Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 15

[JAMES - MEETING THE GODDESS]

While James slept, the truck he had hitched a ride in chugged steadily toward its destination. James was aware of himself, laying on boxes, yet also knew that he was deeply asleep. He became aware of the dimensions of his surroundings. The subtle shifts of boxes this way and that, indicating turns, downhill and uphill stretches. For the time being the fragment of his awareness that was aware told the rest of his sleeping mind that it was safe, to grab all the rest that it could.

His dreaming mind swept him back in time to safer places - summers spent with his parents as a child - playing in the local playgrounds with friends and the excitement of returning to school. Of course at that point his friends declared him “weird” but he didnt care. It was the sense of accomplishment. His parents raised him to get the grades and work hard.

His mind swept back further until he saw his mother in the local hospital with her attending midwife stood by her bedside, offering a baby for her to hold. James gasped. That was him, and this mother, and the midwife! He realized he was watching the night of his own birth. A gift. His mother looked so incredibly happy about it.

Time sped up, and he watched the next few days as his father and mother bustled around and left the hospital and returned home. There was joy. Then one day there was silence in the household - James flew from room to room - the baby was gone. He ached, and noticed that both of his parents echoed the same feeling.

“This is a dream!” he said to himself, stopping the anxious movement, “Back! I need to go back.”

Events around him reversed - parents walking backward, undressing and rumpled night clothes jumping across the room from the linen basket back onto them. They slept. They woke and unwound another day. There - the smiles were back along with the baby. James let the dream unfold again and realized that it was happening all over again, despite his great desire for things to remain happy. His parents were talking, agreeing, but unhappy about the conversation. At nightfall his father put on an overcoat and carried baby James with him to the nearby park. There was no-one else around, a starry but moonless night, pleasantly cool.

James watched as his father placed the baby on the grass, wrapped up nice and warm in a blanket, gave him a kiss on the forehead and then left.

He had heard of this tradition but never expected that his parents had been traditionalists to this measure. He remembered being called in, in his capacity as an officer of the law, to arbitrate family disputes where one spouse was for, the other against. He tried to remember the details. Between eight and twelve days after the birth of a child, tradition said that it must spend a night alone on a nearby hillside. It seemed so …

“Spartan?” a voice said over his shoulder.

James spun, and found himself face to face with an old friend, “Drew! What the heck are you doing in my dream?” James asked.

“I’m not in your dream, ” Drew said, “I was here, in this place, in the memory that you’re watching.”

“And the baby?” James asked.

“Yes, I came for him.” Drew said, striding over and picking up the sleeping child, “Sweet baby James.”

James suddenly understood the sad faces of his parents.

“Keep watching…” Drew said and walked off into the dark carrying the infant.

James urged the memory forward, watching as day dawned, and night came again. After dark was well established James saw a lone man walking through the park. He got close, and James recognized him as his father. The man passed by the place where a baby had been twenty four hours before. He sighed deeply, and kept walking after seeing it was empty.

James sped up time, noting how his father maintained the nightly ritual - a lone walk, checking and returning empty handed. Three weeks and a day it continued until James saw Drew return with a baby in his arms.

“Cutie, arent you?” Drew asked the dreaming James.

Drew returned the baby to the spot on the hillside, and melted into the shadows. Minutes later James’s father appeared and with a whoop of joy he scooped up his son and returned home at a dead run.

James followed, finding the joy of his parents to be infectious. He watched them bathe the newborn, dress him for bed and lay in in his crib. As his mother kissed him on the forehead she whispered, “Sleep well my little Dhampir Saviour.”

The shock of it rattled the dreaming James to the core. She had known? And there was that title again, “Dhampir”, how had she known? What had she known?

The dream faded, but as James woke up he found that the questions remained burning bright in his mind.

[KAT - MEETING THE GODDESS]

Kat ached all over, and felt drained. She opened her eyes and found herself staring at a hanging incandescent bulb burning bright. The ceiling was vaulted, metallic, criss-crossed with girders. She rolled over, weak as a kitten, finding herself looking at corrugated metal of the wall of the building and bare dirt underneath her. She hauled herself into a sitting position, leaning her back against the wall. She was in some kind of metal building laying on empty floor between piles of junk. Hoops of cabling. Several girders. Sheets of the corrugated metal. In the corner she spotted what might be a foot, and an arm, in a heap of discarded electronics. She felt desperately hungry and thirsty. Allowing the two vampire sons to drink had been her last resort and not without risk, one she could have coped with, but two meant the distinct possibility of being drained … a thought that filled her with dread.

She lay back against the wall for a few moments more then made a decision to see if the foot and arm were what she thought they were. She crawled, hands and knees, one step at a time, every one more painful than the last. The pile of electronics indeed did contain parts that used to be Shawna. With a supreme effort of will she hauled on the battered torso to extract it from the pile. It had arms but no legs. The head was present but seemed missing a section of the left side.

Kat lay down. Exhaustion claimed her and she slept, one hand protectively on the torso of Shawna.

[SHAWNA - MEETING THE GODDESS]

For what had seemed like an eternity Shawna had been screaming in the dark. She could neither see nor hear, damage had claimed so much of her processing architecture, she didnt know what to do. Any non-essential system was shut down but still sections of her memory were flagging data corruption. She didnt have the swap-space to start a cleanup operation so chose to simply deal with it and move on.

Then came the glimmer of light. She didnt know if she was imagining it. She had heard of that - AI devoid of input starting to interpret random noise on the line as having significance - but this seemed more real to her than that. There was light and her conciousness sped through her internal data network until she found it. A shady gentleman some years before had taken the time to party with her. It wasnt until after the party that she realized that she had been offline the entire time. Something had fabricated the event from random fluctuations in data lines.

Light! There! She reached for it and clung like a drowning sailor.

[KAT - MEETING THE GODDESS]

Something smelled delicous. Instinctively she reached for it with lightning speed. Deeper instincts than mere thought guided her. She fed. Then she slept. The pattern continued twice more, woken by a smell, then sleeping once she had eaten what she could.

Kat woke, feeling tired, but not the bone-weariness she had felt before. Next to her were three desicated corpses, furry, long tails … rats … she turned to look the other way at the body of Shawna. Along gashes in the torso Kat could see bundles of cables. At intervals were connectors. There were pieces of equipment nearby with similar connectors. Kat got onto hands and knees and started pulling random pieces of junk and comparing. If a connector matched she plugged it in. It couldnt harm. Nothing happened with the first few but a little green light appeared after she connected one small box. It had a small camera lens on the front, and a clip on the back, so she clipped it in place near the connector it had attached so readily to. She searched the pile and found another two, and connected them. The three little green lights gave her hope and their occasional blinks suggested something might be happening inside the jet black corpse.

[SHAWNA - MEETING THE GODDESS]

Light. First one, then another and lastly a third. Color images being fed at excruiciatingly slow pace into her visual cortex. Three small webcams, giving her the ability to gauge depth, and build a full 3D rendering of her surroundings, all at a rate of 1 frame per second.

There were electrical draws in other locations of her internal net but the devices were incompatible or simply distateful - a tape backup device? She couldnt conceive of the desperation needed to want to archive her conciousness to that medium.

She probed the three webcams, finding that they were equipped with small microphes. She listened to the world, watching and listening made her feel so much better. She wanted to aid Kat. Then she had an idea, reversed the polarity of the mic in one of webcams, and projected her voice through the microphone.