Protocol

Listen to the blast.  Two, three, four, boom.  Way down the street behind a few corners, still going at a semi-steady pace.  It's like a microwave with popcorn in it, just more intense.  Honestly, it's about as everyday as a microwave.  Hard to see tech like that coming into being without being used.  Especially when the only people who can't afford a jammer are too poor to really get a voice.  Just enough time to get a scream out before they pop.  Sickening if you see it the first time.  Second time you think you've seen it, then you really watch, really take in the details of how the blood seeps out through the eyeholes.  You never get over it, just learn how to stifle the reflex once it starts, faster, earlier, more firmly.

  In some sense I'm even glad the perp is leaving a trail like this.  makes it easy to track if they leave a dotted trail right to them.  He's not even getting picked up and put down for this, it was for something trivial, poaching might be, I don't care enough to check.  All I need to know he's heading deeper in, down to the darker parts of the crater-city.  down to the parts where electricity starts becoming a commodity again.  Maybe he lives, or lived down there.  Made a break and got a little power, but still thinks of it as home.  Too bad for me I have to follow in.  Even without some of the sensors picking up the heat signatures I can see, I know there are a few watching, more coming.  Still, I've got enough stuff on me to wipe out a city block, so it's not as if it's dangerous for me.  Just painful to go in there and see it all, see the dotted line he's leaving.  A jog then, more than the stealthy stroll that I''d been making up to the edges of the place.  Catching him off guard would be fast, but if I had to spend two hours sneaking up on him before a three second kill, it would still be longer than a ten minute match-off after a thirty minute chase.

The explosions peter off.  A bit in and the house walls started loosing their siding, revealing the pipes and wires underneath.  Half of them were dry and empty, but the splatters were harder to pick up on the uneven surfaces, especially with the grime.  Then they stopped.  Maybe the guy got tipped off, maybe he got bored.  Now I had to switch to real tracking.  Flip a switch on the visor, moving it from visible light and heat to x-ray and auto-scan.  Too many and it got a bit hard to visualize what was going on unless you were really good with them.  Some people ran with all eleven filters running, but I liked to keep it simple.

Tracks led left, through a back alley and up a roof-access.  Gave me a little warning before my jammer beeped in my ear.  Rooftops, right.  He was making it easy on me then.  No cat an mouse once he realized.  When I got a fix on his skeleton up at the top, three floors up, I could see his mouth move, likely to swear by the body posture.  I grinned a bit; swearers were entertaining, especially if it were only from his stolen tech not working.  I could hear him as I hurtled upwards toward the roof, relying on the strength of the tech snuggled around my legs and arms to get me a safe landing.  I hadn't practiced anything like this much, but I'd seen some of the more veteran jump and draw taking down four or five people with a few shots in the air before landing, but I figured that would be just a bit too showy.  Plus I wasn't so great at the quick-draw that I'd risk dropping my gun three stories.

His face was crumpled into that angry expression people get when they know that somebody is about to do them a wrong turn.  Blames it on me.  He knows he's not living through this.  Tries to fire off the device at me again, hear him pull the trigger with a click at the same time my jammer beeps again.  I sigh as I draw, watching him drop the piece and rush me.  He bowls me off the rooftop, out into the open air, but I get the gun dug in where his heart is and pet out a shot, straight up.  Gonna have blood on the suit;  gonna get yelled at and have to clean it when I get back.  Hitting the ground barely registers as I go over in my head what I have to file this as.  Easy to push him up and off me as I stand.

In one of my pockets there's the standard issue marble.  Small, no external sources of propulsion, runs entirely on gravity.  It sticks when I drop it on his torso, then raises him up like some brutal marionette of a ballerina  arching her, his, back.  I took the stairs this time, letting the body float in the street until I went to get it.  It lay where he dropped it, a long sleek chrome wand.  interfaced directly with the nerves, no buttons on the surface.  It went in a pocket and I hopped down, landing on my feet this time.  Now all that was left was the slow walk back to the base.  The easy part was done, now he had to figure out how to talk his way out of being the research team on this guys motives.  Damn shame protocol demanded instant execution if possible.

Ellucid Dreaming

I slip under, feeling the hazy half-real fever dreams when your body just needs some time to protest your current activity.  It's black in here, real black, but fuzzy, kind of.

Hey.

That's new.

Hey you.

It's like a ball of bright white light streaking around inside here.  Looks like the lightning from before.

I ~am~ the lightning from before, and you will address me by my full name.

Usually my mind only summons up the occasional conscience.  I talk to myself enough, but this is different.

Stop ignoring me.  I'm not you.  Of course I'm not you.  Do I look like some lowly two-legged creature?

Well, no.  It, I mean you. . .

You may call me His great and terrible Conqueror of the western skies and all that fall below; Terror of the inland sea and. . .

Anything shorter?

. . .scourge of the great nation of Kwai; Magnificent Serpent of. . .

I'm going to call you Ning.

. . .the expansive ceiling-ocea-what no!

I'm not going to say that whole thing.  Plus, you look like lightning.

I ~am~ lightning, or lightning is a lesser form of what I am.  Don't just casually undermine my status as. . .

Come on, lighten up.  It's just a nickname.

I am not "nicknamed" by mere mortals.

What are you, then, and why are you in my head?

Weren't you listening to my titles?  I'm the great and terrible. . .

A short version oh your eminence?

Stop interrupting me mortal!  This is the short version. Now let me finish.  I have to start over now.  I am the great. . .

He's a sky dragon.

It's coming from behind me, I thought, but when I turn I don't see anything.

No, down here.

Stop.  Interrupting.  Me.

My arm is on fire again, and a form is squeezing itself out through black crevasses in the charcoaled skin.  It's orange and flame colored, flickering a little.  Not like anything I'd ever seen fire do before.

Of course not, flame spirits are quite different.  But anyway, that glowering thing is what you humans have been calling sky dragons.

Such a noble being as I could not take so small a name or so simple a title.

Like the legend of the prince and the seven seals and how he goes to restore the beauty of the land?

Hmph, I should have eaten that one when he showed up with the silly talking donkey of his.

That is one instance, yes.

Stop ignoring me, mortals!

The children's fairy tale.

I mean it!  I shall smite thee both to dust!

You are talking to a flame spirit and a prideful ball of lightning in your dreams.

Point taken.

I'm going to do it, I really am.

Oh come off it cloud-breath, you're insubstantial in here, nothing really happens.

Not until I eat him and take over his body.

Until you what?  Until he what?

Don't worry, the beast is overestimating his capabilities.  We would not make a good snack for him.

I think you will both be delicious and a good three hundred and thirty fifth paragraph for my title.

You seem to be forgetting that eating a human from the inside is not the same as eating a mage.

Mages don't exist anymore.

Just like your kind, cloud breath?

A mage?

Yes, a wielder of high sorceries.

But I'm not a. . .

Yes, well, you show some of the signs.

He most certainly isn't one.  I would have seen the aura before I jumped inside to eat him.

How do you explain me, then?

A figment, the boy has obviously imagined you in order to dissuade me from eating him.

Care to test that?

Gladly.

Ning leaps forward and the fire expands out into a huge mass of flame between me and him, perched on my arm.  Lightning meets fire and the two spark back and forth at each other.  Heat building up that I can feel, unlike the fire.  Err, flame spirit.  It takes a while, but the two eventually split apart.

Would you stop your narration, mortal, it is becoming annoying to my divine perception.

It ~is~ a bit silly.

I can't help it, this is the weirdest dream I've ever had, I have to think through it like this!

Must you though?  Can you not talk just like the rest of us?

Ning rubs his singed nose with his tail.  Ah, sorry, see?  I can't help it!

This will doubtless work much better when you are awake.

But then you two dream figments will be gone.

. . .

. . .

Right?

Things have just gotten a bit more complicated for you, I'm afraid.

No they haven't, as my divine and me-given right, I will eat him.  Not complicated at all.

Grab the Fire, Ride the Wind, Eat the Lightning, Speak the Thunder.

Grab the fire, huh?  They make it sound so easy.  They say it like the thousand year old ritual it is, like the creaking, old bones that stood here before me.  It's not a torch to be grabbed by the handle, it's not some metaphorical flame, it's a naked flame flickering in the soot-stained brazier that sits atop this high mountain.  I can see the scars on their hands, aged burns, some more so than others as they stand on the other side of the light.  Their white robes plastered against the darkness and the cloudy sky.  I step up, trying not to look at their hands, their faces.  The shivering goes away, the wind slicing through me no match for the furnace before me.  Inside it, the deep orange slithers over the blackened logs which burn into little flecks of white caught in the updraft to sail up into the night.  The fire is not special, no strange, magical wood, just some pieces brought up from the kitchens down below.  The brazier is only special in its ancient nature, just iron bent and smelted into a rough bowl on thick, tripod legs.  I'm certainly not special, not fire resistance here.  Just a cup of tea, drugged a bit to dull the pain that will come.  I've been waiting for a while, but the elders don't show impatience.  They don't turn when the thunder echos down in the valley.  I'd rather get it over with before the storm moves up this way though.  A little fire is initiation but a lightning bolt is death.  Plus, the tea is going to wear off soon.  Down into the light I plunge my hand, grabbing and finding nothing.  This is, of course, the expected result.  I have to wait for it to catch.  It's hot, but it feels like there's a layer of something in between me and the fire.  The older monks say that's what the tea does.  A little tongue flicks its way into the cylinder of my hand.  I don't think, just grip down.  It feels cold, so hot that I feel the chill move up my arm as I yank it out, falling over.  My arm aches, and I see the flicker of flame on it out of the corner of my eye.  Above is just the dark clouds, an occasional flicker of light in them arcing from one high grey blob to another.  The bucket.  If I let it burn too far my arm won't fit in the bucket.  I can't see it right away as I pull myself up, scanning the ground to my left where it should be.  A hand on my shoulder, one of the elders holding it out for me.  Thunder.  Lightning.  It comes like a snake out of the cloud, and I can see it dart out at me.  White with little hints of blue to highlight teeth and eyes as it steams forward.  Maybe the tea is still working, because I don't try to dodge, can't dodge in time.  My mouth is the only thing to move, dropping open to scream, to shout a warning, to question my teachings.  I don't know, I just faint.

Its damp, lying here on the stones.  It must be a low patch because it puddles up around me.  The rain is still falling, causing my eyelids to jump every time they get hit.  I'm still outside, still lying in the rain.  Each strand of muscle feels stretched to its limit, strained and bruised.  I can't open my eyes to see, won't, really.  I don't want to see.  I should be inside, bandaged and resting, so something is wrong.  I didn't put the arm out, I let it burn on.  The lighting stopped that somehow.  A groan.  Somebody is still here.  I have to open my eyes, have to sit up.  I'm heavy, like a drenched log, and my body protests the effort.  It doesn't get to make up my mind though.  I'm upright, and now the eyes can open, free of the downpour.  Ahead of me lays Elder Marin.  He also is struggling upright, if a bit faster than I did.  I want to say something, but I can't hear my voice or it won't come out.  I can hear the rain though.  He was always so unflappable, and now his mouth is open, starting.  Past me?  I spend the effort to turn, but just more storm clouds sit over mountaintops that way.  Then I look down.  My hand is still shut into a fist and I see a speck of orange beneath the scarred fingers.  I relax it open, or try to.  I have to bring my other arm open to pry a finger up.  A spark, and a catching one flares out, settling back on my hand despite the rain.  It's warm in the cold dampness, sputtering angrily against the rain before catching into a conflagration that envelops my arm, scars and all.  I hear Elder Marin start mumbling a mantra, but I don't look up, can't look up.  The flames entrance me.  Beneath them I see my skin blacken more, going from the reddish crispy part it was before to a dark obsidian.  The flame draws into itself, burning hotter and the black flecks off into grey, then white ash.  The flame disappears entirely, red veins of heat in the flaky white skin.  The tea must still be working, because I can't feel a thing.  Maybe they mixed in some hallucinogenic stuff with the pain dulling herbs.  Then it goes out entirely, rain washing at the ash, running it off my arm in rivulets.  My whole arm.  My unscarred arm.  Then the pain hits, aches all over again I'd forgotten I had.  When they come to drag me back down to the infirmary, drag all of us down there, I can barely register things.  I might have fainted again.  Brother Milo is a liar, this was much more nerve wracking than the spring resplendent ceremony.

Underneath

Wrecked and broken, whole and sturdy, fear and fearing all go down, down into the hole of a city.  Spiraling round like gutters on the pit walls the roads empty their people in.  None leave, not by that route.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage for them, soaked in religious fervor mixed with pragmatism.  What little shade and water that hides itself down in the depths draws them in, flowing like water down deep to soak into the tunnels, caves, and cavernous buildings that make it up.  We all abandoned the dying surface, that or died on it, parched in the sun.  What's left of us is darkened, even the hopeful casting their eyes downward, away from the light.  I blend into the crowd, blackish cloak with a thick hood, nothing showing from underneath it.  Anonymity for each man woman or child, though nobody seems to care either way.  Some people take quick glances up, burning the surface into their eyes, a moment of pain to remember humanities moment of pain.  It's a passing thing.  Most are lost in thought of what happens next.  What is life like down there, how do I survive, who can I trust, how did it all happen.  Pointless, most of it.  Life just happens, dwelling over it before you even know anything just muddles the mind.  How it happened is worth something.  It won't help now, not for a few generations.  Think on it enough and it will leave a mark, imprint something in us that might be a little respect.  Some of that down the line will help.  Might not take the ground beneath our feet if we have it, might not end a way of life same as how the sky above our head came crashing down.  Still, we exist, we trickle down into our hastily dug holes to hide.  Hundreds of thousands of them scattered all across the globe.  Plans are to connect them all, form a network between them.  Some of them might, most will have to fall down into chaos before they get up as a society again, if they get up again.  This city might make it, should make it.  I knew these people once, and they were strong, they were brave, they were honest.  Some broke under the sun, withered and shriveled into monstrous shapes, but under the black cloaks there are strong men and women.

Day doesn't fit anymore, even with the lights.  There are periods to sleep and periods to work, periods to play and to congregate, but it is not a day.  A night, perhaps, but everything is night, pillars of scattered through the city like stars, a great round chamber in the center shining like an inside-out moon.  We live in seasons now, life progressing for the person despite being crammed in with so many others once the ceiling was closed off.  We are shut in, closed to the sky, and to each other.  The moon-chamber is our openness.  Our center, our light is always alive with the singing and dancing.  It is sad, it is happy, it is brash and shy.  Ecstatic, somber, ritualistic and brave.  There we share ourselves and our emotions, the tender smiles and the flares of anger.  When we spend ourselves there, enervated with our souls bleeding out, we flow back out into the canvas of the night, to the silence.  The moon our heartbeat and the stars our work, sleep, and thoughts.  All that is left of our sky is the food and our clothes.  The sweet tastes of sun and clouds, grass and rain.  Some of that is in it, vitamins that we produce and mix in, chemicals that flavor it like what we used to eat.  Of our dress, it is of the beaches.  Little bits of color tied and draped on around us in certain key places.  The heat forced us to it, and the fashion of it charmed us.  As we work, tunneling, laboring away in it the fat melts away and the muscle stays.  We walk leaving a trail of it in our sweat.  Even the long days of working the machinery or calculating out rations is bathed in the sweat and movement of life.  We are industrious in this, working like ants in a hive.  When a lack is felt somewhere, a man might step in to fill the position; where we fall short, a woman pushes through our lack.  We live here now, these past ten years are the awakenings of a seed that was planted in the midst of hopeless winter, sprouting in the spring of our new way of life.

Where there is darkness comes tragedy.  We put up lights and it seeps in, hearts and rooms alike filled with shadows.  For twenty-five years, the earth was still.  Small shifts as we settled into her, digging our tendrils into clay-flesh and rocky-bone.  She moved this sleep-cycle, cracking apart and flattening in a swathe.  Just pockets left glimmers of light that I cling to.  I push back, forcing my way towards sounds, other shifts in the rock like my own drill.  Where we had once felt proud in our precise cuts, measured calmly and with deliberation, I stab out again and again, moving with instinct.  Loose stone grinds above, reminding me of my folly.  I must check the panic, harness the fear.  Drive and not be driven.  Breathing lets the explosion that builds within settle.  With a care, a thought to our ways before I head out for the moon-chamber.  A great crack runs through it, the center half buried in grey-brown mess.  There are dead all around, many more than passed in the whole of our time here.  We had grown, expanded, and prospered in our fall.  I see others, recognize the dread, the looks from twenty-eight years ago when the sky began to fall, from twenty-five when we assembled that first day in the moon-chamber.  We forgot that lesson, perhaps.  We feel it again, and curse ourselves for it.  

We few reach out to the rest of the city, stretch our power to regain what we had.  Enough to live.  In the tunnels we find the dead.  I know them, the blank faces.  Excavating more room in the graveyard takes as much time as finding them.  It had been left untouched somehow, the peace of the past dead at least left undisturbed.  These are still the strong men and women that walked down here, but we stand hunched and worn down.  With us all the moon-chamber is still left with room for more and more.  The great crack is still there, cracked around us, into us, and between us.  In the large emptiness we create sparks, words like rocks smashing against each other to argue our path.  Some leave, tunneling off into the darkness even beyond the flickering stars of our home.  Most of us stay to rebuild.  We have known other ways, the sun and the sky, and we could change again, but running away just reminds us of what we lost.

A monument of sorts has been erected into the moon-chamber.  The names of the lost, dead and departed, we carved them into the cracks, the opened fissures that run through the dome and the sloped floor.  It seems short of what we should do, but it gives us some peace.  In the months past the collapse, we have been quieter.  Loneliness is less present, most travelling in groups, coming together for the presence of others to lessen the emptiness of the halls.  Then and in the moon-chamber we speak less, sing less, dance less.  Noise will spring up, continue on, and then die with a glance at a remembered name or the slope of a wall that reminds us.  Sometimes it just takes the echo of space to give us pause.  I see the wound as much in the stone as in the hearts.  We heal slowly, and our scars remain.

The face is done, one of them.  They are to be sisters, both scarred and weathered.  A stone pillar I found holding up the center of an unused chamber.  It was once a church, I think.  The earth comes first, as she is the older.  Her face is soft in the hard stone, a smile for her sister wrapped within her arms.  As mankind's features emerge, cycle after cycle into the carving,  I am driven to longer hours.  Her face upturned towards earth's, a wonder in her smooth eyes.  Every so often somebody passes by, drawn by the sound of stonework.  I am not done, I have no time to see them, to look to the door.  I eat quickly, sleep what hours I can in the room, and build up a stench of sweat.  Perhaps it drives away some of the visitors, I am not sure, they never say anything.

Toes complete, and now the base, thirty feet in circumference.  I have reached the place where some inscription must go, yet nothing appears to me.  Each fold of their short dresses, each scar scattered across their bodies cried out to me its shape and form, but this blank loop whispers only of its emptiness, its unfinished blankness.  I sleep, bathe, eat, each time returning to an enigma of my own creation.  It is not done, I cannot move on.  Some days I sit and stare at it, circling it in impatience before sitting again, back against the door-frame.  Other days I wander in the tunnels, reinforced now against a quake of greater magnitude than our collapse.  I have cut myself off from the rest, and I begin to feel it.  Even when I step inside the moon-chamber I stay at the wall, staring out into the people.  I wait, for what, I don't know anymore.

Night gives way to day as day moves ever onward towards the night.  This is what it shall say.  I looked down at the white emptiness for so long I had begin to forget up existed.  Above us there is a sky, past the deep layers of stone there pounds down sun's rays, harsh and blinding.  I looked up, finally.  Water dripping on my nose did it, reminded me of the rain.  I want to see it again, long to in this long night.  So much of it all I have forgotten in the name of remembrance.  Where there are grave lessons of the past, tragedy and pain there were also happy things.  We have forgotten that, somewhat.  It seems to me that it is part of our humanity to forget.  This is why the stone, the earth, is our other half.  Carve out our memories in stone and they last where in flesh they soon disappear.  One day, when I'm old, I will go back to the surface, see the sun with my dying breath.  Now I live in the night, carving out our history for the ones who follow.  First of many, the sisters were the easiest to put into concept, far harder tasks of folly or vivacity will follow.  When I pass them, glancing in, there is often light, one or two figures staring up at the faces or down at the letters.  Perhaps they will gain something from it as I have.