Crystal Glimpses

Somewhere:

"Don't gawk. Move along," the cop commanded through his armor's speaker box. The static robbed the words of any understandable sound, but he was already swinging his billy-stun in a wide arc into a growing crowd. A few people already lay unconscious on the sidewalk near the cop, their pockets being rifled by hobos and businessmen.

"This'll make a good paperweight with an edge sanded into it," one man in a suit said to a crony while trying to pop the glass eye from the socket of one of the cop's knockouts.

"Try to get the real one out, too," the crony suggested and offered the suit an unfolded paperclip.

"Are you kidding me?" the suit said, standing up and brushing his knees, spherical trophy in hand. "Blood's impossible to get out of a suit like this. Trust me, I know."
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Somehow:

Man sitting lazily at his desk. Thirty-something. Fleshtech cosmetic job for sure with transparent strips running up either side of his neck, the pumping of his jugulars visible along with the constant tug-of-war of his neck muscles as he talks. "So, do you think you can handle the job?" he asks.

"What? I'm sorry," says the man sitting across from him. "I was preoccupied by your tie."

"Oh, this?" Thirty-something says looking down at it. It was transparent, like most of his throat, and filled with sand. Also inside, a small colony of ants was building a tunnel system. "My daughter got it for me. You feed them through this little zipper up here."

"First time I've seen one of those. Must be new," the other man said. "But, about that job, the answer is yes. I think I can kill as long as I don't see their faces."
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Somewhen:

A club kid coated her body in silver grease paint before going to the downtown hotspot. She put it on thick, at least a quarter of an inch on most parts of her body and on the bikini she had donned before this grand adventure. She ran it through her hair. She used it as eyeshadow, foundation, and lipstick. Then the girl left her apartment for the evening, departing for her late-night haunt, Tech Noir. Her car's upholstery and steering wheel were smeared silver along the way.

Once there, she was greeted by the other regulars, though they were anything but regular. In pink feather boas, Bruce Lee sunglasses, Mohawks high, and dripping with the latest Nanowear, they greeted her. Hugging, every one of them took some of her silver costume with them. In the gyrating, finely-intoxicated crowd, those who had touched the silver angel brushed against other partygoers, passing her essence further yet.

And she danced with them, bass thick in the air urging young muscles to twitch, thrashing about passionately, the club kid, hot beneath her dazzling coating, let sweat run down her body in shiny rivulets. Some of the sweat flew off of her undulating body in starbursts, showering those around her, speckling their hair and clothes. The rest landed on the cement floor at her bare feet to be tracked across the dance floor by the crowd's hearty celebration of the moment.

Some time later, she held her arms up above her head to spin in circles under flashing screens of binary code. It was then she noticed her normal flesh tone showing through her bodypaint. Then, as she looked closer at her fellow merrymakers, she saw the silver everywhere, something that had been on her body, now on someone else and dancing in the club's colored lasers.

For a second, she imagined it as love.

Then she imagined it as an idea.

Then she thought of it as a virus.

Then she realized that was how everything spread outward from an origin, how everything overlapped and was connected in the act of becoming one.

Crazytalk

Mister Higgins seemed like a pretty normal guy until he waved me across the street one day as I was getting The Paper. We had never really talked much and he looked very eager to speak with me. When I get over there, he leans in real close and says, "Try not to think about it but they're listening to our thoughts."

Now is a pretty good time to mention that I take medication. This medication helps to alleviate any distress I might experience as paranoia. Oh, the intricate, paranoid episodes where every random occurrence is the next logical step in a plan to kill me. Or drive me crazy. Or fill-in-the-blank. So why Mister Higgins lays a head trip like this on me is beyond my understanding. I suppose that he doesn't know about me. Maybe he had been on vacation on New Year's Eve at the turn of the century. That was when I tore down my house with my bare hands because I thought we were going to lose control of the robots.

And that's just crazytalk.

So, I try to make the smart move and respond, "Okay, I won't think about it." And I walk away. As I'm picking up The Paper, Mister Higgins shouts, "Ever been told to not do something that you'd only thought of doing?" I ignore him and go back into my house. I needed some coffee in a bad way at this point.

An hour later, it's still eating at me. Why does this guy, a guy that I don't know from Adam really, say such a thing to me? To me?!? Someone whose already proven susceptible to madness in the past! Then, following its natural tendency, my mind turns upon itself. I begin to question my reality. Had I hallucinated my exchange with Mister Higgins? After going off the deep end, one begins to lose faith in one's senses.

I ask my wife if I've been taking my meds. Puzzled, she checks the records and tells me that I have. Then, of course, she asks if something is wrong. I tell her what had been said. Then I tell her that I might have imagined it, but she shushes me. "Once you start down that path," she says, "nothing can be real anymore." Next thing I know, she is marching me across the street and rapping on Mister Higgins' door.

My poor wife. I'm sure you could hear her screams a mile away when that door opened.

Mister Higgins is a sight, some ghoul belched up by satanic ritual. A scarlet streak oozes down the right side of his neck and into his white t-shirt. The left side of his body is slack, the arm there dangles like an unmanned puppet. His right arm is bloody from the hand to beyond his elbow. There's a chunk of flesh missing from his right hand which continues to bleed freely, pooling on his welcome mat. "Hello," he croaks. But there's nothing to say, no need to ask him any questions, not as his one functioning eye jumps back and forth between me and my wife, not as the right part of his mouth twists up into a knowing smile and the left part remains beyond control. He is for sure the mental one and not me.

As if to reinforce this fact, Mister Higgins shuffles to turn around, exposing a meaty crater the size of a softball behind his right ear. Then he shuffles back around to face us and says in his half-dead voice, "I have a secret now."

My wife was still screaming hysterically when I tapped my relay and pinged Emergency to scramble. I told them that Mister Higgins had dug out both his cred chip and his Brain. They informed me that a mobile medteam had already been dispatched a few minutes ago.

I couldn't believe he had done it. Those were the two devices that made life so hassle-free these days. How do you buy anything without a chip? How do you call an ambulance without a Brain?!? Still, my fingers lingered behind my right ear on my Brain, same spot as Mister Higgins', as I wondered if my wife's screams had caused someone else to notify Emergency before I could or if someone somewhere had read my thoughts and taken the necessary actions.

But that's just crazytalk.

What I'm really trying to say is that you just never can tell about somebody. Mister Higgins seemed like a fellow on the straight and narrow. Two kids. Pleasant wife. Government job. I suppose that doesn't mean a thing these days. Times are changing and you have to be ready for anything in the 22nd century.

Trying Viral

NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION:

Hello there. Odds are you are a complete stranger whose come to snoop through my thoughts. That's because I've begun to drop this URL in every forum I venture into on the Internet. I'm curious as to what kind of traffic and responses I might get when I cast the net that far and wide. Also, it might motivate me to do something more with this blog if I get some unbiased feedback. Basically, we'll see if anarchy can be productive.

Props to Noodleguy for popping my cherry. I'll be perusing his new blog "thang" after this and maybe you should judge it for yourself. What else do you have to do if you're here?

All reactions are appreciated. All suggestions welcome. As you can tell from what follows, I haven't really decided on the true direction I'd like to take this. A news blog seems redundant at this point. I like watching movies but a movie review blog faces the same pitfall. Initially, I wanted this to be a creative venue, specifically in the form of stream-of-consciousness. But this venture has grown lonely, my words have been ghost towns.

But the breadcrumbs I've been dropping have led you here to change that.

I invite you to stay a while and snoop around, sniff at my guts, but let me know what you think of the smell. I'd like to have some fun.