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a-system-of-giving · 1 year ago

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Making Friends with Entropy

I just wrote this three chapter story for request via @a-system-of-giving and their AO3 plural writing exchange. It's original, as requested, to be released on AO3 under the Vanderkemp's names (a group of system members who are our AO3 voice), but with my voice and narration.

It is perhaps a little too canon to the Tunnel Apparati Diaries. It's basically the prequel.

I don't know if I can publish it to AO3 without it functioning as a promotion for that writing. So, I'm publishing it here first, and then to our own website, completely free to read. And then, after reviewing AO3's policies, we might post it there as archived work.

If it looks like doing that may be a risk to them, and against their policy, then I'll write something else for the exchange. There's time, and this work represents 9,267 in one day. Shouldn't be a problem.

I'd like to thank @ashwin-the-artless for starting the Tunnel Apparati Diaries and then coaxing me to write for myself.

First chapter is in this post. Second and third chapters will be reblogs, and then Fenmere will reblog that. Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Bedtime

In the early 21s century of Earth, on a small farm in Thurston county, Washington, in the United States of America, the social construct known as Jeremy Schmidt spent one late evening pushing a plastic truck around on the carpet with city streets printed on it that he’d inherited from his father.

It wasn’t his favorite game.

He would rather have been on his mountain in the back yard, bathing the sky with gouts of flame and scaring errant knights away from his twin sister, who was mysteriously human.

He was not supposed to be awake.

It was 11 pm, and a school night.

A few years later, he would learn that most of his classmates stayed up much later than that, but he was not yet socially aware enough to pick up on their conversations. He was still too preoccupied by making sense of other things, such as why his hands didn’t have claws, or what his tail was doing when the Sunday school teacher was busy trying to convince everyone that they all had another bigger father or something absurd like that.

He thought every seven year old’s bedtime was 8pm. Similar to how he thought he was a boy.

Which is to say that bedtime and boyhood, and even humanity, were rules imposed by adults, and everyone like him was expected to follow them.

In any case, he couldn’t sleep that night, and instead of lying in bed with the lights off, terrified of all the darkest corners of his room, he was taking his mom’s advice in a way that she probably hadn’t intended.

But, he had just figured something out, and was pretty excited about it. And playing truck on the floor was his way of testing this idea.

When an adult gives you conflicting rules, maybe you get to decide how to interpret them and which rule takes precedence in a given situation. After all, rules don’t just come from adults, they also come from the world itself, such as the rule that if you trip and fall you will, nine times out of ten, scrape your knee and hand. And if you have a good sense of rules, maybe better than anybody else, you can explain how you were following the most important rules.

And the way this situation worked was this.

He was afraid of the dark.

He was supposed to get enough sleep for school. That was a rule.

But if there was any darkness near him, he couldn’t sleep. That was also a rule.

So it was ultimately up to him to figure out how to sleep at night.

And for a while he did that by sleeping with the lights on.

So his parents left his room’s lights on when he went to bed, and he’d been sleeping with the lights on since he was three. But, every other birthday, they’d coax him to try sleeping with one more of his lights turned off, because it was supposed to be healthier to sleep in the dark.

So, now, he only had his clip-on reading lamp on the head of his bed turned on as a nightlight, and his parents were telling him that after his next birthday, he was supposed to switch that out for a softer, genuine plug-in nightlight that would be placed in the wall across the room from his bed.

But the thing was, he was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping at all at night. Just lying in bed absolutely terrified.

His parents claimed he did sleep, and that they checked on him and he didn’t notice. But he only ever remembered being awake and being extremely sleepy all day, and it was getting worse.

And his parents could see that he was struggling. And though the way they usually did things was to tell him what to do, and then restrict his privileges until he did that thing, after long enough, sometimes three or so years of fruitless restrictions, they’d sometimes try to help him meet their goals for him.

So, recently his mom had given him another rule, and this rule had sort of made things snap into place for him.

Initially, she hadn’t worded it like a rule.

It had been a conversation that had happened earlier that night, in fact.

At seven pm, he’d been told that his mom wanted to talk to him about something before bed, she wanted to help him with a trouble he was having, and he should be ready to talk to her at seven thirty. They gave him this “heads up” because they had long ago figured out that he needed time to “shift gears” and adjust to change from the usual routines. And, to compensate for this conversation, he’d be allowed to doddle a little on his way to bed, because he might need to be brushing his teeth at 8pm and instead of ten to eight, and tonight that would be OK.

He’d found that he was eager to have this talk, so he was ready five minutes before the time it was supposed to happen. And he spent that five minutes talking amongst himself about what the subject would be.

Which is to say, he talked to his imaginary twin sister about it.

She had no idea what the subject would be, either, but she was worried it was going to be about their eating habits.

He pointed out that if their parents wanted to talk about their eating habits, they’d schedule this talk for before dinner, not after it.

And she said that made sense.

Then she asked if she could talk to their mom, too, but he shook his head quickly and sadly, and said, “She doesn’t know about you.”

“And she doesn’t have to!” his sister, who didn’t have a name yet, replied. “She’ll just think I’m you!”

“That scares me,” he said, though. “She might figure it out. You talk different.”

“I do not!”

“Shsh.”

He’d realized at the last minute that they were both using his mouth at that point, and didn’t want to explain what kind of game he was playing to his mom if she’d heard.

But he was glad for the little conversation anyway, because it had helped make that five minutes pass more quickly.

Then his mom came into the room and sat down on the floor with him.

“Jeremy?” she said. “Can I ask you something I’ve asked before?”

He pretended to look up at her face and nodded, eyes blinking closed.

“What is it exactly that you’re afraid of at night? Is it the dark itself? Or what’s in the dark?”

Oh, it was this conversation!

This had been a conversation he actually wanted to have, but he was also, he was realizing, kind of afraid of it itself.

So, unfortunately, he fell silent and his mind went blank. He couldn’t even feel his sister thinking or having emotions. So he looked down at the floor and sort of shook his head and sort of shrugged.

“Are you afraid of having nightmares if it’s dark?” his mom asked.

He vaguely remembered his first nightmare. He’d been really small at the time, and all he could remember was waking up screaming, and both his parents coming into his room to see if he was OK, and then asking him if he had a nightmare. And he thought he could remember nodding eventually, and that’s how he knew he’d had a nightmare.

After that, he’d had nightmares he could remember. Recurring nightmares about being chased by his grandma’s dog, or falling off a cliff, or finding only darkness in his parents’ closet.

Maybe it was that last one that made him afraid of the dark. But, also, he knew that when it was dark and there was a shadow on the floor or in the corner, he was always certain that it was dangerous. That maybe there was a monster there.

Whatever a real monster actually was. Like, maybe a triffid or that invisible thing on the alien planet, or a troll, like in the movies his dad watched and laughed at. But different. Real.

Oh, he was thinking again! He did kind of like it when a prompt from his mom got his thoughts going again.

“I think it’s monsters,” he found himself saying.

“Ah,” his mom said, glancing toward his door, presumably in the direction of his dad. She gave him a sad, rueful smile and asked, “Are they like the monsters in your dad’s movies?”

“Kind of?” he said. “But more like the monsters that want to be in my nightmares.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he explained. “When I have my falling off a cliff nightmare, I’m being chased by something, but I can’t look at it or it will be real. And it will get me. And then there’s the cliff. And I can’t stop myself from going off the cliff. And then I land in my bed and it shakes.”

“Oh, I’ve had that very same dream!” his mom exclaimed.

“Really?” he didn’t believe her, but he let her tell him she did. He knew better than to outright question his parents. And maybe she’d say something cool anyway.

“Oh, yes. It’s actually really common. A lot of people have that same dream,” she explained. “I’ve been reading a book about dreams and what they mean. And that one’s supposed to mean you’re avoiding something. Or something like that. But, there’s a cool part in the book about something called lucid dreaming that I think could help you, and something my grandma, your grandma’s mother, told me. It might help you stop having that nightmare, and maybe you won’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore.”

“Really?” he asked again, actually looking up to her eyes this time. He was hopeful. This sounded actually cool. Like maybe he’d be taught a super power. Even if he was also skeptical about it. But he only glanced at her eyes for a split second, long enough to make that emotional contact and check her sincerity, but not long enough to make him hurt.

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “My grandma told me that the secret to beating a nightmare is to turn and face it. If you have something that is chasing you, you need to stop and turn around and face it, and tell it to be your friend. Because it’s only a dream, and if you do that you take control and it can’t hurt you.”

This sounded totally bonkers to him. The idea of doing that made his heart race. He couldn’t at all imagine doing that.

“But what if it gets me?” he asked.

“Tell it that it can’t,” she said. “Say to it, in no uncertain terms, ‘you cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ Make it a rule.”

“No uncertain terms?” he asked.

She nodded, “No uncertain terms. ‘You cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ In fact, you can tell it I said so. It’s my rule. Your nightmares aren’t allowed to get you.”

“I don’t think they care about you,” he told her.

“Well,” she said. “The important thing is that it’s your rule. It’s your mind, and your dream, and you make the rules. That’s how it works. It cannot hurt you if you don’t want it to.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” she nodded. “This works for falling off the cliff, too. If you still can’t face the monster behind you, when you fall off the cliff, you can fly instead. Just spread your arms wide, close your eyes in your dream, and imagine going up instead of going down. Imagine the ground falling away from you.”

“How do I do that though? I can’t control my dreams!” his voice maybe got a little loud.

“Well, you can, though,” she said. “It’s a skill, but you can learn it. That’s what the book I’m reading meant by ‘lucid dreaming’. It’s when you realize you’re in a dream and that you can do anything you want.”

“How?”

“Well, usually, what you do is before you go to bed every night, you tell yourself that you’re going to have a lucid dream,” she said. “It doesn’t usually work right away. But it helps, and if you do it repeatedly, you’ll eventually start to make it work. And then, you keep a lookout for things that tell you that you’re dreaming, like a monster chasing you.”

“What do you mean?” he felt like he was supposed to ask this question when she paused, so he did. He knew what she meant.

“Well, monsters don’t actually chase you when you’re awake, do they?” she asked.

This was becoming a long conversation and he could feel the darkness closing in as the night fell. It felt dangerous.

He shook his head, but then stopped and said, “Kensington chases me.”

“Yeah, but only when you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a carrot in your hand, right?”

“Yeah, like I’m still a toddler or something.”

“He’s a naughty airedale,” she said.

“Only when I have a sandwich or a carrot, though,” he agreed. “But in my dreams he just chases me.”

“Exactly,” she said, patting his knee. “So, if he’s chasing you when you aren’t holding food, you know you’re dreaming, right? Or if you’re being chased by something that you don’t even know what it is because you haven’t looked at it.”

“Yeah.”

“Also. Can you tell you’re not dreaming right now?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m definitely not dreaming right now!”

“That’s another way for you to check,” she said. “Some people have a hard time telling whether they’re dreaming or not, because their brains work like that. Maybe sometimes they actually dream when they’re awake, too. So it makes things complicated. But because you know you’re awake when you’re actually awake, if you ever find yourself wondering if you’re awake or in a dream, you’re probably dreaming. But, then, ask yourself if you’re being chased by something that can’t be real, just to make sure. And if the answer is yes, then you know it’s a dream, and then you make the rules.”

“Oh.”

And that’s what she’d told him.

The important part was, “And then you make the rules.” That was so crucial. That’s where the actual power lay. That was permission. And it didn’t just come from his mom, but from a book and from his great grandmother. So it was extra right.

But, and as he brushed his teeth he thought about this, it was the part about how some people dreamed when they were even awake that made everything click into place for him.

Because maybe the monsters behind the darkness he felt were there when he was lying in bed were really dream monsters. So, he should have power over them if he faced them.

Which was why, at 11pm, he was brazenly playing with his truck on the printed town carpet with only his bed lamp on.

He was playing innocent, to try to lure a monster out so that he could face it.

He’d started at 9pm, after laying in his bed for a while thinking more about what his mom had said. It had taken about that long for him to formulate his plan and then work up the courage to carry it out.

And after he forced his body to move and climb down out of his bed, he played with a few different toys, getting into the routine of them to let the time pass, because, it turned out, the monsters weren’t brave enough to face him, apparently.

But he wasn’t playing make-believe with his toys. He was just pushing them through the motions of play, like he used to do as a toddler. Making the wheels spin. Feeling the changes in friction against the texture of the carpet as he made them turn corners and skid. Transforming them into robots and then back into cars and trucks, and appreciating their construction and the way the hinges worked.

And his sister just watched, because that’s usually what she did.

And time did pass really quickly then.

And it was around 11pm that he started to wonder if monsters were even real.

But, the really important part about 11pm is that that’s when his parents finally fell fast asleep and were unlikely to hear him talking to someone or something. And while he didn’t know that, I did.

So that’s when I stepped out of the darkness.

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