DANGEROUS MEDITATIONS

I don’t think we ever slept much.

We moved through our lives like they were just another game, each of us playing to win. We liked the people everybody else liked, and hated the people that the media called “terrorists”. Our families lived in rundown apartments and rented houses, and ate out at the cheapest chain restaurants. Our kids went to all the mediocre schools. We worked up to 20 hours a day most days, and ate a lot of take out leftovers. We were the new digerati; frontline architects of the new “new age”, and some of us wanted more.

Everyone was watching a lot of TV. There were nearly 1500 channels, and a quarter million more through Insta-Play. There were programs to inform and educate in 3D. There were entertaining docu-dramas about Abraham Lincoln and titillating cooking shows, on after 8. There were entire neighborhoods of channels dedicated to shows about people with lots of friends, and great jobs. There were literally hundreds of game shows on in every conceivable time-slot throughout the day.

Right around Halloween 2013 it became trendy to wear a portable oxygen device. The air was getting thick and the rain left streaks on the sidewalks.

We entertained a lot.

We made a little more money and didn’t really save. We spent money we didn’t really have on people who weren’t really our “friends”. We threw parties for all the pay-per-views and served chicken enchiladas to all comers. We drank shots of mid-range tequila and celebrated Cinco De Mayo like we weren’t middle of the road white kids from the suburbs.

My marriage was falling apart. We didn’t really hate each other. We didn’t really care one way or another and that’s what made it so sad. I couldn’t deal with it so I started watching a lot of religious programming on Insta-Play. One of my favorites involved barking like a dog in voice-chat and competing together in co-op multiplayer over the Steam channel relay. There was a weird sense of camaraderie and brotherhood back in those days: I think we all knew we were completely borked at that point.

I started working for a software company out of Sanann-Frangelis. Erion Technologies had made a killing in the educational games niche. I wrote content for their marketing department, and did guerrilla work on the side for “mo ends”. “WWGD? (What would Google do?)” was one of mine from those early days. Mostly, I worked on spec, and took whatever work I could. It was a challenge and I enjoyed it.

I left the software business and started writing full time around 2015. My first real gig was a fantasy romance novel about a dark “Elf” necromancer from an established franchise, and his blushing druid bride. Everyone assumed I’d lost my mind.
I was making good money and I felt like celebrating. I reconnected with some old friends who still played together occasionally on the channel for the game my book was based on. The wife joined in for a time and then dropped out again. Her subscription to the WARK Premium Channel was renewing and there was an expansion out before X-Mas Holiday that she was dying to play.

I threw myself into a trilogy of books about the history and arcane significance of “keys”. It was mindless crap, and I wasn’t surprised when the History Channel picked up an option to produce a mini-series starring the kid from the "sparkly vampire" thing back in 2008. My teenage daughter was thrilled, but I was already feeling more than a little let down by the whole damn process. I still ate a lot of take out leftovers, but the food was from expensive, trendy restaurants. I still worked a lot of 20 hour days.

Time was speeding up.

“Dad. Whose cuter? Milkey Wees or Jakob Blond?” my daughter teased. They were two rival singers from thrash mariachi groups who were sponsored somehow on her local channel-group. I would drop into a defensive posture and take a long drag off my Oxy-Pod. “I always preferred David Bowie, myself….” I grumbled, and she laughed and threw a pillow in my face, shrieking “LOL whose that? HAHA!”

My son had his own concerns. “Dad. Do you know why the oceans turned black in 2012? Wasn’t that the year your first book predicted the end of the world?”
“Well, technically it wasn’t the “end of the world”, it was the collapse of the state vector; there is a subtle difference.”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to ask you” he continued, dropping his voice into a faux stage whisper. “Why didn’t you write us all a way out of that while you were in there in the first place?”

The kid had a point.

I started to disappear into the dark channels of the Underwire around 2023. I developed a cold that winter and never really got over it. I clutched at my Oxy-Pod in my front jacket pocket and hit it whenever I felt like celebrating. A lot of people told me I had plenty of reasons to be happy: I had just sold a series of stories to a major international channel-group dedicated to dark fairy tales and gothic family fare. I worked 96 hours the week the first season debuted. My family celebrated our largess at Sandals in Jamaica. The tele-mails usually had videos attached and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

I started working on the fiction for a simulation channel dedicated to ancient astronauts and the Bavarian illuminati. The war was in its 25th year, and I was getting pretty good at pretending.
I took medication to speed up. I took up mediation to slow down, and I started commuting from a bungalow off Paradisio Bay, along the southern Oregon coast. I was wealthy beyond measure, and millions of good people were dying. My son went to University at a prestigious Acronym on the Right Coast. My daughter did volunteer work for the Valkyree Group; a green-space movement with dreams of cleansing the sea.

I started taking long walks on the beach at night, just like the cliché, staring out into the inky blackness, searching for inspiration. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time playing games anymore, and eventually, my wife joined me in the real world.

Somehow, we still felt disconnected.

My son was a physicist now, and my daughter had largely disappeared over the horizon. Her wanderlust manifested as a hunger to do good, and I envied it.

I started writing my way out of the hole in time I had created when I wrote my first book. The Church I belonged to preached active-spiritual actualization, through the consumption of several rare tropical fruits and vegetables and guided meditation. My best friend retired from the Army after 29 years and he was older than his age for the experience of it. He had started out younger than me by a whole generation, but by the time he retired he had surpassed me somehow. The world was getting older too, and you could see it in its face, on every channel there ever was.

By the time my wife died in 2032 I was 63 years old and thoroughly dependent on her for so many things. I cried for three weeks straight, and didn’t work as much after that. Everything was jumbled up in my head, speeding up and winding down at the same time.
I fell back into gaming (again)and spent a long weekend as the vampire lover from my first short story, “Thee Conversion”. I was young and alive again, and I had the benefit 4 extra decades to guide me. By the end of the story I had screwed it up the same way I wrote it in the first place, but I was learning.

My buddy David spent several weeks with me and we talked about conspiracies and drank a little too much scotch. I doubt either of us enjoyed it much; It’s flavors were too smokey, and too much like home.

The sky was burning for most of the summer. We moved downtown, and shared an entire office building that had been abandoned when the fires broke out that May. Over the broadcast channels on my phone, I heard about the Fire-fighters strike. Folks like me were still paying cash, and everyone else was running from the ashes. I dropped my Oxy-Pod in the stairwell of the new building, the day we moved in, and didn't bother to retrieve it.

We spent our evenings arguing the relative merits of "corporate utilitarianism" versus traditional conservative financial theory. We shot pool and watched the fights while plotting my newest story, only Dave didn’t know it.
“I’m not really here, man.” I'd say, and he'd deadpan back at me, "I know man. You are real real gone," we both laughed out loud.
“Whatcha working on, D?” he asked me one morning as he came back in from his early run, and caught me writing.

“It’s kind of complicated, D” I replied. “There’s some eggs on the stove.”

“Real eggs? I guess some of us are still alive."

"Hrmm." I replied, absently.

I was starting to understand.

In my story the conversation was happening between much younger versions of David and I, and the subject was "simulation theory." Dave was explaining how the world was already a simulation, and we were all living inside it without really understanding how “fake” it actually was. I was listening to him and playing along, not really taking it very seriously, driving the conversation forward. David was always fun to listen to stoned.

“What was that?” I suddenly blurted out. I couldn’t really tell anymore whether the conversation was occurring in the fictional past, or the speculative present.

David smiled and repeated himself. “I said you really know how to live, dude.

I was falling.

My breath came in ragged gasps as I sucked on the end a retractable cord. My Oxy-Pod was low and the song playing on the LED display was “Holy Diver”, but I couldn’t hear it because I was sucking on the speakers.

“Panic attack?” he asked, nodding to the elongated yellow tube on the table next to my fork.

“Yeah, sure” I said, sliding a tube of butter towards the 20 something soldier he used to be. The older versions of ourselves were still standing on a patio balcony, 22 floors above the street. He was smoking cigarettes and I was watching the night-sky, trying to spot the constellations through the burning haze.

“You know how I know we are already living inside a simulation, D?” He asked me as I strained to see the little star off the 3rd rung of the handle of the big dipper. “….The dollar menu’s at all the fast food restaurants are the same now. Whoever designed this world is literally duping to conserve RAM.”

I briefly considered vampires, and dark Elf necromancers. I stumbled out into the hall and started moving towards the stairwell. I needed to walk and think clearly.

I thought about ancient astronauts and illuminists, and imagined throwing myself down the steps, all the way to the bottom floor. I looked at my hands, and they were young again. or maybe they had never been so old? The thought suddenly seemed ludicrous.... I couldn’t remember which me was the real me and which was only part of the story I was telling. The Oxy-Pod at the bottom of the stairs was a crumpled pack of smokes.

I was literally skipping by the time I hit the door, and the sky outside was like a blanket of sunlight reflected off polished chrome and bright dyed plastics. My daughter reached up to take my hand and my son pounded on my head, and kicked his tiny feet against my chest. Instinctively, I turned around. My wife was bringing some things for a picnic down to the car and looked up at me and smiled as my son cheered “MOM” at the top of his lungs.

For a split second I could have sworn I could hear somebody reading out loud from this page, but the feeling evaporated in the cool breeze as fast as it had come. I thought about vampires and the collapse of the state vector, and the kernel of an idea for a new ending to my very first book formed spontaneously inside my head....

My wife smiled, and she looked beautiful. My daughter shouted “MILKY WAY!”

This time I wrote a way out for everyone.

reply to post by 0zzymand0s


I think about that sometimes what it will be like to grow old and die. Is it that you lived to that age, because you never fullfilled what you were meant to do or learn the lesson you were meant to learn. Or is that the lesson to learn is to let time do it's thing and accept your fate for what it is and do all you can to live balaced and love and be loved... Either way good story on how someone got a glimpse of their future and a chance to change and live in the moment?

Sometimes, you get what you want and it really isn't. Sometimes you never get what you want and you are glad for it. I wrote this as a way of playing with the concept of time, and to pay homage to the idea that writers create the worlds they live in.

Thank you for reading it. I really appreciate it!

reply to post by 0zzymand0s

0zzymand0s,

I stopped posting on ATS but your story deserves a reply as it is the first time I ever started reading one of these story's, in the "writers forum" on ATS, and actually got to the end of the story hoping there'd be more.....

If you ever start writing books.....send me a U2U. I'll buy them!!

A well deserved star and flag from a future fan.

Peace

reply to post by operation mindcrime


Wow, thank you so much for reading it, and posting your message. It's been a weird, rough week and your comment made my night!

I have been posting here myself since July or August. I signed up for the "Gray Room" thread IIRC. I wasn't even aware that there was a short story forum at ATS until tonight.

Thank you again for your encouragement! I *love* to write, and i try to do about 10,000 words a night. My daughter has challenged me to "get off my backside" and write her a faery tale by Christmas, and I am working up the inspiration, guts, perseverance and creative drive to do it and not let her down, so we will see.