First World Prey

[Prompt: a rabbit hopping through my back yard]

Jacob sat on his porch and watched a rabbit scoot across the scrub desert behind his home.  It moved in bursts between creosote bushes, stopping at each in a grey-brown rock like hunch to sense: nose twitching, ears flicking, eyes wide.  Jacob thought that it was most likely out in the morning sun looking for something to eat.  Why else would a rabbit ever leave its hole and risk being food itself?

He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back in his chair.  The rabbit moved to another bush and nibbled on something.  Fear, Jacob realized, is what drove it.  Fear of starvation pushed it out of its safe hiding place.  Fear of predators kept it constantly searching with ears and nose and eyes.   Everything that drove this rabbit and its kin was fear.  Even their evolution was all derived by fear: sound catching ears, wide view eyes, ground colored fur.   It was easy for humans to personify small creatures like that rabbit.  To call them cute and curious.  But there is little of that moment-by-moment fear left in urbanized, cultured humanity.

Instead, humanity has embraced a policy of the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense, removing predators and immediate environmental dangers.  Arming themselves with weapons of such power that no other creatures, with their nature-derived claws and teeth and muscles can hope to compete.  Not on a global, species-wide scale.  What is a mouthful of teeth to a rifle?  A charging horn or antler to a bulldozer or paving machine?  A stinger to a crop-duster?

There were certainly parts of the globe where that fear still existed, even for humans.  Most of those were, however, perpetuated by humans where both prey and predator were played by the same species. Warlords preying on the local population.  Countries sending their youth to defend lines drawn on a map.  All justified through an us-or-them line of thinking.

Watching the rabbit, Jacob in his chair with his coffee outside his cinder block and stucco house, wondered what, if anything, humanity had lost by removing all of these immediate dangers.  Was there an edge to that fear that forced a different, more cautious set of actions?  Or by removing them, had they freed themselves to pursue a wider range of pursuits than mere survival?  Can art survive and evolve in a climate of constant fear?

Smiling, Jacob stood and waved at the rabbit before going inside to refill his cup.  The questions that he asked himself were soon to be something more than rhetorical.  He knew where the species-wide existential crisis would come from.  Not from talons sweeping from the sky or fangs striking in the dark.  No, it would instead come from within, something that created due to that very freedom from fear.  He had had the time to learn, to study and to create.  To build something small, but so very powerful.  More than a virus or a disease.  Nothing so mindless.  Something much more unexpected.

Failing

[Inspired by PowerBall Mania]

Abby reached over and turned off her alarm.  She rolled over, pulling her comforter to her chest, not ready to get up and face a new day.  A day of beige cubicles, meetings mired in minutiae and the endless petty slights of an overcrowded office.  A day of struggling through crowded streets both pre-dawn and post-dusk only to lock the world away for too short a time before doing it all again.

And then she remembered: the drawing had been last night.  The drawing for the record payout from the national lottery.  Abby had forgone her morning latte for a week, her one daily luxury, in order to maximize her chances, taking them from ludicrously bad to ridiculously poor.  Forty dollars had netted her twenty chances: two cheap slips of thermal paper stuffed into her purse replacing the pair of crisp twenties still warm from the ATM.  Each slip with its matrix of randomly generated numbers rank with potential, promise, possibilities.

Turning back to the nightstand, she reached for her purse, blindly fingering through the debris until she found first her phone and then the two slips.  She sat up, pushing her fingers through her hair and rubbing her eyes.  A few taps on the phone screen took her to the lottery site which had the winning numbers blazed across the page.  Abby slapped the phone face down on her lap before her eyes could register the information.  She closed her eyes.

If she looked then it would all be over.  She knew the chances.  She knew that it was as good as impossible that she would win.  Even beyond the statistics, she knew that she would not win.  Not her.  Not the girl who was always just good enough.   Whose annual review was peppered with the words "dependable" and "solid" and "on time".  Who got dates with the guys who were too insecure to go after the hot chicks.  Who had received good supporting parts in the school plays, but never the lead.  No.  Abby did not win lotteries.

What she did do was dream.  She dreamed of living somewhere with grass and sunlight.  She dreamed of travel and sandy beaches and ocean waters the color of the sky.  She dreamed of trying new things: foods, skills, adventures.  She dreamed of doing these new things and knowing that it was okay if she failed.  Okay that she could not play the guitar or write a novel or sing well.  Nothing depended on her succeeding because she would still be able to pay her bills, still be able to eat, still have someplace with a bed to sleep in.

Abby knew that when she flipped the phone over and compared the numbers on the screen with her twenty sets of chances that the grass and the light and freedom to fail would all disappear.  They only lived as long as she did not look.  It was like something out of her dimly remembered "Physics for Poets" college class, that part where the professor had tried to get them to understand the impossibility of quantum mechanics.  That thing where particles existed everywhere until they were actually observed.  She felt that way about the tickets: they could still be winning tickets until she looked.  Then it would all be over.

She looked at the clock and knew that she needed to get up, shower, eat something and get out the door or she would be late.  She could not sit here mourning her not-quite-dead dreams any longer.  Maybe that was the problem: she was not committing to winning the lottery.  That was what all of the self-help, get-ahead, win-with-confidence books said.  She needed to commit to success, to change her life as if she had already won.  Quit her job, max out all her credit and know that she was going to win.  She was going to lose because she could not commit to winning.  Abby was dubious that that level of self-assurance worked on anything and certain that it did not work on statistical probability.

Abby closed her eyes, took a deep breath and turned the phone back over.  She opened her eyes back up and scanned the numbers, comparing the six on the screen against those on the two slips.  Then she closed her eyes again and tried not to fail.  She still could not afford to.

HitRecord Weekly Writing Challenge

http://www.hitrecord.org/records/1912608

Gravity: Three Haiku

Your eyes are star filled,
Their depths pulling me towards
The promise of us.

Momentum keeps us
Spinning our lives together,
Circling our hopes.

Burning, we crash through
An atmosphere of regret.
Promise, hope in smoke.

Lisp Time

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo Leaves) left off.]

Lisp was unaware of Mo's passing, but not blissfully so.  Instead, he was unaware of it while cleaning dishes after each meal, while mucking out the sheep pen and while mopping the kitchen floor.  Mostly, he was unaware of her death while not being on line, a state that avoided most of the sensations that Lisp had learned to associate with bliss.

Growing up had not been easy for young(er) August/Lisp.  The youngest of five brothers, his parents had not had much time for him aside from the basics of food, shelter, cleanliness and off to school.  Most of what he had learned about life and dealing with the rest of humanity had come from his older brothers.  These had not been easy, let-me-share-my-wisdom-with-you style lessons.  They had been you-are-the-youngest-so-you-will-do-as-I-say kinds of lessons.  His inability to properly pronounce the ess phoneme had not helped this.

His four older siblings had fought each other more about who got to boss August around than for any other reason, at least to August's recollection.  They had finally instituted a schedule, taped to the inside of the toilet tank lid in their shared bathroom, which detailed who got priority to make August do their chores.  Their parents may or may not have been oblivious to this.  He had tried getting them to arbitrate a few times, early on, using the "it's not fair!" line of reasoning.  Of course, they had stepped in and enforced the rules as stated.  Then that night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep, August had been assaulted by the two brothers who shared a room with him.  They had been paid off by the brother whose chores Lisp had not done.  This had been August's first lesson in escalation tactics.  He had concluded that parental involvement needed to be kept as a last-resort.

Thus, he had endured.  August used his enforced, doing-all-the-chores time to retreat, not jut into his own head, but beyond it.  He had gone so far as to recognize three environments in his life: the environment in his head that encompassed his own thoughts and could not be violated by anyone else, the physical environment that needed to be endured, and the virtual environment that soared so far beyond the first two.

He would clean the two kids' bedrooms, trashed by his older brothers, while trying to understand the finer points of international diplomacy[1].  He would clean toilets to advanced number theory and mow the lawn to astrophysics.  Everything was so interesting, at least everything outside of his own narrow physical realm.

Of course, to do all of that, he needed to be connected.  Age seven was too young to get a PTN installed, but he could use the older, less robust VR glasses.  His parents even had a pair lying around that they no longer used.  As long as he was on the house Wi-Fi, he did not even need a connection subscription.  August, becoming-Lisp, was good to go.

But like many before him, August learned the trap of technology: there's always something more coming.  Something better.  Something that will increase the flood of bits into his grey matter either through increased processing or better sensory interface.  From an addiction to the data, it was a short leap for him to become addicted to the technology itself.  This had lead from the VR glasses to him forging a parental consent form for a PTN two years before he was legally allowed to get one on his own.  And then, finally, embezzling money from his bothers' various investment accounts[2] for the implants and haircut.

Which brought him to the KC2 and the slightly uneven care of Ms. Carmichael.  Lisp knew that he should not complain about his fate.  He had brought it on himself by being too impatient, but being too overt in his need for a better setup.  And Ms. Carmichael was really very nice about the whole thing.  She, having been put in this position by the powers-that-be at the KC2, could have taken out her frustrations on August.  Instead, she had done her best to help him survive in the enforced physicality of the commune world.  Lessons that he had ignored outside of the academic treatments he had learned on line.

For one, here Lisp was forced to pay attention to his body.  At home, eating and cleaning and, to a lesser degree, eliminating were all chores that got in the way of his learning.  He had reduced eating to a slurry shake drink called 'Exception: Meal,' one that was supposed to contain everything that his body needed.  Except taste.  At the KC2, he had learned that smelling, tasting and chewing traditional foodstuffs was pleasurable.  It was worth the time.  The ritualization and tribal aspects of 'meal time', on the other hand, continued annoy his sense of efficiency.

The exercise had also helped.  While doing his brothers' chores had provided Lisp with a certain amount of daily activity, working on the KC2 farm had increased this by at least one order of magnitude.  The result was that his muscles felt stronger, more capable.  His skin was less pale and flaccid.  He could breathe in deeper lung fulls of air and deal with changes in his environment more capably.  He slept better.

All of these things were nice, but they did not replace the mental exercise that he had been self-administering.  Lisp had trouble capturing the zen-like focus that all of the other commune inhabitants claimed took them over when they were doing long-term repetitive tasks.  Instead, he was bored.  Really bored.  Extremely bored.  Sooooooooo bored.

Until Mo had shown up and then Erics.  Now Lisp had someone to talk to.  Really talk to.  Not with the imperfect instrument that was his mouth, but with the full capacity of his intellect.  And at speed.  If Ms. Carmichael knew about it, she would have called it backsliding and reported it to his parents.  Instead, he was able to lean on his well-established habit of quiet observation while discussing everything with the coded AI in his head.

"Erics," he might say.  "The club house supervisor just told me to add some bleach to this ammonia based floor cleaner.  She wants to clear some of the stains out."

"I would strongly advice against doing that."

"I know: we don't want mustard gas in the dining room.  I tried to explain it to her, but I don't think she believed me."

"How will you handle it?"

"I guess I'll mop twice: once with the bleach and then again with the regular cleaner.  Which should I do first?"

"I suggest starting with the ammonia as that will pick up the grease stains better.  Then the bleach can whiten what is left."

"Thank you.  I'll do that."

Conversations like that took less than a second and happened hundreds of times a day.  The virus was not always helpful as it did not have access to its own data cloud, but it could search through Lisp's embedded memory, a store of anything that Lisp had found even remotely interesting during his carousing through all of human knowledge, and apply what it found.  Together, the two of them kept each other sane.

[1] He wandered down that path in an attempt to learn how to control his brothers.  However, his own curiosity became his worst enemy, dragging him down paths that were not relevant to the end goal: The Marshall Plan, Manifest Destiny, Mutually Assured Destruction and other things that turned out to be more history than applicable lessons.  Psychology had also led to interesting topics (nature vs nurture, personality disorders, and his favorite: perception vs reality) that ended up being more academic rather than practical.

[2] Because August/Lisp got good with numbers and was always connected, he started playing the stock market.  First with small numbers, but those grew.  He stayed on top of certain industries and companies and learned what made each of them tick.  He also learned the power of the short-term micro loan.  He would receive the pocket money for the chores that he did for his brothers, but before turning it over to them, he would deposit it for up to forty-eight hours (or until the brother in question forced it out of him).  During that time, he was able to get a few cents on each dollar in interest.  Not much, but it added up over time.  Eventually, his siblings wanted in on the magic.  He set up accounts for each and managed them, earning them small, but significant sums on the side.

Mo Leaves

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo's Back Remembers) left off.]

So it went for three days.  Three days of cutting lettuce and then other low crops.  Three days of steadily decreasing back pain.  Three days of hearty meals.  Three nights of dead-to-the-world sleep.

Mo and Lisp spent most of their physical labor time discussing the ins and outs of PTNs and the coming evolution from augmenting human sensors to replacing them.  Lisp, with his scalp implants and direct-to-brain connections, made some strong arguments for the newer tech.  He did not have to worry that he had the inductive power couplings properly aligned with his contacts: he had no contacts to power, everything went straight to his optic nerve.  In fact, he could walk and move with his eyes closed, the camera and radar located in the chips around his skull giving him an accurate three-hundred and sixty degree view of his environs.  His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes, even using it as a local sonar to help with his location information.  He did not have to worry that his sub-voc'd dialog would contain his lisp as the way that air flowed over his tongue never entered into the data stream, instead coming straight from the speech centers of his brain where muscle position did not matter.  His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes.  And all of it with a lower power requirement as there were fewer active, semi-mechanical packages (speakers to drive in hearing implants, screens to illuminate in contacts, etc.).  He mentioned that some of the people in his augmentation community had even fitted their shaved head with organic, flexible solar panels hooked to abdominally inserted battery packs.

Mo, for her part, argued that by bypassing their evolved sensor package (eyes, ears, nose, etc.), Lisp and others like him were throwing out millions of years of evolution that was designed to fit their environment.  But even as she was saying it, she knew that it was a hollow argument that she did not believe.  She had been on Lisp's side of that debate and knew the answers before he said them: how was a biological organism to adapt to an increasingly virtual world with its graphic overlays and new information streams?  What Lisp and she were doing was to force that evolution.  Speed it up.  When she tried to argue that Lisp was leaving something 'human' behind, Mo merely sounded jealous of his system[1].

Instead, she shifted tactics and asked about his upgrade path.  What would it take to change his system as technology continued its march into the future of Moore's Law?  Her system, being more external to her body, was more easily upgraded: new contacts, new throat mikes, new hearing implants were done in an hour at a provider's store.  Even her arterial stent had been day surgery.  Lisp responded that much of what he had had done was also modular: socketed chips and reburnable firmwares.  He acknowledged that, once technology moved beyond the capabilities of his sockets, he would need to have his entire scalp redone with new implants and tattoo circuits.  He estimated that this would need to be done on a three year cycle.  Three years where he would leap ahead of the tech curve and then slowly drift back behind it, only to leap forward again with the next upgrade.

Lisp also spent time interacting with Erics.  The two were fascinated with each other.  Lisp was intrigued with the concept of a biological organism that metamorphosed into a electronic one.  He wanted to know how the node was programmed into the DNA of the host bacteria.  How did the programmers account for all of the variations of PTN systems, all of the potential biologic inconsistencies?  What was the language used to make the program?  How far back did this node remember?  How far back did the Whole remember?  What information was cached where?  What system resources were used and how were they monitored?  For the most part, Erics could not answer these questions as it needed a connection to the Whole to find the answers.  Without it, it was running on a five minute buffer with a weeklong log of recognized events.

Erics wanted to know how Lisp's system integrated with his various nerve clusters.  Could the various 'centers' of the brain be bypassed and instead have the data routed directly to processing and action areas?  How was the information calibrated between different sets?  What encoding was used at the final electronic-biologic interface?  Electrical impulses?  Chemical?  What maintenance was needed?  Lisp had many more of the answers to Erics' questions than Erics had had to Lisp's because he, Lisp, was more of a stand-alone entity, though Lisp acknowledged that he kept much of the less accessed information in his personal cloud and not loaded into on-body memory.  Through out all of this, they kept the conversational speed to something Mo could hang with.  Barely.

At the end, Lisp decided that having his own node of the Whole would be 'interesting'.  At the least, it would give him someone to talk to during his time of enforced disconnection.  However, instead of going through either the biological infection or through 'Whight_Saddle.strap', he would prefer a clone of the Mo's existing Node, retaining its current buffer, cache and log scripts.  This would give him a more 'grown-up' node instead of starting from scratch.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, there were visitors.

They came in a larger American Power auto-car, one that could hold six people instead of the more standard four, and arrived just before the call for lunch.  Mo, out in the radish field (pull, knock dirt loose, toss, shuffle) did not see them, but Lisp relayed his camera view from his potato mashing station.  The feed showed five people in bulky overalls, potentially electrician uniforms (Mo was dubious), and one person in a suit.  The suited one was talking with one of the commune leaders (as such[2]) and pointing to the logo on the side of the auto-car.  Mo's own auto-car was buried in one of the barns under a pile of hay with all of the batteries disconnected and the lead wires sitting in a cookie tin at her mother's.

Lisp's feed did not provide audio as he was too far away and behind glass.  However, he had a lip reading app that did at least as good a job as the closed-captioning from Mo's earliest years.  It was transcribed across the bottom of the video.  The conversation had been going on for a minute or two before Mo got the feed.

SUIT: WE HAVE THE TRICKING FEED FROM THE CAR.  WE KNOW THAT IT WAS HEAR.

COMMUNE LEAD:  THAT'S IMPRESSIVE.  WE HAVE THIS PLACE DELIBERATELY BLACKED OUT FROM ALL SIGNALS INCLUDING GEE PEE ESS.  NOT SURE HOW YOU COULD'VE TRACED IT TO HERE.

SUIT: EXCUSE ME.  THE TRACE STOPS TWO MILES BACKED UP THE ROAD.  BUT THERE IS NOTHING ELSE UP HEAR.

CL: THAT'S AS MAY BE, BUT I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN YOUR CAR.

SUIT: WILL YOU ASK THE REST OF YOUR PEOPLE?  [PAUSE] PLEASE?

CL:  WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF HARVEST AND EVERYONE IS OUT IN THE FIELDS.  LUNCH WILL BE IN ABUT TEN MINUTES AND THEY'LL ALL BE IN THE CLUB HOSE.  CAN YOU WAIT?

SUIT: SURE.

Which meant that Mo was going to have to miss lunch.  She messaged Lisp to grab her something, then put her head down and pulled radishes towards the tree line.  Once in the trees, Mo circled around until she was behind the barn that housed the auto-car.  She did not enter, but watched to see if any of the commune residents gave her away.  Her mother had had a word with the Steering Committee and word had been spread to keep Mo's presence quiet.  Now to see if everyone was as good as their word.  Lisp continued to feed her video from inside the Club House, but aside from one of the older members standing and saying that he had seen a pack of wild dogs pestering the sheep, no one said anything about Mo or the auto-car.  Not then.

After the presumed power employees left, after the afternoon work session, after dinner, then people did say things about Mo and the auto-car.  Things like "putting us all in danger" and "why should we risk" and "not worth it".  Her mother stood up for her, which was nice.  Lisp tried to say something, but was not allowed being only a temporary, junior member.  Others noted the strange bulges that the five people in the work overalls sported under their armpits.

Mo was allowed to defend herself, to plead her case.  "You're right," she said.  "You're all right.  I am putting you at risk.  I am a stranger to most of you.  Hardly more than that even to my own mother.  You have been more than kind to me.  Let me eat and sleep with you.  Given me something to take my mind off of my troubles even if it was lettuce and radishes.  I'll leave.  Give me one more night to think on where else I can go, and I'll leave in the morning.  Will that work?"

There were grumbles of assent.  She was allowed the night.  Lisp sent over his condolences and her mother patted her on the back.  Mo nodded to them and anyone else who would meet her eye as she left the Club House.

She walked down to the barn with the car, sat in it and started playing with the maps it had cached in its memory, trying to think of where she could go.  Denver as a whole was out.  Probably Colorado.  Maybe she should head for Wyoming and get lost in one of its less popular areas[3].  Maybe head for one of the borders, Mexico or Canada.  Yeah, Canada.  Mo had heard good things about Vancouver and Toronto.  Vancouver was closer, so she opted for Toronto as a less likely destination for her to get caught.  So: out of Ken Caryl, loop south then west then north.  Ditch the car in Frisco and catch a Transport Loop out to Salt Lake before heading into Wyoming.  Spend a week or a month in Casper or someplace like that checking her trail.  Then make her way through the Dakotas and Minnesota up to Canada and Toronto.  That should take her months of temporary jobs and occasional rides[4].  As that was days and weeks away, Mo shut down the car, made sure that it was plugged in and charging, then went to sleep.

The next morning, she ate breakfast, said goodbye to Lisp and her mother, nodded at a few others and then left.  She figured that her biggest risk was getting from the commune out to the first intersection.  It was a rode that she had to take.  There was no other way out of the valley.  Once she made it to C-470, she could cut north to 285 and get lost in the hills.  But she needed to make it to the commuter loop first.

The car took her out of the Ken Caryl valley and back into coverage.  Mo set up her VPNx and TORx systems and then turned on her connection to V-EE.  A second for all of the nested protocols to negotiate their various rights and she was back on the internet.

And then, and then it happened.  Her version of the Erics virus connected back to the Whole and was immediately wiped and replaced.  The new version took less than a second to look through Mo's system before identifying her arterial stent and stopping it.  The tiny turbine seized in Mo's carotid artery stopping the blood flow to her brain.

Two minutes later, Mo died.  The auto-car had its way points wiped and a new course entered, taking her corpse back to the convention center.

[1] Which she was.

[2] Any enterprise that has goals and schedules needs leaders to decide the first and ensure that the second is on track.  The Ken Caryl Commune was no exception.  However, being a commune, the concept of leadership was counter to the 'community' nature of the place.  The compromise was to have a Steering Committee comprised of the five people, elected annually.  The members of the committee were then free to propose sub-committees and the members of those sub-committees could propose sub-sub-committees and so on.  The result was that each of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the KC2 were all on at least one committee of some sub-level and most were on two or three.  There were so many committees and so little time for them all to meet that the Steering Committee had been forced to allow most of them to meeting in the fields while they were working.  The result was that the minutes of those various meetings were often covered in dirt, water stained and fertilized.  The result was that, at the end of each year, all of the minutes that were at least a year old were added to the compost where they increased the soil yield considerably.

[3] Which, sorry to say, is eighty percent of the state.  Aside from the I-80 corridor and Jackson/Yellowstone, there isn't much that blows tourists' skirts up.  Which is fine as it gives the rest of us more space in the Wind River Range and Bighorn area.

[4] With the rise of the auto-cars and Transport Loops, interstate hitchhiking has become a thing of the past.  In its place, because people will always find a way to move freely, is an underground of firmware modified auto-cars.  A person in the know places a request in the right chat room and a space is made for him or her in one of these cars heading in their general direction.  Never on the Transport Loops, always over tarmac.  It's slow.  There often aren't available seats or cars in the smaller communities.  But if you want to get someplace without being traced, it's either that or sneakers on pavement.

Mo's Back Remembers

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo Remembers the Crash) left off.]

After explaining the crash, or most of it, to Lisp, Mo asked him for some time to just pick lettuce.  Now that she had the rhythm, Mo was finding a meditative quality to the action.  It took up just enough of her brain power to keep her occupied but not enough to keep her from letting her mind drift.  To focus on not focusing.  What is the sound of one head sliced?  If lettuce grows in a forest and there's no one to eat it, does it matter?[1]

Despite the Zen of lettuce picking, Mo was decidedly happy when the low crops supervisor called it a day.  Mo pushed both of her fists into the small of her back and stretched backward, hoping that this little bit would keep her from being a ball of pain in the morning.  It was unlikely.

She followed the rest of the crew to the hose by the Club House, soaked her head and back, washed her hands and was thankful when someone threw her a towel.  She piled into the Club House and sat, waiting for whatever came next, hopefully dinner, and was happy to simply be: be wet, be smelly, be stiff, be hungry.  Be a part.  Be a daughter.  Be (alive?).

Lisp came and sat next to her.  Using his mouth and throat and vocal cords, he said, "Thank you for sharing with me today."

"You're welcome.  It's been a while since I've thought about much of that."

"I can imagine."

"My turn," Mo said, turning to look at him.  "What's with the long, educated speech when connected and the short, choppy stuff out loud?"

"I lishp."

"I got that.  So?"

"Shpeech is shloppy for me.  Impreshishe."

"And it that the reason for 'Lisp' being your self-identity?"

"Short of.  Alsho an old programming language.  Elegant.  Flowing."

"And you're not talking to me over the connection now because?"

"Your mother is watching."  Mo looked where he pointed.  Her mother was standing with some of the older members of the commune.  However, she had positioned herself in such a way that she could see them both.  Not all of the old mother had left the new Mom.

"Ahh.  And if the two of us were sitting here not talking with our mouths, she would assume that you were connected to me and throw a fit, right?"

"Yesh."

Then there were some announcements: upcoming events, status on the crops and other projects.  New members and guests were asked to stand and introduce themselves.  Mo stood, said she was Ms. Carmichael's daughter and did not know how long she would be staying.  Then dinner (sheep stew and salad).  Then two hours of free time before lights-out.  Mo discovered that most of the members had some hobby that they did during this time, most of which were some craft that could help benefit the community.  Some knitted.  Some quilted.  Some carved wood.  A small group in the kitchen brewed a batch of beer.

Mo, at loose ends, joined her mother who was making paper.  She helped squeeze the wood pulp onto the screens and hang them to dry, then trimmed the edges of the dried pages.  It was not the pristine white of laser paper or of the default PDF settings, instead being rough, off white with occasional bits of leaf or bark.  Her mother explained that to get the pure, smooth white of commercial bond, they would need to use heavy steel rollers running on a conveyor belt and also a lot bleach.  Neither were available, easy to work with or positive for the commune.  The imperfections were seen by the members as a sign of their purity of purpose and the resulting pages were more than good enough for the internal record keeping of the place.

Then bed.  And sleep.  But not dreams.

Mo awoke at some dark hour of the night, her back and thighs a mess of pain.  She tried different positions in the bed, but nothing was comfortable.  Sitting up helped her back some, so she slowly got dressed and went back to the Club House to sit on the porch.  She knew that she would regret the sleep loss later, but there was nothing for it, not with the pain keeping her awake.  So she rested and thought.  Thought about her time at the Institute.

Now, viewed from a distance, she saw that the place had been nice.  Restful, if she had needed rest.  Peaceful, if she had needed peace.  All those things that people who are troubled are supposed to need.  But, at that time, need was not want for Mo.  What she had wanted was to be dead.  For others to acknowledge that she was dead.  Not to continue this farce that life was continuing without her father.  That she was not at fault.  That if she had done better at the competition (or worse), then they might not have been on the road at that time and then whatever had caused the crash would not have been there to kill her father.  That if she had just spoken to him more (said 'I love you' one more time), been a better daughter, been a better person, he might still be alive (to tell her than he loved her).

They had assigned her a room.  Small with a desk, a bed and a window that did not open.  It looked out on pine and mountain meadow and sometimes a deer.  She was responsible for keeping it neat and clean and there was a bed check every night to ensure that she was getting sleep (and to lock her in at first).  There was an intercom which she had never used except to go to the bathroom.  After a while, she had been allowed some decorations: cat posters, paintings that she had done.

They, Doctor Rex and the nurses, had presented her with opportunities for engagement.  Game night where everyone played team games.  Pictionairy.  Balderdash.  Mo was assigned a team, but did not help.  Not at the beginning.  There were painting and music sessions where Mo could have put her piano lessons to use.  But no.  She would listen.  She would watch.  She could not leave.  It would have been noticed.

Of course, there had been therapy sessions as well, both group and private.  She answered questions with the bare minimum.  And only because there were consequences if she did not: more questions, more sessions.  It took her a few months, but she had learned how to respond to minimize her time with others.  Not all had been avoidable.  Not the morning or afternoon group.  Not the twice a week privates.  But responding reduced it to just those.  Not additional ones because they were 'concerned.'

Again, from four years out, Mo could see that the staff, doctors and nurses, had been genuinely concerned.  It had not been an act.  Mo had been the one acting, putting a living mask on her dead face.  Pretending to live so that the living would let her be dead.  A mask that had taken her five years to perfect.  To wander the wastelands of trail and error as each aspect of the mask was reviewed by the staff.  Picked apart.  Found out.  Then she would back up to the last success and work forward again.  This smile at this time worked.  This 'emotional breakthrough' kept them all at bay for one more week.  But too many and she would get accused of not being genuine.  The worst of crimes at the Institute.

She would get suffocated by the mask.  Often, masks.  Once she had confessed in a private session that she felt that the accident had been her fault.  But that had been a breakthrough mask sitting on top of a calculating mask sitting on top of her dead mask sitting on top of her real, pained face (which happened to be the same as her breakthrough mask).  If she had listened to how Doctor Rex had dealt with her survivor guilt, instead of using his response to plot her next session-minimization move, then she might have been released sooner[2].  But getting released had not been on her end game.  That had been interaction reduction.  Short term thinking.  Dead thinking.

Mo remembers one session where Doctor Rex tried to call her out on her layers of (self) deception.  "Mo," he had said, using her real name instead of her given name in an attempt to break the doctor-patient barrier.  "Mo, why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you resisting our help?"

"Am I?  Aren't I answering your questions?  Two days ago you told me that you thought our session went well.  When I told you that I felt responsible for my Dad's death."

"Yes.  That was important, but I'm not sure that you were being completely open.  I get the feeling that you are giving us, myself and the rest of the staff here, the answers that you think we want to hear and not what's actually going on in your head."

"I'm trying," she had said.  Mo remembers bowing her head, letting her hair fall over her face, trying to look fragile and hiding at the same time.  "I'm not sure what else I can do."

"Well, answer me this," he had said.  "Do you think you're still dead?"

Mo had raised her head, looked him in the eyes. "No.  I don't think I'm still dead."

Doctor Rex had pursed his lips and held her gaze for a few seconds.  He scribbled something on his notepad.  "I know a rehearsed line when I hear one.  How often have you practiced that one?"

Mo had not said that she tried it out every night in her window's reflection, trying different expressions and stressing different words, trying to sound believable (to herself).  She had said, "Does it matter?  I really don't believe I'm dead."

"I'm afraid that I don't find you convincing.  I'm going to need something more."

Mo had signed, internally and externally.  While she did not know the specifics, she knew that what was coming next was more.  More therapy.  More sessions.  More questions.  Less being dead.  "What?" she asked.

"I want you to join the hiking sessions.  Get out of here and into the world.  See some of what these mountains have to offer.  I'll expect to talk with you about them next week."

And so Mo had gone hiking.  Sun dappled trails.  The scent of pine.  Startled wildlife.  Majestic mountain views.  It did not make her feel less dead, but that may have been her own stubbornness.  She had been too buried in masks to know.

All of that had happened in her second year.  Her masks would keep her in there until she was eighteen and legally allowed to discharge herself.  Over three years past that conversation.  Stupid masks.

It was with those thoughts that the sun found Mo, sitting on the porch of the Club House, letting her back remind her of how much exercise she was not getting.  She groaned herself upright and stumbled into the kitchen where she harassed the breakfast crew into letting her make the coffee.  Two mugs later, and she was almost ready to face the low crops again.  Almost.

[1] Only to the head of lettuce.

[2] And would have found some peace with her lot in life a bit faster, but let's not get carried away.

Mo Remembers the Crash

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo Explains Half of Everything) left off.]

Saying out loud[1] that she had died to another human being triggered memories in Mo.  The first therapist that her mother had taken her to had assigned her a mantra to repeat: "I am alive."  Just that.  She was to repeat it to herself as often as she could, out loud if she was alone or with her mother.  Supposedly, this was from the fake-it-til-you-make-it school of psychiatric treatment.  A month later, she had told the therapist that she said the words, but they were not true.  She knew that she was dead and that this was not real.  When she was asked what was not real, she had replied "Everything."

She had been referred to another therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress.  Psychic breaks.  Mental schisms.  This one, a man where the first had been a woman, had spent time in the military dealing with soldiers who had survived when others in their squads had not.  He asked the usual questions:

How are you?  Dead.
When did you die?  In the crash.
If you are dead, how are we having this conversation?  This isn't real.
So what?

That last one had momentarily pulled Mo from her patterned responses.  She had looked up at the therapists from where she was, crouched on his couch.  He had brown hair cut close in a military flat top.  He wore black rimmed glasses.  He was not smiling reassuringly at her.

"So what?" she had asked back.

"Yes.  So what if you're dead.  So what if this conversation isn't real.  It's still happening in your imagination.  Your dead imagination.  You still have to deal with it, right?"

"No," she had said.  "I don't." And she had stopped talking.  To him.  To her mother.  To everyone.  That was when her mother had committed her to the Institute.

"They call that solipsism," Lisp said after she had told him about these early sessions.  "More traditionally, it is the supposition that there is no way to prove that the reality that we perceive is not all in our head.  Our sensations are being faked."

"Yeah," Mo replied.  "Trust me, I learned about solipsism.  That second doctor, the military one, he knew it and tried to jump ahead a few dozen steps.  That's what the 'So What?' was about.  It doesn't matter whether reality is 'real' or not, we all still have to deal with it as it presented to us.  Maybe that had worked on his soldiers with their sense of duty and pride of country or whatever.  It did not work on a early-teen suburban girl.  All it did was make me see that I was dealing with it by responding and that if I did not want to deal with reality, I needed to stop responding to it on all levels.  I stopped talking.  I stopped eating.  I stopped getting up to use the bathroom, I just went where ever I was.  As I said, I didn't give Mom a choice.  She had to put me somewhere where they could at least deal with me."

"Didn't you get bored?" Lisp asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Not doing anything.  Did you think about things?"

"Sort of.  Mostly, I thought about the crash."

And Mo was back in her memories.  Sort of.  Like most trauma, much of the specifics of the crash were lost to her.  Maybe it was her brain shutting things out, maybe she had been thirteen and not paying attention to where her father was driving.   Paying attention to something on her phone, probably.  She could not remember where they were coming from, but she knew that they were going home.  Maybe from one of those robotics competitions that Dad had signed her up for and that she had enjoyed but had not admitted because he had not asked her first.

Her memories of the moments immediately leading up to the crash were impressions: night, two-lane road, trees on one side, not trees on the other.  For the crash itself, she knows what she was told happened but cannot remember it clearly.  More snapshots: her phone leaving her hand, bright lights filling the interior, her body changing direction quickly like a roller coaster but not fun.  The feeling that something is terribly wrong and that she should have been paying attention to help prevent it.  Then nothing until she woke up in the hospital.

Her first question had been to ask after Dad.  It was late at night and she had to wait for a nurse to respond to the call button.  Which she had found once she worked out where she was.  For her, it was one second panicked in the car and then next lying in a dimly lit room with beeping machines.  When the nurse came in and Mo asked, the nurse told her not to worry about her father, the important thing was that she, Maureen, was doing better.  But the nurse's face, lined and worried and smiling that everything-is-all-right smile told Mo what she needed to know.  He had no made it.  From there, it did not take much mental effort (even with the pain killers making her woozy... maybe because of the pain killers making her woozy) to wonder if, perhaps, she had not made it either.

"But what actually happened?" asked Lisp.  "Why did the car crash?"

"It is a little unclear.  We were on Route 6 above Golden.  There are tire tracks where Dad had turned sharply, then broke through the guard rail.  One theory is that someone driving up the road had their brights on, came around the corner, startled Dad and he swerved.  Another is that there was some animal in the road.  A deer or sheep or something.  All that they know is that he swerved sharply and we headed over a cliff.  Apparently, all of the safety mechanisms worked but were over matched by the impact.  I survived because I was smaller and lighter and had less momentum than Dad.  Despite that, I broke all four limbs and slipped a disk in my middle back.  I had a lot of time in the hospital to think.  Too much time as it turned out.  Hospital time is too much like Purgatory in the first place."

"Never had the pleasure."

"If you have the opportunity, don't.  I don't remember it as boring, but that may have been the pain killers.  I was immobilized, what with the casts on both legs and both arms.  And the back brace.  They fed me through an IV and removed my waste through a tube in my side.  There was a TV and they left it on.  To keep me company, they said.  But that was the era of rabid daytime talk shows[2].  Even at thirteen, I knew better.  As I said: Purgatory."

What Mo did not tell Lisp, what she had trouble admitting to herself, was that she had known that she was in Purgatory for a reason.  She had died and been put on trail for the death of her father.  Had his death been her fault? Not directly.  She knew that.  But was their an underlying cause?  Something that she had done (or not done) that angered a higher power and caused it to go all Old Testament on her?  That was a different question and its answer was what occupied her mind for the next five years of her life.

[1] Well, sub-voc'd.  Really admitting.  But then the cliche still has it as 'admitted out loud'.  Hey.  Get off my back.  I know it's not out loud.  I know it's a bit of a tired idiom.  Deal with it.

[2] The talk show as a medium for disseminating information about the latest fashions and the movies and such died with the advent of the video chat show.  Instead of a single camera on a set, these were conducted over networks like Google Hangouts or Skype.  Now everyone was in the in-studio audience, could provide feedback through votes and win prizes.  The audience was more involved, not cleaning house with this in the background.  It allowed for instant audience metrics and micro-targeted ad overlays.  The old model died to be replaced by something slightly more rabid.