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Felines (one of our own)
“There are places I’ll remember, all my life, though some have changed, some forever not for better, some have gone and some remain”- In My Life, The Beatles
Without fail, every night except for Sunday… Every cat in the neighborhood gathers in the middle of the overgrown storm ditch at 3am- when not a human soul can detect them. The cats of course see each other perfectly fine and can mingle freely.
About a dozen Tabby’s from the neighboring subdivision travel by fence post and across yards; another 30 or so cats scamper down from a system of large apartment complexes nearby, all located off of Nacogdoches road in North Central San Antonio. Their elder, a fat, orange and white cat with a scruffy beard, their loyal and valiant leader, Chester, stood before them. A crowd of yellow eyes waited eagerly for his announcement.
“My people” spoke Chester.
“I received a signal of distress from one of our own, just hours ago. It came to me in the ancient language… listen” spoke Chester and he began to purr loudly. At once the crowd before him purred together in unison, a bridge of dark hair down each of their backs bristled with fear.
“Some months ago,” Chester went on.
“The young female Jinxie was adopted to a home and taken to the inside.” The elder took a deep inhale.
“There is trouble in the home. And I believe Jinxie to be in mortal danger. We must assemble a team and go to her aid at once.”
The medium sized gray cat, Tom, stepped forward from the crowd.
“Jinxie is in trouble?” He exclaimed. “Elder, you must tell me how much you know!” The crowd of cats behind him gasped. The elder locked eyes with Tom and spoke gravely. “I know no more than I’ve just told, yet I fear for the worst. You Tom, however, must keep your head separate from your heart. As I am very aware where your heart lies with Jinxie. But if you cannot keep your head about you, you will have to stay behind.”
Tom the gray cat recoiled with shame and anguish, his tail went from standing straight up in the air to curled tightly around his hips.
With some misgiving, Tom bit his tongue and took his place at the caboose of a 15 cat team of knights led by the Elder, Chester.
The squadron would travel by what they referred to as The Grand Chariot. This of course was a 2001 Honda Accord parked by the dumpsters of the closest apartment complex, and evidently the least well off. The owner of the Honda, an old woman by the name of Dorothea, had died of a heart attack in her upstairs apartment some months ago. Her body, still yet to be discovered. Her car keys, inherited by her two tabby cats and used at the discretion of the Elder Chester. Luckily, Mrs. Dorothea died with a full tank of gas.
The back window of the Honda was left cracked open just wide enough for the two smallest knights, Peanut and Lucy to shimmy inside and work the unlock button and the door lever. The remaining cats leaped docily across the front and back seats while Tom, Bruno and the Elder Chester helped swing the door closed. Two cats would position in the driver footwell, one by the gas and one by the brakes, extending tails up to 3 more cats who used paws and shoulders to work the steering wheel. Chester laid on the dash and they all purred in unison. Chester gave the driving team commands in the ancient language.
The cats drove extremely carefully and came to a stop in front of a pretty looking two-story home across town. An expensive looking Lexus SUV stood quietly in the dark driveway.
The squadron of knights approached the front of the home single file. The front door was slightly ajar and already open. Fear panged in the Elder Chester’s heart, yet paled to the despair which bloomed inside of Tom.
Inside the home was a high entryway with Chandelier, the cats crossed this soundlessly. In the living room, was the aftermath of a grisly domestic dispute.
A wide statured man lay across the hardwood floor his face covered in blood. His chest rising and falling shallowly. A handgun lay at his side, still loosely laced in his fingers. A well dressed woman lay across from him in a bed of glass from the decorative coffee table she had collapsed into. The remains of the heavy lamp she had efficiently smashed into the man’s face was still clenched in her hands. Her chest rose and fell slowly too. She had been shot twice in the midsection. Behind her, cruelly caught in the crossfire in a black and silver heap, lay Jinxie. She clung to her final breaths.
“Jinxie!” Tom cried out and ran to her side. The Elder Chester only watched wordlessly.
“T-Tom” Jinxie whispered.
Her big green eyes dazzled. He had never seen her so beautiful. Tom began anxiously to lick her wounds and purr against her. A stray bullet had passed through her chest and back. A pool of dark blood had sprouted around her.
“T-Tom, st- stop” she said. “It’s too late”
Tom did and put his face to hers, brushing her with his tail.
“No my love, please God no.” He choked.
“Not God” Jinxie whispered. “I’m sorry Tom” she went on.
“No, no, don’t be sorry my love, the knights, the Elder, we can still save you.”
The other cats stood behind Tom and watched, they all knew it was too late.
“No Tom” said Jinxie.
“I am sorry… I’m sorry we couldn’t be together. I- I love you Tom, I’ve always loved you. It was always you, I’m sorry I wasn’t sure before.”
“My angel,” Tom began. “Please don’t be sorry, please let me help you. I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you.”
“I know Tom” replied Jinxie.
“I love you too my prince, and I always will…”
Jinxie died there on the floor and Tom sobbed uncontrollably. He kissed and caressed her face as the light faded from behind her eyes.
“Tom!” Spoke the Elder firmly.
“We must go. If the Police haven’t arrived yet, they will at any moment. We must hurry.”
The Elder Chester pawed at the scruff of his neck like a kitten and Tom knew he was right.
Chester lead Tom toward the door first before stating one final order to his Knights.
“Carry the woman onto the Chariot… and put that fucking Dog out of his misery.”
The rest of the dozen or so Knights began to drag the still breathing woman, each by a different corner of her clothing; while the two largest tabby’s approached the man’s head from either side before biting into the large chords of his neck and ripping his throat out.
Sometime before she remembered being dumped in front of an Emergency Room and waking up in a hospital bed some days later, Cassandra Hill had what she figured to be dreams of laying in the back of somebody’s old Honda. She remembered being licked and caressed by at least 15 stray cats.
Today, Cassandra Hill lives by herself in a cozy one bedroom apartment while she works full time and attends night school in the hopes of becoming a family Lawyer. And of course, she has adopted multiple stray cats and protects them dearly. One of them is a medium sized gray cat, she calls Tom.
The end
Everything except heartbreak
“Yourselves and your dependents have everything covered except heartbreak with Sun Gold Package.” The room laughed.
“With Silver Package all hospital visits are covered up to $10,000” the presenter went on. I zoned out.
“Broken bones, sexually transmitted diseases, diabetes, cancer, even Dentist appointments are covered…”
I only became more sure I didn’t want this woman taking any money out of my paycheck.
Now look at me.
Two stalky female Paramedics rolled my stretcher up to the ambulance then lifted me inside. The lights were bright. I wasn’t sure what was happening or what had happened to me. One of the nurses pulled a breathing mask over my nose and mouth while the other stuck a cold feeling IV in my arm. When she twisted the top of a long, silver tank connected to my mask, I tasted a kind of fruity air, and I stopped thinking altogether. The lights were bright… and those nurses… had fat asses…
I came too and the lights were still bright but this time I stared up at paneled LED’s as I was being rolled down a hallway. Two new nurses pushed me along but I couldn’t make out what they looked like at this point. I still had the mask on and the IV in. A set of heavy doors opened somewhere in front of me and I was rolled through it. I became aware I was completely naked and uncovered on the bed I was on. I wanted to use my hands to cover myself up but I suspected it was that fruity tasting air in my mask that prevented me from commanding any sensation into my arms. I couldn’t even lift my head. Then I realized I didn’t very much care, cool hospital air felt nice on my groin and belly.
The ceiling was different here, it was some kind of ward. LED’s were hidden behind thicker glass making the light prettier and the rest of the ceiling was painted all baby blue with puffy splotches of white like a springtime sky. While I could not lift my head, I did discover I could turn it on its side, covering my right ear in the bed.
My gaze was sent into the ward. Everybody’s room seemed to be open that day. All the rooms seemed to be lined with a layer of soft, gym mat like material. My eyes fell into a room where a young man about my age sat on the floor. I remember he looked as if he couldn’t have been more relaxed. He looked fit and confident. His dark hair even still seemed to be in a combover. His jaw chiseled upward at a coat wearing Doctor who stood in the doorway with a clipboard, he stared inquisitively at the young man who seemed to dismissively shake his head at whatever the Doctor told him. The young man had the air of a sauve criminal, of an accused man confident in his innocence.
In the next room, I had only the briefest glimpse before one of the nurses repositioned my head facing back up to the sky colored ceiling. Another Doctor in a white coat stood in a similar position towards the open doorway with a clipboard. Except this patient seemed to be an old man, bald head and haggard gray beard who clung to what looked like a stuffed animal monkey closely to his chest while he cowered at the Doctor.
I soon after heard another set of heavy doors swing open and felt the wheels of my bed go over another seal. I felt the IV plucked out of my arm and the mask was pulled from over my face. My first breath of unaltered hospital air was dry and bitter, I needed water badly. Yet; almost immediately I was able to sit up and examine my naked body. Covered in goosebumps.
I appeared uninjured, I felt fine. What had happened to me?
The ceiling in this room was still painted like the sky but darker. As the sky just before it rains. My nurses were gone. The room was small and square and heavy hospital doors were sealed shut behind me.
“Good morning, young man” spoke the Doctor.
Just ahead of me, an old woman sat on a single stool. She wore a long white coat buttoned all the way up which hung down to her feet like a dress, covering her legs completely. My throat was too dry and my head still too foggy to respond with anything more than what I said,
“Hey.”
The old woman smiled. Her long silver hair was tied tightly behind her head, her wrinkled face formed a long, thin smile.
“Would you mind trying to stand up for me?” She asked. Without replying, I did. My knees trembled a bit but I was strong. The floor was not padded. The white tile was cold under my feet. I stood there butt naked in front of this old woman, my arms slack at my sides.
“If you’ll excuse me” she began
“I’ve continued to grow old unfortunately and my back isn’t what it used to be…” she took a slow inhale. “So, I will perform the examination from this stool… would you mind stepping closer to me so we can begin? Then we can get you into some warm clothes and of course some water…”
Obligingly, I did.
My steps towards the woman were small and unsure. At the time I figured it was the immediate effect of medication fading from my mind, but anxiety began to rise in my throat. When I was about 3 feet from the woman I stopped. I looked directly into her face now, a thin smile still stretched on her leathery face, a button nose curved slightly upward and her large, drooping eyes were murky gray-green as a pond. She looked at least half blind.
“Closer” she said.
I took another two small steps forward and began to shiver. The old Doctor placed both her bony hands on my naked shoulders and gazed into my eyes. Then her stare fell over me; studying my chin and neck, my chest and belly, my penis and legs, down to my feet. When her gray eyes came back up to mine, they were distant and seemed to tremble in their sockets. She pulled me in close to her and put her nose up to my neck and took a long inhale. Now my anxiety spiked.
Her grip tightened on my shoulders and now I tried to push her off but found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t the meds anymore either, I shoved her midsection hard but her grip was clamped in place. The bags beneath her eyes sank even further down and her eyes bulged out. Her wiry smile opened up revealing two rows of huge, crooked and yellow teeth.
I swear on the Bible I made a fist and punched this old woman in the face as hard as I could and I knew it was hard because nerve pain shot through my wrist and forearm. She didn’t even flinch. I hit her again and again. That was when she took a harsh bite out of my neck and yanked her head back like a dog, taking some of my trapezius with it. I screamed like a baby, hot tears immediately bubbled in my eyes when she tossed me to the floor.
So much blood came out of me and spilled down my naked body. I could barely raise my left arm. I collapsed against the doors and pushed and pounded with all the strength I KNEW I HAD but they wouldn’t budge. When I looked back the old woman stood up high, her silver hair almost brushing the ceiling. Her legs unfolded and revealed themselves from under her coat and they were crooked and knobby like a birds legs. The white clouds painted on the ceiling became dark storm clouds that drifted through the sky. Real lightning flashed and real thunder sounded like it landed close by.
Right then my bladder completely let go and whatever water was still in my system became pervading warm fluid over my legs. The old woman bent over towards me and I saw her shoulder blades protruded like wings behind her, huge black feathers ruffled underneath her coat. She grabbed me by the ankle and bit me again, this time taking my entire leg off at the knee. I watched her begin to gnaw on the calf that had been mine forever. A downpour of rain began to fall from the sky, my leg jetted dark blood when I blacked out…
For some months I figured I had blacked out before I even made it on the ambulance, but as time passed, I remembered.
When I woke, there was the sky colored ceiling, all white and baby blue. I was in a hospital bed, perfectly covered and tucked in. A glass of water sat by my bedside which I had no problem promptly reaching for and taking a few long, savored gulps.
Simply put, I had never felt so good in my life. There was a copy of the Holy Bible by my bedside too. And at the foot of my bed where both my feet made intentions in the sheet, sat a benevolent old woman Doctor. Her hair silver and pulled back in a bun. She wore charm necklaces, some seemingly woven of colored string with symbols hanging from them I did not recognize. Her eyes were murky gray-green like a pond. Yet, they sparkled under the hospital LED’s. She smelled strongly though not unpleasantly of incense and Patchouli.
She held a clipboard in her hands and proceeded to ask me questions about my life. But she lead with,
“Do you feel better?”
I nodded my head yes.
She asked about my family, my job, my sobriety and even knew by name of a woman I loved very deeply whom I was no longer with. I continued to nod my head and as she continued I realized all of my usual thoughts and opinions, fears and insecurities had vanished.
“There is so much evil and corruption in this world” she concluded. “When it becomes a part of us, it can become very destructive to the soul. Evil can exist in all of us and can be a bit tricky to cast out.”
The end
Baby, Don’t Cry
There once was a man from Texas whom we will call Khail. Khail was thirty one years of age. He lived in a one story home in a suburban neighborhood not far from the city, with a good school nearby. Khail had a pretty, brown haired wife named Rebecca whom he lived with alongside their infant child, Cassie- a doe eyed two year old with all the makings to be a pretty, brown haired wife herself one day. Khail adored Cassie with every ounce of his soul. She resembled the love of his wife Rebecca in her purest form, as well as himself.
For the last four years, life had been bliss for the young family. Khail was a car salesman; but one of the few who strived to do good, honest business. He was a Christian after all. As a result, he had lots of repeat business and earned a fine living for his family.
One night in the summer, Khail did not return home until after 9:00 o’clock. It was dark outside but the Texan humidity still lingered. Upon pulling into the driveway in his new Lexus, he walked up the short path and noticed his key did not fit in his own front door. He quickly realized this was because the lock was upside down and the door was left uncharacteristically open. Khail pushed the door open to find the open living room undisturbed and empty, the kitchen lights on as usual. The smell of warm supper
wafted through the air. Upon entering the kitchen, he set his keys on the counter automatically as he discovered Rebecca lying in a heap on the floor. Her famous Chicken pasta still cooking on the stove. Khail saw the dark pool of blood collecting around his wife and was too stunned even to cradle her. She had been shot two times in her face, leaving her with a large crater in the front of her head. Khail knew immediately she was dead. Her blue jeans were wadded around her ankles and he knew immediately too (as confirmed later by emergency services), she had been raped.
Khail’s vision blurred and his knees weakened and he stumbled into his bedroom to get his gun. Holding the heavy nine millimeter he marched through every room in the house, on the phone with 911 in his free hand. He groaned and sobbed as he marched, waving his gun wildly through his empty home. It was in these moments when Khail realized his beloved baby Cassie had been taken. Law enforcement could only advise Khail that the attack seemed to have been random and there were at least two assailants who entered the home. Because the attack was not believed to be the work of one man, it was concluded that baby Cassie would likely become the victim of child sex trafficking.
Almost immediately Khail quit his job, his employers who thought very highly of him pitied Khail greatly. The following Sunday would be his last time in Church for many years. Over the next two years, Khail would foreclose on his home and sell his Lexus. Sleepless nights became innumerable. He began traveling by Bus in search of any possible lead on the whereabouts of his daughter. In his heart, he believed firmly that baby Cassie must still be alive. Khalil attended support groups for parents of child victims around the country. They did little to lift his spirits. He had offered a cash reward for information leading to Cassie’s safe return from the sale of his Lexus and his wedding ring. Every lead came to nothing. Soon Khail turned to drink in order to calm his nerves.
Khail became progressively more paranoid during his travels. Every young girl he passed seemed to resemble his daughter. Every pretty, brown haired woman seemed to resemble his wife. Another five years would pass and Khail became only a shadow of the man he used to be. His hair and beard had grown long, he weighed no more than one hundred twenty pounds, he became totally estranged from his remaining family, namely his own parents who wrote him letters and searched for him often. Khail lived on the city streets, drinking heavily, his eyes yellowed and he had become so lonely as he walked the earth hoping to catch a glimpse of his baby Cassie, that he resorted to dealings with prostitutes in exchange for whatever small sums of money or drugs he could afford.
One evening, on the mattress of a derelict flop house he made love to an especially pretty, brown haired twenty-two year old prostitute named Sugar. Khail was wordlessly shameful as he finished and lay beside her, when he noticed the girl began to cry. Khail watched her quietly as she tried to hold back her streaming tears while she dressed herself. As he studied her, Khail saw a striking resemblance to his wife and baby Cassie, or as much as he could now remember. An odd feeling in his belly caused Khail to tell her “baby, don’t cry.” Just as he used to tell his own daughter. The girl held no relation to Khail or his family but proceeded to sob and tell him how an abusive relationship lead her to lose everything and turn to the streets for money. She shared about the shame she felt for the means she had turned to in order to raise money for her infant daughter she was left to raise on her own. Khail began to cry with her.
The very next day, Khail would arrive on foot to a homeless shelter and would soon be admitted to an alcohol rehabilitation program. He eventually sobered up, and returned to physical health and reached out to his family for the first time in many years. Today, fifteen years have passed since his wife’s death and Cassie’s disappearance. Khail lives in a one story home in the suburbs near a good school. He is remarried to a woman who is the love of his life and together they have 4 small children. Khail is now a school teacher, and attends outreach programs for those suffering with alcoholism regularly. He is a happy man, no longer searching for his lost daughter and he no longer carries the shame of his past. He loves his family and his students deeply, with every ounce of his soul and has since become a member of a new church which he attends every Sunday.
Hypersleep (serial) #1 Prologue.
In the year 2061 human trials began for a technology previously referred to as hypersleep or cryogenic sleep. Although, the real science behind it invented by Swiss scientists in American labs was not quite so fantastic. Indeed, thanks to breakthroughs in this field, a healthy man or woman within some certain, strict parameters could sleep for up to three months at a time; or the equivalent of exactly ninety-two days.
The science relied less on particular hardware, emitting a cool spritz of gas upon the inhabitant of an enclosed, egg-shaped sleeping apparatus; and more on the careful preparation of the Circadian rhythm. While some hardware was necessary for the operation and the sleeping chambers did infact resemble porcelain colored, egg shaped pods; the real breakthrough lied in the modification, and thus the manipulation, the stretching like a piece of a chewing gum into a thin strand of the human sleep cycle.
Preparation for participation in these trials was extensive. A regimen of medications, sleep deprivation, intense physical exertion and a commitment to long periods of meditation and fasting were required for the technology to work in any form. Early renditions saw subjects sleep for no more than 10 days before waking, sometimes in varying degrees of mental and physical duress. Furthermore, to ever become a viable form of travel for a human being to sleep for months or years at a time, specifically for the purpose of interstellar travel; would require the bodily functions of the body to slow down to almost corpse-like degrees while keeping the subject alive and able bodied upon waking.
Theoretically, a body in this slowed state would also be much less susceptible to the effects of radiation on his brain and body; the often unsung yet inevitable obstacle of human space travel is the deadly radiation of outer space and Solar Winds. Foreign trials on chimpanzees as well as mice did see vast improvements in the condition of them after exposure of up to 1000 Rads (well passed the known human redline of around 400 Rads) while these early trials often reduced the animals into coma’s; mostly because they were unable to be awakened by their lack of necessary preparation and meditation as previously mentioned. The bodies themselves remained in fine form.
As the human trials progressed, there was certainly no shortage of ready and willing volunteers, and the 92 day span was determined. A group of students from the University of Texas at Austin had successfully tested in consecutive 92 day spans with twenty eight day periods of deliberate recalibration in between composed of primarily a medically advanced meditation practice. This finding, gradually proved on a repeated basis: that while the human body under the right conditions could not sleep longer than 92 days in one sitting, with a short period of recalibration in between, he/she could sleep for another 92 days and the cycle could be repeated indefinitely. The ramifications of what this could mean for the preservation of Earth’s resources had spiked the worlds interest.
However, in roughly 13% of successful subjects, man or woman and seemingly at random; was observed a new and unpredictable breed of night terrors whilst under the influence of hypersleep. One such case made famous by various Journals of medicine was the case of a New England man, whom upon waking from his very first 92 day sleep claimed he had dreamed of spending 10 years in a high security prison. What was especially striking about this case was the mechanics of the long dream, which had already been observed in less extreme cases. The logic of these dreams was still subject to the subconscious soup of a usual 6-8 hour nightsleep where there is often a certain personal essence of randomness and softness within the dream. However, even extremely lifelike dreams in the average person are usually short lived and tend to flow into other dreams. These dreams or night terrors which can occur during the hypersleep still possess these variables of personal randomness, but due to the span of the dreamer, the subjects mind is given time to essentially fill in the blanks that would not be possible in the standard 6-8 hour night. The man from New England had never been in any legal trouble of any sort in his waking life, and was entirely unable to produce a reason as to how he had landed such a lengthy sentence. He did however, and very specifically note that his estranged father who had passed in his waking life in his teenage years was in his prison unit with him and extremely violent. One particular instance claims the New England man was forced to murder his estranged father with the revolving ceramic plate from inside of the prison microwave, broken into long and deadly shards. This altercation, landed himself in the prison hospital for many weeks with dozens of stitches to his own neck and abdomen, and then subsequently forced to serve the remainder of his sentence in a single room cell. In his initial interviews too, he described many of his fellow inmates as people he had known from grade school, teachers, school children (conveniently grown enough to fit the dream) or even distant family of which he could not with sufficient force pull into his conscious the awareness that his experience was indeed a dream and not real life. His later recovered Neurological data illustrated that his brain could not tell the difference either.
Upon waking at the end of the 92nd day, researchers noted the New England man’s hair had gone completely white in his sleeping chamber and he had happened to leave a majority of it in the chamber itself. While its connection is as yet unconfirmed, the otherwise healthy, physically fit, 34 year old man with no underlying conditions was dead of heart failure within 1 year following his hypersleep.
Also unconfirmed in their connection but still relevant for the sake of our story, was the apparent spike in the rate of suicides among the subjects of hypersleep within up to 5 years following their individual participation.
The case of the New England man made International Headlines, and did help determine further pre-requisites for successful hypersleep. Researchers had determined that an unsound mind, while more than capable and perhaps even content in the physical world, was highly susceptible to subconscious complications during hypersleep. It has been theorized that deep resentments from the youth of the New England man had managed to be cleverly avoided in his meditation practice which had regardless progressed to the previously mandated level of sitting completely still with legs crossed on a foam pad from regulation dusk until regulation dawn without any breaks or adjustment.
#2. Cassie
Cassie Vasquez dreamed of riding a bicycle through every park and trail she had ever known. She could descend into the thin interior forest trails without any fear of being catapulted over her handlebars by a stray root or stone. Instead, steadily gaining speed, feeling the warm forest air across her face and neck; her father somewhere close behind enjoying the ride just as much as she was, just as they did when Cassie was a young girl and they would ride in the neighborhoods near their childhood home. Forgotten and beloved schoolmates laughed and giggled behind her too, she heard the unmistakable happy trampling of her childhood dog, Kiki somewhere over her shoulder; all gaining more speed all the while and practically flying over impossibly thin trail that was endlessly satisfying. The sun painted golden fractals in the forest all around her, Cassie was perfectly serene.
When another soft voice seemed come from in front of her on the trail, somewhere too far up ahead to see, impossible to see around so many winding curves anyways; a voice that she did not recognize. Or perhaps, did not recognize in the same golden light of those carrying on gleefully behind her. A new feeling of dread became a sudden weight in her stomach and golden light enveloped her vision completely, and the pleasant sounds of her past dwindled lightly and the soft voice from up ahead became louder and louder. Suddenly too, she was aware she had been dreaming, was still dreaming as the white-gold light faded into the flourescents above the pod chamber as she watched her fellow grad student, and bioengineering major, Tyler Krutchens leaning over her open sleeping pod kissing her feverishly on the neck and whispering to her. The words were largely indiscernable to her but the obvious lust in them was perfectly evident. She felt his weight shifting on top of her as he climbed very carefully into the pod with her, as though he was careful not to wake her. The weight in Cassie’s stomach seemed to multiply like a cast iron pot slowly filled with water at the sink to be boiled as she realized her dream was over and what she was witnessing was happening in real time. In reality, Tyler Krutchens had waited 65 days into Cassie’s sleep cycle until he was absolutely sure she would not wake up and he had spent himself a majority of that time convincing himself she would only remember it as her own dirty dream if she was aware of it at all. But Cassie was awake, as he began to nimbly unzip her white jumpsuit from the neckline; she was terrifyingly stuck in some in-between consciousness, where after 65 days in REM sleep, she could not immediately assume command of her faculties.
Tyler thought he saw her nostrils flare, but he was far too invested now, sweat began to glisten on his forehead, Cassie could smell his anxiety was rancid. He had slowly managed to unzip the front of her jumpsuit, exposing the round swell of her breasts in their nylon bra and her bare belly. Tyler could not resist and placed a trembling hand over each of her breasts. Cassie began to fight very hard to wake up. Her eyelids began to flutter, briefly showing the rolled back whites behind them, Tyler did not notice. He sat back in her pod, placing most of his weight in her lap as he began to fumble with his belt buckle.
Sensation began to trickle back into Cassie’s fingers but she found her muscles dull and unresponsive; she began to wonder if the muscle preservation techniques had worked at all, she wondered for a moment if perhaps this was simply a nightmare and she had failed at her emotional conditioning too. But her wisdom told her otherwise, and that she must wake up. She began to fight very hard now.
Cassie gained a vague conception of Tyler’s flacid penis against her stomach as he began to fumble her jumpsuit down and off her shoulders so that he could get to her underwear. She felt her body exposed to cold air. And somewhere in the panic, Cassie found solitude in her foolishness of trying to wake up to full consciousness all at once; all she needed was one single, focused movement from her prison of half-dream state to her physical body. One single, focused movement, she felt a small breath draw into her lungs, one single focused movement. Tyler’s fingers began to tug down her panties when one of Cassie’s knees shot up with the mindless rigidity of rigormortis directly up into his exposed groin.
He screamed out in a rictus of pain, so startled his knees weakened and he fell over Cassie, clamoring his way out of her pod gasping, “Cassie, oh my god can you hear me?” “Cassie?!”
She could not respond, her knee was still frozen in air where it had struck him, she still lay flat on her back. Her eyes fluttered and her jugular bulged from her neck.
Up until this interval, Tyler Krutchens would sustain a plausible deniability via his attorney in the later recounting of the courtroom at trial. What he would brazenly attempt next is what was most concretely considered by the Jury to solidify his guilty verdict though he would ultimately serve no jailtime.
His mind reeling, sharing subconciosuly with Cassie the mutual certainness of his actions; he felt in these moments reality had become papery and he held the cruel potential to crumple and manipulate it without the guise of his own self-deception- but pure animal force. Surely, Tyler thought although without the tact of conscious language, he had come too far now and with discovery of his actions imminent he felt any apprehension towards his target give way. He was like a frenzied dog with the hair along its spine darkly peaked for battle. He climbed back into the pod with Cassie, pushing away her rigormortis-like postured knee, pulled down her uniform and underwear fully now and promptly began trying desperately to achieve an erection; the nausea still radiating immediately above his groin slowly subsiding, he felt achieving it easier this time as he ran his hands harshly up and down Cassie’s body. Her mind, fluttering in her prison of sleep paralysis, again drawing breath into her lungs the adrenaline in her body nearly batting it away. Her senses had become utterly magnified. One single, focused movement she began to pray someone would barge in and rescue her before he could rape her. She felt his furious rubbing against her, making slow progress towards a usable erection. One single, focused movement. Cassie knew she must swat away her prayers for rescue if she was to stay present, placing the intention instead on the burning of blood in her muscles. One single, focused movement. Tyer grabbed behind her neck now, bracing against her body as he prepared to enter her when with the same unconscious force of her knee in his groin, it was as if she shot all of her strength from her core, both legs and arms into one flat driving palm into Tyler Krutchens’ nose, flattening it to his cheek and in the way of his left eye, two ropes of pearly red blood shot out onto Cassie’s face. And her whole body heaved forward into an upright position, writhing with adrenaline fully awake now, her stiff knee loosened with life, reeling it back one more time and kicking Tyler, stupidly drugged in pain and surprise, in the chest catapulting him to his back on the floor outside of the pod. Cassie, hurriedly dressed herself as Tyler haphazardly gathered himself too and ran for the exit letting the heavy steel door slam behind him. Cassie climbed to her feet, still leaning her weight against the white egg shaped pod with blood on her face and neck, her chest rising and falling like a gladiator. Her very next thought was her gratitude and the very one following was the realization that her tireless preparation for the hypersleep, body preservation and her previous hypotheses, were flawless. She was in this moment like Edison seeing the bulb flicker.
Tyler Krutchens, would soon after be stripped of his academic accolades as a part of his association with the University and kicked from his enrollment with the school altogether. He would however, narrowly avoid jail time in a plea deal which granted him 96 Months of probation as opposed to an equal sentence incarcerated. His role in the early days of hypersleep research would also go down in infamy, himself fading into obscurity.
Cassie on the other hand, would go on to become one of the worlds’ foremost authorities on Hypersleep preparation and her findings would prove invaluable to the medical and scientific communities alike; touring recruit training facilities and universities world wide with her course and steps to a successful sleep. For five years following the incident with Tyler Krutchen in the pod chambers at the University of Texas at Austin, Cassie would also become an advocate for the safety of young people, particularly women during clinical trials and the role of safety in cutting edge research. And after those five years, at the age of 29, in July of 2066, Cassie would be selected as a crew member of the manned mission known colloquially in the canon for the years following along with 4 other highly qualified crewmembers as The Deep Space Disaster of 2066.
3. Phillip
Sitting towards the rear in the upper rows of the packed lecture hall, Phillip Nguyen sat near a handful of other adjuct faculty members with his elbows on the folding desk in front of him and his chin cupped in his hands. The presentation was the Massachusetts chapter for the nationwide tour of Cassie Vasquez and her lecture regarding the vegetation discovered on the moon SK47219 and how Hypersleep would prove to be an integral part of researching it. But of course, Phillip had heard the speech already in D.C. and once more in Pittsburgh and as the rest of the audience leaned in eagerly to listen with baited breath, Phillip began to doze off.
He did not dream, but he did remember…
Walking with his mother being led by the hand and only coming up to her pencil skirted hip. He remembered how her perfume captured so much of the sophistication and bitterness of the rose and so little of the sweetness he would learn to love about ladies’ perfume as he aged. He remembered how it mixed with the smell of the city on Thursday afternoons when she would lead him to his daycare center in downtown Dallas, walking through the ghettos that had become inescapable. His tiny strap on shoes following clunkily next to his mothers’ stockinged flats which she always managed to make sound like heels. Very few cars passed by but for small electric wagons and even those were barred from traveling down some roads in areas where the living quarters had poured into the street. “The city within the city” his mother had warily called it, referring to the homeless ghettos where men slept flat on the concrete at all times of the day, and harsh looking children played makeshift, harsh looking games and the old simply stood hunched over in rags and wavered. The walk from his mothers office to the daycare was a brief one and one only made on certain Thursday afternoons when his father was unable to fetch him due to his own professional obligations. His mother afterall was an attorney, his father an Orthopedic Surgeon. He understood it was quite a commodity that his family should have a hybrid electric vehicle that also took gasoline, as by this time the price per gallon was roughly $57. But his mother was afraid to drive it such a short distance, and by herself at that, so on those Thursdays when they did come, she elected to walk.
Phillip and his mother observed many great absurdities together, she would tell him to divert his eyes so as not to stare but to a young boy this task was virtually impossible. He remembered looking up to see stone faced beings dangling their feet from the open windows of once vacant skyscrapers, themselves now occupied to the very top with Ghetto’s. Trash burning in bins from the upper floors too and mothers hanging laundry. He remembered being afraid of one old man in particular who was missing both legs and an arm, the nubs of skin at their ends twisted and sealed crudely and grotesquely. The man sat in what looked to be a rolling desk chair now stationary on the asphalt balanced upright by the counterweight of his bloated belly, his expression one of absolute disgust and his eyes unabashedly meeting young Phillip in his helpless stare. His mother had barred him from taking out any water or snacks from his backpack until he was safely behind locked doors of the daycare and warned him almost everytime they took the walk of pickpockets and snatchings, things Phillip never was able to witness firsthand. As he would learn later, many of the men sleeping flat on the concrete at all times of day had in fact been dead of hunger, dehyrdration or exposure. Stalls without any goods to sell, canopies of wood, nails and tarp lined up and down the block, empty storefronts had people laying shoulder to shoulder on their floors. Every different posture and every different figure in every different skin tone and the many colors and contortions of all their garments existed on top of eachother and together, as much a part of the city as the concrete itself. Like Coral Reefs growing over the city in huge swathes down entire city blocks and composed of living, breathing people. And through it all, as a boy Phillip remembered his mind was often elsewhere.
Her name was Sophia. A beautiful young girl with long brown and very curly hair, and huge mahogony brown eyes to match, exactly Phillip’s age. He only knew her from daycare, and had only spoken to her in the infinitesimal articulation of young children, in which journeying across the room to ask permission to borrow her scissors in particular was akin to a most grandiose profession of love. His boyish heart pounding in his chest. She smiled and offered them to him, at which point young Phillip snatched them up and hurried back across the classroom. Images of a twinkling Sophia haunted him through the day and in his dreams with the strength enough to till the hard soil where the sprouts of adolescence had not yet bloomed. He never mentioned her to his mother, or his father for that matter, and with his child’s attention span he would forget about Sophia soon after his departure from daycare until he was once again left only to his own devices.
Phillip remembered his anticipation swelling inside of him as he walked with his mother, her own eyes often darting back and forth in her characteristic paranoia which followed her regardless of her surroundings. And most of all, Phillip remembered the soul crushing weight of Sophia’s absence when she was not at daycare at all. Sophia, the young daughter of some other affluent family was placed in the daycare at their discretion and in fact had only landed in the classroom at the same time with Phillip only twice. Thursdays came and went, each time Phillip prayed to see her so they could finally share their love. He fantasized running away with her or resucing her from some dream-like scenario, and he would be haunted by the images of her mahogany eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Phillip could not remember exactly when he had let go of her memory but it was somewhere after the time of his daycare tenure and once he was old enough to attend primary school.
From his earliest days of Primary school, Phillip was expected to perform well and for all intents and purposes he did. He was a very bright young boy with a talent for arithmetic and a special hidden love of the stories and poetry from English class. His mother and father taught him to work hard and persevere through the mental obstacles all young students face. And at least partly stemmed from this, Phillip kept a side of himself under lock and key within him, the part of him that fell in love with countless girls over the years often with nothing to spark it but seeing her smile from across the cafeteria. He understood too, it was quite a commodity to attend a private school. His bus ride with the other school children was a much longer journey than the short walk through downtown he would make with his mother, and Phillip remembered the ghettos and shacks, stacked upon eachother like favelas that stretched even far outside of the city and in fact seemed the wide majority. He remembered the wrap around lines and resulting bedlam of days when rations were airdropped from the massive skyships, watching all through his bus window. It was these images which further fueled the competitive nature of private school. The students often felt, as pervaded by their teachers, that success in life was like a podium and upon it were more limited spots than ever before.
Therefore a love of beauty and poetry and love itself was like a sanctuary for Phillip which he protected as he got older, and watered in the form of the occasional dates and extracurricular interests he once more never mentioned to his mother and father. He remembered the academic downfall for many of his fellow students, so steadfastly committed to hiding their emotional and sexual natures that they outright refused their existence. A young woman he had dated once, a beautiful emerald eyed, almond skinned Minerva Twain had been the defining scandal of his sophomore year in University-prep highschool when it was discovered the final essay she had turned in had in fact been her suicide note, citing how the shadow of her parents and the pressure of a strained world was simply too much for her to bare. She had been found dead of an overdose in the small wooded area behind the school. Phillip remembered drugs and scandal had run rampant in private school among the academic elite, and he also remembered how through it all he had managed. He would go on to graduate near the top of his class, and his commitment to balance in life, allowed him to hide what interests he needed to from his own overbearing family without shame. This soundness of mind would help Phillip in his successful hypersleep conditioning as well, being one of the first of his immediate peers to achieve the full 92 day sleep span and awake in full bodily condition just as the stories now made famous of Cassie Vasquez waking up to defend herself from immeninent assault at the University of Texas at Austin. By this time Phillip was a P.H.D. physicist, he also had an extensive bookshelf at home comprised of almost exclusively fiction and poetry. He would also be the only crew member of the Deep Space Mission 2066 to leave behind a wife and children, both of which would already be of college age.
4. Douglas
Douglas Michael Katz attended public school. Which by this time had largely consolidated onto single mega-campuses rather than the traditional Western systems of multiple schools within a district. He stayed his first year in the dorm at age ten after commuting with the younger children at George S. Patton Technical School with an estimated 8500 other students up to eighteen years old. Douglas did of course come home each summer to his father, Hector Katz and his older sister, Angela. Stepping through the door of his childhood home after the long school year in his school uniform and fraternized independence felt very foreign to Douglas. His father was in his recliner where he had left him after visiting over the Christmas break and his sister was in the kitchen alone with her own fussy newborn, frustratedly reasoning with her to eat now or cry later. Douglas would hug his sister and wave hello to baby Isabel as he poured himself a glass of water at the sink, quickly realizing this was not the same clear stuff running through the pipes at school and was instead an immediately rust colored liquid swirling with tiny brown flakes.
“Dougie, Get a bottle of water from the pantry” said Angela over Douglas’s shoulder as he was already three quarters of the way there. His father entered the doorway soon after, giving his own wave to baby Isabel as if he too was only visiting and leaned against the counter, eagerly crossing one ankle over the other.
In all of his years, there never seemed too much to say. The face of baby Isabel served as the most accurate meter; a look of consternation painted across her soft, unmolded brow. It was a face that characterized the feeling in that kitchen better than any words or singular adjective could. Before long, that look of consternation continued only in the direction of Angela; and Hector, the old man would return to his chair and continue collecting cobwebs to his physical form and to his psyche. By the time summer vacation rolled over to its finish, Douglas was struck with the realization that he too collected cobwebs of his own sort in the droll of his home, enough to feel the swell in the bottom of his throat of anxiety a feeling as opaque yet constant as a cedar fever upon returning to school for the semester.
The smell of unsunned mold over dusty carpet, urine and excrement sat unstirred but for the trampling of mostly bare feet through it, red haze settled near the ceiling even out in the hallway from the synthetic leafy stuff they called Yage. Doors that had been slammed so many times most of them hung open. Boys could be seen masturbating naked in their beds, some of them passed out from the Yage, some still naked, a few of them in pairs and small groups. The hallways stretched forever and behind every door lay some new horror, putrid sight or smell. Douglas’s dorm was a standard enough room with proprietary bunkbeds, two of them sleeping a total of 4 boys in the small cell. The bathroom however had been destroyed in years passed and never fixed. The toilet had been dragged as far into the corner as it could go and the sink still sat coated in a hard orange rust somewhere out in the hallway. Younger boys smashed the porcelain to make small, un-reliable knives and shrapnel. All four of the boys made their business directly into exposed pipes and drank and showered from another, unable to do so without dousing the floor and walls of the bathroom and leaking onto the dorm carpet. While the water admittedly ran perfectly clear by the school’s infrastructure, hands were seldom washed and bacteria ran rampant, sickness seemed to ravage everybody on the floor periodically.
Douglas had taken a strong liking to the Yage, as did most of the others on his floor which consisted of a looping hallway over a quarter mile long. It seemed entirely necessary to smoke it in order to survive the dormitories, as if one could not exist without the other. There were pills around, sure, but Yage was the most prevalent and the cheapest. A synthetic potpourri to be smoked and left its signature red haze in the air following exhalation. Douglas began using it daily almost as soon as he became acclimated to the dorms. It had made him seize only once, and luckily he carried no recollection of it. Yet every time he inhaled the red smoke, his vision would twist in front of him and he commonly emptied the contents of his stomach as the world began to turn more and more violently until the vision was blotted out completely and he was faced only with the solid blackness that composed the door to his soul, sealed as shut as a steel prison door. He had been molested once by a couple of tenth graders in one of his Yage induced blackouts, and he had returned the favor to one of his roommates some time later. The boys exhaled the red smoke and experimented on eachother with wild abandon, fighting and fucking like sick dogs…
Classes did carry on, three days a week from 9am-9pm. Most of the teachers were either fiends or perverts too. And most of the classes involved some form of physical labor. In English class, when Douglas was 14 in what would be his fourth and final year in the dorms, they spent 8 weeks on a project for the 120 year old novel Animal Farm by George Orwell consisting entirely of constructing a massive Windmill for the school’s power supply… His young body racked with torn and strained muscles, with nothing to fuel them but filtered water and cheese crackers, he remembered hyperventilating at the feet of his professor who wore bloody purple and black tracks up and down his arms.
There was one redeeming factor to school time, which seemed to form the straining twine which bore the weight of society from entire collapse; was that classes were coed. The girls and those whose identified as such laid the caulk on the foundation while the boys and those who Identified as such, poured the cement. This was when Douglas met Brianna, a pale skinned girl with a demure, bony face and long dark hair and dark eyes. Brianna took an immediate liking to Douglas for reasons he did not quite understand, but it was this fact alone which made him love her. They met along the grand electric fence outside of the Mega dorm and sat in the grass venting about their families and their peers. The girls floor was inaccessible from Douglas’s floor when the staircase doors were sealed, an architectural design only mandated after the invention of what was considered entirely fire retardant insulation. However, like everything in the public school system the lock was bound to break and never be fixed. When it did, girls began to appear with increasing regular on the floor. When Brianna finally visited, Douglas insisted on turning off the lights and waiting for the roommates to disappear or pass out. Brianna did not understand why this was important. The couple smoked yage and made love, they both were blinded by a kaleidoscope of color as they orgasmed, Douglas came inside of her and laid with her afterward breathing in the dark amongst a cloud of stale red smoke, burning ashes landed on the mattress with its single sheet, their bodies snuffed them out. They made love a few more times following, eventually both of them complained of sores on the genitals, sores Douglas had recognized for the penis’s of some older boys he had seen in the dormitories. And the couple was divorced because of it, he soon saw Brianna entering and exiting the rooms of other boys on his floor. The couple would never speak again, and soon Douglas would do the same as he increased his forays with other girls.
To make some extra cash, Douglas began selling yage, and cutting it with regular spice and rose petals to stretch it farther. He had been beaten badly as a result of it more than once, one time even being stomped into a coma by an especially large and strung out eighth grader called Logan. When he returned from the mega dorm infirmary, Douglas resolved to kill Logan with a crude blunderbuss he had acquired in his trade. He did so, shooting the boy then 13 in the chest with a mixture of porcelain shards and nails propelled by gunpowder. There were witnesses, as it occurred in the doorway to Logan’s dorm and the young boy spent several minutes bleeding out from his neck and chest but nobody came investigating. The body was simply removed within the week. After this Douglas got especially high on yage and heroin as he lay against the smutty carpet and this time when faced with the black door of his soul, it’s hinges seemed to swing open. After this experience his addiction would spiral for many more years but once he returned home for the summer of his 15th year, he would never return to the dorms. He would join the military when he was 18 and would largely credit his tenure in the Marines to cleaning him up off the drugs and beginning his fitness and spiritual journey to rehabilitation which would ultimately earn him the respect of his peers as a champion of reform and his own spot on Deep Space Mission 2066.
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