skonen_blades | Entries tagged with light

When opening the door to the outside world
Means a broken dam of input
Enough to flood a farmland
That would drown the city of your mind

When the sunlit windows scream at your eyes
Become warning-sign billboards
Threatening the terrifying interactions
Involved with going outside

When the screens to the internet gush fire-hose dark
With pressure that can strip flesh off of bones
and kill all hope

When the future holds no promise
And the present isn’t so great either
And you can only speak in danger

When the cocoon feels like the best place
Not the safest place
Just the least dangerous place

Remember that our translation of reality
Has never been accurate
We’re great at recognizing patterns and assessing threats
But in this non-caveman existence
Of day jobs and apartments
We end up seeing patterns and perceiving threats
That may or may not be present

We’re all delusional by default
It’s how we survive
But sometimes we survive too hard

It’s cold comfort to know we’re all in this together
(To varying degrees)
But that can be like cold pizza
Which is to say
Better than nothing
When you feel like thick liquid in a chrysalis
Waiting to be born again

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You left me a message once
Your voice trapped in my phone
A moth in a jar softly hitting the edges
Telling me about a poem you thought I’d like
Reciting it
And you were right

Later you became a poem yourself
Leaving beautiful evidence of yourself behind
A finite wake of archaeological shards
Video clips and photographs
And a couple of books

I found a poem the other day that I thought you’d like
And I left you a message
By reciting it softly to the air
A moth free to find its way
To wherever your light is now

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A disco ball made of rearview mirrors
The size of the boulder that chased Indiana Jones
Lit by Batman’s spotlight
Turning my crime-ridden body
Into shining ocelot spots of memory
That haunt me while I’m dancing in the club

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Take the halo
And give it a half twist
Into a symbol for infinity
An 8
That can also be used
For handcuffs
And hang it up
Where you’ll never return

Take the feathers
From the wings
And use them to stuff pillows
For children’s fights
And deep fry what’s left

Take the robes
And cut them
Into flags of surrender
And let them wave goodbye
In every wind

Take the harp
And pawn it
Or melt it down
Or leave it lucky horseshoe empty
By using the strings
To cut cheese
Or hang pictures
It doesn’t matter

Go forward
With no light in the dark
Grounded
Naked
And silent

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I don’t like traveling in a cloaked vessel. It’s like being a ghost and having no control.

I’m an ensign on a Space Force vessel from Earth. A lot of my fellow crew members aren’t human and the tech and spec on this ship is borrowed from a hundred systems. It’s a pretty heady experience for a race that just joined the Corporation of Planets fifteen years ago. I’ve been on the ship for almost a year now.

We’re explored, terraformed, battled, lost crew members, gained crew members, contributed to the Galactic Library with our exploits, and been worthy of note to the powers that be. Several commendations and medals have been bestowed on this crew. We’re not the best but we’re definitely pulling more than our weight.

Right now, we’re on route to Corcarroway 5 with a load of plague cure. Time is of the essence but the quickest ‘straight-line’ course is through a patch of space inhabited by a spacefaring race that hasn’t quite reached the quota of light-drives for an invite to the Planet Corp and its Space Force wing. They don’t know we exist and we don’t want to set off a panic or a timely premature first contact scenario.

So we have to fly dark.

Flying cloaked sounded pretty cool to me until I actually did it.

You see, not only the ship disappears. I disappear. The controls disappear. Everything onboard the ship disappears. All spectrums. I can see the stars warp and stretch around me as we tesseract through the the NearLight dimension but I can’t see my hands. I can’t see my body or the helm controls in front of me. I can’t see any walls. I can’t see the floor or the ceiling. Just the fathomless eternal dimension streaking and folding all around us.

Even if I blink, I can’t see my eyelids. Traveling like this for more than a few days can drive some species (like humans) insane. Sleeping with one’s eyes open doesn’t come naturally to us.

Luckily, it’s just seven more hours and then we can uncloak back in PC space again.

Seven hours of staring into warpspace while the AI does its preprogrammed best to keep us on course because we can’t touch the controls.

My eyes don’t dry out but it feels like they should. I have to feel for my own body to scratch an itch even though it looks like I should be able to see just fine. I can hear the ship and the crew around me but I can’t see them.

I do my best to try to ignore my entire field of vision. With no visual reference, I can’t tell if the smeared stars are right under my feet or light years away. The illusion is disconcerting.

I try to relax but I’m looking forward to decloaking and getting on with this mission.

I wonder if anyone would notice if I got naked?

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Hello?
Are you there?
I’m the dark.
Can you see me?
Here. Let me light a match.
There.
You see the parts that are dark?
Around the edges?
That’s me!
It’s nice to meet you.
Don’t be scared.
People are so scared of me.
All I want to do is keep people safe.
When they sleep.
I love night time when I can cover so many houses.
And forests.
And oceans.
And lakes.
Helping animals and people sleep.
And helping some nocturnal animals wake up!
In the dark it’s easier to hide
And easier to imagine good things
I look forward to seeing you tonight
I’ll give you a gentle hug
When the light gets turned out
I don’t mind a tiny light if that’s what you want
It doesn’t hurt me
I’ll see you soon
Good night

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April 30/30

27/30

I’ve stabbed deep into the envelope around the white dwarf sun at the center of this solar system. My gravity repellers are maxed. I’ve skimmed the perihelion right in the onionskin. I came in at .75c and the slingshot here has nudged me just past full light. This experimental craft is performing perfectly. A silver arrow of flexible diamond called The Needle. The seventeen thrusters that have burst-accelerated me across a fifth of the Milky Way to end up here have all been discarded behind me like Fibonacci-spaced buoys. I was by all accounts the fastest human-constructed artifact in the universe.

I am seven miles away from the surface of the dwarf and here I will stay.

I can look up from my cockpit and see the whorls and radiation of the star as it quickly spins. My ship’s cabin protects me from the effects as does my hubris.

I have found out what happens when a ship with mass goes faster than the speed of light. Caught by surprise, physics found an agreeable solution that I have not found agreeable.

The moment I hit 1.0000001.c, all of my control panels stopped. They didn’t turn off. They just stopped. Anything that oscillated froze in mid strobe. My shuddering, screaming, deafening ship became silent. Oddly, I am free to move about. I can touch everything in my cockpit but I cannot move it. It’s like I am immersed in a three-dimensional photograph.

I am a fly trapped in an amber bulb of time. Why my consciousness has been permitted to remain alert is a mystery. Perhaps something to do with Schrodinger and perception. Even though there will be no outcome, there needs to be an observer.

The folks back home are waiting for telemetry from my ship. By my viewpoint, they will always be waiting.

I have been here for six days so far. My ship has not moved forward and I have not run out of air and I’ve felt no hunger or thirst. I seem to be destined to remain here. In a few years, I suppose I’ll find out if I’m even aging at all.

If I’m caught in a loop, it’s a loop too small for me to detect. I won’t go forward. I won’t go back. I have been put ‘on hold’ by the universe’s laws.

I wonder how many alien astronauts dot the border of light with me, strung out across the galaxy like doomed fireflies in jars.

Perhaps when the universe ends and physical laws break down we will all be set free to complete our parabolas.

Until then, my orbit is not done. My orbit will never be done.

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Hey bookshelf! How’s the bullet wound in your green shirt doing? Is the red ink flowing? Are you in debt? Do you fear the reaper? Does your wooden exoskeleton feel exposed to traitor arrows? Do bullets made from the same stuff at printing presses scare you? You are a hardcopy going softcover. Your spine is thinning. Heavy books covering heavy subjects are becoming fewer and fewer. You might even say that it’s become the twilight of an age when books about vampires are no longer sun-damaged and have lost their teeth to love.

As your subjects become lighter, you need less support. Oak bookshelves give way to plywood. Huge bookshelves are replaced by smaller ones. Periodicals disappear into phone lines and magazines grow in number to satisfy the shortened appetite-span of the average reader. We used to be locusts. Now we are full. Libraries are turning into uninhabited airships, becoming all homeless Bruce Wayne secret identity that no one even cares to know anymore. Cruise ships up to their necks in cat pictures.

They’ll join the billboard atlases and vintage spacesuits in the attention span vortex of the internet. They’d be better off becoming a vagina with a Mohawk. Crater photography and florist x-rays have no place in a society that no longer cares how things work. Even mechanics now dream of playing mechanics in movies. Famous is as famous does has become the reality television motto of every living soul not struggling for water in the third world.

If this is the year of the dragon, then maybe fire will descend from the clouds. Perhaps electricity will stop swallowing all the words and give us back some candlelight. Closets full of worlds will bloom again, cats will dream of whales, and black-eyed barbershop quartets will appear in park gazebos. Panda bears will roam condominium halls and ideas, precious ideas, will swarm like hornets dripping lust from the fertile minds of our young men and women. Each tickled fish will gives an artist year of pleasure.

Rubbing two ideas together can create a storm. Let the light bulb of your ideas give you enough illumination to write when it’s darkest. Because the sun is going down.

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“The thing about navigating at C and a half is that you have to be traveling that fast to navigate. The universe slows once you go past the speed of light. If you go any faster than 2C, you start to travel backwards as you travel forwards. You get to your destination before you leave. That is impossible and it tears the ships apart. No one wants that. Light and a half. 1.5C. That’s the sweet speed when the universe stops.”

She was talking to me after I’d just come back inside the ship. She was so full of herself. I was a first-year telengineer but she was so full of herself. I did sort of do have it coming, though. I left the plate off of the forward buffer sails during the initial checklist. Big deal. There are seven thousand plates on the buffers. I didn’t think one plate would make a difference. I know it’s my first mission but the her voice is really starting to make me wonder what it would be like to see some fear on her face. I don’t like that feeling.

“Are you listening? The entire universe becomes a three dimensional, unmovable photograph. Once you’re holding steady with the buffers holding us at 0 in space but 1.5 at lightspeed, it’s possible to send out a pulse through the super strings. Y’know, like a bat. Do you know what a bat is?” she asked like a children’s show narrator. She waited for a reaction.

I nodded, glowering.

“A very accurate picture of the obstacles on your journey come back to the ship. After that picture is analyzed, you can nudge the ship forward in space to 1.6C and the magic happens. You are transported to your destination milliseconds after you left. You see?”

She clapped her hands once to get my attention, raised her eyebrows and smiled at me sarcastically. I looked sullenly at the wrench in my hand and tightened my grip on it. I hoped this talk would be over before we hit the switch for travel. I couldn’t take another ten minutes of her condescension.

“Do you hear me?” she asked.

“Yes.” I answered. It was an effort not to shout it at her.

She stared at me.

“The. Buffers. Holding us at 0 in space but 1.5 in lightspeed. Doing the impossible so that we can have an accurate picture of the universe at rest. That way, we can move when nothing else is moving. No asteroids, no suns, no DUST can get in our way. We can look at the picture and then we can zip there instantly. Do you understand me? The BUFFERS.”

She was getting agitated. She grabbed my chin and looked into my eyes.

“You left a plate off of the forward buffer sails. We are not holding at zero C any more. According to my calculations, we are holding at 0.0000000001 C. Do you know what that means?” she asked.

“It’ll take a little longer for the computer to calculate a safe route before we turn the buffers off, I guess?” I retorted with a sneer.

“Yes.” She answered. I saw her bottom lip quiver. “Do you know how MUCH longer?”

“I don’t know, a few minutes?” I was already bored with this conversation.

“A year.” She said. “Or close to it. Three hundred and eleven days by my calculations.”

“What?” I whispered.

I looked at her dumbly. I could see tears forming in her eyes. It was going to be a long year.

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When Brother Lazarro’s mutant ability kicked in, he was 19 years old. He’d been a novice priest for six weeks.

His blood glowed.

It appeared to those around him that an inner celestial light was pouring out through his pores. He was lit from within, veins clearly visible as streaks of light, toaster wires buried under his now translucent skin. A halo of divinity surrounded him.

The light also gave off heat. It was tied to his emotions. If he was at peace, the light was soft and comforting, merely a few degrees above normal body temperature. If he was angry or disturbed, it increased.

The archbishop proclaimed that it was a miracle and that the boy was a gift from god, an angel, a harbringer of the rapture, or maybe even the second coming himself.

The archbishop took Brother Lazarro into his chambers after this public proclamation to talk to him about a secret course of action. The archbishop had been contacted by Rome. There was a secret society of priests whose mutations had also become active in the last five years. They had been gathered to create a secret society of assassins whose purpose it was to kill those who opposed the church.

The archbishop asked Brother Lazarro to be a weapon in God’s war against the atheists.

Brother Lazarro had taken the good parts of the bible to heart. He wanted to spread God’s message of love and brotherhood and acceptance. He wanted no part of being trained to kill or to use his powers for murder.

The archbishop wasn’t happy with this. He beat Brother Lazarro with his scepter. He would have beaten him to death except that in his anguish and fear, Brother Lazarro became hotter and hotter under the blows of the archbishop. Within seconds, the archbishop’s robes caught fire and the metal scepter became too hot to hold.

Brother Lazarro fled the church, setting fire to the pews along the way as he ran crying, despondent, and concussed into the warm night.

The archbishop was burned but did not die. Scarred horribly and on life-support, he called a press conference. He reversed his earlier proclamation and said that he had never witnessed evil like he had in his quarters, alone with the boy. He said that the boy had tried to kill him in an unprovoked attack.

The archbishop named the boy as a demon. He excommunicated Brother Lazarro.

Brother Lazarro stumbles now, glowing, through the sewers of Brazil. He is a flame in the dark dressed in ruined priest’s robes. His memory is spotty but he knows he must hide.

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“I’ve been to space.” He says.

His wild blue eyes match the hue of the ass-baring paper dress he’s wearing. The plastic bracelet is a nice accessory.

We’re in the interview room in a small-town hospital. I’m a visiting federal psychiatrist. I’ve travelled to a lot of small towns to interview crazy folks who say they’ve been to space. I work for the government. It’s like being Fox Mulder from the X-Files except that it’s really, really boring.

The fourth floor of this hospital is for suicide risks and delusionals. Every single small town I go to, the people with the highest suicide risk are kept on the top floor. Every glance out the window must be like a dare to the patients here. I shake my head.

I feel the need to end this interview quickly. I’ve been doing this for ten years. Collating, recording, classifying, defining, and sifting nine kinds of bullshit for an ounce of truth. I’m like a prospector panning for reality. I’m tired.

“Okay. Prove it.” I say, giving this nutbag a little of the deadeye for wasting my time. That usually starts the list of elaborate excuses that ends up drawing the interview to a close.

“Alright.” He says, and holds his hands up. His brow crinkles in concentration. He’s clenching his jaw. He closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath and holds it.

Well, this does happen from time to time. I like it better than the stories. It’s a little entertaining. Eventually, the patients will express surprise that the transmitter installed in their fingernail is suddenly no longer there or that his or her powers don’t work in my presence.

It must be like a judge watching criminals lie or hit men watching the light go out of their target’s eyes. After a while, they must just sit back and enjoy it like I’m doing.

He grunts.

His hands shine bright blue and the room splashes with light. The walls turn semi-transparent and I can see the architectural structure of this entire hospital below and around me. I can see the wiring and the radiators showing up solid greenish-white like an x-ray of scissors in a stomach. I can see the skeletons of the doctors and patients milling around, bored on the night shift.

The man is front of me opens his eyes. They’re glowing green. He starts to hyperventilate. I can see his muscle fibers, capillaries, and bones, depending on which layer I concentrate on.

With a sigh, he slumps forward. Everything around us returns to being opaque. He is staring forth, drooling. He is a dead battery for the time being and I can’t blame him.

I found one. I need to bring him back and add him to the sixteen we already have.

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We lived in a tribe outside the main disc. The arm struts of the cogshield branch out above us like a gear. Where we live is all angles. My headlamp dimmed at the thought of what I had to do next.

My little one was sick. I’d built him according to the proper specs using the proper tools. I’d been licensed and refitted for programs to propagate. Even with all the shielding and over-protective parenting I’d put in as a precaution, a recursive virus had still gotten into his wiring.

My little one had a stutter that was getting worse. Soon he’d be locked in a loop with too little time between the repeats to do anything but power him down. No backup, complete wipe, start over. He’d be sent back and I would lose my right to build for another cycle.

Our lattice has a central nexus that our main struts grow out from like crystals. We take up a square block of vacuum equal to what The Human’s library calls a hydrogen atom.

The Human had come to us several cycles ago. He communicated with us by beams of binary light flashes. We set up nets to capture the particle waves and record the frequencies.

At first, we thought that the strobing sun was another one of us giving us a first contact. After The Human had downloaded a small repository of his own knowledge to us called Encyclopedia, we realized that humans were a race of creators made of complex structures to big for us to see.

The revelation was astounding. There were many debates on how to treat the situation.

He continued to download information to us.

We gathered a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’. It’s a fad that’s still popular to build little ones in an image that conforms to one or the other. I made mine a male.

The humans build machines out of silicon that are much larger than us but have no souls.

They have an understanding of an art called psychology that they use for organic minds.

“Take him to The Human,” kr80ll-ore8 said to me. It was the answer I was fearing and hoping for all at the same time.

I need to take my stuttering boy to Contact Point out on the Proto-Spur from whence we all came. There, I need to stand on the endless plateau and walk into the light underneath the Viewing Plate.

With the particles of light falling around me like hail, I need to speak to them by using binary flashes of my headlamp.

I need to ask the Human for advice on how to fix my boy.

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Here are some fun things that I thought I would like to share with you in the last few days that I've seen. I'm aware that some of it is old hat but I like the pretty pictures and I know that some of you do, too, so here you go. I hope you like them.

Two versions of a Snickers commercial. Which one do you like the most? I'm not sure which music (or lack thereof) or editing I like better.

Watch on YouTube

Gummi Bear Chandelier