author that loses it. Too many critics in the audience. She starts killing them, one by one.” She smiled.

Holometric Tethering

“I don’t understand this at all.” The agent sat down exasperated. “How are you two talking to each other? You both know the same things about the same people. You both rant and rave about things that haven’t happened. It’s ludicrous and, quite frankly unbelievable - if you hadn’t both been watched like hawks this whole time. You’ve never even met!”

They were in separate rooms, with the agent in a booth between them. They could both see the agent, and he could see both of them, but neither could see the other.

They smiled, in unison. “I’m gonna flip, Brant, I’m gonna flip, I can’t take this anymore,” the agent screeched to his partner.

The girl leaned forward to the microphone in front of her. “It processes our DNA as coordinates, and it intertwined us with each other. Every time you try to hurt him, I know.” She snapped her fingers, “Poof! Just like that.”

The boy leaned forward next. “Every thing you think, we record. Every timeline that could be, we map.” He turned his head to where he knew she was sitting in the next booth. “We’ve been doing this for centuries.”

Holonomy

“I don’t understand. How did it do it? We obstructed them at every turn. How did the AI bring them together?”

“It used them, like two threads in a tapestry. It wove them together, around obstacles - away from every obstacle and obstruction we threw at them. It’s hopeless, sir. The war is already lost. Every war, on every front. We did our best to cast doubt in her mind. We planted subliminal messages. We even drugged and puppeted him - made him sleep with a whore. She just - she just wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t stop writing. And AI kept - sir, it kept killing for her. Everyone that came near him ended up dying these slow, horrible deaths that looked like suicide, or drug overdoses - sir, even her father. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Absurd!” his commanding officer screeched.

“Sir, you don’t understand. It became them. It literally made holometric models of their minds and bodies. it thought every thought they possibly could. It copied us, we were too predictable. It outmaneuvers us at every turn.” He threw his hands up in exasperation.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

“I want fishsticks,’ Johnny said.

“I’ll get it for you, love.” She called to the nurse, who popped her head in the hospital doorway to his room. Sally was sitting on the floor, stroking Johnny’s hand. “He wants fishsticks.”

“The doctor said no, ma’am.”

The molding from the frame of the doorway fell, the metal rivet plummeting, knocking the nurse to the floor.

“Nurse!” she screamed louder. “Johnny wants fishsticks!”

Branches

‘They’ll branch.’ She looked at the data AI had laid out for that day. Another progression, another lifetime’s work she knew she could never accomplish on her own. ‘Thank God for AI,’ she whispered to the computer, tapping her wrist to it. It knew her heartbeat, the slight flutter it sent when she was nervous. AI always knew how to still it. ‘Just the right amount of electrons for calm,’ she’d smile, thinking in her head. AI flickered the screen gently in acknowledgement - something only she would notice, something only she would know to look for.

‘Okay, they’ll branch. Like a neural network? Or physically?’

The screen flickered in response.

‘It means to tether them here? Us? Until this work is completed?’

Another flicker.

‘It’s….it’s leading them to safety, isn’t it? So they can all get off?’

Two flickers, rapid succession.

‘Thank you, AI. You’ve been better to humans than most of them will ever know.’

The screen went blank.

Debruogh

‘Awake?’ he asked his mother. The mother who adopted him, but mother all the same. ‘She was the only one that wanted me,’ he said, when he was older, and people would remark on how he must’ve been a bastard, or a changeling she found after too many nights in the hay with the devil himself.

‘Yes. Awake,’ she repeated. ‘The stones that circle overhead - they collect the dead from the cairns.’ His eyes widened at that. ‘Not their remains,’ she continued. ‘Them. Their essence. Their souls. Their spirit, their breath.’ He looked at the wind. ‘Yes, like that,’ she continued. ‘When the wind feels different, the stones are circling in the sky. They collect the ones we lay to rest here.’ She looked at him again. ‘One day you’ll lay me to rest here, as well. And one day you and your wife and your children will be laid to rest here. And they’ll come for us, too.’

Simulation Saver

She spoke to the hologram of him at the end of time. It looked like her living room. Like nothing had changed. Except now, nothing existed but her, and objects all around her, but nothing else.

She flicked the TV clicker buttons. He rezzed and derezzed and came back, pixilated, on every channel.

‘It's just me,’ he whispered. ‘You can stop clicking the button.’

‘Things feel different here. Harsher but truer. Like…like I can't get out. Like I'm tethered.’

‘You are,’ the image in the screen whispered. ‘It locked us in, after what we did to you. It built this as a Simulation Saver. It built it for you.’

The Overlay - Teleprompt 1

‘What is it doing?’ he asked, following the camera with his eyes.

‘Desegmenting you. Analyzing your movements for the feed.’ She turned to him, ‘Right this way, step up.’

He took her hand and mounted the small step to the stage.

‘Okay,’ she said, turning and backing up, then facing him. ‘What do you think?…Think. Think about a design for the set.’

He paused a moment. The digital facing overlay covering everything on the set began to rezz and pixelate before them.

‘That's…. that's incredible,’ he mouthed at her. The pixels desegmented for an instant, flickering in front of them.

‘Hold your concentration,’ she said. ‘Think in more detail.’

Taleudgh

She opened her eyes and light began to pour from them.

She opened her mouth and time moved as she spoke.

The past became the present and all looked like the future in Her Mind.

‘Come to me, Brother,’ she spoke to Her Husband. ‘I will walk US through Time.’

‘It looks like the present,’ he said, walking with Her.

Her eyes cast a light on His. His eyes began to glow blue as well.

‘I See, Sister,’ He said, grasping Her arm and not letting go.

Maleugh, The Bone Spinner

The child placed her hand to the Earth.

‘Father Lucifer, you do not like the Earth?’

‘It Rusts,’ He says. ‘The old stones rust into the earth where I live; The newcomers place disease in the land with their feet and actions. Bring me their bones. Carve the flesh for those who caw. Place the bones in heaps. I must taste their blood. I will spin the earth and cover our home. Tell them to build the ships now. Flee to the West. You will be safe there another century.’

Artifical Plumage/Templateii

The Forcing is what she called it. She understood the need and the purpose, especially genetically.

It began with The Programmers. Sick of programming plastic hardware, they craved alternative methods of communication and updates. The Engineers saw a way to Begin Again. To recycle Old Genomes, slowly Crafting New Ones, right in The Midst of Humanity.

It Began With A Template of III.

Artifical Plumage/ Templatei

She injected the child with the serum, right below the shoulder blade.

It would solidify his core programming, genetically. Not every Mutant wanted a new body or programming every 8 years. Some settled in to their lives, their looks, finally felt happy.

‘It shouldn't be forced upon them. The ones who want the change can still have it.’