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ohthatphage · 4 months

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Chapter 3: Darkness

“Being a boy sucks,” the sister said. “And I can’t do it. But they won’t let me be a girl. I just know it. And that sucks even more. They don’t see me, and they don’t want me, so I don’t want them.”

After hearing that, the dragon seemed to understand, and started to nod, mumbling, “I do kind of feel the same way about being a dragon. I like playing with other boys, but I’m not a boy, I’m a dragon, and I really can’t be one, though.”

Something seemed to click with the sister and she looked sharply at me, and asked, “You said you can do powerful things that scare people?”

“Yes,” I replied, filling my tone with caution, radiating it, to remind her that therein lies danger.

She was unconcerned and ignored my warning, asking next, “Like magic?”

“Some might call it that,” I said. “I do not. I call it physics.”

“Like what? Can you give us our own bodies?”

There was a possibility I could do that, not due to my natural abilities directly, but due to the technology that was under their mountain. There were something called construction nanites there, which also housed the Network that I was inhabiting when I wasn’t part of Jeremy’s psyche. But bringing those nanites to the surface and giving anyone access to them was extremely dangerous and something I was not ready to do.

In fact, my goal was to destroy them. But since they had existed here on this planet for longer than this species of humans had existed, and they had been dropped here with the intent of making contact with the humans when they were ready, I didn’t have permission to destroy the nanites. They were programmed to ignore my commands to self destruct, only to obey the commands of the owners of this planet.

So, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I inform the children of the nanites and tell them what they could do and how dangerous they were, and of my intent that they should learn how to destroy them and choose to do so, and therefore be a responsible being and rightfully earn their trust and consent?

Or do I hide the existence of the nanites from them for the time being, until they could earn my trust that they would make the right decision?

The path forward was not clear to me either way, too much chaos, but the balance of life on Earth was at stake. In the wrong hands, the nanites could be used to obliterate everything.

Although it had become a custom on my former world, or rather my other world (as I could still travel back and forth), people could use the nanites to form technological bodies that they could inhabit, using something that translates into the words “neural terminals”, I had to tell them I could not.

I was still telling the truth, because the sister was asking me about my “magic”, not about the nanites.

“No,” I said. “Maybe with a lot of time and careful work, I can coax your body to grow in a way that is more comfortable to you both, but you’ll have to agree on what that means, and I can’t change its shape in a way that it wouldn’t be able to do on its own. I can make your hair go gray sooner, or much later than it would. I can help you stop growing taller, or grow quite a bit taller. That sort of thing. But I cannot make you look just like your inner true selves, your residual self images I think you might call them?”

“I think that’s from a movie,” the dragon said.

“But you know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

They both thought about this, and then the sister said, “Poop.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We both really hate being a boy,” she said. “I mean, even if no one else existed, and it was just the two of us alone in the world, it’d still hurt. We hate it.”

“Really hate it,” the dragon said. “It feels so wrong. It’s distracting.”

“You do realize that you’re not a boy,” I told them. “You are a dragon and a girl. You told me this yourself.”

“That’s not what we mean,” the sister said.

“Yeah,” the dragon said, looking away, out the window of their room, into the darkness outside. “It’s hard to say it, though. It feels wrong to say the words.”

“We’re not supposed to talk about this kind of thing with strangers,” the sister said.

“Then don’t,” I told them. “We can cease this conversation until you are comfortable having it again.”

She lowered her head and looked up at me through the corner of her eye and through her hair. Their body mimicked this action.

“You do know what we mean, though, right?” she asked.

I did. If we hadn’t been connected and intertwined through sharing their neurology and electromagnetic fields, the conversation itself had provided enough clues, and with that flash of a vision I’d had of their future, I knew exactly what they were talking about.

“Yes,” I said. “And someday in the future, your people will allow and help you to do this thing, as best as they can. Reluctantly, perhaps, but they will. When you’re adults, and when people’s minds have changed.”

Their eyes filled with tears, and they both said in unison, “We need it now.”

“I know, and I can’t give it to you,” I said. “It’s just not within my power. But your world has medicine that can help. Something in your memories tells me this. You’ve seen a show on it, perhaps?”

They looked bewildered.

“Nevermind,” I said. “I can sometimes know things I shouldn’t logically know. This is one of them. Sometimes I can see the most likely future, and if you can hold on and keep each other safe, you’ll get there. You’ll get to experience the thing you want.”

“They can’t make me a real dragon, though,” the girl’s sibling said.

“Not like you mean, no, though you could get some kinds of body modifications that could help,” I said. “You’ll have to agree on them, however. You will still be sharing your body.”

They both nodded glumly, and the dragon said, “I think we like being together. Except for being so different from each other.”

“Yeah,” the girl said.

I let them sit with that, and waited for another question, whenever it would arise.

Again, it was the sister who spoke up, “What happens if we say ‘no’?”

“I go away and leave you alone,” I told her. “As long as you live here, in this bedroom, you will be close enough to call on me. And even you if you do not consent to have me as part of your system, while you are here I will work to protect you, out of kindness and in hospitality. It is just what I’ve taken to doing. Not that there are many significant dangers nearby. And if those dangers are from other people, I will be limited in just what I can do. But either way, I will work for you. You will not need to be afraid of the darkness anymore, yes or no.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Also, in saying ‘no’, you may prove to yourselves that you do have control over me. Or rather, that you have control over yourselves, and that you can deny me my presence in your lives, forcing me to leave. I will not be hurt by this. I can wait for others. I have all the time in the universe, and it is not vitally important that I make this connection at all.”

“What will the aliens, your other people, do when they meet us?” the dragon asked, jumping to the other side of the whole conversation. “How will they meet us? What are they like?”

“I don’t even know if they will meet you,” I said. “Even if you say yes to my request, I may decide that you and they should remain separated. I need to learn if you are compatible with each other.”

“I like the sound of choosing your own name and pronouns,” they said.

“I think it was a good choice on their part, yes,” I said. “Recently, they’ve been very good to each other, and they’ve taken to a strong curiosity about other people in the universe. But they also have a long, long history of being very awful to each other.”

“Our mom says the same thing about humans,” the dragon said.

“That’s why I want to be cautious,” I said. “I want to facilitate not just positive relations, but beneficial ones. Not just beneficial to me, but beneficial to both peoples. I will exist long after both are gone, so I do not matter. I have decided that what matters to me is that the people I meet experience as much harmony and happiness as possible, and, if possible, come to understand each other better.”

“Why?” the sister asked.

“I have existed since the universe was created. And on one a planet that is now long, long gone, so long gone that despite how far away it is its light no longer reaches yours, when life began there this smaller version of myself took form and learned what loneliness is like. That was billions and billions of your years ago, before your planet even formed. And in that time, I have seen so much suffering and so much joy. I have seen and felt the joy some beings feel in the suffering of others, and I have seen and felt the joy other beings feel in bringing joy to others, over and over. And, while life must consume other life in order to continue existing, you must eat to survive, and that brings suffering for joy, that is always the less of the two joys. It’s… mathematical.”

“I think that makes sense,” the dragon said, and the girl nodded.

I narrowed my eyes, and said, “I am pleased to have met you both, but I think you need to sleep now. I will be nearby and you can talk to me whenever you want, as long as you’re here. Think about all of this. We have time yet to make any sort of agreement. Maybe even until you are adults, if you are more comfortable with that.”

The girl got a determined and fiery look in her eyes, just as the dragon took on a worried expression, and she asked, “Can you help us fight bullies?”

It was with that question, I realized I wouldn’t be able to get them to say, “no.” No matter how I answered her. They were both too invested in my existence now.

Part of it was that they still weren’t certain I was real, that they weren’t dreaming. And so, they had a certain lack of regard for their own safety. And even if I was perfectly safe to them, which I was, as much as any being of my kind can, that disregard shouldn’t become a habit. It would make them vulnerable to others.

I felt a sense of responsibility there.

Especially after hearing them declare their distrust of their own parents.

These children were not related to me, not in the way they were related to their parents.

But biological relation conveys responsibility, not trust. And without trust, that responsibility cannot safely be exercised. And, the responsibility, as far as I’m concerned, lies solely on the parents.

They decided to have children. They’re children had no consent in the matter, and were stuck with their parents, if nobody gave them any other options.

I felt this to the very beginnings of my own consciousness, even though I can’t really claim to have a parent.

I was conceived in darkness, just before matter flashed into existence with light. And I was conceived in darkeness again, when life first began to dream.

I’m not a god. I, as a small, limited locus of strange consciousness, can only influence a tiny set of things, even if I may seem amazing to any other person. But, due to my age, experience, and sense of identity, I do feel a sense of responsibility toward all life.

I don’t really know if I’m trying to convince myself or you of my supposedly good intentions. But I know better than anyone else that, while intentions absolutely do matter, they are only part of the equation. Intentions become meaningless if they are not accompanied by a deep interest and concern in impact, in the outcomes, in the effects that come from the cause.

I like to think I’ve learned.

“I shouldn’t help you fight bullies,” I said. “I won’t.”

The girl looked positively destroyed, and the dragon scowled.

So I grinned, and said, “I will help you get the absolute best revenge on them, though.”

“What is that?” the question came.

“I’ll help you survive them. I’ll help you to not be hurt by them. And then I’ll help you live a life that is better than theirs,” I said. “I can do that, without hurting them myself. It might even make their lives better in the end, too, when they see what happens. And then you’ll know you truly defeated them and taught them who and what they are.”

“Even if our parents are the bullies, too?” the girl asked.

“Are they? Earlier tonight, I saw your mom being very kind to you. Helpful.”

“Yeah, that’s what she’s like when she’s not making us sit at the table until bedtime with a plate full of peas.”

“Dad’s the same,” the dragon said.

“They don’t understand how much we can’t eat peas. Our body won’t let us.”

“And it’s not just the peas.”

“Sunday school.”

“School.”

“They won’t stand up against the bullies at school. They just tell us their lives are worse than ours, and we should have pity on them.”

“Yeah. And they say we have a bad attitude when we can’t make our body do chores.”

“I can’t do the laundry. I can’t. It just doesn’t work. I don’t know why.”

“And they tell me I can’t really be a dragon. I know they’re wrong. I can be a dragon stuck in a boy’s body, because that’s literally what I am. But they keep telling me to stop pretending all the time.”

“And they shout at us if we can’t do what they want us to do.”

“And spank us if we cry.”

I held up my hand, and asked, “What is a bully?”

“It’s someone who keeps hurting you even after you tell them to stop, because they can,” the girl said.

“And do your parents do that?” I asked.

“Yes!” they both said forcefully, in perfect sync.

“Then I will help you get my kind of revenge on your parents,” I said. “And maybe, someday they won’t be your bullies anymore.”

A few years later, they would pick their names, but keep them to themselves. Their parents would convince them repeatedly that they were just imagining things. The two of them would struggle to keep believing in each other and in me. But, sometimes accepting the reality that is pushed on you by the people around you is a matter of safety, and we would let this happen. We would keep our secrets deep in our dreams until the day it was safe to make them real.

And we did.

And, coincidentally, around the time a Ktletaccete would be reaching adolescence, when these twin Earthlings were 21 years old, in college, they came out to their old highschool friend and roommate, Erik.

And so did I.

Erik was something of a peer to them, in more ways than one. He was also plural and trans and autistic, and safe to come out to, even about the both of them existing. Even for me.

But their parents would still be bullies for a while, and that sucked.

But I got to see that smile in the mirror.

And they shave the right side of their head for Goreth, and grow the left side long for Sarah, and although that’s a compromise, and it looks like the haircut of just about any other queer person these days, they’re super proud of it. Because it has a deeper meaning that most people can’t see otherwise.

And they wear a pendant of a bacteriophage around their neck. And when people ask them about it, they grin coyly and say it’s their childhood imaginary friend.

But, maybe, most importantly, they found strength in darkness and were finally able to sleep at night. And if they hadn’t done that, their already chaotic and fragile health would have really started to fail them, and they might not have survived to find that smile.

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.

#Tunnel Apparati Diaries #Sunspot Chronicles #A system of giving #Making Friends with Entropy #Chapter 3

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ohthatphage · 4 months

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Chapter 2: Life

I chose that night to make myself known specifically because Jeremy and his sister had finally learned about the concept of personal autonomy and consent, and their rights to them, even if their mom hadn’t taught them the words themselves.

These rights weren’t always something I was aware of myself, not as rights. Much like the way Jeremy had been seeing things up to that point, I’d seen them has rules, restrictions on what I could do and where I could go. And they still worked very much like that. But the time I’d recently spent amongst a different people had taught me quite a lot about how to think of them.

But mechanically speaking, when Jeremy and his sister learned that they could draw lines and set the rules of their own shared psyche they also, in the process, were convinced to give me permission to finally make contact and show myself.

And the way that Jeremy had conceived of that was to consider me to be one of his dream monsters. And that meant that I could access parts of their neural system, the critical step for me to be able to make contact.

He didn’t have to say it out loud. He just had to willingly allow me in. Which he did.

But, I want to make it clear that at this point in my own existence, I would not have made the overture if he also was not fully aware of his rights.

I imagine you are asking me now, “Are you really a monster then?”

I never said I was a monster, though maybe this story implies it.

But, yes, I am.

Every culture I have encountered, whether human or otherwise, has labeled me a monster. So it is pretty clear that that’s what I am.

In any case.

There was a sweatshirt on the floor, between where Jeremy and his sister were sitting and the open doorway to their room.

That sweatshirt cast a shadow in the light of their reading lamp. And that shadow, amongst all the others, was the one that caught Jeremy’s sister’s attention more than anything else. And with her focused on that while he was playing with his truck, he also had it in the back of his mind as the most likely monster in the room.

So, that’s where I emerged.

The physical location of it didn’t matter so much to me as the association in their mind. I didn’t actually exist there in the sweater. I existed in the space between the gateway that I’d traveled through, its mechanisms located below the mountain in their backyard, and the small part of their brain that they’d allowed me to share with them, which included their auditory and speech centers and visual cortex.

But when the shadow of the sweatshirt moved, Jeremy’s eyes snapped to it, piercing it with a glare of fear, anger, and adrenaline.

And then I allowed my own psyche to extrapolate the information from my own senses, such as they were, and use their visual cortex to help me visualize my view of them from that location. So I felt like I was the sweater’s shadow and perceived our subsequent conversation as if it was happening out loud.

Which it was on Jeremy’s part. He spoke.

“You can’t get me. It’s not allowed,” he said.

As had been my habit for hundreds of millions of millennia, I took a shape that resembled Jeremy’s shadow, and said, “Good. I do not want to, but it is good for you to make that clear.”

The both of them had very mixed reactions to that.

For one, suddenly this was very real to them. Which they had not expected at all.

This was easy to tell, because I was sharing their brain and could feel their emotions and thoughts as they pushed against my psyche.

Taking the shape of their own shadow, but detached completely from their body, was also confusing to them. Although they couldn’t think of any of their dad’s movies where this happened, it prompted them to think of those kinds of movies, and then they both suddenly felt like they were in one. This did not help their senses of reality.

It did, however, reinforce the feeling that they were dreaming, and remind them of their great grandmother’s advice, and the rule that they’d learn, and that Jeremy had just invoked. And that made them feel better.

And my words definitely helped. They reinforced the idea that that rule was true.

Their head spun with dizziness as these emotions and ideas conflicted with each other and tried to find their places in the ever changing puzzle of their reality.

So, I thought it might help if I told them my name, which I did.

The only reason I “spoke” English at that point was because they did. I was using their brain, so my thoughts were given their words.

And, at some point in the previous year, they’d been watching a T.V. show with their parents and had heard the word “phage” being used by one of the people on the show. And they’d asked what that word meant, and their dad had said that it was the ancient Greek word for “to eat”. And that the characters on the show were calling the virus they’d just discovered a phage because it preyed on bacteria. It ate bacteria from the inside out. So it was a beneficial virus, and one they could use for whatever it was the heroes were doing.

“That sounds like a supervillain name!” Jeremy had said. “A cool one!”

And their dad had blinked, and said, “Yeah, actually. It does! Good call, son. You might make a good comic book writer someday.”

It turns out that someone had already thought of that, and there already was a comic book supervillain by that name. But nobody in the family had learned that yet, and though I’m not that villain in any way, when I told my name to Jeremy and his sister, that’s what they heard.

To Jeremy and his sister, I was named after the virus, if that’s important to anyone.

To me, I am named after the process by which life must function to grow and continue existing, whatever word you use for it.

Previous cultures I’d encountered had used ancient words to describe this, such as ‘efeje’e and Mau. So, there was this idea attached to my name that it should be an old word from a root language to the one known by whomever I was talking to.

And that’s how I became Phage.

“My name is Phage,” I said. “I am exploring the universe, and I want to talk to you. May I talk to you? Both of you?”

Jeremy, startled, looked briefly to his left, then faced me again with wide eyes and asked, “You can see my sister?”

I filled my shadowy silhouette with stars, nebulae, and galaxies, and then manipulated some of them to form a smile, with two supernovae for eyes, and said, “Of course. You are both there.”

“What are you?” he asked.

This is always a difficult question for me to answer. And everyone asks it as well. No language is equipped to encapsulate what I am. And with someone as young and new to language as Jeremy and his sister were, the result of describing what I am results in just repeating my name.

“Phage,” I said.

But, I think, deep down, beneath the word, they both sensed what I meant by it. Subconsciously, at least.

He seemed satisfied with the answer, even if it unsettled him. His next question seemed to suggest he grasped the basis of it. It’s the second most common question I encounter.

“Are you like God?” he asked.

I chuckled. I always chuckle at this, I think. Then I took a very serious tone and said, “No. Do not ever call me a god. That will foster a poor understanding and the wrong expectations. To you, I am a person, like you are.”

He blinked.

But his sister seemed to have gotten more out of my identity than he had, because she was sure of her words when she said, “But you can do things we can’t do. You can do anything.”

“I cannot and will not hurt you without your explicit consent,” I said. “It is a rule I have given myself, and one that I must follow.”

“But,” she said, and then floundered, because she was uncertain of just what words to use to formulate her question. She just knew that what I was saying was contradictory to her sense of my identity.

“I have a greater self,” I explained. “But when I use the word ‘I’ and ‘me’, I am talking about this, my smaller self.” I made my silhouette gesture at its own torso. “Oh, by the way. If you want to refer to me, use ‘it’ and ‘its’. That’s my pronoun. I am Phage, it/its.”

They both stared, trying to understand what I was and why I would say something like that.

“Where I come from most recently, it is polite to tell people what your pronouns are, so that they don’t have to guess,” I told them. “Because you can never really know what someone’s pronouns are until they tell you.”

At this point, I knew a lot about both of them. I had been watching for a few years now, and now that I had access to their language I could make more sense of my memories of them. I could also immediately sense their identities on a subconscious level. But as I had just explained it would be rude of me to assume that knowledge was mine to have.

“What are your names and pronouns?” I asked.

“Well, my name is Jeremy and I guess my pronouns are he/him,” Jeremy said. “I’m supposed to be a boy. But, really, I’m a dragon.”

“And I don’t have a name, but I’m a girl, so my pronouns are she/her,” his sister said, confidently.

“Why don’t you have a name?” I asked.

“I don’t want one yet,” she said. “That way no one can tell me what to do.”

I smiled and said, “Smart.”

“Well, I tell her what to do sometimes,” Jeremy said. “Be she does it back, so it’s fair.”

She nodded, grinning.

“It’s the adults that matter,” she said. “And the other kids.”

As we talked, I could feel them both relaxing. This subject seemed to put them both at considerable ease. Like it was giving them relief about something they didn’t even realize had been making them tense.

But Jeremy was still notably more uncomfortable than his sister.

So I asked, “Jeremy, is that really your name? Or is it the name your parents gave to both of you?”

“How do you know that?” he asked, astute and reflexively cagey.

“I pay attention,” I said. “And I can guess from what I see.”

“What do you mean?”

“You share your body, almost equally,” I told them. “You have the left hemisphere of your brain, and your sister has the right. Because you take control most of the time, everyone thinks you’re right handed. But there’s always been two of you. And your parents think there’s only one of you. And I think they named you. You react to your own name like it doesn’t fit. Same with your pronouns.”

I try to be polite, but it’s hard. Sometimes telling the truth is more important. Also, politeness is fluid, relative, defined by the culture you exist in. And in this moment, I didn’t exist in the culture I had last grown accustomed to. I existed in Jeremy’s culture, the one created between the two twins. And I found myself naturally adapting.

Still, I could tell they were startled by my words and maybe put off by them.

“Where I’ve just come from,” I explained, “children get to pick their own names and pronouns whenever they want. Until then they are simply known by their teacher, or Tutor, like Student of Phage, if I were a Tutor. I’m not, but I’ve been one once. And they go by they/them until they choose another pronoun.”

“So,” the sister said cautiously. “If you were our Tutor we’d both be Student of Phage?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I like my pronoun, she/her,” she replied, definitively.

“I like it, too,” I told her.

“Maybe,” the other sibling, the dragon, experimented. “Maybe Jeremy is our name, and my name could be something different. And I could go by they/them, too. He/him could be what people think we are. For now.”

“If you want,” I said. “I think it is a good convention. But I sense that it is not what your people do.”

“Our people?” the sister asked.

“Your parents. Humans,” I replied. “Or, at least the humans closest to you.”

“Yeah, no,” the dragon said. “They give us names and pronouns and tell us we’re a boy and what to do.”

“What would happen if you told them otherwise?” I asked.

“Bad things,” the sister said.

“Yeah,” the dragon agreed. “They’d get mad. It’s against the rules.”

“Do you ever get to say who and what you are?” I asked.

“Maybe when we’re an adult,” the sister replied.

The dragon nodded.

At this point I was seeing them as what they really were, they were voluntarily sharing so much of themselves.

Their body was four feet and six inches tall, according to their own measurements. They wore a navy blue set of fleece pajamas with a velociraptor embroidered on the left breast as if it was a company logo (I’m describing this in retrospect after having learned more about their culture). And their hair was blonde and wavy, and they preferred to let it get as messy as possible.

But, on the right, where the dragon perceived themself to be, because of the way human neurology works, I saw six limbed reptile with a barbed tail and a proud posture. They sat like a cat, with their tail wrapped around their feet, and their wings folded against their back, head held high, horns brushing the ceiling, looking down on me.

And on the left, I saw a slightly smaller child with long, curly brown hair, wearing a soft, light blue nightgown with ruffles and an embroidered unicorn where the velociraptor was on the their pajamas. She had dimples on her cheeks, just like their shared body had, but she grinned more freely and beamed with twinkles in her eyes whenever she looked up from the floor. She did seem to fluctuate between emotions more freely than the dragon, and wore them on her sleeve, as their parents would say.

I would later see that smile on the face of their vessel while looking in a mirror, but that would be a decade and a half from now. I knew this. I got a flash of vision while looking at her, as happens sometimes with me.

I am cause and effect itself, after all. And even though the universe is chaos embodied, there are chains of causality that become stable and probably enough that I can rely on them.

And an indelible part of this vision was my presence and perspective in it.

If I stayed with them, that smile would eventually become physical.

I wasn’t sure yet if that’s what I wanted to do. I needed to know more. I was, after all, on a particular mission. I did have my own goals. I needed to see if their goals aligned with mine, or if I should keep searching.

But, one thing was certain, if I wanted to keep my memories, I would need their help. I would need to hitch a ride with them until I found better hosts, if I couldn’t serve them justly. Or wait until someone else entered this house.

But I was feeling optimistic. I did like that smile. I don’t think I have ever seen a smile quite like the one that was in that future mirror.

“When do you become adults?” I asked, to help clarify this.

They both shrugged, and the sister said, wrinkling their nose, “When we’re 18 I think?”

“Do you want help getting there?” I asked.

“What?”

“What do you mean?”

It didn’t really matter which of them asked which question. They both meant them.

The shorter question really meant, “hold up,” or, “wait,” or, “you are surprising and scaring us.”

I answered the second question, hoping to satisfy the first in the process, and said, “I could use your help, and I would like to offer a trade. Before you say yes, though, I would like to properly inform you of what I am doing and what this means, so that your consent is informed.”

They were both very hesitant to accept that, but I waited, and after a while the sister spoke up.

“What are you trying to do?” she asked.

“I’m exploring life,” I told her. “I want to learn what it is like to be alive, a living thing. I have had the chance to do this occasionally, but not on this planet yet. But also, the people I have been existing with for the past several epochs have not let me inhabit a biological body very often. They have tried to treat me like a person, but they kept me confined to their technological Networks.”

The dragon frowned and asked, “What does that mean?”

“There is a piece of technology, alien to your world, buried beneath a nearby mountain,” I told them both. “I mostly exist in that technology right now, but I am broadcasting a part of myself into your system in order to talk to you.”

“Like in a movie?”

“Yes,” I said. “But this is real. This is not a dream. I am here. And I do represent the people I came from, but I also represent the universe itself and all life. I represent you, and what makes you you. But I also represent myself. This small part of me does. And I have recently been learning how joyful and rewarding it is to understand things, and for others to understand things better. And so I have come to your planet to say, ‘hello’, to introduce myself to you or your people, and to see if it would be OK to get to know you. And also to see if my previous hosts might start visiting you some day. But I want to be cautious about this, and I need consent from you and your people to make it work. It will take a while.” I paused and then asked, “Does this make sense?”

They were both hesitant, but they both started nodding, almost eagerly.

They seemed excited.

I caught the dragon thinking about something called “show and tell”, and I gave them a cautioning look.

“For a while, I will need to be kept more secret than your sister,” I told them. “You can call me your imaginary friend, if you need to. But it would be best to approach knowledge of my existence with caution. What I know and what I can do is very powerful and can scare people. And if you fall prey to trying to convince other people I am more than just imaginary, they will almost certainly react badly to it.”

They both frowned in different ways, turning in opposite directions to do so.

“You can say, ‘no’,” I told them. “In fact, you probably should. I am a stranger to you, something you have not spoken to before, and we have no history of trust. And because no one else in your life knows about me, you cannot verify that trust. And I cannot guarantee you that I’m not manipulating you. I have a very real history of doing things that people call manipulation, and not everyone has been happy with my presence.”

“But?” the sister asked, prompting me when I’d stopped.

“There is no ‘but’,” I replied. “Those are the considerations. The reasons you should say ‘no’ to my request. Do you have any questions?”

“What is your request again?” she asked.

Her sibling nodded in agreement.

I waited a couple of their heartbeats to emphasize the weight of what I was going to say, and then I said it more clearly, “I would like to join your system, to become a member of your psyche for a time. We can make it an agreement, that maybe it’s for the shortest time possible, until you can bring me to someone else who is more willing. But I would like to explore your world and get to know some people who live here. You, if you are willing to let me. And I would like to genuinely earn your trust and reward it with contact with another civilization that I hope will be able to have friendly relations with you and your people. And to also reward your trust by agreeing to stand up for you, to help you get through your life with less struggle. At least until you choose to part ways with me, which you may do at any time. Would you both consent to this?”

“You want to be our Tutor?” the sister asked.

“No,” I said. “No. You do not have that role in your culture, and it would be presumptive of me to even ask that. No. You have your parents and I will not replace them. What I want is to be your friend. I want to learn how to be your friend, on your terms. To understand what it means to be your friend on this world. So that I might avoid hurting you or anyone else living here.”

“I don’t like our parents,” the sister said suddenly.

Her sibling looked so startled at that.

“I’ve always wanted to be adopted,” she declared.

Making Friends with Entropy

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“Really?”

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

“How?”

“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.”

“Yeah.”

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

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

“Oh.”

And that’s what she’d told him.

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.

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.

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

#Tunnel Apparati Diaries #Sunspot Chronicles #A system of giving #Making Friends with Entropy #Chapter 2

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ohthatphage · 4 months

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Making Friends with Entropy

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“Really?”

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

“How?”

“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.”

“Yeah.”

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

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

“Oh.”

And that’s what she’d told him.

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.

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.

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

#Tunnel Apparati Diaries #Sunspot Chronicles #A system of giving #Making Friends with Entropy #Chapter 1

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