Category: Writing

First let me start out that I played a lot of video games. Not as many as some, but probably more than a lot of you. I would say I was an expert of a sort. I know what the tropes are, I can describe the motivations in level design, and I could be considered a source of authority on aesthetics and user interaction. A great example I could point to is the level design of the classic Half Life or Left 4 Dead. If you see a light in a dark hallway, that is usually the level designer attempting to entice you towards the next part of the map. Progression through appealing to our monkey brains.

But some of the best games take our monkey brains and expose their soft pink folds to something else.

A fear of deep water as you tread away at the surface. Dark shapes beneath you, unmoving, yet aware. The thrum of a noise you feel in your chest more than what your soft delicate ears can pick up. That is where terror lives. Screaming, throwing hands up and down, tossing leaves, and baring teeth because running away means that you are the prey. You are the dinner. I know this too. I am expert of a sort.

I wonder how many monkeys were eaten before our fur covered ancestors learned to make weapons? How many poor screaming scared creatures met their end between the jaws of something larger? Monkey teeth are sharp, but those predator teeth… the ones long as swords and serrated like steak knives, those are something else.

The game that I speak of is Subnautica. I have played it from start to finish at least four times, exploring every nook, every cranny, every square meter of the digital world. I have conquered the Leviathans, I have scared off the small and large predators, and I have built farms and resource harvesters in the deepest places of the game world. I have dropped my Seamoth of the crater edge to see how many Ghost Leviathans I can spawn in before I lose my nerve. I dart into the deepest Leviathan spawns in the map as well, swimming right up to the beasts, scanning them, smacking them with my ineffectual heat knife and swimming away before they can kill my character in revenge. I used to laugh about such things.

I have beat the game in every way. I have conquered the puzzles, the resources, the builds… everything.

That is why I am writing this down. Well part of the reason anyway. I have been told to write it down. But I wanted to to assure you.

To let you know that your monkey brain is not prepared.

I thought a couple weeks ago, that I should do it again. I said to myself, Hey Self.

Self went, Hey what?

I continued, We haven’t beat Subnautica in the last year. Maybe reinstall it?

Too bad you can’t flush the memories of playing it, but it would still be better than half of the games the triple A studios are vomiting on the market.

Self went, Hell yeah. Let’s do it, irrational voice in my head.

A couple right clicks here, a couple left clicks there, and boom, Steam had installed it and thanks to my fast internet, I had the game at my fingertips again. Time to dive into Safe Shallows, start scanning, and find as much Titanium wreckage as I could to get a jump on builds and the blueprints. I can kind of trick myself into finding the wrecks, stumbling into them in a roundabout way, feigning surprise and scanning what I can. I can race my O2 timer, and usually play a little loose, knowing exactly how long it takes to take damage. In the past, I have enforced rules that the game designers may not have intended, like I only play with the progression that is forced on me through the narrative, and not just grab as much as I can ahead of time… in effect racing the designer’s intent. I decided to play it that way again, and not rush through.

But now… I am questioning my sanity. Because the game is different. I checked the patch notes, nothing new since my last playthrough. The developers had not changed the game version at all. Yet, here I was, in the Safe Shallows, and I could hear something else.

A thrum.

A thrum that has never been there before. My monkey brain immediately cried out, shrieking its loud monkey scream, and the thrum persisted. It filled my ears, my consciousness, my all. Exploring in the cardinal directions, I could hear it getting stronger to the south, a little west. There is typically a leviathan over there called a Reaper. They are designed to scare first time players, but relatively tame if you know what not to do. It spawns in early and will destroy your first sub called a Seamoth if you let it.

I swam that way, following the sound instead of turning the game off, as I should have.

I found the Reaper dead, floating on its back, with strange graphic fidelity another creature eating away at its carcass. That was a massive red flag. Creatures do not have eating animations in Subnautica. A larger creature will collide with a smaller creature, there will be a flash of green-ish blood, and then the smaller one will be gone. You don’t see a Sand Shark chewing away merrily on a Boomerang Fish. But there, on my monitor, there was a black thing wrapped around the red and orange Reaper like a boa constrictor, mechanically chewing away at the midsection. This was no game model I had ever witnessed.

It looked real.

I hit my screenshot hotkey, but Steam told me that it was disabled. I tried to turn on my Twitch capture, and the app wouldn’t load. I even pulled out my smart phone and tried to take a picture of my monitor, but every time I tried, my camera app only captured a blurry screen.

I couldn’t capture the black form, wrapped around the great beast, its tentacled maw shredding digital chunks of flesh. Below, there were Sea Treaders collecting the scraps that fell from the black beast’s shredding machine of a mouth, which even from this distance, appeared to be a flurry of spiked tentacles and spinning teeth.

Sea Treaders don’t eat either. They go in a circle, stomping the ground in a completely different part of the map. What the hell is going on with my game? I felt a strange distant terror in my gut, as if the scene was real, that huge dead Reaper was real, and the… thing… eating it was even more real still. Purring in the water, the thrum on the deep.

I closed the game, not even bothering to save. My heart was thumping in my ears, the rush of blood pushing on me at my desk, telling me to get up and run.

I sat in silence, forcing my heart to slow down. Once I was calm again, I got to work hitting the game wiki. I checked everywhere. I ran Google searches, I posted to the Steam forums, and I even sent an email to the developer. I found nothing but confusion, internet troll level forms of teasing, and some developer congratulations for enjoying the game so much.

I slid my mouse cursor back over Subnautica in my game list, clicking once to highlight it, wondering if I should uninstall it. I hovered.

That black thing. Its eyes were darker still, flashing from the depths of my mind. A flash of white.

The game booted and I was greeted by the peaceful and serene automated voice welcoming me back. I awaited the thrum. But only the sound of the Safe Shallows waves tapping against the hull, permeating by base. I exited the base door, and first noticed the lack of fauna it. Usually the water was teeming with small fish that made up the bottom of the food chain and the resource ladder, fish that fed the player’s character and helped with basic survival. But now, they were gone like bugs going eerily silent before a storm. In the distance, I heard the undeniable scream of a Ghost Leviathan. These monsters are only in a few key places in the world map, and spawned automatically in the ecological dead zone outside the crater of which the game takes place. They are meant to be a game design choice to keep the player where they should be, exploring the crater’s depths, and not in the vast empty nothingness beyond. Yet, just at the edge of the visual range of my character I could see the Ghost Leviathan tearing away. Perhaps it had glitched in somehow?

My rational brain was of course trying to make sense of it. But there is no sense to be made here.

A pursuing dark thing writhed through the water like it was a chemical reaction not restrained back by any semblance of fluid dynamics or the more obvious programmatic means. It grabbed the Ghost Leviathan by the tail, and enveloped it like a coiled spring, tearing into it, as the leviathan’s hollow shrieks echoed across the Elysium folds of the Safe Shallows. Thumping, bumping, and not far behind, the sea came alive with the sound of Sea Treaders following the malevolent cloud of death providing digital manna from above.

This is all beyond the programming, the design, the epitome of the experience. I know it is a game. I repeat it over and over, like it is a holy mantra. I mutter it under my breath like a forgotten exhalation escaping from between my lips, counter to my aspirations. It sounds far away to my own ears. I flee back to my Seamoth, and head towards the deeper waters.

The vines part, the scattered fish scurry onwards, trying to flee the terror behind. The sandy plains open up below, their red grasses waving as the sand sharks gnash and writhe. I pull into the dark crevice that marks the entry to the deeper biomes… the Lost River is far below me. Warpers drift here and there in the dark, I can hear them even though I cannot see them. Above a shadow eclipses my craft, and I pull my Seamoth as close to the walls as I can, hearing the titanium hull scrape. The writhing black mass sluices past, diving for the deeps. Did it follow me? So far, it has seemed to ignored my presence.

I spun my Seamoth in place to head back to the Safe Shallows. My craft did not move forward.

Black lines creep across the glass, vines of horror foretelling the onset of death.

What can I do? I ask myself mutely. Inwardly I know what my fingers should do to control the game, but my mind blanks, stalling against the muscle memory at my fingertips. My Seamoth slides backwards towards the crushing depth, the blue azure light fading above. I know I could escape the craft, but I also realize that the horror will only grab me and drag me along.

This was not the design.

This is terror. I pushed away from my desk, breathing heavily, but I cannot take my eyes away from my monitor. I reached for the power button, my fingers shaking.

Thalassophobia. That is what it is called. My monkey brain knows that dark things used to prowl the deep waters of the Earth. And here in this virtual world, those dark things have found a new home. A way to feed on those monkeys from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I screamed, pushing the power button over and over, smashing it as if it is a living thing itself.

The button does nothing. The light of the water fades, as my monitor goes black, and the thrumming drowns out everything else through the soundbar on my desk, the bass making my mouse click as it vibrates the wood.

I know, in my core, that this is only a game. I knew it then, and I know it now.

Isn’t it?

But… what if it isn’t? What if there is something real here? Between the lines of code, residing in the darkened pixels on my screen… an apex predator lies in wait? If I tore my eyes away from the animation of the crushing dark, would I be able to?

With ironic horror, I realize that this is what a deer feels as a car barrels towards it in the dark.

I am only a deer.

I submit, and I feel the terror consume me. I tip backwards in the chair, and my walls writhe, the darkness consumes… everything.

I haven’t touched a computer since. The therapist says I am getting better, but I am not. The darkness writhes everywhere I look. The terror was not a single event, a challenge to escape, it is the outcome. I am nothing more than a meal that continues to struggle it its machine maw.

The invisible leviathan thrums still. I feel it in my bones. My soul is awash in its feasting from, it is only a matter of time until I nothing more than a catatonic husk of my former self. The sea treaders must be nearby, waiting for the chunks to drift downwards.

Thrum.

Thrum.

Thrum.

“Will I feel anything when I wake up? Or nothing?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say nothing. You will definitely feel something. The AmaPharm neuroblockers can only do so much, and eventually, we will need your nervous system to interface with the, uh huh, AtoZ interface,” Doctor Priat said, quickly shaking his head and mumbling, “I really need to come up with a better explanation. Marketing should have something I can use…”

“It sounds fine. I am just worried about the pain. I have heard it hurts.”

The doctor shrugged. “Pain is normal. It’s the future, we all have pain now. Not like it used to be. When I was a kid, you would get a cocktail of drugs for medical procedures, rolling through the Oxys, the Norcos or the Fentanyl, all the different versions of opiods that the modern drug market could produce. They even had a card, a diagram of pain scales showing this scrunched up red face all the way to a green smiling face. Like pain was a disease and not a symptom.”

“But the pain that I have…”

“I know, I know. So your pain will probably be fairly intense at the beginning, I am not going to lie to you. But it should be better than the pain you have now,” the doctor grinned.

Nelson nodded sagely, “I never thought a missing arm would hurt this much.”

“This Prime prosthetic will change your life. The pain receptors will light up like a Christmas tree at first, but remember, that’s good! Don’t let your body tell you that it’s bad. This pain means it is working. In time, that feeling of pain will shift to other sensations, like cold. Heat. Vibration. As the AtoZ interface connects in, the bioprocessor will allow to feel other things that your normal body will never feel, like magnetic fields and radiative energy. It will make you more efficient and your pick rate will sky rocket because you will be able to slave some of your autonomic hand and arm function to the fulfillment center AI. There is a reason some folks come back asking for their other arm or leg to be replaced. It can be, uh, exciting to go up those pick rate leaderboards.”

“Addictive, you mean,” Nelson frowned.

“Perhaps. Addictive is not a word that is approved by our marketing team.” Doctor Priat looked uncomfortable, plying his polymetal and ceramic fingers over the display console. They tapped rhythmically, creating an inadvertent melody as they clicked, clicked, clicked through the forms. “We have a few things you will need to sign before we can continue.”

“I have had some friends get the Alphas,” Nelson pressed.

Doctor Priat’s softly glowing eyes shifted left and then right, as if scoping for unseen cameras in his own office. “There are risks with any procedure.”

“Two guys on my rotation, too. One was retired. And the other, well he is making due as best he can.”

“It is company policy that you take the required blockers after the required workplace injury remediation, per the Logistics Preventative Unionization Act of 2047,” Doctor Priat recited in a dead monotone, which meant the fulfillment logistics AI had subsumed him. “INSERT NAME OF PATIENT, you must comply with all written and verbal instructions as specified in your Right to Be Employed Contract, signed at start date of your employment, INSERT HIRE DATE HERE. You waived all necessary rights when you clicked I Agree on the employment forms, and any corrective action requiring arbitration with the Amazon Logistics Manager, may result in punitive fines or in extreme cases, early retirement.”

Nelson quelled any further questions. The last thing he needed was one of the Amazon Logistics Manager subminds to take notice of him. He couldn’t be retired… who would look after his mom? Or his sister? No one could afford her augs, since they were congenital. Mom could barely keep up on her own blocker payments to the company. And with his new aug, he would be on the same hook. The downward spiral of augs leading to more augs leading to more blockers or… the Alphas. Watching them shake was the worst, that look of terror as they observed their bodies as if for the first time, an alien locked in side a prison that evolution had not prepared them for.

Doctor Priat’s face resumed as his own personality came back to the fore, and he immediately apologized in a half-hearted shame ridden chuckle. “Sorry about that, but you know the, uh, boss is always watching.”

“Yeah I get it,” Nelson offered, just trying to move it along. The company did not give him a choice for the arm replacement, the sooner they got it over with the better. Even though it was only a Prime arm, it was still better than no arm. Even being offered as the best the company could do, it was still a backchannel knock-off of some fancy version like the Kamen Bionics or Intugenic. It was their way of doing business. Notice what works in the Marketplace, produce their own at a cheaper rate without any of those ‘pesky patents’ getting in the way, and boom, saturate the market. The fancy arms ran the same risks, but at least those were voluntary choices. The Prime arm was probably manufactured in some place where those ‘pesky patents’ couldn’t be wholly enforced, like Malaysia or the Philippines. Wherever there were militarized police forces that could be bought and sold without much effort.

“So click ‘I Agree’. Here, here and here.” The Doctor offered the tablet, holding it so Nelson could flick his biomarker over the signature boxes. His biomarker choice like so many others was his middle finger on his right hand. So far it had not been ruled as a workplace violation, but it was only a matter of time until middle finger use was blocked via the Employee Terms and Conditions.

“I shouldn’t even have to sign. The procedure is mandatory.” Nelson sighed.

“The signature is mandatory too,” Doctor Priat smiled. “Have to keep it all on the up and up for the Ethics Board.”

“And if they found something not right, what would happen?”

“It would go into Arbitration. But that wouldn’t happen, because everything is right. As you well know, the Logistics Manager AI makes sure of it,” the Doctor used his wide mouthed hyena grin again. “As I said, uh, the boss is always watching.”

Nelson understood the implication. Everything ended up in the same shit show. No escape from the corp, yadda yadda yadda. He flicked the tip of his only remaining middle finger against the screen, signing off of on hundreds of unseen pages of terms and conditions behind the scenes. It was implied that he had taken the time to read them, and the requisite legal degree which he needed to understand them, but as he and every other logistics employee at the fulfillment center knew, that’s the joke. He needed the arm, so there was no point in taking the time to review. Or take the time to understand it. That delay would just end up in Arbitration anyway, and he would be out the pay for the time he wasn’t pushing his stats up in the picking boards.

“Good! Now just lie back, get comfortable, and we can start the procedure as soon as the Prime arm is pre-op’d for your biomarkers. We wouldn’t want rejection with the AtoZ interface, would we?”

“That would be terrible,” Nelson murmured.

“Imagine your pick rate stats if your arm was rejected? Worse than having only one arm, eh?” Doctor Priat joked. “Good news is that if this arm gets ripped off in another incident, like your us, you know, original arm, the company will replace it for a small nominal fee because you are a Prime member. Isn’t that great?”

“Yeah, great,” Nelson pretended to agree. The fact that any incident in the workplace was attributed to employee error did not make it better, even when the original incident that had caused his injury was very much a company fault, not an employee fault. However, it would never be classed as such. Because, surprise, that would require Arbitration. No one got through Arbitration with a win.

“Oh I almost forgot. Would you like to sign up for an additional blocker shipment at no additional cost for six months? Thereafter, charged at $199 a month until you cancel. No early termination fees if termination of agreement is done while employed. Another great benefit from Amazon Workforce Services.”

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure? It’s a great deal,” The doctor tried.

“Pretty sure.”

“Alright, I will go ahead and decline the offer. You may be contacted by an Service Chatbot later on to explain why you declined.”

Nelson sighed. “Of course.”

There was always the hope he would die on the table, but that would hit the Doctor’s stats… so…

“We are all in a grinder, aren’t we?” Nelson mused.

“What’s that?” The doctor replied, already ignoring the patient.

“Nevermind.”

“Good, good. Alright, lay back, the blocker will kick in here, and then we can get that interface connected. If you feel anything, just remember you signed all the T&Cs, so there is nothing you can do. Just lie there and think of how awesome your new arm will be, alright?”

Nelson grunted noncommittedly, as he was already ignoring the doctor. He closed his eyes and wondered why drones couldn’t do his job. They did everything else. With the AI and the AI subminds, they controlled everything. Why did humans need to be a part of it?

Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was all something else.

Maybe… this was hell.

Old Toovey was in a right state when I arrived to the Pub, his spittle frothy with the animated pursuit of his tongue attempting to catch his teeth. He had a full golden pint in one hand, seemingly forgotten, and in the other, and empty shot glass, its contents either long spilled or swallowed.

Henry must have have caught my staring, as he waved at the other empty shot glasses arrayed in a nonsensical pattern at Old Toovey’s elbow. Toovey was regaling a few locals and a couple outlanders with some tale, which itself was not out of place, but the fact that his eyes were bulging, and his cheeks flushed a bright red seemed right off.

“What’s all that about?” I asked Henry, as he pulled a pint without me asking. I took the cold glass, and tipped my head in thanks.

“He is taking the piss. I can’t catch enough to make sense of it. But something shook him terrible.” Henry pulled another pint as Charlie walked in behind me, looking for his usual post shearing stout.

“Hey Charlie,” I tossed him as he sidled up to the bar. His shoulders were wet, must have started raining out.

“Hey Ewan, thanks Henry,” Charlie nodded in quick succession. “Toovey, huh?”

“I was just asking,” I said.

“He is worked up about something up on the Queen’s land,” Henry added.

“How many has he had?” Charlie asked the obvious, I hadn’t even thought it yet.

“Just the one whiskey. Something about settling his nerves. The others are props. Won’t let me touch ’em,” Henry lauded. “Gets all red faced and blustery if I even try to take one away. That pint is merely a memory, more of it on the floor than in his gut, that’s for certain.”

I took a long swallow of my first pint, feeling the cool bubbles light up the back of my throat. The first sip was always the best drink, and all the swallows that followed were only attempting to live up to the first’s memory.

“Who are the strangers?” I asked.

Henry leaned in a bit towards us and whispered, “Not quite sure to be honest. Seem police-ish. Might be Scotland Yard? I didn’t bother to ask, and they aren’t bothering to drink.”

“…I am telling you the truth. Why would I lie? I have been working the Queen’s Estate for forty years now! Why would I ever make anything up like that?” Old Toovey’s pitch escalated wildly and then dropped to a near whisper. “I will have to inform the Estate Steward for certain. He has to know…”

I leaned towards Old Toovey with a raised glass, “Hey there, Toovey, going well?”

“It is not going well, Ewan. Not going well at all,” Toovey’s eyes went wide, and he ignored the small crown to his right, taking care to turn towards Charlie, Henry, and myself on the other side. The other gents rolled their eyes and shifted off, but the two outlanders seemed to be conferring with each other quietly. Toovey continued, “There is nothing in all my years that scared me like this, my young fellow, nothing. Not when that stag charged me, or when Mim fell down those stairs, nothing at all. Henry, I need a pint.”

Henry chuckled, “Tooves, you have it in your hand already.”

Toovey looked at his hand and realized he was holding both an empty shot glass and a pint. “Ah, so I do. Then I need another since this one shall be gone in a swallow.”

Toovey hammered the beer down, true to his word and Henry gently slid another over.

“So what happened, Toovey? Come on,” Charlie said. I nodded along in encouragement. The two outlanders seemed to have decided something and headed for the door.

“I was over near Lochnagar, where the snow is already accumulating, so I wanted to clear one of the old paths before it became impassable for the season, I am not sure why I pushed it off all summer, but I had…” Toovey swallowed heavily. “I didn’t even take one of the boys with me, again, not like me, not as strong as I used to be. I pulled up on a felled tree. Big one, not sure why it was over.”

“So far, this seems like a shite story, Toovey,” Charlie quipped with a grin. Henry shook his head.

“I am getting there, give me a minute. I need to set the scene, Ewan understands.” Toovey replied.

I shrugged nonchalantly, not knowing what that meant. Outside, the weather seemed to be getting worse. There was a far off peal of thunder, and the rattle of the windows told tales of the gusts beyond. The TV over the bar was showing something in the news, but it looked like typical Scottish weather, so I left it.

“I had the winch all setup, leaning over this trunk, making sure it was clear to pull, when my eye caught someone walking up on the high moor, had to be on the western side of the loch. There should be no one out here, I thought. I tried to make it out, this shape, moving slowly in the settling fog. I grabbed the spotting scope, and… I…” Toovey’s breath caught in his chest, trying to form the air into words to express his shaking memory.

“Its alright now, Toovey, you are with all of us. Just tell us what happened,” Charlie nudged.

“Damn it all,” Toovey spit, taking another long draught from his glass. “I saw a woman.”

Charlie laughed. “A woman? Oh come off it, Toovey. That’s odd, but does not explain your state.”

“She seemed to be clothed in ferns and moss, and her eyes, my god her eyes.”

“Odd, for certain. Strange, without a doubt. Perhaps a mental patient, escaped and living on the Queen’s land in secret.” I tried.

“No… no… the rocks, they were floating around her as she walked.”

“Come again?” I asked.

“She, ah… she was walking as if walking under the blustering clouds, cold was as nothing to her dressed even as she was. And the rocks she passed lifted from the ground, floating about her as if they were a cloud of butterflies, landing again in different places, some forming cairns, others scattering themselves again in the dirt. I thought at first it was an illusion, some trick of the light, but the boulders came up too, shifting about as if they were bits of cloud themselves, to settle again in new places.”

“Trick of the light alright, or your knackered,” Charlie said.

“I’m not. Swear it. But you see, that is only the beginning. She was at one moment, high up on the moor, me watching through the glass, and the next, I swear, I absolutely swear it, she was standing before me, right there as you are Charlie, as real as anything.”

“You are taking the piss!” Henry exclaimed. “This is a great story.”

“I am not! It is the truth, through and through. She stood before me as close as I am to you, her hair waving about as if she was under water, bits of rock, lichen, and moss floating around her like snowflakes caught on the wind. Her eyes were red, the color of a turned leaf yet to fall, and she was dressed in wisps of cloud falling from her form. Grasses and lichen beneath it all, creating this solid thing. She looked me over as if I was a specimen in a jar. I felt her look through me, and I was measured in a glance. Like I would look over bug before stepping on it.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. Overhead the rain was getting louder, and the windows were hazed by the sheets of falling rain.

“She, ah, she wasn’t normal-“

“Because she was dressed in moss, Toovey!” Henry said.

“No. That’s not it. She wasn’t a woman. It was if there was a thing wearing a woman like a suit. Like a puppet. This slight wain of a girl, red hair as the dawn, red eyes as the sunset. Dressed like an imitation of our ancestors, but in the things of the land, water, or sky. She was something else, something terrible in disguise.”

“That is quite the story,” Charlie shrugged, his usually jovial nature downright stoic now. His face was written with a grimace halfway between disbelief and deep concern.

“That’s not the scary part,” Toovey admitted. He set his empty pint glass down, trying to work up the courage to tell us something more. “She spoke to me. I heard gravel in her throat and the cry of gulls on the wind. I heard the thunder of a distant storm and the crashing of titanic waves the world has not seen since before the dawn of man. Her voice was in my head, and I heard the half-remembered songs my mother used to sing to me. My ears heard all those things, but in my head, I heard her words. She understood the whole of our modern life in a moment, and spoke to me as such. She told me… told me… such terrible…”

“Almost there, mate. Go ahead,” I encouraged.

“She told me, she was here to bring about the end of our world. We had forgotten her, the one true god. We had forgotten her song, her voice, and her name. She was waiting until she knew we could not save her gift to us, the Earth. She saw it all through my eyes, my ears, my heart in the moment she stood before me. Tatha-na-Cailleach judged all of us. She saw it all in a heartbeat, and she has judged us all the same. She will remake the children, she told me. But for us, this is the end. We ruined it, we ruined it all.”

“Oh you had us for a damn minute,” Henry laughed, breaking the tense air among us. I forced a chuckle, but my heart was not in it.

“She… Oh, my.” Toovey gasped as he looked behind and he fell sideways to the ground.

I jumped to his side, trying to catch him, but he was limp as a fresh noodle and he slid right from my grasp. I managed to keep his head from striking the pavers, but his eyes were open and they told me everything that I needed to know. He was dead.

“Toovey?” Henry asked, leaning over the bar. “Should I call nine-nine-nine, Ewan?”

“I expect you should,” I replied. “But I think his heart gave out. He is already gone.”

Charlie’s hand slapped my shoulder, followed by an urgent whisper. “Look. Look at that.”

I turned, and there was a woman standing at the door, drenched from the rain, dressed in mosses and lichen, as if they formed her as much as the skin at her neck and arms did. She was a sallow white, nearing yellow in color, her hair long and as red as Toovey had witnessed. Over her shoulder, another TV was live as Thames was overtaking London, the great wheel tipping over, black cabs darting away from collapsing buildings. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing either in front of me or on the telly.

The strange woman waved her hand, and the last thing I ever saw was the bar around me leveled to the ground. But as the crushing darkness rushed in, I witnessed everything to be in a moment. Her vision of the world to come. A place not marked by our progress, but instead marked by the human race that should have been. One with the world that birthed it. Whole cities were to be swallowed by the grinding earth, filth to pulled down to the mantle to be reforged into the rock that whence the materials had come. The roads were to be shredded by vines and grasses, all the works of man plucked from existence as easy as I would toss a stone across the surface of the water. God Among Us, dressed in the spring, would dance with the children and raise them as her own. She had done it before, she would do it again. She had danced on the Moors, the Savannah, and in the valleys of the Three Rivers before it turned to sand, and she would dance in the new places with new names, everything on the face of the Earth healed and rewritten.

At the moment’s end, I did not find any of it as sad as I thought I would.

I appreciated her gift before the darkness consumed me.

Blessed be her name, Cailleach, tore across the last gasp of my mind as the crushing pain ceased and my last breath rattled out.

Hello there. I know where I need to go, but first, I need you to follow along for a page or two.

I have a secret.

The last time I told anyone about my secret, they thought I was maliciously lying and I was sent to bed without dinner. You probably figured out in that single sentence that it was one of my parents, and I was but a child, and you would be correct on both counts. My father brooked no forms of jest in our household, and even though I was doused in my own tears, sniveling snot dripping from the tip of my eight year old nose, he thought I was only working to make him the fool. I often am thankful that my father did not believe in physical violence, because I think that night he probably would have beat me to death. Doesn’t matter that I was a girl, I think he would have hit me anyway.

My mother was too drunk to care. Or she was deep in her stamp box, seeing how much LSD it took to shift the walls into noncongruent shapes, abstract forms dancing at the edge of her fingertips as she attempted to commune with the great spirit of the universe.

So my secret has been mine and mine alone for nearly thirty years now. As I got older, I knew that if I told any rational adult within shouting distance of a medical professional, I would suffer a barrage of tests, pokes and prods, metal leads taped to my skull as machines beeped monotonously in the background. I had fears that if someone believed it, only for a moment, that could ruin my life. It could ruin my freedom.

Ironically, my secret ruined my life for other reasons. I was so bathed in my fear of it getting out that I avoided deep friendships, lovers, and even my own family once I moved out. As you could probably guess by now, my own family was shit. But my extended family wasn’t so bad, and at least they made an effort to have a relationship with the only kid that came out of the train wreck of relationship my parents had. Maybe they felt sorry for me. Or maybe they felt sorry for the entire situation. Who knows? Pity was pity, and I did not take much of it.

I wished during many long nights that I could just be honest with a boyfriend. Tell him how I felt, but then at some point, he would discover the truth. I can’t hide it because I can’t fake the reality that everyone else call’s normal.

I don’t sleep.

At all. I have not laid my head down for a night’s rest since grade school. Growing up, that created unique challenges on how to keep myself busy while everyone else slept. I would have to take pains to not be discovered, and the game of it satisfied me for the most part. When I went to University, I had to hide myself, rotating between classes, dorms, and study halls to enshroud the truth. My life had it’s own set of clothes, and depending on where I was, or what I was doing, I compensated from within my fear by being confident or brash. ‘Working late?’, I was asked. Oh yes, of course, I would reply. ‘Pulling an all nighter?’ I would shoot back is there any other way to study? ‘Why don’t you ever go back to your dorm room?’ Oh you know, I see girls. Lots. Of. Girls.

‘Lesbians are hot.’

Sure they are, but I am not one. Just bored and happen to have all the time in the world to think this stuff through to throw everyone off my scent. Including dumbasses in their high school letter jackets trying to pick up a thin girl at the coffee shop who is obviously not interested in their muscle mass. I would love to tell people that when you all are sawing logs, I am acting like an idiot savant caught up in a new passion, discovering anything new to me, attempting to keep myself challenged… and not just binge watching the entire internet since, you know, I seemingly have the time. I mean, I will make time for the latest series that blows up my skirt, and who doesn’t like a little period romance or a good BBC series? But most of the time, I am just trying not to go crazy. Like my mom. Or in his own special fucked up way, my dad.

I often wonder if my mom was actually like me. Maybe that is why she self medicated so heavily. And maybe my dad knew as well, and that is where the anger came from. I would like to ask them, but they died, miserable and alone, while I was off at University becoming the highest ranked student in multiple degree programs. I had professors wonder if I was abusing amphetamines, but they admired the work ethic regardless. I graduated the same way that I entered University.

Alone.

So you may be wondering what has changed here. Why am I opening up on this now? After all these years? I may be a brilliant doctor, a competent surgeon, and a distant mentor to the new residents, but in all of that, I still struggle with any form of intimacy, even of the friend kind. I don’t mind that people think I am just a high functioning autistic, but still, sometimes, I wish that I had someone to talk to. I am not talking about the person reading these words, of course. I am talking about the Other or Others. I am not sure what they I should call them. I don’t think there is a definition or taxonomy for our relationships. They are simply Other.

You may think that I am starting to fracture into disassociated personality disorder, but I am certain that is not the case. I am not schizophrenic, and I am not mentally unstable. I am just different. My neural behaviors are a mutation, allowing for short term and long term memory formation and sensory filtering resets while I am awake. And that is how the Other reached out the first time, when I was resting.

I do not sleep, but my body needs to rest. I have to allow my physical processes to catch up, and my brain is no different. Where you lie down, close your eyes, and shift into patterns of sleep with dreams and somatic bliss, I sit in a chair, stare into the corner of the room, and meditate. My form becomes one with my mind, my breath pulls and pushes upon my alveoli, exchanging gases within my bloodstream, my heart pumping the components for life to all the cells within me. I fall into a dreamlike state, and often, I believe, achieve a REM cycle like those that do sleep. My brain is able to catch up like an awkward gangly long distance runner, and my body is able to adjust into the circadian rhythm that my brain forgot somewhere along the marathon route. I call sleep. But it’s pale imitation, by definition, is no such thing.

Seven years ago, I was sitting in my chair, focusing on my breathing, and I felt the comfort of my meditation take over. I had a long sixteen hour shift at the Hospital, and my body was tired. I let it cascade upon me, a tide coming in after too long of a hot sun, cooling my form in the iterative wash of crash and spray. There in the corner of the room, my eyes fluttered and shifted, and I felt the peace that I needed.

A voice spoke. Calmly, as if it had been calm conversation long before I had shown up.

“…and that is why I need you in my life. To guide me, to provide me a light to my feet. I need your guidance, your care, your love.”

I called out a panicked ‘hello?’ to the air suddenly, my eyes snapping fully open, wondering if someone had snuck into my home, and was for some strange reason, praying in the corner. The voice did not answer, and nothing changed. I got up, wandering the rooms of my house, checking the closets, flicking the lights on and off, and navigating each space, looking for an intruder. There was nothing.

Frustrated, I sat back down in my chair, feeling my way back to my place of Zen. As I approached the calm wash, I felt the voice coming long before I actually heard it. I knew it was not me, not originating from within my own grey matter. It was outside of me, it was Other.

“…I wish you would answer. I wish you would talk back to me.”

So I decided to try, staying in my calm state as best I could, not letting my own thoughts rage upwards and push me from my center. “I can try to answer,” I said to the empty space of my living room.

“What?!”

Her voice, that was a definitely a her. Younger, maybe preteen?

“You can hear me?” She asked.

“I can hear you. Can you hear me?” I asked, focusing as hard as I could on my breathing. The push and pull of the air, the folding and unfolding of geometric shapes, a dot forming a line forming a triangle, forming a square, forming a pentagon, then a hexagon. Stop. Reverse it. The hexagon becoming a pentagon becoming a square and so on. Breath holding at the top and the bottom of the sequence, forcing the peace to run through my veins instead of the blood that wanted to course to carry adrenaline to every cell. I instead focused on ataraxia, a boat on a sea of tranquility.

A tentative answer, timid nearly. “Yes.”

“Who are you?”

She did not answer, and I somehow understood that she had faded away. It must have been her choice. I waited for an hour more, wondering if she was trying to reach back, but unable or unwilling. When the room of silence became deafening instead of comforting, I instead made a second dinner, ate calmly and then headed to my study to workout. Being an nonsleeper is so much easier when you own your own place. No one can notice that you have six meals a day and exercise at odd hours.

The next evening, after I was feeling normal again, I sat myself down at the same time to see if the Other would arise from my place of calm. I focused on my breath, and again, I sensed her before I actually heard her.

“… was scared, I did not know how to respond. Please come back. Please come…” She pleaded.

“I am here,” I asked.

“Oh god,” again, shock in her voice.

“Don’t be afraid.” What else would I say? I had to understand this. My medical brain was whirring in place, trying to sort the conditions, components, and physical state into a sort of running chart, but with a massive wall of focus on my breath and the fragile voice on the other side of my spiritual telephone, it was all but shut down.

“I am afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I can’t sleep,” she said, the admission sounding like a desperate confession.

My heart started to race, and I struggled to hold on to the barely tenable thread of connection in my excitement. Could this be someone like me? I tried, “Insomnia?”

“No, I haven’t slept for weeks now. I can close my eyes, and I think I dream? But I don’t ever fall asleep. My mom is worried, I think. I heard her talking to my aunt about a sleep study. I don’t want to be a freak.”

I could hear the desperation in her voice. She knew it was wrong, but she also knew it was normal for her, and the two competing forces at her heart were pulling her apart. How could you know that it was wrong for everyone else, but right for you? How could you explain it to someone that would never understand? But I could understand. The universe had connected us… or perhaps our conditions did.

“You are not a freak. What is your name?”

“Imani,” she said carefully. “Shouldn’t you know my name?”

“Why would I know your name?”

“Because you are an angel or god or somethin’?”

The confusion came through so clearly that I nearly laughed out loud. “I am not either. I am a doctor of internal medicine in Vancouver.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yes. And I haven’t slept since grade school. And I am nearly forty years old now.”

“What? You are like me?”

“I am, I suppose,” I replied. “Tell me about yourself, Imani.”

“I’m eleven, and I live in Queens, New York. I am scared… uh… what’s your name?”

“You can call me Claire.”

“How are we talking, Claire?” Imani asked. Her voice was transitioning from fear to calm, even though a small torrent ran underneath.

I could pick up on nuances in her voice, as if I had my hand on her face like a blind person, feeling the emotion and body language through a different set of senses. It was a bizarre sensation.

“You were praying?” I asked.

“Yes, then I heard your voice last night, and I freaked out.”

“I freaked out too. I meditate to rest my body and mind. I think we connected because our brains were doing similar things. I don’t know anything else beyond that, this is new to me as well.” I could feel her crying over our shared thread, a gossamer connection, silver and bright reaching across the North American continent, and a sense of relief thrummed across it. I knew her feeling, and I assumed she could feel me too. “But we are in this together now.”

“What do I do, Claire?”

“This will sound bad, but you will just have to lie to your mom. You will have to tell her that you sleep great, it was just a recurring nightmare. When you hear her checking on you, deepen your breathing and I can teach you to meditate like I do.”

“I should lie?”

“This is not a malicious lie, Imani. Think of it as a coat that you can take off when you are not outside. Eventually, you will be able to use this gift however you see fit. Right now, I assure you, you are not going to die from this, and you are no less a person because of it. I have been steadily studying my own condition since my residency, and I am at or above every baseline for a healthy white woman at my age.”

“Why can’t I tell her?”

“You might be able to, someday. When you are in control of your condition, and it is yours to share as you see fit. Any doctor she takes you to will only try to medicate you into sleep, and while it may look like your sleeping, you won’t be. Your brain will still be going, you just will be under a heavy blanket of sedation. Ask me someday how my gall bladder surgery went, and I will tell you how to avoid the bad sensations.”

“I think I understand. You’re white?”

“Yes.”

“I’m black.”

“Why would that matter?” I asked seriously.

“Could this be genetic?”

I was impressed. “That is a great thought, Imani. Why would we share this condition if we are genetically diverse?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Other diseases and conditions can exist in different races. Maybe you and I have a shared ancestor somewhere along the line. Could be a bunch of reasons… and we can work through that together. With two of us, we have more data.”

A sigh of relief over our shared connection. “Can we talk soon?”

“Every night, if you want. Time zones don’t matter, so whatever time you wish during the night,” I smiled.

“K. Tomorrow at 1am my time?”

“Sure.”

We broke off from the connection and I came back to myself covered in sweat. The amount of effort it had taken me was significant, but I suppose like any exercise, it would probably improve with practice.

I continued with Imani all the way through her high school years, teaching her to meditate, guiding and mentoring her when she needed it, and act as a tutor when she struggled in school. She was crazy smart, and she was headed for pre-med on a full ride scholarship. It was like having a little sister or even an adopted child of my own. We made plans to meet in person over the summer, I was looking forward to my trip to NYC. Even with the age difference, I finally had found a friend. After all these years, being by myself, a stranger to all, it was still a unusual sensation to realize that Imani and I were bound together now, hundreds of miles away from each other.

Three weeks ago, we connected at our usual time. She sounded breathless, as if anticipation had built up for so long she was on the verge of bursting.

“Claire. Claire. Claire…”

“I am here, Imani. Why do you sound like you are about to explode?”

“There is another one of us! There is another one!”

That is what I could make out. She was shoving so much thought and emotion over our connection, that even in my calm state, I could not focus on all of it at once.

“Slow down, Imani. Take a breath. Who did you find?”

“I was meditating in the middle of the day, because I wanted to be rested for that final this afternoon, and I made contact with someone,” Imani said breathlessly.

“Who?”

“His name is Stephan. He lives in France, in the Bordeaux region, proud grandfather to four girls and a retired vintner. He was praying… and I heard him just like you heard me.”

My stomach nearly did a flip. One of us is an aberration, two is a coincidence, but three? There may be a pattern here. Something for us to dive further into. The limited testing that I had been able to facilitate between Imani and myself had been limited and constrained to our talks, emails, and occasional snail mail packages.

“Claire? Are you there?” Imani followed up.

“You can feel me, you know I am here,” I replied sarcastically.

“What do you think? Isn’t this amazing? Do you think…”

“Amazing for certain. If there are three, there may be tens, or hundreds, or more even. With 7.5 billion humans, it could be a lot higher even if it is a minuscule percentage number.”

“So why hasn’t it happened for seven years? Why just us?”

“It has to be the state of mind, right? Prayer. Meditation.”

“But lots of people pray. Lots of people meditate. We should be tripping all over each other every time we open up.”

“Was he praying about something specific?” I remembered my first time with Imani. The distance, the fear, but above it all the need to find peace in our strangeness.

“He was praying about being alone, I think. His wife passed last year and they were married for like, ever,” Imani said. “What should we do?”

“Is he open to coming to NYC?”

“You mean all of us together in person?”

She sounded giddy, and I grinned, feeling the infectious nature of her happiness.

I shrugged, “Why not?”

Now perhaps you understand why I am writing this all down. Telling this story now. Sharing my secret to these pages. Because it turns out that after all this time, it was not my secret. Or only my burden. It was all of ours. There is purpose here and now my job is to find it. I am starting these journals to capture it all.

A shared experience that now I know is not only my own. What I have learned through all this so far? Mainly that sometimes you don’t have to pray to have that prayer answered.

And that is something I can believe in.