Lucid Waking

Archive for the ‘Mystery’ Category

Betelgeuse VII: Suspicions

            “Twenty four hours ago I was free as a bird,” she said, toting the cliché ball and chain across the concrete floor. “My only offense was that I was too human.” She sat down with a rusty creak on a lone plastic chair and stared into the video camera.
            “As soon as they got the hang of making robots and could make them at low cost, they started perfecting them. That’s what they do with everything don’t they? Once they’ve got the technique down, they try making it better. So, then models of new robots came out for people to buy for only one or two hundred. They made them sensitive to heat and cold and basic emotions. They figured out how to get them to simulate the language process and speak without a programmed speech. Every model was one-upping the other model another company made. But things started getting really bad when emotions came into play. That was the door separating robots from humans and some idiot had to go find the key. Soon, robots had emotions like fear, hatred, love, jealousy, and frustration. They became less and less perfect and more flawed. Eventually, we were making humans from metal scraps and ethics got involved. The simple strive for perfection went up in political flames and people were quoting everything from the Greek mythology to The Terminator to make their point. Physical and intellectual guns went off in all directions and this bloody “coup d’état” lasted for about a decade. Then, without warning, they boxed up robots like me and started from scratch remaking robots from the first models. Some they shut off, others were hired for small jobs: flipping hamburgers, emptying garbage, and so on. Still others were kept in deliberate hiding until the time came to coup them up in jail for imaginary crimes. That’s what happened to me. If you look at my record it’ll say I’m in here for smuggling drugs, but the only way the established that was after a doctor examination. They never mention why you’re really here but deep down inside you know it’s because you’re a robot. You know it’s because you’re different. And that’s just wrong.”
            The tape flickered out to black and then flashed back to static. Dr. Cindy Lawson rewound the tape and ejected it out of the player. She turned to the teenage boy, Aaron, who had brought this to her and handed it back to him. His long black hair was deliberately placed over his eyes and in one fast motion he brushed his hair to one side and grabbed the tape.
            “You realize the evidence you brought to me,” she said sitting down.
            He nodded, but remained silent. She sighed in frustration and stared into his blue eyes like a cat staring down its prey. He looked up.
            “She doesn’t exist. Her records will not be in the computer as dead or alive. She’s an illegal model. I can’t do anything to get your girlfriend out. Besides,” Cindy said putting the file folder back, “if she’s a robot there’s even less I can do. There are no more laws on robots protecting them from the government. For the future, any marriage or relationship is null according to government standards. If you do succeed in having children, you’ll set the whole world in an uproar, again.”
            Aaron looked at her with a greater ferocity and said coldly: “She’s not a robot.”
            Cindy jerked her head back in surprise, but kept her gaze. “What?”
            “I said: she’s not a robot. She only thinks she is. She’s human. I think they brainwashed her in that ‘doctor visit’ and made her think she was a robot. Besides, there’s no proof that the 700’s even know that they aren’t 100% human.”
            “Do you have any proof that she’s human? Right now, it’s your word against theirs.”
            “Are you in? I’m not going to waste my time if you won’t help me.”
            “Right now, I’m a third uninvolved party.”
            He looked at her skeptically, but continued, whisking his head to the side to get his hair out of his eyes. “I have written and oral accounts of her from school and other stuff. I even managed to steal some of her records out of various filing cabinets from the organizations she was involved in. Even medical records and everything says she was human. Then she disappeared and I get this tape in the mail saying that she’s a robot.”
            “Why did you have her records in the first place?”
            “We were planning on running away to Betelgeuse VII,” he said quietly, “and we needed our records to relocate.”
            Cindy sighed and pulled out a pad of yellow paper. “It’s probably much more complicated than that,” she said, “she probably needed help and just so no one would suspect anything, she put clues in the video.”
            “Exactly,” he said pointing his finger at her emphatically and leaning back in the chair.
            “In which case,” Cindy continued, “she is still human and she knows she is human. What we need to figure out is why she sent this cry for help.”
            “We?”
            She ignored him and pulled out a pen from the pencil cup on her desk. “What sort of organizations was she involved in?”
            He paused and stared at his shoes. “Well, she was a big supporter of the Robot Equality Act of 2029. When people signed petitions to get it changed, she signed just about all of them. If it came to politics, she was always talking about how robots should be treated like people and they should relocate them to other planets and do other exploration advances because some of the older new models never age and they don’t die. She was always seeing things that humans could do and what robots could do. I used to tell her that there weren’t enough jobs for all the people in the world, let alone robots, too, but it was like talking to a brick wall. The only thing we truly disagreed on was that subject. Nothing else is worth noting. Except maybe the supplementary mafia.”
            “Supplementary mafia?”
            “Sorry,” he said laughing a little, “it’s an underground organization that gives a time limit on people’s existence. Basically, the person that has not had a job for six years and does nothing but sit in his parents’ basement all day will have a horrible accident in the next few days if he doesn’t change his ways. They consider it cleaning out the gene pool. Trish joined most likely for people who would be racist, bigoted, or generally rude. It would give her the power to anonymously threaten them. She never killed anyone though, she would only use it as a harmless outlet for her anger.”
            Cindy eyed him cautiously and surreptitiously checked her watch. “Well, we had better get going if we’re going to catch an air bus.”
            He stood up quickly and gave her a frightened look. “Where to?”
            “Betelgeuse VII.”

To be continued…

Lost Richard

More at a later date… Please don’t comment, yet

            “Every night I used to do the same thing. I would make sure the lights were off, the curtains drawn, the house locked. And I would check to make sure he was all right before I went to bed. Sometimes he would wake up and tell me not to worry. I didn’t want to worry I just…and then, he…”
            She pulled a cotton handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed her eyes for a moment before giving up and sobbing into it. Her muffled wet sniffs and sobs filled the room, sobs like a small child and quite loud too, reminding Michael of a baby squirrel calling out into the early morning for its mother.
            “And then?” Michael patiently said when her sobs had quieted down. He picked up her teacup from the rim and handed it to her. She looked at him with large, wet, green eyes, but didn’t take the cup.
            “He was gone,” she chocked going back into her sobbing convulsions into the handkerchief. Charlotte Winston was an aspiring young actress who lived in the southern reaches of London in a small townhouse with her son, Richard. She was a delicate woman with large red lips and frizzy blond hair. Her body was long and slender and moved gracefully, even as her shoulders bobbed up and down to her sobs.
            “Do you know what happened to him?” Michael asked putting the cup down on the table between them.
            “If I knew do you think I would be coming to you?” she yelled, hysterically.
            Michael took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched his fists. He stood up and looked out the window at the carriages driving by. He heard her loudly slurp down some tea from her cup and place it back down with a loud clank of china.
            “No I don’t know where he went.” She sniffed. “I just went to his room to wake him up for school and he wasn’t there.”
            “Anybody who would want to kidnap your son for any reason at all?”
            She placed her head delicately on her hand and looked up at the ceiling. “No I don’t think so. All the teachers at his school have loved to have Richard in their classes, but I don’t think they would kidnap him. My family…well if they even recognize him as part of the family at all, they wouldn’t dare take him from my home. Most of them don’t even look at him. No, there’s no one who would dare do that.” She poured another great deal of milk into her tea and gulped it down.
            “What about the father?”
            She paused and stared at the tea in her cup. “I don’t know his father. I was too drunk to tell a bed from a chair.”
            She looked up at him, her lip pouted out and her eyes large, as if expecting him to pass some sort of unwanted judgment. Michael just walked behind the chair and placed both teacups on a tray by the door.
            “I’ll see what I can do.”

The Swan’s Secret

More coming, of course…

            Papers were strewn all over the floor in a carpet and were flying across the floor above the wind that billowed through the window opening. Bottles of ink were shattered and smeared across several dozen empty parchment sheets. Chairs lay on their sides from the impact of a fall and table legs were dented from the impact of something heavy smashing against it. The bed sheets were splattered with ink from the wet papers flying across it and quills were ripped and stabbed into the floor. A large white swan lay on the bed covers, its beak soiled with ink, its head resting gracefully on the pillow. Lady Catherine looked at the creature’s barely moving ribcage as it laid facing away from her, completely docile.
            “Get Ann,” she barked to her soldiers behind her, “tell her she needs to bring a bucket of water and a brush.”
            Silently, two of her men at the back turned down the stairs and disappeared around the stone pillar rising in the center of the spiral staircase. Catherine sighed stepped around the papers as best she could. She pushed a piece of auburn hair behind her ear and approached the bed. The air smelled of potent magic and she could hear the faint buzz of a new spell between the crinkles of the paper in the wind. A large gust blew her into the bed post as a mysterious vile slid off the table and shattered on the floor in a sickening crash. The swan raised its head to glance at the vile as a small pink fire started in the papers, but it didn’t move anything else and lay its head down again on the pillow. Catherine sat down and felt the bed give under her weight. She rubbed the bedpost thoughtfully remembering the day she was sworn in as Captain of the Guard. She had been sitting on the bed at age eighteen and was being congratulated by the old captain of the guard and Lady Selena for saving an entire army section from a spell. It was just luck, she had thought at the time, but she knew better. In fact, if she hadn’t been scouting around enemy lines or got caught, the outcome of the war would have been quite different.
            “Oh, my,” Catherine heard Ann cry quietly as she put down the bucket with a faint thud and started on her hands and knees collecting papers. Catherine pulled her hand down from the bedpost quickly and looked at the swan.
            “Can you feel it?” Catherine asked her, reaching out a gauntleted hand towards the bird.
            Ann nodded and her curly hair bounced. “Clear as day. Seems like a wisp wizard, but I’m not sure.”
            “Or a shifter.” Catherine put her hand on the bird and lifted up the wing with her other hand. “There, there,” she comforted wiping away the silvery residue of the spell from the bird. It stuck to her hand like spider webs, but she rubbed her hands together until they stuck to the palm of her hand in a single thick string.  She picked it up just as easily and cradled it in her arms, watching Ann’s expression carefully.
            “Don’t give me that look,” Ann said wrinkling her nose, but keeping her head down. She was the only servant who would dare talk to the Commander General of the Army that way and she was probably the only servant who could get away with it. Ann had met Catherine when she was sworn in and assumed position as captain. But when Ann told her she was Lady Serena’s advisor, who stayed as a servant for safety reasons, Catherine was more than critical. However, it was advantageous to have help from a highly qualified mage to manage an orc problem that was terrorizing the town. Catherine rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh.
            “So you haven’t a clue.”
            Ann shook her head and gathered up the ink in new glass pots with a quick wave of her hand and a small burst of purple light. She splashed a bit of water on the pink fire, which went out in a curl of smoke and placed the new inkwells in a circle. She stood up and waved her hand to gather all of the papers in a pile on the table. Another wave sent the bottles of ink into another group next to the papers. She brushed off her apron in two neat little pats and walked over to the table.
            “Obviously that swan is Lady Serena.”
            Catherine looked down her armor at the bird in her arms. “Given a sedative.”
            “Don’t be so mundane,” Ann bent down and lifted the bird by balancing it on her forearms. She carefully placed the bird on the floor and pulled out a piece of chalk from her apron.
            “What do you know of the Wisp wizards and the shifters?”
            Catherine snorted indignantly. “Not much. Wisp wizards were shifters that talked to the dead and can travel back and forth between death and life. They have legends of this shifter who learned necromancy and spoke with the dead. He made a deal with some death god and was granted permission to travel back and forth between life and death.”
            “Uh, yes. They are the messengers of the dead. Much as we have a mail service, they are the mail service to the underworld. They also have pilgrimages to discuss treaties with dead kings and living ones. Sometimes the dead can’t stay dead and manage to hire one to finish their dirty work while they are living. What about shifters?”
            “Shifters? Isn’t it obvious? They change their form of the form of others.”
            “Not just that,” Ann sat down on the chair and pulled her blond hair out of her face. “That’s the only magic they can do. None of this wind stuff,” she waved her hand in a nonchalant way about the room. “But, shifters are the only ones that can change the shape of something,” she said pointing at the swan on the floor.
            The swan was now sitting in a cage of blue light, flapping its wings wildly, a sort of fear and fury in its eyes.
            “I suggest you call off the troops,” Ann said smiling.
            Catherine got up and went towards the door. “No further orders; continue training. Lieutenant, take three of your troops to guard the foot of the stairs. Dismiss.” Clanking metal armor confirmed her orders and she closed the door when she got back in the room. Ann had rested her head on her thumbs and was lightly touching her index fingers on her head.
            “So about that sedative,” she said. She smiled maliciously, but didn’t face Catherine. “It wasn’t a sedative, it was a demon structure. They use them to make sure no one dismisses the spell. If another spell is used, the demon is released and the body our Lady is contained in goes berserk. They keep the second body quite, sleepy, to make sure nothing happens to it.”
            Catherine turned, horrified to the swan pushing its neck through the cage bars and slamming its body in full force to its cage. The blue bars of the cage cut into the skin between the feathers and when the bird pulled back for that moment, Catherine could see blood dripping down the snow white feathers.
            “They usually stop when a deal is met or her time is served,” Ann said, continuing to watch, without moving.
            Catherine nodded. “Ann, tell me what you found out.”
            Ann turned to look at her, frowning.
            “Now,” Catherine said forcefully.
            Ann instinctively sat up straight in the chair as a slight fear gripped her. And this is what she’s like as commander, she realized standing up and gathering her composure. She walked over to the bed and pulled out a coin from underneath the pillow. “I can’t be in the room when you read it,” Ann said sadly bending down to enlarge the chalk ring in the room and lightly breaking the smaller one. The cage popped open to accommodate the larger side but the bird still thrashed against it. “I already know of the agreement and swore not to tell. If anything happens, I didn’t tell you about this. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to stay here.”
            “Wait, Ann. How does this work?”
            “Wait for the moon.”
            Another gust of wind blew into the room and whistled through the bars of the cage, but didn’t knock anything over. Catherine nodded and flew out of the room and down the stairs.
            “Go back to training,” she said as she passed the guards at the bottom of the stairs. They walked off in clanks of metal as she ran the opposite way to the camps. The air was still outside and had a faint fresh smell of garlic from the kitchen. Birds chirped in the trees and the sun shone down on the field. She stepped cautiously into her tent and sat down on her cot. Sighing, she placed the coin in her trunk and locked it in. With the click of the lock she heard the leaves of the trees rustle and a scrabbling at her tent. Ever alert, she pulled out her dagger and waited. The shadow of someone about her height walked around her tent, bent down to either track, scope, or see if she was inside. Adrenaline rushed through her veins and she waited carefully, embracing the energy inside her. Soon, whomever it was rushed off as suddenly as they had come and the sun dimmed for a brief second. She waited inside her tent for a little while longer, until she knew there was no one there and trotted off towards the barracks.