The tell-tale printer

In the cold, darkness of a poorly insulated house, the light from the power button of our wireless printer pulsates like the beating of a elderly heart. It sits there on the desk with as much dust as any antique and the same amount of judgement as it fills the room with light and then returns me to a resting room.

It repeats this action: light that fills the ceiling like some projection of a mid-summer dream and then darkness where I sense the calmness and verisimilitude of dignified reality. Then as I get used to the darkness the joy of the ceiling light comes back, only to return me to the now petulant darkness. Then light! Oh such light that lasts an instant and shows me all the things in my messy room I thought I'd lost. Now darkness! Wretched terrible darkness and light!...

I can't take it anymore and I go for its life blood! I turn the overhead light on and the room fills with the dirty yellow light from the single room light above me. Half asleep, I rummage around the back of the printer for its jugular.

It's difficult to find and for a moment, I wonder if there even is one? Have I killed this agonizingly beautiful creature which pulsates vacillating light and darkness as part of its waking dream? Does it think of my snores as a paltry annoyance and wish it could turn me off as I sleep beneath it's heart beat and am bothered by its perturbing yet necessary life?

As the 1/2 second ends that I think all of this, I find its chord and it turns out it's just a printer and inanimate object after all. I rip it's chord from its backside and shout, "you're dead now you flickering bastard!"

Yet as I go to sleep, the thoughts of my friend the printer haunt me and I think of how it's been doing that for years now and never have I unplugged it. Yet in the end, darkness is truth and I tend to sleep better without light, however small or bright.

I drift off to sleep with the dead things all around me. Sweet sleep at last.

Highway to hell

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. He felt himself swerve slightly as he held his neck from a shooting pain that seemed to arise when he had turned his head to follow an eager BMW driver; the sun, flashing in his eyes, he swerved back towards the road and away from the median.

"Goddamn BMW drivers! They're all assholes! Every fucking one!" He said as driving began to return to normal.

A fog began to gather as large bushy clouds rolled in overhead and Jack began to think about his family. His little boy smiled at him in his head and his wife said, "just come home safe," as he thought about her beautiful curls around his shoulders caressing him to her heavenly embrace.

He decided he would call her but as he called, the phone would just ring and ring and ring with no answer or even a message machine. He hung it up as he meandered through this eternal road.

He began to think about all the bad things he'd done in his life and the bad things he'd recently done on the trip he was on. The fog seemed as thick as water as he looked out on the road and couldn't see even a mile down the road.

As he tried to slow down to stop, he found that he couldn't move his leg; it was glued to a constant speed going down the highway.

He tried his radio and Enya began to play. He began to scream. He tried to roll down the window and the fog that rolled in was steam.

Suddenly, the Enya halted and a voice spoke, "welcome to hell, you cursed the Lord while driving and so you shall now drive for all eternity to remind you of your blasphemy."

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. His heart raced and he only begged for sleep and a crash so the road would end.

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

The following message reads as dictated from Col. Ronald T. Harris of Baton Rouge LA to Stg. Michael Wayneright of Chicago IL. Their position at the time of dictation was unknown but is assumed as well into the country of Cambodia in Eastern Asia.

Boy... I mean Mikey... Mike or do you prefer Michael? In any case, I want you to copy this down as if I made it, y'see? I want this to be read to my kids, kids as if grandaddy was telling it to 'em, ya get me? Mike, what have I gotten myself into this time? Promise me you'll change that bloody outfit before you recount this tale. Oh I talk too much. Well, here goes:

Back in my war days, I used to tell the boys who were waiting to ship out, in officer's bar in Saigon: "you gonna wind up like Mikey," and I don't think any of 'em ever got it. You see, they'd all joke and clown about a lot but I only told this to the strong ones.

Of course, all they saw was that Mikey was a lower pay grade and they thought I meant that they would end up on the bottom of the barrel like Mikey: Doing the grunt work, digging out the latrine and making dirt pay to do it; what they didn't see is that the reason Mikey was assigned so many tasks, regardless of how much he made was because Mikey was the fastest to dig a trench or a fox hole; he was the quickest to go from cover to cover, he got the most consecutive gook kills and at the end of the war, he was the only one of those bastards still alive. That said, that last one is an achievement I couldn't even attain. I wish I had "been like Mikey" in that regard...

You take this message back to Saigon now. You survive and don't make a liar out of me. Be an example to my boys.

ADDENDUM:

I dug a fox hole just like he always told me I could and covered it with leaves. Then carried his body on my shoulders until I hooked up with an attachment at the border and we got on a bird to head back to Saigon for debriefing. On my way back, I had been hit in the calf by grenade flack but the wound wasn't as serious to me as it was to the medics. I was discharged to bring this letter home and am available for comment in Washington DC at REDACTED FOR PRIVACY REASONS.

Sincerely,
Stg. Michael M. Wayneright

Breaking the mold

Chapter 7: Molding a Human Brain

The synaptic functions of a human mind are extremely complex and even in a child brain, the wiring must be worked with delicately or you will kill the form you hope to become.  The easiest path, but difficult unless you see human beings the way I do, is to determine using heat signatures and the x ray spectrum who's actually pregnant at about 4 weeks old.  The brain of that adolescent will begin to develop at 5 weeks according to my research.  Therefore, what I essentially do is unplug that life before it begins and take over the human process of brain and spinal cord development according to the infant  blue print that can be found on most scholarly doctoral databases.

Due to the fact that I was not an infant when I became the form that I am, I had to truncate my molecular structure to fit the human form.  Even the child's body had to be enlarged in the development process in order to properly configure my consciousness into the humanoid structure.  This one that the humans call god must have been an incredible archetect because the complexity of building this body was one that took tremendous amounts of energy to acheive and even at that, I had to borrow amounts of energy from this child's mother just to properly develop.  In the end, however, the majority of the genetic sequencing was provided to me and all that was left was wiring in my own brain functions into this body.

The higher brain functions were too much for the human mind to handle.  After all, I had the vast knowledge of the cosmos stored in my individual atoms but ironically so did they, they just were born blissfully unaware of the phenomenal cosmic powers they were made of.  Forgive my non-sequitur but it is important to note that human beings, unlike the Taylorn possessed an evolutionary trait that made them so formidable that they even viewed each other as enemies.  Whereas my people viewed black wings as simply a difference in life position, human beings viewed such things as superior and inferior. It was as the japanese humans would refer to as ero-guro.

Ero-Guro translates to beautifully grotesque which I feel, as I began wiring myself into the container of a US diplomat's wife, aptly described human beings.  They had the potential for great good and great evil and as I described before, as energy beings we had no distinction between the two.  However, as I began to wire myself into the confines of a human spawnling, I began to feel not only human emotions but specifically, the emotions of this human mother to be.  She was kind hearted and had become a diplomat's wife through her devotion to international diplomacy as opposed to a desire to hold political power.  She gave more than she took and as I had observed in the international databases of Earth, she was truly a rare breed amongst the species of earth.

For 7 months and 3 weeks longer, I would grow in her stomach as she strained us both by continuing to work on some great international agreement of peace and prosperity between more than one violent culture.  She enjoyed books and that knowledge due to the nature of my connection with her during my initial occupation was translated to me through her synaptic impulses into my developing mind.  I had no idea what it was at the time but as I began to understand emotion, in that primordial soup, I realized that I loved her.

Love was a strange emotion and whereas it had the broad application of the formless Taylorn, it could be as secluded and limited as the human mind.  The more human I became, the more I forgot about the knowledge I had of the cosmos until one day, as I smelled the air of the human world through a human nose and realized that I barely knew that I used to be Taylorn let alone that I used to be formless.

Getting to understand Earth was not an easy task either.  Human beings were apparently not the only creatures on earth as a dog I greeted was a little off put that I knew how to speak telepathically which is how dogs communicate.  They are not engaging speakers either, as the one i greeted was afraid at first and then immediately thought only of the hot dog that the human who called me "dada"viciously consumed.

There were many other animals around this planet as well.  Lions do not care for Humans at all, they have nothing to say to us and although this one stared at me through the glass of a window at the Bronx zoo, I feel as though he was envious more than willing to talk.  Speaking of the zoo where many of these animals from around the globe seemed to reside, the humans seemed to enslave even species that were genetically similar to themselves which I found barbaric as we passed by the primate enclosure.

In my first year of life, there would be many unusual traits of humans but after a day at the zoo and 5 weeks of life, it was time I once again enjoyed the only connection to my people I could enjoy: dreaming…

Breaking the mold

Chapter 6: A choice to make

After attaching myself to the tallest energy giving structure on this blue planet at the time, I climbed down through the electrical conduits to observe these strange creatures all around me.

It occurs to me that man could not comprehend what it is like to look at the world as pure energy.  I will attempt to explain but I cannot promise a good explanation.  Man was a vibrant spectrum of color to me.  Heat represented its self as a color yet, those colors could be felt as well.  Blue was a particularly somber and cold feeling and I say this literally.

My physical form was not even able to be seen unless someone happened to have a mass spectrometer on hand. To explain why, I simply need say, "have you ever seen a cell phone signal?  Have you ever seen radio waves?  Have you seen the static electricity and electrical waves that exist all around you and inside your body?  If the answer is no to any one of those questions they you would not be able to see me even though in a certain light, I can see you.

I could see the whole world; feel the world and though one would need a working knowledge of theoretical physics to understand what I was and what I was seeing, it was clear to me that I had stumbled upon something magnificent.

Earth had such vibrant life.  It experienced things with a softer hand than was dealt the Taylorn.  Human beings were so many shades of grey in the metaphysical world and yet they were shades of every other color in the physical one.  It was magnificent the intricacies that Taylorn males and females would have discarded for their complication.

Man was talented and his eccentricity built upon even things that were supposed to simplify his world.  The energy waves on this planet were all so diverse.  On my home world, it is true that we had our pleasantries but everything seemed to be boiled down to such simplicity that waves never crossed and energy was diffused into everything for maximum efficiency.  Humans threw a lot away.

In my travels, I came across a waste heap so large that it was said by locals to be visible from space.  The universe was humongous to a human mind.  While traversing their vast network of computers I learned all about trivialities that they worshipped like the invention of the... I-phone... and important concepts that they tossed out like the invention of soap.  I learned that they had a concept of lying and cheating and people did not have a set place on their planet once they'd chosen a path.  There was nothing so enthralling as the magnificent chaos of mankind.

There were downsides though.  There was war over ideals like patriotism, that my society would dismiss as trivialities.  There was mass breeding and the population swelled.  There was famine and disease as people depended on their earth to take care of them and abandoned their technology to produce results.  They protested things that might help their society grow like the stem-cells that existed in their bodies, and would have thought our society mad for the willing participation in chemical castration after a couple's first two children.

There was emotional decisions made by man like wars to go after one man, and this may have hurt the society at large but he never-the-less excelled at what he was able to control.  Emotional decisions didn't always bring bad things either: the sweet surrender of a man on his knees in front of his god was a practice that if used right and moderated and agreed on by the masses, could make for a beautiful and functioning society.

By this I mean that religion brought conflict when people held it to the standard that one was better than the other or one god/set of gods was more right than another.  The bottom line for a functioning spiritual society was a belief in a higher power than one's self from any origin.  The conflicts over who was right were irrelevant but because of the emotional connection, this brought about conflict over this particular issue in human society.  Not all feared this "god" being who said "thou shalt not kill," and I see this fact as the only way that this concept of religion would be feasible, I suppose that's the nature of choice.

So man was emotional and irrational but he certainly had a magnificent society; it was not as streamlined as the Taylorn home world but certainly as high functioning.

As I pondered these things or rather went over billions of scenarios and tried to calculate a next move (this was the closest thing an energy being could have to emotion) I began to see that I would never be able to understand these creatures more than their logical application until I saw through their eyes.

For weeks I observed them from many different spectra of energy.  I studied their physiology in their computers for 15 years before making the connection on how to become one of them.  The process was dangerous and the conversion nearly impossible but it came down to the synaptic electrical functions in a human brain.  My electrical functions had been scattered and this is what caused me to be the energy being that I was but what if I had a template?  A guide to put them back together?  The bottom line was there in plain sight but what the human mind could not configure, I could.

The only problem was that an adult mind was completely wired and had no wiggle room to reconfigure the synaptic impulses.  This is where I found out that I would have to start from the beginning, I would have to be born as a child and do the entire human life from beginning to end.  There was no guarantee that I would survive when that human body left this world but I suppose I would have to wire a trigger in my mind to remind me of what I was so that I could rebuild the matter transporter that would give me back eternal life before this ephemeral human one burned out.

Breaking the mold

Chapter 5: The conversion

It occurs to me at this juncture that I have left out an important detail to what I am and the story of my people.  I left out the quintessential part that I mentioned in the beginning of this story and then forgot to explain.  I left out why I am not the only one.

In the beginning of our evolution, there was only myself and my father who went from Taylorn to pure energy.  As time went on, our race searched for us and our experience produced a sense of duty to evolve the rest of our bretherin as we had been evolved.  First, however, we had to find a way to communicate with them as pure energy beings can only communicate with each other when we try to do it directly.  The Taylorn were not capable of telepathic speech as most of the extra terrestrial movies try to claim.

For weeks, my father and myself tried inhabiting our brethren which killed a few and simply didn't work with others and the strange deaths only made people afraid.  There was talk amongst our people of a dark time that had come to the Taylorn and a viciousness that befell them because of unforseen forces.

There really was no god amongst my people.  Not because we didn't believe in a higher power but simply because each of us had our own interpretation of the same thing and it had not been a priority to a people who didn't think like humanity did.  So when this dark time came and Taylorn began to die because of our attempts to possess them, they viewed it, at least at first, as a defect of their science and then of nature and then finally evil spirits and a higher power punishing the Taylorn for their rapid advancement.

As an energy being, we felt what was described by some as god.  We felt the nature of the universe and the physics that moved all things.  A burning bush that didn't burn, as described in the human bible would be the only way that a god could exist without us sensing him because nature and physics was us.  To be god was to be what we could not explain or be a part of and even as pure energy, there was a lot.  God existed to us as energy because of the Holmsian quote, "Once all that is possible has been eliminated, only the impossible remains."

I digress again.  At last I stopped my father from his attempts at communication through direct contact and steered his consciousness towards a more indirect means: the electronic communication.  Electricity and technology are a requirement for any civilization that becomes advanced enough to call its self a civilization and my people were no different.  We had communications arrays and space stations and vast technological resources. Just because we had wings on our backs and our devices were slightly larger to fit our differing physiology and sociology doesn't mean that we ceased to explore.  We had been to the outer edges of our solar system but because of the huge expense and material needed to construct one of 2 ships we had with the capability, we had halted at a slow incline of growth.

The idea of a matter transporter as my father saw it hadn't even been considered for space to ground yet and the entire idea was still revolutionary for its time.  However, for us to get it to work again, we needed a corporeal creature to understand its value and to put the process into action.

[Father, do you remember the formula still] I communicated.

[Son, you know that we never forget in this form. You are now the imprint of all life lived past present and future; although we are an echo of what they would consider living. What would you suggest for communication?]

[Father, we are energy. We exist as the one thing we knew how to play with as corporeal beings.]

[You suggest manipulating machinery. What crass communication. Allow me to try something else first.]

In my young and petulant state, I went forward with my plan and reached a few Taylorn with the message but his show was so much more grand.

With his form, he became heat and began to light up the rocks in the houses of every Taylorn as a message began to burn into those walls of every Taylorn in our entire civilization. He became the planet and began to transmit fierce lightening bursts through the clouds that formed messages and spoke to those who saw it as they soared from cliff side to peaks. He became a mist and rewrote some Taylorn brain signals which are essentially electricity and sent a vague message inside their brains (so as not to fry them like before) to build and use the device that made us what we were.

The things he did could be interpreted by the weak minded as a message from God but we knew that God would have been far more impressive than utilizing energy in a closed system. It's simply a matter of size. A planet is relatively small when you're pure energy as well as the laws of physics which dictate that in a closed system like our planet that was surrounded by an atmosphere, all energy was connected.

That being said, if my father had done something like create energy that wasn't already there or try to do all those feats at once, it might have been impossible but doing it very rapidly and one thing at a time was exhausting and draining but possible. By the time he was done, he had to regenerate by draining power from several cities to get back to normal and still be hindered enough to restrict him from transference travel.

This may need explanation. Transference travel is the words I use to describe to you as humans: adapting energy to our forms and becoming that energy at any point in the universe. We know it simply as a concept but humans have such colorful language and labels that I thought I'd give it a try. Do you like it?

Digression. In any case, this display was enough to lock my father to our planet for at least 100 years but for me? I used no energy adapting a computer to spell out my message. In fact, I gained energy by draining the computers of their current while I spelled out our message on the screen. Just enough energy to transfer travel to a little blue rock lightyears away called earth.

The process went quick once our entire civilization got the message. Most of them got my father's message though. At least 99% of my people ignored me and heard him. I would venture, however that 99% of those Taylorn would also not venture out into the universe when they became energy beings. Only a small fraction of them were explorers. I knew because the last thing I did was watch the glow of light on the surface of my planet as I was surrounded by light and the quiet glow of a sunrise from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Breaking the Mold

Chapter 4: Born in Exile

Being born conscious is what it means to touch the veil.  Who was this child whose life I would replace?  Where would the life inside of him go?  These were questions I didn’t know how to answer.  The being that I was, I didn’t care enough to answer them because “right and wrong” and “up and down” are corporeal concepts that are limited to the creatures that are fallible because of dimension and mortality.  I experienced neither and the only thing I truly feared was that what humans know as god and what we know as, “the benevolent and unexplainable force that allows us space and consciousness as pure energy”; or that’s how one would describe it if it weren’t more of an understood concept than something definable. I feared that this might one day not exist and I would cease to be.  I enjoyed existing and I think, as humans enjoy not being dead, so too we enjoy existing.

               Death is not a concept known to one of pure energy.  How can one fathom an end when there is only a sure time of beginning with patches in between that can only be defined as a loose concept?  As I remember being born, I think of the struggle that it was just to become a living thing.  There are hundreds of ways that being born can kill you and I suppose the same can be said of the process that made me pure energy.  One wonders how many others, who tried devices to teleport themselves, simply exploded and were no more?  How many of them simply met death and that was it?

               I digress as I ask too many questions in my story but life is full of more questions than answers.  A person’s day can go, “I woke up, had some cereal and played video games until I went to bed,” as many of my childhood days would be in this life I was about to undertake, but then there are questions within something even as simple as that.  How many opportunities did I miss by not interacting with other people?  Would this young, portly version of me have been better with a walk rather than a video game?  What percentage of my enjoyment of said video game were my own enjoyment and what percentage was enjoyed simply because I was able to connect with another human being who had spent the same ill-conceived day as me, on this video game?  Then there were deeper questions that human beings never asked such as was this part of some greater plan?  If I had gone outside those long days inside, maybe I would have gotten hit by a car, suffered heat exhaustion, been hit in the head and lost the ability to conceive my own ego.

               So many questions that make up our lives and we never ask or answer them because it’s easy to worry about things known. I know I can get hungry; I know I can die; I know I have a strong sexual urge and that the girl telling me to go into the tent alone with her might lead to satiating that urge.  This is the simplicity of the average human and with this corporeal form I had taken, I realized that I had come in contact with a civilization that was far less interesting than my own… or was it?

               By mid adolescence, I had begun reading books that evoked emotion and I began to experience wonder in the most mundane things.  With the birth of my human child, I experienced love in a way that no energy being ever could.  I experienced a different more shallow and animalistic view of beauty than my people ever had.  The passion of these beings was unmatched and as an enlightened one, I had long debates over things that were higher minded than video games and as my groups of friends evolved so too evolved my toys.

               The most interesting thing about humans to me was their hesitation.  When there was a decision that could benefit the whole of their society, they weighed concepts and liquid ideas with decisions.  There could be the most elaborate order in the chaos that was man. 

               A question like should we take unused stem-cells and use them to cure diseases like we never were able to before, was debated in courts rather than a small gathering of arbiters making decisions based on absolute logic.  To humanity, life was not a puzzle; it was a painting and one that took the entirety of their existence to paint.

               In my 27^th human year, I began to recall what it was to be a Taylorn and then also what it felt like to be in this foreign form. I remembered the feeling of power and prowess that came from being high born and yet as a human I was serenely focused on being unfocused and different with sore spots on my back where I felt my wings should have been.  I remembered my beak and felt it like a phantom limb the same way I perceived my wings.

               My empathic abilities were also intensified as a human. As a Taylorn, we had the ability to sense others around us and their intents as an instinct; as an energy being, we communicated telepathically so empathy was simply an added bonus because energy beings do not have emotions but humans have them like an overflowing teapot.  A telepathic connection, however dulled, could easily pick up on emotion and they were everywhere.  The little child pining over a fallen ice cream scoop, the investor pining over a net loss of $500,000.00 and how he would pay his child’s tuition; the great sorrow of humanity was overwhelming but there was also great joy.  A child who gets to go out for their birthday to the water park; a man who catches his child’s gaze for the first time; such joy as the latter could never be described as just joy but the point is made.  Experiencing a walk in the park was a dizzying experience for me if I did not distract my mind and senses with something.

               Then there was sex.  Taylorn women and Taylorn men had sex as an animal instinct.  It was no different than the rage of battle or the need to breathe air when one has been submerged underwater.  In this right, men and women were prone to having concubines for the soul purpose of sex and nothing else.  Did my father love my mother? Of course he did.  He did not want anyone else to be with but when she was having issues that made her not want the sexual urge, he went to places and others he could relieve himself with and they understood this in written contract that came with all Taylorn marriages.  Human beings have such great passion and emotion that it does not surprise me that they channel at least some of it into their sex lives.  Who damns the success of a man quite like a woman can?  Pitiful creatures…  Both sexual urges were archaic to us when we became pure energy though.  Sex was not required as energy is constantly created and destroyed in space as the parameters of physics allow.  There’s no need for sex and even the urges of a solid being are weeded out so that neither species that I have been is included.

               Questions and opportunity, desire and want, a sensual nature; all of these were paltry pleasantries enjoyed by man.  The Taylorn shared some of them as well but to devolve to something so ephemeral was, at best an experiment in futility.  Why did we exist was the question that human beings always asked and if I had to answer it, I would say, “…because the will of the universe which is conscious and alive provides us the space to exist and to ponder.  At our very core, it allows us to experience things that we might never have thought possible.” That was my answer for humans and Taylorn alike but my answer for what I never could escape, the energy being, the highest form on the evolutionary scale which I had experienced was a world of difference.  Why do we exist? “Energy beings exist because of a mistake in a matter transporter which gave us the ability to be a part of all things.  We exist to lubricate and experience existence itself.”

               I stopped in the park where I sat on a bench under a blue light and looked out onto a vast pond, pondering all these things.  “We exist to experience existence itself…”  In a way, I was experiencing existence by looking at things through a human’s eyes.  The only reason I even made it this far out into the universe was because matter and energy existed here, similar to that of my own planet.  On our planet, we had an Oxygen/Nitrogen balance in the air that we breathed and our sun also gave off ultraviolet radiation which caused temperatures on our planet to stay between 50* and 90* depending on the season.  There was also electricity in the air that was similar to earth.  Through the clouds, great bolts of blue lightning struck the hillsides in times of stormy weather.  There was rain and there was water and the elements were in sync with the planet.  Although I never ventured to the oceans on our world, I imagine there were currents similar to those of the earth and that life existed similarly to that of the earth although its inhabitants evolved differently.

               It was because of these things that I was able to adapt to the earth and look in at human beings with the desire to try and become one.  It was because of these things that I did become one and as I looked through their eyes, it was because of these things that I missed the energy being I would have to find out how to become again.