Today I worked from 1:00 to 9:30. I hate long days like that. Even with a half-hour lunch break in the middle, it really just gets me down having to work that long in a row.
The deposit machine deep in the bowels of the mall, where we usually put the day's cash and check takings, has been broken for about a week now. So we must manually take the deposits over to the Bank of America also in the mall complex. It was just me and Kiel (pronounced "Kyle") on-shift for a bit today, and he was very busy, so he told me to go and do it.
"Here," he said, thrusting a plastic envelope into my hands. "Drop this off at the bank, and get a receipt."
"Yesterday's receipts?" I asked. He nodded. "How much?" I asked.
"Not much. Around two thousand," he said.
Two thousand dollars. Cash.
In my pocket.
After getting directions to the bank, I left to go get to my car, every step of the way through the mall thinking "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, I have $2,100 in cash in my pocket." I'm pretty sure I was emitting visible "Rob me!" rays, because I noticed more than my share of menacing-looking people closing in on me. I fled to the car and promptly got lost.
I was actually afraid that, in my jumbled thoughts, I would get stuck in auto-pilot and start driving home. This sounds like a comedic exaggeration, but if I start driving and I lose a clear focus of where I'm going, I go to the mall. Or from the mall to home, if I'm already at the mall.
It's...become instinct. Many's the time that I've snapped out of a light trance, found myself circling the mall parking lot, and thinking "Dammit, I wanted to go to the movie theater," or something. So I was afraid that I would mechanically proceed home, arrive with the cash still in my pocket, cause Kiel to think I was taking too long and assume I'd stolen the money, and all sorts of troubles would ensue.
I finally found the bank and made the deposit without incident. So it worked out okay.
Later that day, I was standing in line at Taco Bell to refill Kiel's Diet Pepsi (he sends me on little errands like this a lot, I don't mind, because I enjoy getting out of the store for a minute or two) and these three girls were having a conversation in front of me which I was sort of tuning out, until I heard this snippet:
"You're not only a lesbian, you're a rambunctious lesbian. You need to chill out sometimes."
I leaned in and said "Mind if I suddenly take an interest in this conversation?" This earned a round of hearty laughs, so I started talking to them and got one of their phone numbers. (A nice girl named Haley, turned out to be the only straight one in the group. lolz.)
That evening, a boy and his mother came into the store. He traded in several games and selected a game to purchase - Grand Theft Auto IV. He was twelve years old. The game is rated M for Mature for, mainly, being a GTA title. So, being the responsible person I am compelled by store policy to be, I said:
"Ma'am, are you aware this game is rated M for...Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Strong Sexual Themes, Nudity, Drug and Alcohol Use, and Strong Language?"
Her reaction: "...Really?"
His reaction: "Gngh! Shhh!"
Unfortunately, Amaury (my coworker) and I were forced to tell the whole truth. It played out something like this:
Mom: "Is there swearing?"
Amaury: "The whole nine yards."
Me: "Yeah. Scarface-level swearing."
Mom: "Oh, dear."
Kid: "Mooom, you already agreed."
Mom: "Well, I didn't know. Now, what's this about Strong Sexual Themes?"
Amaury: *shrugs* "There's a strip club."
Mom: "Does it have topless women?"
Me: "You ever see a strip club that didn't?"
(Amaury thought this was such a good line, he high-fived me right on the spot. The kid found it less amusing, but even the mom chuckled briefly before realizing just what she was laughing at.)
And so on. The kid ended up not getting the game and swearing revenge on me. Hey, better for his mom to find out now, as opposed to hearing some of the salty language or seeing some of the really bad stuff you can do in the game (I dare not even speak of the way to regenerate your health). She would have yelled at him, then taken the game back and yelled at me for not telling her, and I didn't feel like the headache.
That was more or less everything interesting that happened today.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Five Minutes
Before you read this, wait five minutes. Set a timer, check your watch, whatever. Just let five minutes pass before you read any more into this post.
I'll wait.
Did you wait?
I hope so. It'll provide some perspective.
Anyway, most of you who know me know I have allergies. Most of my allergies are the "sniff sniff, achoo achoo, snrrrrrkkk, I hate my life" style of allergies that plague most. Dogs, cats, dust, etc. It happens to me so often and unpredictably that I've grown accustomed to not being able to breathe through one nostril or the other. I just deal with it.
But, er, I have other allergies. To horses, chiefly, although I'm more or less certain that there's something else out there, I have no idea what, that affects me in the same way. These are more the sort of "break out in hives, stomach twists into a tight knot of pain, throat closes up and breathing restricts" sort of allergies that plague somewhat less people. These are a pain in the ass, because they always mean the same thing: I start to feel it, and if I didn't get away from whatever the hell it was that was causing me this grief fast enough, I have to suffer for half an hour or more, depending on if I pop Benadryl fast enough. And even then, I fall asleep for eight hours and am drained for several more, missing whatever it was I was going to be doing the next half-day or so. This is also fairly well-known by people around me.
This...I haven't told many people.
About a year ago, or so, I don't remember when exactly, I woke up in the middle of the night with an attack, and a bad one. I mean, it's always miserable, but I was in a great deal of distress.
3:00 in the morning, I'm balled up on the ground, my intestines are in searing agony, I'm bleeding from many places due to the fact that I've torn my skin from the incessant scratching of the terrible hives that are popping up everywhere, and I can't even weep in agony because my breathing is restricted to a slow hiss.
I have taken Benadryl. It has not helped.
Then...there was a short period. Couldn't have been more than five, six seconds, but to me, it was an eternity. In which...I could not breathe. At all. My throat sealed up. My lungs or diaphragm or whatever worked vainly, but I could not draw breath. My vision darkened - probably due to the herculean effort I was putting into trying to breathe - and I felt dizzy, in addition to everything else.
In those five seconds...God, it's not even easy to write this. In those five seconds, I was absolutely stone-cold certain that I was going to die, right then, right there. And that is a disquieting feeling, to say the very least. But, honestly, that isn't what affected me the most. Immediately afterwards, I was able to breathe again, a little. The worst had passed. About, oh, I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes later, the medicine finally kicked in and I was in good enough shape to go to sleep. I woke up nine hours later, with a terrible headache and the memory of what happened.
What really affected me the most, is that during those five seconds...I wanted to die. I wanted...to die.
I wanted to die.
I wanted an escape, any escape, from the pain I was in. I literally welcomed death.
I spent most of the next day doing nothing. I sat around. I didn't eat. I stared at the computer without actually doing anything. Mostly, I was just trying to convince myself that I hadn't really wanted that, that it was just the pain talking, that I was in a feverish state, that my everpresent joie de vivre hadn't taken a sudden holiday, and trying not to look at the bloodstains on my sheets.
I love life. I never want to die, ever. I want to be immortal. I want to last to the end of the universe. And yet.
I talked about it to the doctor at the university a few days later. He said that it sounded serious, but I had taken care of it and there should be no permanent side-effects. (No physical ones, anyway.) It was just a particularly bad flare-up, he said. I should have used my Epi-Pen (a shot of epinephrine I carry with me for just such an emergency), but it sounded like I had handled it well.
I talked to him for a while. I asked him why it hit me in the middle of the night, and he said that in some cases, an allergic attack can be delayed as much as six to eight hours from the exposure to the allergen. When I asked him how serious it could have gotten, after repeatedly stating that this was worst-case and almost impossible, that it would require circumstances uniting beyond all probability, he admitted that some attacks could kill a person in just five minutes.
From healthy, to dead. Five minutes.
Apparently, severe anaphylactic shock can stop one's heart, in addition to blocking airways and such.
Remember that five minutes that you waited? If you did? At any time, that could be my life expectancy. From the tick of every second, that could be exactly how long I have left to live. At any moment, I could be five minutes away from dying in agony, and never knowing why.
Heh. I've told some people that a phobia of mine would be to die in some bizarre and nonsensical way without knowing the reason? Like...melting into a puddle, or suddenly flying into space and suffocating/depressurizing, or whatever. To die without knowing why, it was an irrational fear of mine. This was present before this incident. The incident...did not help.
There's no cure. I took allergy shots for three years, and they helped with my minor allergies, but the doctor told me from the beginning that there's no way I can treat life-threatening allergies like I have to horses (and I'm fairly sure some other unknown thing). I'll live the rest of my life like this.
This is one of the reasons I am such an exuberant person. Particularly observant people who've watched the way I operate for the last few years may have noticed that recently, I've become even more...outgoing than usual. I talk louder, laugh longer, shout louder, and in general just do the hell out of whatever I'm doing even more than I used to.
These same people will observe that I'm always doing...something. I never just sit around and think. I go for a walk, I watch TV, I go on the Internet, I write, I play WoW, I play video games, I watch movies, I provoke arguments just for the sake of yelling back and forth. Yes, I've always been like this. But it's gone up. At least, I think it has.
The reason for this is to drown out the little voice in the back of my head that more or less constantly whispers "At any time, at any place, you could die and never know why. All your dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future could be destroyed in five minutes." And such. (I don't actually hear a voice. I'm not schizophrenic, or anything. But, y'know, the concept preys on my mind.)
So.
Uh...
Yeah.
I've been having trouble falling asleep lately.
I'll wait.
Did you wait?
I hope so. It'll provide some perspective.
Anyway, most of you who know me know I have allergies. Most of my allergies are the "sniff sniff, achoo achoo, snrrrrrkkk, I hate my life" style of allergies that plague most. Dogs, cats, dust, etc. It happens to me so often and unpredictably that I've grown accustomed to not being able to breathe through one nostril or the other. I just deal with it.
But, er, I have other allergies. To horses, chiefly, although I'm more or less certain that there's something else out there, I have no idea what, that affects me in the same way. These are more the sort of "break out in hives, stomach twists into a tight knot of pain, throat closes up and breathing restricts" sort of allergies that plague somewhat less people. These are a pain in the ass, because they always mean the same thing: I start to feel it, and if I didn't get away from whatever the hell it was that was causing me this grief fast enough, I have to suffer for half an hour or more, depending on if I pop Benadryl fast enough. And even then, I fall asleep for eight hours and am drained for several more, missing whatever it was I was going to be doing the next half-day or so. This is also fairly well-known by people around me.
This...I haven't told many people.
About a year ago, or so, I don't remember when exactly, I woke up in the middle of the night with an attack, and a bad one. I mean, it's always miserable, but I was in a great deal of distress.
3:00 in the morning, I'm balled up on the ground, my intestines are in searing agony, I'm bleeding from many places due to the fact that I've torn my skin from the incessant scratching of the terrible hives that are popping up everywhere, and I can't even weep in agony because my breathing is restricted to a slow hiss.
I have taken Benadryl. It has not helped.
Then...there was a short period. Couldn't have been more than five, six seconds, but to me, it was an eternity. In which...I could not breathe. At all. My throat sealed up. My lungs or diaphragm or whatever worked vainly, but I could not draw breath. My vision darkened - probably due to the herculean effort I was putting into trying to breathe - and I felt dizzy, in addition to everything else.
In those five seconds...God, it's not even easy to write this. In those five seconds, I was absolutely stone-cold certain that I was going to die, right then, right there. And that is a disquieting feeling, to say the very least. But, honestly, that isn't what affected me the most. Immediately afterwards, I was able to breathe again, a little. The worst had passed. About, oh, I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes later, the medicine finally kicked in and I was in good enough shape to go to sleep. I woke up nine hours later, with a terrible headache and the memory of what happened.
What really affected me the most, is that during those five seconds...I wanted to die. I wanted...to die.
I wanted to die.
I wanted an escape, any escape, from the pain I was in. I literally welcomed death.
I spent most of the next day doing nothing. I sat around. I didn't eat. I stared at the computer without actually doing anything. Mostly, I was just trying to convince myself that I hadn't really wanted that, that it was just the pain talking, that I was in a feverish state, that my everpresent joie de vivre hadn't taken a sudden holiday, and trying not to look at the bloodstains on my sheets.
I love life. I never want to die, ever. I want to be immortal. I want to last to the end of the universe. And yet.
I talked about it to the doctor at the university a few days later. He said that it sounded serious, but I had taken care of it and there should be no permanent side-effects. (No physical ones, anyway.) It was just a particularly bad flare-up, he said. I should have used my Epi-Pen (a shot of epinephrine I carry with me for just such an emergency), but it sounded like I had handled it well.
I talked to him for a while. I asked him why it hit me in the middle of the night, and he said that in some cases, an allergic attack can be delayed as much as six to eight hours from the exposure to the allergen. When I asked him how serious it could have gotten, after repeatedly stating that this was worst-case and almost impossible, that it would require circumstances uniting beyond all probability, he admitted that some attacks could kill a person in just five minutes.
From healthy, to dead. Five minutes.
Apparently, severe anaphylactic shock can stop one's heart, in addition to blocking airways and such.
Remember that five minutes that you waited? If you did? At any time, that could be my life expectancy. From the tick of every second, that could be exactly how long I have left to live. At any moment, I could be five minutes away from dying in agony, and never knowing why.
Heh. I've told some people that a phobia of mine would be to die in some bizarre and nonsensical way without knowing the reason? Like...melting into a puddle, or suddenly flying into space and suffocating/depressurizing, or whatever. To die without knowing why, it was an irrational fear of mine. This was present before this incident. The incident...did not help.
There's no cure. I took allergy shots for three years, and they helped with my minor allergies, but the doctor told me from the beginning that there's no way I can treat life-threatening allergies like I have to horses (and I'm fairly sure some other unknown thing). I'll live the rest of my life like this.
This is one of the reasons I am such an exuberant person. Particularly observant people who've watched the way I operate for the last few years may have noticed that recently, I've become even more...outgoing than usual. I talk louder, laugh longer, shout louder, and in general just do the hell out of whatever I'm doing even more than I used to.
These same people will observe that I'm always doing...something. I never just sit around and think. I go for a walk, I watch TV, I go on the Internet, I write, I play WoW, I play video games, I watch movies, I provoke arguments just for the sake of yelling back and forth. Yes, I've always been like this. But it's gone up. At least, I think it has.
The reason for this is to drown out the little voice in the back of my head that more or less constantly whispers "At any time, at any place, you could die and never know why. All your dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future could be destroyed in five minutes." And such. (I don't actually hear a voice. I'm not schizophrenic, or anything. But, y'know, the concept preys on my mind.)
So.
Uh...
Yeah.
I've been having trouble falling asleep lately.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Today At Work
I regaled many with my story about how the movie theater caught fire. One of my coworkers who had seen the whole movie threatened to tell me the end about 500,000 times. He will burn. He will burn.
Kind of annoyed because another one of my coworkers got to basically stand outside all shift and do nothing but watch the Madden tournament we were hosting, and make sure nobody used illegal plays. While I busted my buns inside with a million billion customers. Jerk.
I'm sick of bandwagon haters. You wouldn't think that such a thing as an online webcomic would inspire both fanboys and haters, but there you are. The funny thing comes when one comic that everyone loves produces a comic that - if the exact same dialogue was transposed into another comic that everyone hates - people would say it sucked. That is to say, Comic 1 made a comic everyone likes, if Comic 2 made a comic with its own characters but the same dialogue, everyone would say that comic sucked. I hate mindless fanboys/haters.
With an inspiration I got tonight between games of this one "Race to the Galaxy" game my friend Nolan showed me, that brings my total number of story ideas floating around in my head to an even half-dozen, five of which are Protector of the Universe stories. It remains to be seen how many will eventually crystallize into actual stories. I suspect most. Two are already half-written.
It's my 20th birthday on Tuesday. Go me.
Kind of annoyed because another one of my coworkers got to basically stand outside all shift and do nothing but watch the Madden tournament we were hosting, and make sure nobody used illegal plays. While I busted my buns inside with a million billion customers. Jerk.
I'm sick of bandwagon haters. You wouldn't think that such a thing as an online webcomic would inspire both fanboys and haters, but there you are. The funny thing comes when one comic that everyone loves produces a comic that - if the exact same dialogue was transposed into another comic that everyone hates - people would say it sucked. That is to say, Comic 1 made a comic everyone likes, if Comic 2 made a comic with its own characters but the same dialogue, everyone would say that comic sucked. I hate mindless fanboys/haters.
With an inspiration I got tonight between games of this one "Race to the Galaxy" game my friend Nolan showed me, that brings my total number of story ideas floating around in my head to an even half-dozen, five of which are Protector of the Universe stories. It remains to be seen how many will eventually crystallize into actual stories. I suspect most. Two are already half-written.
It's my 20th birthday on Tuesday. Go me.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Damn Everything
I missed the last forty minutes or so of The Dark Knight, and apparently the climax of the film, because the movie theater caught fire.
No joke.
Smoke, fire trucks, firemen.
...sigh.
No joke.
Smoke, fire trucks, firemen.
...sigh.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Protector of the Universe: A Tidbit
I decided I needed a little perspective.
So I spent a million years floating in space.
I'm not completely irresponsible. I didn't abandon my duty or my planet or anything like that. I jumped back in time to before intelligent life was even a gleam in the universe's eye, and just...waited.
When I arrived, I was a little surprised to find that though I hadn't moved in space, I was now floating in vast emptiness, the Earth and the sun and all that nowhere in sight. It took a minute for it to occur to me that, duh, stars and planets and galaxies move over time, and I'd just stepped over a hell of a lot of "over time."
Then...I waited.
I didn't go crazy. I had made sure of that. But to paraphrase an excellent modern author:
"The first ten thousand years were the worst. The second ten thousand years, they were the worst too. The third ten thousand years I didn't like at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."
It actually wasn't too bad. Very peaceful, just drifting amongst the stars and knowing absolutely that nothing, nothing would interrupt me. My internal clock kept track of time, and before I knew it, a million years had just flown by. I then came back to the exact time and place I left. (It was in Morocco, in a hotel which would have been rather stately if it hadn't been for the holes in the walls and ceiling from artillery shells. I had wanted to travel a bit.)
I didn't go crazy, but neither did I gain any great wisdom. There was nothing to gain it from. Still, I think the experience has enriched me as a person. It certainly gave me a better sense of perspective. It only left me with one really permanent change, though.
If I ever, ever, ever again hear someone say "I'm bored," I will smack that person in the back of the head.
So I spent a million years floating in space.
I'm not completely irresponsible. I didn't abandon my duty or my planet or anything like that. I jumped back in time to before intelligent life was even a gleam in the universe's eye, and just...waited.
When I arrived, I was a little surprised to find that though I hadn't moved in space, I was now floating in vast emptiness, the Earth and the sun and all that nowhere in sight. It took a minute for it to occur to me that, duh, stars and planets and galaxies move over time, and I'd just stepped over a hell of a lot of "over time."
Then...I waited.
I didn't go crazy. I had made sure of that. But to paraphrase an excellent modern author:
"The first ten thousand years were the worst. The second ten thousand years, they were the worst too. The third ten thousand years I didn't like at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."
It actually wasn't too bad. Very peaceful, just drifting amongst the stars and knowing absolutely that nothing, nothing would interrupt me. My internal clock kept track of time, and before I knew it, a million years had just flown by. I then came back to the exact time and place I left. (It was in Morocco, in a hotel which would have been rather stately if it hadn't been for the holes in the walls and ceiling from artillery shells. I had wanted to travel a bit.)
I didn't go crazy, but neither did I gain any great wisdom. There was nothing to gain it from. Still, I think the experience has enriched me as a person. It certainly gave me a better sense of perspective. It only left me with one really permanent change, though.
If I ever, ever, ever again hear someone say "I'm bored," I will smack that person in the back of the head.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Protector of the Universe: Another Story
This story doesn't follow the same theme as the previous ones do, I just think it's fun. Not to be taken seriously. C'mon, for a guy raised on Dragonball Z and all that, I can't be expected to have a character like this and not have him do something neat every so often.
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I'm bored.
This is not a state in which I often find myself, these days.
I've been sitting at my house for the last six days, mostly staying in bed, not doing much more than watching television and browsing the Internet. Why, one might ask? Why aren't I gallivanting around and having adventures, or going from hot spot to hot spot and aiding those in need? The long and the short of it is, I can't. At least, not well.
For the very first time since I got this power, I now know what it means to exert myself. I pushed myself to the breaking point recently (the story is a bit too outrageous, too rotten-science-fiction-novel for me to share with a serious expression), and as a result I am now here. I've had a bursting headache for about a week. Any time I try to use even the most minor manifestation, it feels like I'm being stabbed in the eye socket with an ice pick. I can do regular stuff, driving, typing, etc, without increasing my pain, but no warping reality for me. It isn't worth the pain.
No, I can't use my power to get rid of the pain. I tried it. Doing that brings me more pain, and trying to get rid of that starts an infinite bloody recursive loop that ends up with me rolling on the floor and weeping.
I have long tried to reduce my reliance on my power to accomplish regular tasks, but now I see just how dependent I really was. I mean, having to go out and buy food is irritation itself, getting to the store and back, waiting for the bus, etc.
Yeah, the bus. Apparently, when I over-exerted myself, this caused most of the things I had conjured into existence to wink back out again, for some reason. When I got home, I was chagrined to realize that my car was one of those things. (Yes, I limit myself to driving around, but I'm not going to limit myself to driving around in the beater I had previously. I made myself a fine custom car. Reap what I sow, I suppose.) So I have to take the bus. Which, as has previously been stated, sucks. I did it twice, then said "screw this" and have been living mostly off of pizza and Chinese food ordered in. I'll fix my metabolism when I start feeling better.
I have slowly been getting better. I estimate that, oh, about another week before I'm back on my feet again. But during that time, I've been reduced to sitting around my house doing nothing in particular. I did get my paladin to level 40 in World of WarCraft, so that's something, I guess. It seems a little silly in the grand scheme of things, but I find most things do.
Ashley somehow heard that I was laid up and stopped by yesterday with a bowl of chicken soup and a bottle of aspirin. Looking at the box, I saw that she had scribbled out "Extra-Strength" and written in "Cosmic-Strength". Oh, her. What a sense of humor. It would be funnier if I didn't constantly hate everything because of the pain. Still, a nice gesture. I'll repay her somehow when I can use my power without passing out.
Right now I'm watching anime. Some damn thing. It has some complex Japanese name which roughly translates to "Fist of the Everlasting Power Destruction Torrent of Absolute Energy Domination." This is why I like the Japanese, because their repressive culture produces quality entertainment like this. A bit of a high price for them, I'll admit, but things work over there far better than here in America, and whatever gives me my spiky-haired muscle-bound louts punching the daylights out of each other.
Hah, now. This episode features the villain claiming that as a result of absorbing some energy field...of a god...I think, that he now is "all-knowing" and thus can counter the hero's every move. This is of course accompanied by a lot of shouting and grunting and pained facial expressions, as befits yet another DBZ knockoff, but it reminds me of the time I tried omniscience.
It really, really is not worth it. I mean, I am not even kidding here. I tried to give myself omniscience once, reasoning that it would make things easier on me in terms of knowing where to go and how best to apply my abilities. So I set up a few safeguards, held my breath, and plugged myself in to infinite knowledge.
Ooooookay. Forget knowing the hero's every move. Forget knowing all the information in every library, forget knowing lottery numbers a week from now, forget knowing every soldier's name in the Battle of Antietam, forget all of that. That's dross. That's meaningless. True omniscience? Think about exactly what the word means: "knowing everything." Everything.
Every spin of every electron in every atom in every piece of matter everywhere. I read somewhere that the number of protons in the universe was something like 1.2 x 10^80. Just to give you a better handle on that, that's 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons. There are more or less a similar amount of electrons, and a slightly smaller amout of neutrons. Imagine knowing the position of each of those particles, everywhere, updated in real-time with a refresh rate of infinity. And then add in all the stuff about every thought in every conscious mind everywhere, all the information about every cell of living matter, the rate and state of decay of every subatomic particle, then you add in the piddling little stuff like the trajectory of every meteor and the World Series scores and that.
It completely annihilated my mind. Safeguards though I had taken, the human mind is simply not built to process that kind of information. I was floating in space at the time (I often do, it clears the mind), and for a while I just...drifted. Mindless. Fortunately, one of those safeguards was that no matter what, five minutes I would revert to the way I had been. I did. And that was the end of my experimentation with being all-knowing.
The show ended on a cliffhanger. They always do. Commercials began for some kind of fruit juice, I think, though you'd hardly be able to tell because almost the entire thing was just a bunch of girls playing volleyball on the beach, with a few glimpses of the juice bottle scattered about haphazardly. Those commercials annoy me.
Aagh. I tried to call the remote into my hand, and was rewarded with a blinding stab of agony. Seeing stars, I limped over and got it manually.
I can't wait for this to be over. Seriously. This bites.
The thought occurs that the story of how I pushed myself too far might actually be of some interest. It is extremely ridiculous, though, so...yeah.
This enormous alien fleet, about nine galaxies worth of massive warships, popped into existence about halfway across reality from where we are, armed for extermination. I have a system set up wherein if anything happens that massively affects the cosmic consonance, I know about it, so the instant I knew I zapped myself over to where they were.
I hopped onto their flagship. They were not happy about this, as far as I could tell, because - I swear - these things looked like giant Hostess Twinkies with five spindly blue arms on one side. Just like, down to the cream filling leaking out the top and everything. It kind of threw me off my stride.
Giving myself the knowledge of how their language worked, I told them in no uncertain terms that they were to back off and not harm even a single world or star. They responded with some blather about how their universe, I think they called it the "Quasi-Real Field of Existence" or some such, had been preparing for war against ours for eons past and this was their fleet and blah blah blah, basically we stubbed their toe an age ago and they'd been smarting over it ever since, so they decided to come on in and wipe out all life.
I wasn't about to let this happen, obviously. So with a gesture, I disabled all their guns and defused all their bombs. They were really not happy about this, but now they knew what they were dealing with. I further told them that if a single one of them made any attack on anything here, I'd send the lot of them packing. This did not go over well.
Here's where I made my mistake. I was a bit arrogant (not unjustified, but still) and thought they'd just whimper and turn tail. Turns out, they had an emergency backup plan in case they weren't going to win by conquering everything. The boss Twinkie hit a switch, and all of the ships detonated simultaneously in an explosion for which the term "massive" is a legendary understatement.
Instead of taking the more reasonable route, leaping back in time and dealing with it another way, I brashly thought I could contain the blast myself. Biiiig mistake. I didn't know what kind of energy I was dealing with. It was about a third the intensity of the Big Bang.
A blast about a third in size of the fucking Big Bang.
It rapidly became obvious that I couldn't contain it for long, given the bursting capillaries in my brain and the fact that energy flares were leaking out everywhere around my containment. I desperately sought for a solution - the sum total of matter and energy in the universe had just increased by, oh, a whole lot, and it was my job to take care of business.
The last-second solution I did come up with, I believe, was elegant and well-formed. I funneled the energy all across existence into the heart of every star, re-energizing them and pushing back the inevitable heat death of the universe about twenty billion years or so. Great. But doing so nearly ripped my conscious mind to pieces. I was barely conscious enough to bring myself home, and passed out as soon as I landed back on Earth. Whereupon I woke up, limped to my house, and, well...yeah.
Told you it was ridiculous.
*
*
*
*
*
*
I'm bored.
This is not a state in which I often find myself, these days.
I've been sitting at my house for the last six days, mostly staying in bed, not doing much more than watching television and browsing the Internet. Why, one might ask? Why aren't I gallivanting around and having adventures, or going from hot spot to hot spot and aiding those in need? The long and the short of it is, I can't. At least, not well.
For the very first time since I got this power, I now know what it means to exert myself. I pushed myself to the breaking point recently (the story is a bit too outrageous, too rotten-science-fiction-novel for me to share with a serious expression), and as a result I am now here. I've had a bursting headache for about a week. Any time I try to use even the most minor manifestation, it feels like I'm being stabbed in the eye socket with an ice pick. I can do regular stuff, driving, typing, etc, without increasing my pain, but no warping reality for me. It isn't worth the pain.
No, I can't use my power to get rid of the pain. I tried it. Doing that brings me more pain, and trying to get rid of that starts an infinite bloody recursive loop that ends up with me rolling on the floor and weeping.
I have long tried to reduce my reliance on my power to accomplish regular tasks, but now I see just how dependent I really was. I mean, having to go out and buy food is irritation itself, getting to the store and back, waiting for the bus, etc.
Yeah, the bus. Apparently, when I over-exerted myself, this caused most of the things I had conjured into existence to wink back out again, for some reason. When I got home, I was chagrined to realize that my car was one of those things. (Yes, I limit myself to driving around, but I'm not going to limit myself to driving around in the beater I had previously. I made myself a fine custom car. Reap what I sow, I suppose.) So I have to take the bus. Which, as has previously been stated, sucks. I did it twice, then said "screw this" and have been living mostly off of pizza and Chinese food ordered in. I'll fix my metabolism when I start feeling better.
I have slowly been getting better. I estimate that, oh, about another week before I'm back on my feet again. But during that time, I've been reduced to sitting around my house doing nothing in particular. I did get my paladin to level 40 in World of WarCraft, so that's something, I guess. It seems a little silly in the grand scheme of things, but I find most things do.
Ashley somehow heard that I was laid up and stopped by yesterday with a bowl of chicken soup and a bottle of aspirin. Looking at the box, I saw that she had scribbled out "Extra-Strength" and written in "Cosmic-Strength". Oh, her. What a sense of humor. It would be funnier if I didn't constantly hate everything because of the pain. Still, a nice gesture. I'll repay her somehow when I can use my power without passing out.
Right now I'm watching anime. Some damn thing. It has some complex Japanese name which roughly translates to "Fist of the Everlasting Power Destruction Torrent of Absolute Energy Domination." This is why I like the Japanese, because their repressive culture produces quality entertainment like this. A bit of a high price for them, I'll admit, but things work over there far better than here in America, and whatever gives me my spiky-haired muscle-bound louts punching the daylights out of each other.
Hah, now. This episode features the villain claiming that as a result of absorbing some energy field...of a god...I think, that he now is "all-knowing" and thus can counter the hero's every move. This is of course accompanied by a lot of shouting and grunting and pained facial expressions, as befits yet another DBZ knockoff, but it reminds me of the time I tried omniscience.
It really, really is not worth it. I mean, I am not even kidding here. I tried to give myself omniscience once, reasoning that it would make things easier on me in terms of knowing where to go and how best to apply my abilities. So I set up a few safeguards, held my breath, and plugged myself in to infinite knowledge.
Ooooookay. Forget knowing the hero's every move. Forget knowing all the information in every library, forget knowing lottery numbers a week from now, forget knowing every soldier's name in the Battle of Antietam, forget all of that. That's dross. That's meaningless. True omniscience? Think about exactly what the word means: "knowing everything." Everything.
Every spin of every electron in every atom in every piece of matter everywhere. I read somewhere that the number of protons in the universe was something like 1.2 x 10^80. Just to give you a better handle on that, that's 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons. There are more or less a similar amount of electrons, and a slightly smaller amout of neutrons. Imagine knowing the position of each of those particles, everywhere, updated in real-time with a refresh rate of infinity. And then add in all the stuff about every thought in every conscious mind everywhere, all the information about every cell of living matter, the rate and state of decay of every subatomic particle, then you add in the piddling little stuff like the trajectory of every meteor and the World Series scores and that.
It completely annihilated my mind. Safeguards though I had taken, the human mind is simply not built to process that kind of information. I was floating in space at the time (I often do, it clears the mind), and for a while I just...drifted. Mindless. Fortunately, one of those safeguards was that no matter what, five minutes I would revert to the way I had been. I did. And that was the end of my experimentation with being all-knowing.
The show ended on a cliffhanger. They always do. Commercials began for some kind of fruit juice, I think, though you'd hardly be able to tell because almost the entire thing was just a bunch of girls playing volleyball on the beach, with a few glimpses of the juice bottle scattered about haphazardly. Those commercials annoy me.
Aagh. I tried to call the remote into my hand, and was rewarded with a blinding stab of agony. Seeing stars, I limped over and got it manually.
I can't wait for this to be over. Seriously. This bites.
The thought occurs that the story of how I pushed myself too far might actually be of some interest. It is extremely ridiculous, though, so...yeah.
This enormous alien fleet, about nine galaxies worth of massive warships, popped into existence about halfway across reality from where we are, armed for extermination. I have a system set up wherein if anything happens that massively affects the cosmic consonance, I know about it, so the instant I knew I zapped myself over to where they were.
I hopped onto their flagship. They were not happy about this, as far as I could tell, because - I swear - these things looked like giant Hostess Twinkies with five spindly blue arms on one side. Just like, down to the cream filling leaking out the top and everything. It kind of threw me off my stride.
Giving myself the knowledge of how their language worked, I told them in no uncertain terms that they were to back off and not harm even a single world or star. They responded with some blather about how their universe, I think they called it the "Quasi-Real Field of Existence" or some such, had been preparing for war against ours for eons past and this was their fleet and blah blah blah, basically we stubbed their toe an age ago and they'd been smarting over it ever since, so they decided to come on in and wipe out all life.
I wasn't about to let this happen, obviously. So with a gesture, I disabled all their guns and defused all their bombs. They were really not happy about this, but now they knew what they were dealing with. I further told them that if a single one of them made any attack on anything here, I'd send the lot of them packing. This did not go over well.
Here's where I made my mistake. I was a bit arrogant (not unjustified, but still) and thought they'd just whimper and turn tail. Turns out, they had an emergency backup plan in case they weren't going to win by conquering everything. The boss Twinkie hit a switch, and all of the ships detonated simultaneously in an explosion for which the term "massive" is a legendary understatement.
Instead of taking the more reasonable route, leaping back in time and dealing with it another way, I brashly thought I could contain the blast myself. Biiiig mistake. I didn't know what kind of energy I was dealing with. It was about a third the intensity of the Big Bang.
A blast about a third in size of the fucking Big Bang.
It rapidly became obvious that I couldn't contain it for long, given the bursting capillaries in my brain and the fact that energy flares were leaking out everywhere around my containment. I desperately sought for a solution - the sum total of matter and energy in the universe had just increased by, oh, a whole lot, and it was my job to take care of business.
The last-second solution I did come up with, I believe, was elegant and well-formed. I funneled the energy all across existence into the heart of every star, re-energizing them and pushing back the inevitable heat death of the universe about twenty billion years or so. Great. But doing so nearly ripped my conscious mind to pieces. I was barely conscious enough to bring myself home, and passed out as soon as I landed back on Earth. Whereupon I woke up, limped to my house, and, well...yeah.
Told you it was ridiculous.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
At 4:00, The Quiches Burn
So this morning was hell.
7:30 - I get ungainly yanked from bed to take my sister Michelle to the medical clinic she goes to daily. Grand. Barely able to keep awake, I bull through the drive to the clinic and promptly fall asleep as she goes in. Oh, and just to set the tone, because I rarely feel like getting dressed for this chore, I just throw on my bathrobe. I figure, why not? I never leave the car during this and it covers all it needs to cover.
8:10 - I wake up for the drive back, she reminds me that she has to go to the doctor's office at 9:15 and there isn't the time to drive back and put on a decent set of clothing. Which means I cannot accompany her indoors, because, y'know...bathrobe. But we have some time to kill, so we drive out to the lake and BS for a while. She smokes. Well, considering her other exploits, smoking's pretty much the least of all evils. She lets me nap a little while longer.
8:45 - We're heading for the doctor's office. She says she knows exactly where it is, that I shouldn't worry because her sense of direction is keen and unerring.
9:00 - "I'm pretty sure it's this way..." she says. My confidence drops.
9:07 - "Uh, maybe it's...that way?" My confidence plummets.
9:12 - We luck out and make the correct turn. She leaves. I stay in the car, park in a relatively shady spot, and fall asleep again. (I stayed up way too late last night.)
9:35 - Sweet Christmas, it's hot. I can't believe it. It's not even that late in the day yet, how can it possibly be this hot? I turn on the air conditioning for a brief few seconds and wipe the sweat from my brow.
9:47 - So hot...starting to hallucinate. Gotta keep it together. She can't be in there for much longer, anyway, it's just a routine thing. Did she say that? Did I just invent the memory on the spot so's I would feel better about this whole thing? Trying to find out is a fool's errand.
9:54 - Hooooooottttttt. Feel like I'm melting. I vaguely recall some remarks Michelle made about "a big Lucas-shaped puddle" being all that would be left of me. I am starting to believe her words. Fired up the air conditioner again, for longer this time.
10:06 - Can fingernails melt? I'm pretty sure they shouldn't, so this is starting to worry me. I now see, when I direct my failing vision outside the window, an angry sun a la Super Mario Bros. 3 aggressively beaming down at me with all the force it can muster. I'm more or less certain that this isn't a good thing. Trying to sleep. Failing.
10:17 - Ungh...the heat is oppressing me like a South American dictator. Think my eyebrows might have caught fire. The mirror shows me naught but a pack of lies, so no good there.
10:22 - I now know what heroin addicts mean when they say "chasing the dragon." At first, a little blast of air conditioning was good to sustain me for a while, but I'm needing more and more just to keep me below the temperature of spontaneous combustion. This is an unsustainable way to go on. Once I use up all the cold air, the frost elemental under the hood will be angry and freeze the blood in my veins in his terrible wrath. Is that how AC works? At least I'll be cool.
10:29 - Did I ever have a sister? What was the reason of my coming here? Due to the gradual evaporation of all liquids in my body, my brain is working at less than peak efficiency. Her egress from the office seems to be nothing but one of the many hallucinations I am currently experiencing, like the one about the little imps bathing me in napalm. I thank them for the cool liquid treat, it's a shower compared to Florida sunshine.
10:31 - What's going on? I don't understand...where am I? Is this a car?
10:35 - I forgot one crucial thing when parking this car: as time goes by, shadows move. I am fully exposed.
10:38 - Death. Death. Death. All has become ruin. All has become chaos. I have descended into hell.
10:46 - *gurgle*
.
.
.
.
.
10:58 - Sweet relief! Michelle finally reappears. "You look hot," she says, therefore winning the Lucas Award for the Single Most Obvious Statement Ever Said. The awards ceremony begins and ends with a sizzling glare and a smack in the back of the head, from me.
10:59 - Nursing my various wounds suffered from her retaliatory assault, we scoot home. I thank all powers that will listen that I'll finally be able to get inside and cool off.
11:00 - She informs me that we need to stop by Publix (grocery store) before we get home. I now, officially, hate everything.
11:07 - "Get on I-95 to get home," Michelle tells me. "It's faster." So I do.
11:07:32 - "Ah, crap, you should have gone south, not north," she tells me, exactly .00001 seconds after it's too late to change my course. Thanks, Michelle. So we are diverted.
11:41 - After driving up and down I-95 for some time, culminating in a heated debate over the merits of driving on a smaller road or a larger one under construction, we arrive at the grocery store. "I'll just be a second," she says, ducking out. "I only need three things."
11:51 - It does not take this long to get three things. And I can't call her because she doesn't have a cell phone, not to mention I left my cell phone at home, in the pocket of my pants, which I'm not wearing, as I'm wearing my bathrobe, so I can't enter the Goddamned store to retrieve her because I can't leave the car because I'm not dressed properly because RARGH ARGH HATRED OF ALL THINGS
11:58 - As it transpires, she was in the store for so long because of a squabble over the price of a package of baby carrots. They claimed $2.79, the price shown was $1.29, it was a misprint, and they ended up giving them to her for free. Jubilant at her acquisition, she (deliberately?) fails to notice my bad mood. And by "bad mood," I mean "smoldering like cracks in the earth, ready to erupt into a raging torrent of absolute destruction and insanity at the slightest provocation."
12:00 - We arrive home. I am defused.
7:30 - I get ungainly yanked from bed to take my sister Michelle to the medical clinic she goes to daily. Grand. Barely able to keep awake, I bull through the drive to the clinic and promptly fall asleep as she goes in. Oh, and just to set the tone, because I rarely feel like getting dressed for this chore, I just throw on my bathrobe. I figure, why not? I never leave the car during this and it covers all it needs to cover.
8:10 - I wake up for the drive back, she reminds me that she has to go to the doctor's office at 9:15 and there isn't the time to drive back and put on a decent set of clothing. Which means I cannot accompany her indoors, because, y'know...bathrobe. But we have some time to kill, so we drive out to the lake and BS for a while. She smokes. Well, considering her other exploits, smoking's pretty much the least of all evils. She lets me nap a little while longer.
8:45 - We're heading for the doctor's office. She says she knows exactly where it is, that I shouldn't worry because her sense of direction is keen and unerring.
9:00 - "I'm pretty sure it's this way..." she says. My confidence drops.
9:07 - "Uh, maybe it's...that way?" My confidence plummets.
9:12 - We luck out and make the correct turn. She leaves. I stay in the car, park in a relatively shady spot, and fall asleep again. (I stayed up way too late last night.)
9:35 - Sweet Christmas, it's hot. I can't believe it. It's not even that late in the day yet, how can it possibly be this hot? I turn on the air conditioning for a brief few seconds and wipe the sweat from my brow.
9:47 - So hot...starting to hallucinate. Gotta keep it together. She can't be in there for much longer, anyway, it's just a routine thing. Did she say that? Did I just invent the memory on the spot so's I would feel better about this whole thing? Trying to find out is a fool's errand.
9:54 - Hooooooottttttt. Feel like I'm melting. I vaguely recall some remarks Michelle made about "a big Lucas-shaped puddle" being all that would be left of me. I am starting to believe her words. Fired up the air conditioner again, for longer this time.
10:06 - Can fingernails melt? I'm pretty sure they shouldn't, so this is starting to worry me. I now see, when I direct my failing vision outside the window, an angry sun a la Super Mario Bros. 3 aggressively beaming down at me with all the force it can muster. I'm more or less certain that this isn't a good thing. Trying to sleep. Failing.
10:17 - Ungh...the heat is oppressing me like a South American dictator. Think my eyebrows might have caught fire. The mirror shows me naught but a pack of lies, so no good there.
10:22 - I now know what heroin addicts mean when they say "chasing the dragon." At first, a little blast of air conditioning was good to sustain me for a while, but I'm needing more and more just to keep me below the temperature of spontaneous combustion. This is an unsustainable way to go on. Once I use up all the cold air, the frost elemental under the hood will be angry and freeze the blood in my veins in his terrible wrath. Is that how AC works? At least I'll be cool.
10:29 - Did I ever have a sister? What was the reason of my coming here? Due to the gradual evaporation of all liquids in my body, my brain is working at less than peak efficiency. Her egress from the office seems to be nothing but one of the many hallucinations I am currently experiencing, like the one about the little imps bathing me in napalm. I thank them for the cool liquid treat, it's a shower compared to Florida sunshine.
10:31 - What's going on? I don't understand...where am I? Is this a car?
10:35 - I forgot one crucial thing when parking this car: as time goes by, shadows move. I am fully exposed.
10:38 - Death. Death. Death. All has become ruin. All has become chaos. I have descended into hell.
10:46 - *gurgle*
.
.
.
.
.
10:58 - Sweet relief! Michelle finally reappears. "You look hot," she says, therefore winning the Lucas Award for the Single Most Obvious Statement Ever Said. The awards ceremony begins and ends with a sizzling glare and a smack in the back of the head, from me.
10:59 - Nursing my various wounds suffered from her retaliatory assault, we scoot home. I thank all powers that will listen that I'll finally be able to get inside and cool off.
11:00 - She informs me that we need to stop by Publix (grocery store) before we get home. I now, officially, hate everything.
11:07 - "Get on I-95 to get home," Michelle tells me. "It's faster." So I do.
11:07:32 - "Ah, crap, you should have gone south, not north," she tells me, exactly .00001 seconds after it's too late to change my course. Thanks, Michelle. So we are diverted.
11:41 - After driving up and down I-95 for some time, culminating in a heated debate over the merits of driving on a smaller road or a larger one under construction, we arrive at the grocery store. "I'll just be a second," she says, ducking out. "I only need three things."
11:51 - It does not take this long to get three things. And I can't call her because she doesn't have a cell phone, not to mention I left my cell phone at home, in the pocket of my pants, which I'm not wearing, as I'm wearing my bathrobe, so I can't enter the Goddamned store to retrieve her because I can't leave the car because I'm not dressed properly because RARGH ARGH HATRED OF ALL THINGS
11:58 - As it transpires, she was in the store for so long because of a squabble over the price of a package of baby carrots. They claimed $2.79, the price shown was $1.29, it was a misprint, and they ended up giving them to her for free. Jubilant at her acquisition, she (deliberately?) fails to notice my bad mood. And by "bad mood," I mean "smoldering like cracks in the earth, ready to erupt into a raging torrent of absolute destruction and insanity at the slightest provocation."
12:00 - We arrive home. I am defused.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
The Protector of the Universe: Another Short Story
Those people, very few, who know about my role as Protector of the Universe assume that I am always cool, confident, and in control. He’s near-omnipotent, they think, what could possibly throw him off his stride? What could confuse him, frustrate him? What could scare him?
I’m scared all the time.
Scared about what I could become if I let things slip. About what I, with my power, could truly do if I lost some of my standards. If I lost my humanity. If I allowed myself to lose control.
Sometimes I get asked things like “Why do you still eat?” “Why do you still breathe?” “If you can teleport, or fly, or do whatever you want, why do you still drive around?” “Why, with everything else you still do, don’t you sleep?” Actually, I do sleep. I just stop time before I nod off, so I can enjoy a refreshing twelve-hour nap without having lost any real time. It just appears that I don’t sleep, is all.
But the real answer to these questions is fear, primal fear. Sure, I could go without eating, or sleeping, and I could just teleport everywhere I wanted to go in a puff of smoke. But with every step I took towards optimizing myself, towards losing the shackles of the flesh, I would take a step away from my own humanity. My soul.
If I stopped eating, sleeping, traveling, breathing, I would have less and less in common with the rest of the humans on Earth. Pretty soon, I might find myself beginning to wonder why I still interacted with them face-to-face, when it would be so much more efficient to appear with a thunderbolt from on high or as a disembodied voice, booming out over the horizon.
Pretty soon, I would wonder why I even bothered with having a body, if I wasn’t going to use it for anything much. And then, what would I become? Some kind of cosmic deva, floating in the stars, unbodied, unaffected by such petty human concepts as morality, joy, hope. Merely a vessel for my great power, dispensing it only with eyes to the cosmic consonance, losing sight of all the infinite small sparks of life and happiness that make this universe the jewel it is. That’s what I’m scared of.
But in addition to fear, there is also pain.
I frequent a café known as Spanner’s, in Albany. It’s outside of the hustle and bustle that is New York City (in a million inhabited worlds, you may be interested to know, I’ve never encountered another place quite like the Big Apple. It’s just so...vibrant.), but still metropolitan enough not to make me completely lose interest. And the food is good, with good service. A little overpriced, but really, that’s not exactly a priority of mine.
The real reason I go, though, well...you might call it the service. I call her Ashley Simms. One of the waitresses. Beautiful girl – flaming red hair, freckles, delightfully pale white skin, and a smile that could bring cheer to a patient with terminal cancer. Her hazel eyes sparkle “as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,” to quote one of the finest wordsmiths to ever put pen to paper. Yes, yes, she also has fantastic tits and an ass that just won’t quit, but I admire her beauty more than I admire her sex appeal.
Yet more stunning than her physical beauty is her vibrant spirit. I’ve known her for two years now, since I became a regular at this place, and yet every time I enter I’m stunned afresh at the sheer radiance of her presence. She’s never without her smile, her disarmingly nice nature defusing even the most annoying patrons, with no hint of sarcasm or bitterness.
She takes a genuine interest in all those she associates with. If ever time permitted during her hectic work schedule, I’m fairly confident I could sit her down and tell her my life’s story, up until I became Protector, and at the end she would smile brightly and thank me warmly for sharing with her. And she’d remember every detail.
All right, all right. Nobody's that perfect. I admit that she probably has some kind of terrible flaw, some imperfection, some bad quality about her, but for all my power, I am unable to see it. To me, she is the very definition of perfect excellence.
I have it for her, and bad. As you may have imagined. It’s not just her attractiveness. Hell, with a snap of my finger, I could magically conjure up ten girls proportioned to my exact specifications and thinking only of my pleasure. (I did once. Didn’t leave my house for eight weeks straight.) Ashley is pure and perfect in every way I can detect, mentally and physically. Given the general tenor of the universe as it relates to my love life, though, she thinks of me only as a good friend. Not that friendship with such a marvelous girl is bad, but to see her so close and yet such a distance away can become an agonizing thing.
Ashley is a jewel among dross. So, of course, she has a boyfriend, Bill. She rarely mentions him to me – I get the feeling that she sort of knows I have a thing for her, so she doesn’t bring him up much – but as far as I can tell, they’ve been dating since before I met her. For a long time, I cherished hope that she would break up with him for one reason or another, and I would be there to catch her as she fell, but it eventually became obvious that I should not hold my breath.
This brings me to the fear. See, my power allows me to do almost anything. I can reshape planets, consume stars...tear a galaxy in half. It would be absolutely effortless of me to simply twist a thought in her mind – and direct all her passion for Bill towards me. The temptation will arise when she gives me a brief hug as she leaves the restaurant at the end of her shift, or when she leaves an extra mint with my receipt and a little smiley face drawn on the bill.
I could do it in an instant. To see it happen...to see the look on her face, confused briefly, then changing to an expression of pure joy and radiance, the thought of this miracle is enough to strain my will to the breaking point. The only things holding me in check is my unshakable belief that it is the most grievous of sins to subvert the will of another, and my appreciation and respect for her as a person that is far too great to allow me to impose my will over hers.
Still, though, sometimes I want to do it so badly it leaves me trembling, and I have to get up and leave quickly lest I do something I will forever regret. I mean, yes, if I had a moment of weakness, I could undo what I had done, or even go back in time and fix things so that I never succumbed, but the stain of performing such an act would be on my soul for all my life. And I will live a very long time.
Today was different, though. I noticed as soon as I entered. She moved as though in a dream. Distracted. Her mind elsewhere. Her famous smile was still in place, but she had a strange look in her eyes that I had never seen before.
Upon seeing me, Ashley brightened up and approached.
“Hey, you,” she said playfully. “Table for one, again?”
“You know me,” I said. “The loneliest number yet again, I’m afraid.” She giggled and showed me to an empty table. It wasn’t my favorite – an elderly French couple occupied my preferred table near the window – but it was in just the spot for the setting sun to shine down upon me. She always did have a knack for this sort of thing. It’s one of the things that made her a good waitress, and a good friend.
As she turned to get my lemonade (I always ordered the same thing, to the point where I no longer had to order), I saw her eyes cloud over again, like they had been when I had entered. What was different? I sat back in my chair and pondered. If this guy Bill had hurt her, I decided, well...hoo boy, was he gonna be in for it.
A sparkle from her direction caught my eye, and I saw it. A ring of silver, with a small diamond set in an intricate pattern of sigils, adorned her fourth finger on her right hand.
Oh fuck.
I thought I had long since abandoned any thoughts of going out with her, but the finality of the engagement ring I glimpsed was like being hit with a truck. I sagged in my seat. All the small displays of affection she had shown me over the years – the hugs, the brief touches on the arm, the warm smiles – rose up in me like bile. This was it. My last, desperate hope had finally turned to ash and cinders with a single gleam.
So caught up was I in my own pain that I barely noticed her arriving back with my mozzarella sticks. Morose as I was, I vaguely registered someone saying something to me. With an effort, I snapped back into the real world.
“You okay?” she said, her brow wrinkled with concern. “Are you feeling well?”
Summoning up all the fortitude within me, I cleared my expression and returned to her with a smile nearly as sunny as her traditional one. “I’m okay, Ashley,” I said. “Just lost in thought.” Her smile returned at the news. “Say...” I said, pointing at her ring finger. “Didn’t notice that before. Did Bill finally pop the question?”
I expected an explosion of giggles and a quick confirmation, before she scuttled off to do her duties. What I didn’t expect was for her brow to furrow again, and her eyes to drop.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “He did. I’m...” She blinked once, twice. “I’m so happy,” she said, and I have never once heard a person say that phrase with such conviction and yet so obviously mean it so little.
“Are you all right?” I said, leaning forward.
“Yes,” Ashley said, shaking her head slightly. “It’s just...well, I’ll talk to you about it later,” she murmured, turning away to one of her other tables. As she went, I watched her wipe her eyes on the back of her hand.
What on earth was going on here?
(Yes, I could have used my power to read her mind and find out, but not only is that taking another step away from humanity, it’s a gross invasion of privacy, something I’m not at all comfortable with.)
I waited until her shift was over, I knew how late she worked on Wednesdays. I was sitting outside Spanner’s in one of their wire-mesh chairs next to their wire-mesh tables, topped with an umbrella that might as well have been made of wire-mesh for all the protection it gave from the elements.
Ashley emerged, absent-mindedly taking off her nametag, and sat down next to me looking downcast. She sniffled slightly and fiddled with her nametag.
“What’s wrong?” I asked pointedly. “You just got engaged, shouldn’t you...y’know...be happier about it?”
“I am!” she said sharply. She turned to face me. “I love Bill. I have for a long time now. I’ve waited for this day for years, but...” She turned away again.
“What?” I said. “Did he hurt you?” Part of me wanted nothing more than to locate and absolve her pain for her, yet another, perverse part of me wanted her to tell me how badly he had wronged her, so I might descend from on high and mete out righteous punishment.
“No.” Ashley looked up, her eyes brimming. “See...I never told you. Bill has stomach cancer.” My eyes widened. Ah... “The doctors...” She sniffled again. “The doctors just told him that it has definitely turned fatal. They only gave him three months to live.” She took the ring off her finger and held it in the palm of her hand, the streetlights glittering off of it.
“He...he gave this to me...he said he wanted to get married quickly, so he could...” She broke down sobbing and fell into my arms. I held her while her chest heaved, doing my absolute dead-level best to ignore how fantastic she looked even while wracked with grief. After a minute or so, Ashley calmed down some, and sat back into her seat.
“He gave this to me...he said he wanted to get married so that he could die a happy man,” she said in a hollow voice.
It is an unfortunate measure of my imperfect character that part of me cheered at this pronouncement. She obviously loved him dearly, but a person can only stay attached to a dead man for so long, before the land of the living and the close friends with unrequited feelings make themselves apparent. It might take years, but what did I have if not time? Banishing these thoughts with a disgusted shake of my head, I leaned in closer.
“That’s very noble of him,” I said softly. “I hate to see you like this...” Wiping her eyes, Ashley nodded. “You obviously love him, and it’s terrible that it has to happen this way. If there was anything I could do, I-”
I stopped, stunned at my own words. Had the impact of gaining my power truly not sunk in yet? It would be so simple...but I would have to reveal myself. My secret is very, very closely guarded, and I hesitated long before divulging this even to my very closest of friends.
I was going to offer more hollow condolences, when I looked up and into her eyes. She was puzzled at my cutoff in mid-sentence, waiting for me to continue. Her watery, red-rimmed eyes decided for me. I could not see those eyes burdened with such grief any longer, even if it meant revealing my true nature to her.
“I, uh...I actually have a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. Even as I spoke, I cursed myself for my insensitivity. Her fiancée, who she loves deeply, is dying, and I had the unmitigated gall to bring up my own subjects. But it is a testament to her wonderful personality that she dried her eyes and awaited my words, attentively. Ever considerate, she was (and is), ever thoughtful, ever pushing away her own needs to help and comfort others. What could I do in the face of such nobility?
“I’m...” I was going to ease into this, but damn everything, sometimes bluntness was called for. “I have something I have to admit,” I said quietly. Ashley said nothing, confused. I soldiered on. “I’m the Protector of the Universe,” I said.
Her confused expression segued into one of utter amazement. I could see the questions in her mind, without using telepathy or anything. Why is he wasting my time with games now? Before she had a chance to speak, I acted. My eyes flashed.
Her eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly. I had imparted into her the tiniest fragment of cosmic quintessence – for a fraction of a nanosecond, she saw all reality, all the universe, and my place in it. She saw who I really was.
The sensation faded. The knowledge did not. Her mouth closed, but her eyes remained wide. “You really are...” she breathed. I nodded.
“There’s something else I have to admit,” I said, hesitantly. “I...I love you.”
Her eyes softened. “You do...?” she said quietly.
“Yes, I do,” I said, fully aware of how useless and futile I was sounding. “I have, for...some time now.” I gazed into her eyes, full of so much emotion. “But you don’t love me. You love Bill. You see me as a friend,” I continued, each word feeling as if it was ripped from my soul.
She said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“You have no idea...how difficult it’s been, with what I can do,” I said. “The temptation to just change your mind...it’s been slowly killing me for a long time.”
“Why didn’t you?” she said softly.
I was taken aback. I could not answer.
“I mean...I love Bill, more than anything,” she said. “And I’m sad for him, but I treasure the time we have more than I dread...the end. But to think of you, with all your power, to see me and love me...and be able to make me love you...why didn’t you?”
Her generous spirit truly was unquenchable. To empathize with me for not dominating her, to try to understand my motivation for not forcing her to love me, while in the grip of such crushing grief...she truly was a jewel.
“I couldn’t bring myself to,” I said, slowly. “It would be like...” I waved my hands fruitlessly in an attempt to explain. “It would be like hacking the Mona Lisa out of its frame and hanging it up in my bedroom. I could not bring myself to violate such purity for my own selfish ends.”
I looked away. “If I had done it, and I had looked into your eyes, and seen love and devotion and compassion, and known it was all a lie...I wouldn’t be able to go on living, knowing I had desecrated something like you.”
I was forced from my reverie by a gentle kiss on the cheek. Shocked, I looked back at Ashley, leaning back into her seat. Her eyes brimmed with tears once more, but she was smiling again. “That’s why I like you,” she said. “For all you put yourself down...and you do, a lot,” she added, raising an eyebrow good-naturedly, “you really are a good person.”
I tried to smile back, but my heart just wasn’t in it. “There is something I can do, though,” I said, so softly she almost couldn’t hear me. “Bill has cancer, metastasized...fatal?”
“Yes,” she said. A tear dripped from her eye, but her expression remained steady. She wiped it off quickly.
“Not anymore,” I said. My thoughts tingled in my head, power flickering invisibly around me, as I reshaped reality. “In the morning, the doctors will be mystified to find that his cancer has gone into complete remission.” Ashley’s eyes bugged wide, and her mouth slowly started to open. “Within three weeks, there will be no evidence that there ever even was cancer there. He will be healthy, and pure, and...ready to marry you without a time limit hanging over his head.”
I looked back at Ashley. Her eyes were positively alight, and her smile was lit up like a beacon. “You really...?” she breathed.
I nodded. “Think of it as a wedding present,” I said.
She sprang from her seat and latched onto me, hugging me with tremendous strength for such a slender girl. She kissed me again on the cheek, then stood up and backed off. I followed her gaze to the hospital down the street.
She met my eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.
The sheer emotion she put into those two words brought tears to my own eyes. She took a step or two towards the hospital, with an anxious expression. I nodded wordlessly. With one last smile, she tore off down the sidewalk, dashing across cross-streets, until she burst through the doors of the hospital.
I remained where I was, not moving, still feeling the impression of her kiss on my cheek, for a very long time.
I’m scared all the time.
Scared about what I could become if I let things slip. About what I, with my power, could truly do if I lost some of my standards. If I lost my humanity. If I allowed myself to lose control.
Sometimes I get asked things like “Why do you still eat?” “Why do you still breathe?” “If you can teleport, or fly, or do whatever you want, why do you still drive around?” “Why, with everything else you still do, don’t you sleep?” Actually, I do sleep. I just stop time before I nod off, so I can enjoy a refreshing twelve-hour nap without having lost any real time. It just appears that I don’t sleep, is all.
But the real answer to these questions is fear, primal fear. Sure, I could go without eating, or sleeping, and I could just teleport everywhere I wanted to go in a puff of smoke. But with every step I took towards optimizing myself, towards losing the shackles of the flesh, I would take a step away from my own humanity. My soul.
If I stopped eating, sleeping, traveling, breathing, I would have less and less in common with the rest of the humans on Earth. Pretty soon, I might find myself beginning to wonder why I still interacted with them face-to-face, when it would be so much more efficient to appear with a thunderbolt from on high or as a disembodied voice, booming out over the horizon.
Pretty soon, I would wonder why I even bothered with having a body, if I wasn’t going to use it for anything much. And then, what would I become? Some kind of cosmic deva, floating in the stars, unbodied, unaffected by such petty human concepts as morality, joy, hope. Merely a vessel for my great power, dispensing it only with eyes to the cosmic consonance, losing sight of all the infinite small sparks of life and happiness that make this universe the jewel it is. That’s what I’m scared of.
But in addition to fear, there is also pain.
I frequent a café known as Spanner’s, in Albany. It’s outside of the hustle and bustle that is New York City (in a million inhabited worlds, you may be interested to know, I’ve never encountered another place quite like the Big Apple. It’s just so...vibrant.), but still metropolitan enough not to make me completely lose interest. And the food is good, with good service. A little overpriced, but really, that’s not exactly a priority of mine.
The real reason I go, though, well...you might call it the service. I call her Ashley Simms. One of the waitresses. Beautiful girl – flaming red hair, freckles, delightfully pale white skin, and a smile that could bring cheer to a patient with terminal cancer. Her hazel eyes sparkle “as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,” to quote one of the finest wordsmiths to ever put pen to paper. Yes, yes, she also has fantastic tits and an ass that just won’t quit, but I admire her beauty more than I admire her sex appeal.
Yet more stunning than her physical beauty is her vibrant spirit. I’ve known her for two years now, since I became a regular at this place, and yet every time I enter I’m stunned afresh at the sheer radiance of her presence. She’s never without her smile, her disarmingly nice nature defusing even the most annoying patrons, with no hint of sarcasm or bitterness.
She takes a genuine interest in all those she associates with. If ever time permitted during her hectic work schedule, I’m fairly confident I could sit her down and tell her my life’s story, up until I became Protector, and at the end she would smile brightly and thank me warmly for sharing with her. And she’d remember every detail.
All right, all right. Nobody's that perfect. I admit that she probably has some kind of terrible flaw, some imperfection, some bad quality about her, but for all my power, I am unable to see it. To me, she is the very definition of perfect excellence.
I have it for her, and bad. As you may have imagined. It’s not just her attractiveness. Hell, with a snap of my finger, I could magically conjure up ten girls proportioned to my exact specifications and thinking only of my pleasure. (I did once. Didn’t leave my house for eight weeks straight.) Ashley is pure and perfect in every way I can detect, mentally and physically. Given the general tenor of the universe as it relates to my love life, though, she thinks of me only as a good friend. Not that friendship with such a marvelous girl is bad, but to see her so close and yet such a distance away can become an agonizing thing.
Ashley is a jewel among dross. So, of course, she has a boyfriend, Bill. She rarely mentions him to me – I get the feeling that she sort of knows I have a thing for her, so she doesn’t bring him up much – but as far as I can tell, they’ve been dating since before I met her. For a long time, I cherished hope that she would break up with him for one reason or another, and I would be there to catch her as she fell, but it eventually became obvious that I should not hold my breath.
This brings me to the fear. See, my power allows me to do almost anything. I can reshape planets, consume stars...tear a galaxy in half. It would be absolutely effortless of me to simply twist a thought in her mind – and direct all her passion for Bill towards me. The temptation will arise when she gives me a brief hug as she leaves the restaurant at the end of her shift, or when she leaves an extra mint with my receipt and a little smiley face drawn on the bill.
I could do it in an instant. To see it happen...to see the look on her face, confused briefly, then changing to an expression of pure joy and radiance, the thought of this miracle is enough to strain my will to the breaking point. The only things holding me in check is my unshakable belief that it is the most grievous of sins to subvert the will of another, and my appreciation and respect for her as a person that is far too great to allow me to impose my will over hers.
Still, though, sometimes I want to do it so badly it leaves me trembling, and I have to get up and leave quickly lest I do something I will forever regret. I mean, yes, if I had a moment of weakness, I could undo what I had done, or even go back in time and fix things so that I never succumbed, but the stain of performing such an act would be on my soul for all my life. And I will live a very long time.
Today was different, though. I noticed as soon as I entered. She moved as though in a dream. Distracted. Her mind elsewhere. Her famous smile was still in place, but she had a strange look in her eyes that I had never seen before.
Upon seeing me, Ashley brightened up and approached.
“Hey, you,” she said playfully. “Table for one, again?”
“You know me,” I said. “The loneliest number yet again, I’m afraid.” She giggled and showed me to an empty table. It wasn’t my favorite – an elderly French couple occupied my preferred table near the window – but it was in just the spot for the setting sun to shine down upon me. She always did have a knack for this sort of thing. It’s one of the things that made her a good waitress, and a good friend.
As she turned to get my lemonade (I always ordered the same thing, to the point where I no longer had to order), I saw her eyes cloud over again, like they had been when I had entered. What was different? I sat back in my chair and pondered. If this guy Bill had hurt her, I decided, well...hoo boy, was he gonna be in for it.
A sparkle from her direction caught my eye, and I saw it. A ring of silver, with a small diamond set in an intricate pattern of sigils, adorned her fourth finger on her right hand.
Oh fuck.
I thought I had long since abandoned any thoughts of going out with her, but the finality of the engagement ring I glimpsed was like being hit with a truck. I sagged in my seat. All the small displays of affection she had shown me over the years – the hugs, the brief touches on the arm, the warm smiles – rose up in me like bile. This was it. My last, desperate hope had finally turned to ash and cinders with a single gleam.
So caught up was I in my own pain that I barely noticed her arriving back with my mozzarella sticks. Morose as I was, I vaguely registered someone saying something to me. With an effort, I snapped back into the real world.
“You okay?” she said, her brow wrinkled with concern. “Are you feeling well?”
Summoning up all the fortitude within me, I cleared my expression and returned to her with a smile nearly as sunny as her traditional one. “I’m okay, Ashley,” I said. “Just lost in thought.” Her smile returned at the news. “Say...” I said, pointing at her ring finger. “Didn’t notice that before. Did Bill finally pop the question?”
I expected an explosion of giggles and a quick confirmation, before she scuttled off to do her duties. What I didn’t expect was for her brow to furrow again, and her eyes to drop.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “He did. I’m...” She blinked once, twice. “I’m so happy,” she said, and I have never once heard a person say that phrase with such conviction and yet so obviously mean it so little.
“Are you all right?” I said, leaning forward.
“Yes,” Ashley said, shaking her head slightly. “It’s just...well, I’ll talk to you about it later,” she murmured, turning away to one of her other tables. As she went, I watched her wipe her eyes on the back of her hand.
What on earth was going on here?
(Yes, I could have used my power to read her mind and find out, but not only is that taking another step away from humanity, it’s a gross invasion of privacy, something I’m not at all comfortable with.)
I waited until her shift was over, I knew how late she worked on Wednesdays. I was sitting outside Spanner’s in one of their wire-mesh chairs next to their wire-mesh tables, topped with an umbrella that might as well have been made of wire-mesh for all the protection it gave from the elements.
Ashley emerged, absent-mindedly taking off her nametag, and sat down next to me looking downcast. She sniffled slightly and fiddled with her nametag.
“What’s wrong?” I asked pointedly. “You just got engaged, shouldn’t you...y’know...be happier about it?”
“I am!” she said sharply. She turned to face me. “I love Bill. I have for a long time now. I’ve waited for this day for years, but...” She turned away again.
“What?” I said. “Did he hurt you?” Part of me wanted nothing more than to locate and absolve her pain for her, yet another, perverse part of me wanted her to tell me how badly he had wronged her, so I might descend from on high and mete out righteous punishment.
“No.” Ashley looked up, her eyes brimming. “See...I never told you. Bill has stomach cancer.” My eyes widened. Ah... “The doctors...” She sniffled again. “The doctors just told him that it has definitely turned fatal. They only gave him three months to live.” She took the ring off her finger and held it in the palm of her hand, the streetlights glittering off of it.
“He...he gave this to me...he said he wanted to get married quickly, so he could...” She broke down sobbing and fell into my arms. I held her while her chest heaved, doing my absolute dead-level best to ignore how fantastic she looked even while wracked with grief. After a minute or so, Ashley calmed down some, and sat back into her seat.
“He gave this to me...he said he wanted to get married so that he could die a happy man,” she said in a hollow voice.
It is an unfortunate measure of my imperfect character that part of me cheered at this pronouncement. She obviously loved him dearly, but a person can only stay attached to a dead man for so long, before the land of the living and the close friends with unrequited feelings make themselves apparent. It might take years, but what did I have if not time? Banishing these thoughts with a disgusted shake of my head, I leaned in closer.
“That’s very noble of him,” I said softly. “I hate to see you like this...” Wiping her eyes, Ashley nodded. “You obviously love him, and it’s terrible that it has to happen this way. If there was anything I could do, I-”
I stopped, stunned at my own words. Had the impact of gaining my power truly not sunk in yet? It would be so simple...but I would have to reveal myself. My secret is very, very closely guarded, and I hesitated long before divulging this even to my very closest of friends.
I was going to offer more hollow condolences, when I looked up and into her eyes. She was puzzled at my cutoff in mid-sentence, waiting for me to continue. Her watery, red-rimmed eyes decided for me. I could not see those eyes burdened with such grief any longer, even if it meant revealing my true nature to her.
“I, uh...I actually have a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. Even as I spoke, I cursed myself for my insensitivity. Her fiancée, who she loves deeply, is dying, and I had the unmitigated gall to bring up my own subjects. But it is a testament to her wonderful personality that she dried her eyes and awaited my words, attentively. Ever considerate, she was (and is), ever thoughtful, ever pushing away her own needs to help and comfort others. What could I do in the face of such nobility?
“I’m...” I was going to ease into this, but damn everything, sometimes bluntness was called for. “I have something I have to admit,” I said quietly. Ashley said nothing, confused. I soldiered on. “I’m the Protector of the Universe,” I said.
Her confused expression segued into one of utter amazement. I could see the questions in her mind, without using telepathy or anything. Why is he wasting my time with games now? Before she had a chance to speak, I acted. My eyes flashed.
Her eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly. I had imparted into her the tiniest fragment of cosmic quintessence – for a fraction of a nanosecond, she saw all reality, all the universe, and my place in it. She saw who I really was.
The sensation faded. The knowledge did not. Her mouth closed, but her eyes remained wide. “You really are...” she breathed. I nodded.
“There’s something else I have to admit,” I said, hesitantly. “I...I love you.”
Her eyes softened. “You do...?” she said quietly.
“Yes, I do,” I said, fully aware of how useless and futile I was sounding. “I have, for...some time now.” I gazed into her eyes, full of so much emotion. “But you don’t love me. You love Bill. You see me as a friend,” I continued, each word feeling as if it was ripped from my soul.
She said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“You have no idea...how difficult it’s been, with what I can do,” I said. “The temptation to just change your mind...it’s been slowly killing me for a long time.”
“Why didn’t you?” she said softly.
I was taken aback. I could not answer.
“I mean...I love Bill, more than anything,” she said. “And I’m sad for him, but I treasure the time we have more than I dread...the end. But to think of you, with all your power, to see me and love me...and be able to make me love you...why didn’t you?”
Her generous spirit truly was unquenchable. To empathize with me for not dominating her, to try to understand my motivation for not forcing her to love me, while in the grip of such crushing grief...she truly was a jewel.
“I couldn’t bring myself to,” I said, slowly. “It would be like...” I waved my hands fruitlessly in an attempt to explain. “It would be like hacking the Mona Lisa out of its frame and hanging it up in my bedroom. I could not bring myself to violate such purity for my own selfish ends.”
I looked away. “If I had done it, and I had looked into your eyes, and seen love and devotion and compassion, and known it was all a lie...I wouldn’t be able to go on living, knowing I had desecrated something like you.”
I was forced from my reverie by a gentle kiss on the cheek. Shocked, I looked back at Ashley, leaning back into her seat. Her eyes brimmed with tears once more, but she was smiling again. “That’s why I like you,” she said. “For all you put yourself down...and you do, a lot,” she added, raising an eyebrow good-naturedly, “you really are a good person.”
I tried to smile back, but my heart just wasn’t in it. “There is something I can do, though,” I said, so softly she almost couldn’t hear me. “Bill has cancer, metastasized...fatal?”
“Yes,” she said. A tear dripped from her eye, but her expression remained steady. She wiped it off quickly.
“Not anymore,” I said. My thoughts tingled in my head, power flickering invisibly around me, as I reshaped reality. “In the morning, the doctors will be mystified to find that his cancer has gone into complete remission.” Ashley’s eyes bugged wide, and her mouth slowly started to open. “Within three weeks, there will be no evidence that there ever even was cancer there. He will be healthy, and pure, and...ready to marry you without a time limit hanging over his head.”
I looked back at Ashley. Her eyes were positively alight, and her smile was lit up like a beacon. “You really...?” she breathed.
I nodded. “Think of it as a wedding present,” I said.
She sprang from her seat and latched onto me, hugging me with tremendous strength for such a slender girl. She kissed me again on the cheek, then stood up and backed off. I followed her gaze to the hospital down the street.
She met my eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.
The sheer emotion she put into those two words brought tears to my own eyes. She took a step or two towards the hospital, with an anxious expression. I nodded wordlessly. With one last smile, she tore off down the sidewalk, dashing across cross-streets, until she burst through the doors of the hospital.
I remained where I was, not moving, still feeling the impression of her kiss on my cheek, for a very long time.
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