A Thought

I had a thought yesterday:

What if there were a sentient alphabet?

An alphabet that worked to make people understand how to read it and forced them to use it?

An alphabet that reproduces by people writing with it so others would use the same alphabet?

An alphabet whose very twists and edges to had meaning we couldn't understand, but changed how we think?

If there is such an alphabet, could we know?

In The End

There’s a big blue box. It’s bigger on the inside than the outside. It can go anywhere in space and time, sometimes where it is supposed to go. Something will go wrong, and there’s some bloke called The Doctor who’ll make it all right because he’s awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch "Blink."

--Neil Gaiman

I got to WonderCon at 9:30AM yesterday. I wanted to make sure that I could get into the Dr. Who panel that started at 11:30. I thought two hours would be plenty of time. When I got there, there were at least 500 people already lined up. Let me tell you, there's not much out there like sitting in a room of 3500 people who really enjoy what they're seeing. Too bad there was only 45 minutes, I think the panel could have gone on for hours.

One thing that I got out of my time, this weekend, is how much I miss buying comics. I could order them online or have some shop mail comics to me, but I miss going into the shop. I miss picking up new books and flipping through the pages, admiring the art and skimming the story, to see if I want to buy it. The nearest shop is about an hour away and with gas prices what they are I'm not going there anytime soon. Still, I miss it.

A Little Fun for the Weekend

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

NewBones

So, the NewBones line that I was concerned about is much better in context:

Bones

In the new Star Trek trailer, NewBones has a line. He says, "Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence."

It bugs me.

It bugs me because the real Dr. McCoy would have made that kind of a comment about humanity or sentient species in general, not space. The real Bones just saw space as a place where all beings were just as stupid as they were on their home worlds.

I tell you, if they get NewBones to be as great a character as the real Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the rest of the movie can be shit and I'll still enjoy it.

More Other

Still don't want to go on about the horrible.

So, saw the new X-Files movie. Before watching it, kept saying the subtitle as "I want to be good," rather than the actual "I Want To Believe." Was pretty good. Nice to see Mulder and Scully again. *Spoiler* Odd to watch them sleep in same bed and then in next scene call each other "Mulder" and "Scully" rather than "Fox" and "Dana." Do many lovers, who have been lovers for years, call each other by family name? *End Spoiler* Psychic guy was cool, but not as cool as Peter Boyle's psychic on the show. Villain properly freaky with properly freaky attack animal. Skinner still = awesome. Like with show, sort of wish science/logic right rather than creepy sci-fi/fantasy always right. Still, enjoyed the movie. Like one of the good episodes that didn't involve any of the ongoing conspiracies.

Fiction Friday #16

World's End: Training Wheels

After The End of the World, the people in Shame just sort of stopped worrying about what day it was. And I don't just mean whether it was the 4th or the 29th, but a lot of them quit saying it was Thursday or Monday.

When people started moving into the gym at Meredith Willson High School, the Rileys, a couple who had retired to Shame a few years ago, started a new calendar. They counted the days since The End happened. (I counted their days, once. Seemed to me that they figure the end came when we lost power. I figure it happened a few days before, but I wasn't the one in charge.) They called it AC and said it stood for After the Coming. No one in the gym argued with them and no one in the gym seemed to use the calendar, but there were a few kids who earned a smack or two for asking who it was that came to town.

At the time, I wasn't really worried about the date. I was more concerned with the rising and the setting of the sun and how much could be done before it got too dark. Although, soon after we left town, I wished that I knew the date. Was it just an ordinary day or was it an important day? I never did check the calendar at my place while I was picking up my hiking boots.

There wasn't much else there that I wanted. I grabbed a couple of long sleeve shirts and more clean underwear and I already had my old pocket knife with me, but nothing else would have helped on the trip.

I shouldered the sack and headed out.

Abbot's Sports was a few streets over and one up from where my apartment was, just like everything else within the city limits. The building had been there for as long as anyone could remember and it showed the way the ivy had spread up one wall and anywhere the brick was showing it was crumbling. The Abbots didn't even run the place anymore. The last one in the county had moved out onto a farm to cash in on Ethanol. I guess that didn't quite work out for him.

The store was sort of a catch all for anything that wasn't food. Everything that was sold there could also be rented. Tents and rafts and bikes and sleeping bags for those folks who wanted to see the river or spend some time on it and pretend they were Huck Finn, without the huge black guy, of course.

Trista and Roy weren't there when I looked throughout the shattered windows, but I knew they'd be along soon enough. I headed in and scouted around for the things I thought we'd need.

First were bikes. They seemed like the best way for us to travel. Smallish and pretty damn light, we could ride around any cars and wouldn't have to worry about gas. If we kept up the basic maintenance, we probably wouldn't get much worse than a popped tire or a broken chain, and those were small enough that we could carry lots of extras, and if something worse happened, there were pretty good odds would could find the right tools and stuff in any town we came across. Best of all were the baby carriage things that people used to drag their little kids around in. I figured those things would be great for dragging around extra food and gear for those days we didn't roll on into town.

By the time Roy and Trista showed up, I had already picked out the three bikes we were going to be using and had just finished bolting on the last baby carriage thing.

"Supposed to be using scooters," said Trista, pulling a wad of gum out of her mouth and throwing it over her shoulder. She always was one to care about her community.

"Why's that?" I asked, standing up and stretching.

"Didn't you never read The Stand, Crete?" she asked, coming in close to me. "That's what they all rode into Vegas. Well, that or motorcycles."

"Stephen King must have lived in a place where the gas fell from the sky and all you needed was a funnel to fill a tank." I poked her in the shoulder.

Roy laughed. If his voice had been deeper, I would have called it booming, but it was more like tapping on a snare drum than pounding on a bass drum. To the best of my knowledge, Roy was the only black man who lived in Shame. There were a couple of colored families who owned farms, but Roy actually lived in the city. How he started teaching here instead of some other place, I didn't know, but here he was. He was also gorgeous. Short cut hair. Solid jaw. Huge shoulders and arms. Dark brown eyes that a person could fall into. It was hard to believe he taught math.

"This is how we're going," I said. "Deal with it."

"Fine," she said, dropping her stuff on the ground. "What do you want us to do?"

"We each need a sleeping bags and tents and stuff," I said.

Roy grabbed my arm as I started to head in. "Go on in, honey," he said to Trista. "I want to talk to Crete for a minute."

"'Kay," she said and headed off.

"What do you want?" I asked Roy.

"Uh," he turned away from me, "I don't know how to ride a bike?"

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah. Never learned."

"Well," I said, "I'm sure we can find some training wheels in there some where. We just have look."

Fiction Friday #15

The Machine

"So, the first step was to find a way that could squeeze every moment of time to one point without also pulling all the matter to the same point." The Professor changed the slide to one showing an animation on the universe collapsing in on itself. "That would probably cause a big crunch which would, of course, kill us all, destroy the universe, and quite possibly turning all that existed into one black hole."

"But you found some way around this, right?" asked some guy in a dark suit.

"Yes, of course we did," said The Professor, smiling like he would to a four year-old who was worried he wouldn't get pizza on his birthday. "It all had to do with gravity," he said, switching the slide again, this time to an animation of a guy standing on the earth jumping up and coming back down, "and an incredible discovery my team made."

Jim turned away from the presentation. The truth was it was all bullshit. No one understood how the machine worked, they just knew it did. Thousands of different objects had gone through and come out okay. About ninety different animals had gone through and come back with nothing wrong, that the team could tell. And one human went through and claimed that nothing happened, until she saw the way her puppy had grown in the two months she was gone.

Time travel. It had always been a thing of science fiction, Jim thought. It couldn't really exist. But it did.

He turned a corner heading for the stairs to get down to the machine. He wished that the facility was more like it would have been in the movies--gleaming walls, shining steel equipment, no mice--but the place they were working in was a gutted hospital that was built in the '60s and then abandoned sometime in the '90s and was only halfway cleaned up before The Professor was forced to move his team here.

The stairway smelled like old wet wood; it wasn't a smell that Jim liked, but it was better than the basement. The Machine was kept on the top floor because it seemed to work better away from the ground. Some members of the team said it had to do with being farther away from the closest large source of gravity. Others said it was the Earth's magnetic fields. Others claimed it was none of these things, but some mysterious different force, like dark energy. Jim didn't know and he didn't care. It just seemed to work better a hundred or so feet above the ground than it did on the ground. And that's what pissed so many of the team off. There was just too much they didn't know.

The room that held the machine wasn't built large enough to house all the equipment The Professor wanted to monitor it, so walls had been knocked down to make it larger. It also made it dustier, which Jim's nose didn't like.

He was alone with the machine, a doorway of twisted greenish/orangish metal that made Jim's fillings taste tangy. Everyone else was downstairs with The Professor listening to him lie to the men and women who thought they were funding breakthrough, original research. They weren't, really, though. The Professor was trying to learn how the machine worked, but didn't really care about the whys. He didn't want to know what new technologies could be born from the machine; he just wanted to replicate it.

All Jim wanted to do was to step through into the past. See what it was like. See what could be changed. Jim wanted to find out if time was just one straight shot that no one could change or if there were infinite possible universes that existed out there. Unfortunately, everything they'd send through had only gone into the future, or the present, depending on how you look at it.

There was nothing coming from the machine to show that it was on. No shimmering in the door. No burning smell. No hum. Sometimes some thing would go through and just come out the other side. Other times things would go in and not come out for hours or days or weeks.

Jim thought he'd take a chance and stepped into the machine himself.

Fiction Friday #11

Wade's World

We've been on this Earth for eighteen weeks now.

It's the longest we've been on one Earth since we started sliding.

It's almost like being home again. There's no plague killing massive numbers of people, no asteroid plunging toward the planet, no giant killer bee/spider things, and no Kromaggs. The world is peaceful enough. No one's chasing us. No one's aiming or firing any guns at us. No trouble of any kind, other than the usual political problems, but those don't effect me or the others.

The biggest difference I've noticed about this San Francisco is that there isn't a Golden Gate Bridge. It seems that when it was first being built, there was an earthquake that destroyed the early work. The state's tried to build a bridge there three more times since then and each time there was another quake. People here think the Gate's cursed. That makes everything more cramped in the city. Back home there were neighborhoods in the city with yards that circled the entire house. There aren't any homes like that here. Each building is built so close to the one next to it that they may as well be connected.

When we first got here, it was exciting. Finally we'd be able to live normal lives. We could get jobs. We could borrow books from the library and take our time reading them. We could take our time living because there was nothing to run from, nothing to frighten us.

Rembrandt found a gig singing at a nostalgia bar out in North Beach. Six nights a week he's on stage. Some times solo, sometimes with a three other guys, always singing the hits of Motown. He says he can't stand singing all those songs, but can't sing anything that he got famous for, if you believe one top fifty song while you're part of a singing group makes you famous; I think he really misses that world where he was the king of rock and role. I know he loves this job, though. He was born to sing and he'll do it on any world, especially the ones that haven't heard of The Crying Man because it gives him a chance to find fame again.

The Professor hasn't had the same sort of luck as Rembrandt has had. He thinks he should be able to walk up to any university, shout out his credential, and be handed tenure. So far, it hasn't worked out. He's been fired from two bookstores, a Wallgreens, the zoo, and a hot dog cart. (To be fair, he was fired from the last one for eating the profits.) He comes back to the hotel each night complaining about the idiots in this world, but I think he enjoys the complaining and if he couldn't complain he'd be frustrated and angry at us instead of the nameless multitudes.

Quinn got hired at a little fixit shop out in the Sunset. It's stuffy and dirty, but he has all sorts of things that he use so he can tinker with the timer. Early on, he spent a lot of time searching for his double here hoping that there'd be a complete sliding machine he could use to get us home. When his visited his address, he didn't found his house or his mom, but more squeezed buildings. Eventually, he tracked his double to an apartment in Berkeley. Apparently, this world's Quinn moved into an apartment with Conrad Bennish where they became so stoned they were eventually dropped out. The Quinn of this world could talk about alternate dimensions, but only in the way that burned people can, in that pseudo philosophical verbal babbling.

To say Quinn was disappoint would be like saying it's a long walk to Mars. He tries to hide it from us, his guilt. He smiles and he jokes, but whenever someone talks about home, his eyes tighten. He blames himself for our... predicament and he thinks he's the only one who can solve it. I wish he'd talk to me about it. I'm afraid that one day he'll break and we won't be able to put him back together.

Me? I found a job working as a techie for small architecture firm. They're just starting to move from all paper to a CAD system. Mostly, my job consisted of opening boxes, putting computers on desks, and installing the programs. My supervisor promised me that things would get more interesting once they got their network online--probably in the next six months--but for now, this was all I was going to do. I wasn't happy, though.

We've been to so many worlds where we didn't have time to meet people and make friends. We leave when we start to get to know people. The few, that we've brought through with us, leave at the next world. I wasn't sure I could stay at a job for several weeks, get to know, and like, the people I work with, and then leave, again.

Rembrandt saw how sad I was getting and understood. He told me to quit. He bought me charcoal and paint and brushes and paper and told me to capture moments in the city.

And that's what I've been doing for the last twelve weeks. I pick a spot in the city each day and draw or paint what I see. And I'm always sure to put in a person, or an animal--something that's in motion because that moving thing takes a still picture and turns it into the story. The ferry crossing from Marin, a woman chasing after the bus, or the sad buffalos in the park all tell a story about the city.

Tomorrow, we slide. I have to leave everything I've done here. It's okay, though. I feel like I'm leaving stories of this world behind. I just hope that the person who finds them takes a look before they throw them away. I'd like to think that they want some more tales about the city.

Fiction Friday #8

World's End: Moving

As much as everyone in Shame would deny it, we don't really know when The End of the World happened. We can make some guesses, but no one knows for sure because there wasn't any giant explosion, or flying saucer, or Jesus Christ to announce that The End was here.

The best I can guess is that it happened Thursday night or Friday morning about four and a half weeks ago. I figure it happened then because when I got home Thursday night after drinking with Trista and some of her friends, Sanford and Son was on Nick at Night. I know enough to know that the shows are on some sort of automatic rotation, so they don't have to have someone there to handle everything, but when I came back to my place for lunch on Thursday, just about every channel was dead. Some must have had longer schedules laid out in advance, others, not so much.

When school let out, some parents sort of panicked because their kids couldn't just plop down in front of the TV. Their kids were bored. What were parents to do without TV? Drive to the video store and rent something?

The real panic didn't start until a few days later, when the power and phones cut out. That's when people started heading over to the high school. The insanity didn't set in for about a month, but it came and that's when I knew it was time to leave.

First thing I did was head to my tent and pack up. I stuffed some of the clothes that I brought with me into the knapsack I'd taken from Abbot's Sports. The things I left I left because I thought I could get them newer and better by hitting a few stores on my way out of town. Food and how to carry it was a big problem.

And where was I going to go?

Rumor had it that St. Paul and Minneapolis were okay, and people were still living there, but who in their right mind want's to live there? Maybe a stop over would be okay. Just to check things out.

I grabbed my knapsack and hitched it over my shoulder. I was ready to leave the high school. I left the tent, because it was a cheapie, along with all the blankets and the pillows where they were. I knew that there were plenty of better things I could take with me. After all, I was the first one who went into Abbot's when we all moved in here.

During the fight, I hadn't seen my sister, or Roy, so I walked over to his tent hoping to catch them there. When I walked up, I could hear some rustling and some thrashing, and I smiled. These were the noises I'd heard every night my sister brought a guy back with her before I moved into my own place. Funny how something that drove me crazy when it woke me up two or three times a week sort of made me happy now. Not all the time living with my sister was bad. And during those weeks when she had a steady guy, it was like living by myself, but only paying half the rent.

"Trista," I said as I got closer, "I need to talk to you." I started to hear panting. "Trista, God dammit, I need to talk to you!"

"Shit," I heard her say.

"Who is it?" I heard Roy ask.

"My brother," she said. "Now get off of me."

A little grunting and heavy breathing later, she unzipped the top of their tent, poked her head out, and asked, "The fuck do you want, Crete?"

She wasn't really beautiful, sort of cute with her sort of upturned nose and roundish face, but not beautiful. The rest of her was more round than trim and she was lucky that she wasn't old enough to start drooping. She wasn't one to dress sexy, either. She mostly wore loose shirts and long skirts in miss-matched colors. The reason so many guys liked her was because she liked sex, a lot, and she preferred it sober. She was a cheap, easy lay. Our father never liked that about her, but he didn't like a lot of things about a lot of people.

"Leaving," I said. "You and Roy want to come with, meet me at Abbot's Sports in about an hour and we'll all start there."

"Why an hour?"

"You two'll want to finish up," I said, grinning at her with all my power, "and then you'll want to pack and I gotta go get some stuff from my place."

She looked at me like I was nuts.

"We gotta get out of her, Tris," I said, squatting down so our faces were level. "They're going crazy in there. I just saw Mrs. Harding beat the shit out of Mrs. Greeling over Band-Aids. I don't want to be here when that shit," I pointed at the gym, "explodes and I don't want you here, neither."

"And Roy?"

"He'll keep you happy." I winked at her.

"You shit," she said. "Fine, we'll be there."

"Good," I said as she zipped the tent up.

I stood up and heard Roy ask, "What's going on?"

"First," said Trista, "I'm going to cum. Second, we're going to pack. Third, we're going shopping."

"What?" he asked.

"Shut up," she said and I walked away.

I needed to get to my apartment. I needed my hiking boots because, like everyone knows, you never go on a long hike with new boots, and I figured that there'd more hiking on this trip than I ever wanted to do.

Fiction Friday #3

World's End: Shame

You know, it's a funny thing. When The End of the World came, the world really didn't come to an end.

Sure, most of the big cities were gone. (Although, from what I've heard St. Paul and Minneapolis are still there. I guess whoever took us all thought Minnesota was just as useless as the rest of the good old US of A did.) Most of the little cities and towns weren't, though.

My parent lived just out side of a town called Shame in the corn fields of Iowa with my older sister, her husband, their baby, one of my younger sisters, and my younger brother. They grew corn. I guess they occasionally switched to soy beans to help the soil get better, but it was mostly corn. Dad was convinced that ethanol was the wave of the future. I hated growing corn. Me and my other younger sister, Trista, lived in town. She worked at the liquor store and slept around a lot. I worked as a clerk in a law office and didn't. I was hoping to save enough money to head off to community college part time and learn to be a paralegal. Didn't happen, though.

When The End came there were probably about 2500 people living in the city limits of Shame. We had one of the two high schools in the county, though.

At first, everything was fine. People were so scared of whatever caused The End of the World that they all worked together. Everyone gathered at the high school and set up cots and sleeping bags in the gym. We got ourselves organized into groups. Some of us went to grocery store to gather canned good and noodles and other things that didn't go bad; you should have seen the smiles when Roy pulled Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs out of his cart, people looked like they thought everything was going to be okay. Others went to the hardware store to bring back stuff we could use, like flashlight of all sizes and batteries and tools and wood and other building supplies. The drugstore was hit, too, for peroxide and Band-Aids and other things for the scrapes and bruises we were sure to get.

A lot of families went to their homes and gathered up all their extra blankets and towels and camping gear and things without even being asked, which was great. We pitched tents out on football field so people who wanted the privacy could have it. Mostly, they didn't though. In that first month everyone seemed to want to be near people. I guess it set them at ease.

I moved out into a little pup tent that I had swiped from the sports store, the place I volunteered to raid. At the time, it seemed to me that this was the place to find the things we were going to need, seeing that the electricity probably wasn't going to be back any time soon, if at all, and I didn't think anyone was really out there watching the water, making sure it was kept clean, so the purifying pills seemed like a good idea. And if a couple of things that I took decided to stay in my backpack, rather than be handed over to the group of women who were sorting and storing everything, who could blame me? I had me and my sister to look out for.

Trista'd found Roy's tent, and he was all the happier for it.

After a couple of days, the gym started to stink. People weren't shitting in there or anything, they were using the toilettes in the locker rooms, but they weren't really smelling good, either. Water was still running, sort of, since gravity works whether or not the human race is destroyed; it just didn't get hot. Without electricity to pump the water into the big tank outside of town, though, we'd run out eventually and then what would we do? So, a couple of guys got smart. They went out and built a latrine where the baseball dugouts used to be, that way they didn't have to dig as much. And there were already benches there, too. Plus, having two made perfect sense: one for the men and one for the women. Lucky for us, the hardware story had tons of lime so there wouldn't be too much of a stink there.

Into the second week, some of the guys got restless. They wanted to know what was going on in the world outside of Shame and, since the radios weren't picking any thing up, they decided to put together an expedition to see what was what. At first, they were day trips to the nearby farms to make sure the families were okay and to see if any wanted to come back to town with us. No one came. Not even my family.

I was there for that one. Dad refused to come. He was sure that everything was just fine and that the government of the good ole US of A was going to come in soon and tell us what was going on and that everything was a-okay. When my brother-in-law said the he though him, my sister, and their kids ought to come into town, Dad punched him in the jaw and said nobody was taking his baby girl away from him. Dad always was a stubborn, and an ass. He should have stayed in the Marines. Become a sergeant. Boss scared little kids around for a living. Instead, he grew what he was sure was the gold of the 21st century. And while I feel bad that Ma and my brother and sisters and my nephews were stuck there, if they had any balls at all they would have left on their own.

After the local farms were checked on, people started talking about trips to other towns, or even cities. Lots of people wanted to head into Iowa City and, if no one was there, head up to Cedar Rapids. Some thought people should start by going straight to Des Moines. They argued that that's where most people would be heading. They also thought that if there was going to be any news from the government, it'd end up there first. The town voted, and the decision was to head to Des Moines and check in at Albia, Knoxville, and the other towns on the way.

A team of five men left by truck the first day of the third week since The End occurred. It's normally only a three hour drive, but they were stocked with enough food and gas to last them a week, just in case. Most figured that they'd be gone two or three days. To the best of my knowledge, they never came back.

After a week passed, some men wanted to go searching for the ones who went to Des Moines. Others argued that they had to stay to protect the women and children. Trista called them backward rednecks said, "The 'women and children,'" she put up air quotes, "can do just fine with you shitheads and can make better decisions without you around since you won't make decisions with them. Get the fuck out of here if those assholes are more important to you than your families!" Then she stormed out.

I thought she was right. So did some of the other men and women. What had started as a discussion to plan a trip soon turned into a yelling match. After a while, the group tired out and Roy tried to have a real discussion with everyone. But people flared up and then someone would call someone else something and the yelling started all over again.

Nothing was decided. Eventually people started to poop out, or kids came in saying they were hungry, or they just got mad and left.

I thought they were all idiots.

The day after the four week mark, a fight broke out in the gym between two mothers. One accused the other of hoarding Band-Aids. The accused said that the other didn't have to give her son a Band-Aid for every bump, bruise, or little scratch. The accuser pushed the accused. The accused pushed back. The accuser slapped the other. The accused grabbed the hair of the accuser. And it got worse from there. And I know that there are guys out there who think women fighting women is sexy, but let me tell you, it's not. Men, at least seem to have some rules--no nut shots, fists not feet, once one's down it's over--but women don't. Shins were kicked. Hair was ripped out. Scratches bled. They bit and broke the skin. And when one finally went down, the other kicked her in the face for good measure.

"She was hoarding the Band-Aids," said the winner, spitting blood out of her mouth. I couldn't tell you it was hers or if it came from the woman on the floor.

That’s when others started in. "He has a stash of rice!" "They're hoarding cans of beans!" "Well you're saving batteries!" "Who's saving batteries? I need batteries!" "I'm not saving batteries!" "And who has the pillowcases?" "You are!" And on, and on.

I watched this go on for a few minutes and decided to leave.

Fiction Friday #2

A Taste of Yellow

I sat on the bench at edge of the park, near the car lot, waiting for Jo, watching the cars in the sky all around me. With the sun setting behind me and the sky darkening in front of me, it seemed like I could see the blue-white blurs left by each car forever around me. And I wondered what it used to be like for people to look above them and not see anything move. The stars probably seemed like permanent points.

They're world must have been so still. As if nothing would ever change. What would one of them think of the world today? What would one of us think of the world then?

Jo was late, which was her usual time for everything. For a while, I would lie to her about when things started, but she's not stupid and quickly figured out that I told her to show up forty-three minutes early to everything so she'd be there, nearly, on time. She started leaving whenever she wanted, and started to be always late, again.

I scanned the sky for her car, a boxy, orange thing that could hardly stay in the air and was all wind resistance. Its patch was good, though, so it wasn't going to fall unless the battery died, so she kept driving it, much to the horror of her parents. I didn't see her car, but I couldn't see much of anything. The sun had set and the paths started to glow, leaving the park behind me crisscrossed with yellowish white lines. A few patches of luminescent grass also glowed, in blue green, warning people they were too far from the path. It was still too cold for the star beetles to leave their nests in the woods, so the air was still.

I sighed. The concert had probably started. Sure, it was only the warm-ups, but I liked those. They helped me to adjust and prepare for what was coming. Just starting cold always made it harder for me to get into the spirit of the show. Still, showing up after the beginning was better than not going at all.

A car suddenly appeared from below the lip of the lot. It was Jo's. I stood up and started waving my arms at her. She pounded the horn, causing the entire car to flare up, bathing the lot in a bright, orange light.

She hovered over the lot for a minute, looking for a space to land in. I watched her from below and followed along, as best I could, when she started moving toward an open spot.

She landed the car in her usual way, cutting power a few inches above the ground, so it landed hard. It landed so hard this time, my butt ached in sympathy for hers. She popped her door, climbed out, slammed it shut, and thumbed the pad. Then she did a sort of slithering thing with her whole body, probably to straighten out her clothes, before turning toward me and waving in an excited manner.

I waved back and motioned for her to hurry up.

She put one hand on her hip, which she jutted out toward me, as if to remind me that I wasn't in charge of her.

I rolled my eyes, turned around, and started to walk to the nearest path with a black arrow on it.

Just as I was about to step on the path, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and look up into Jo's eyes, doing my best to frown at her. She looked down at me and smiled. I tried to look angry, but she started shake and then laugh and I started to laugh, too, and I put my hand behind her neck where the stiff, cool material of her suit met the soft, warm skin, stood on my toes, and pulled her toward me and we kissed.

She broke off from me, straightening up, and smiled even wider.

I took her hand and we started down the path following the arrows toward the concert. She flashed another smile my direction, gave my hand a tug, and started running. I followed as quickly as I could, but when Jo runs at her full speed, there wasn't going to be any way I could catch her. She turned a corner into a grove of trees, and was gone. I as fast as I could and followed the arrows until I got to the amphitheater entrance where Jo was waiting there, her arms crossed beneath her breasts and a look fixed on her face as if she was trying to tell me she'd been waiting for me for hours.

I just gave her a quick look then headed through the entrance. She put one hand on my shoulder as I passed and followed me in.

The bowl in the ground was mostly dark, the completely black. The seats were lowered so people could dance on the terraced semi-circles surrounding the stage. The air was thick with the smell of all the other people there who had gone through the warm-up. It smelled like real life in there.

Jo tapped my shoulder and when I turned she pointed me to an empty section, halfway down and to our right. She could see better than I could, being as tall as she is, so I followed her lead.

It was a good spot. Not too far back from the stage, but more off center than I'd like. Although it was hard to complain too much since we'd gotten there so late.

The stage lit up in nearly blinding white light and Decon was standing in the center, his wand in hand.

Everyone in the theater froze and watched the stage, waiting for Decon to start.

He raised his arms and the light around him shifted into a deep blue. With a slow wrist movement, he lowered his wand and a tendril of the blue light slowly moved off to his right into the crowd and he lowered his hands a little. With another movement another tendril went more toward the center of the crowd, this one a darker blue, and his hands lower. Another movement sent a deep purple one toward us, his hands lower still. He quickly raised his hands and all the colors became brighter and stopped.

He held his hands and I started to count. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. And on ten, he dropped both his arms and tendrils of all colors shot out from him into the crowd.

We threw our hands up in applause and I noticed that the colors around us started to shift. The purple above me and Jo started turning more red. I tapped Jo on the shoulder and pointed toward the shifting light. She gasped, looked at me, then back at the light, and smiled.

Decon had started dancing, slowly. More dark colors slid off his body in large clumps into the crowd. The front row started moving with him and the colors around them shifted slightly. Decon moved faster. There were more colors, still dark, in smaller clumps. Occasionally he'd flick his wand and a sharp shaft of green or red or blue or purple would lance over the heads of the crowd.

Jo and I started dancing when one of the early clumps of color reached us. It was dark forest green. Like Decon, we started slow, watching the green grow a bit lighter, then more blue until it was totally blue. As we started moving faster, the blue lightened and small bursts of red, yellow, and orange appeared and then faded away into the blue.

On stage Decon was a blur of color. All shades in all intensities were pouring from his body and out onto us. He shifted from green to orange to red to blue to purple to yellow to red on and on in endless combinations.

Jo put her hand on my face and turned it to her. I smiled as a halo of yellow appeared around her head. She started dancing harder, faster. I started dancing harder, too.

The light around us got brighter. It shifted from a light lavender, to sky blue, to sea green, to sunshine yellow. And, as we held on to each other, pulsing to the colors pouring off of Decon, the yellow around us became more intense and shot through our bodies, warming us and driving us closer together before it faded into an orange.

The concert ended with Decon spinning on stage, creating a whirlpool of color around him. All the colors surrounding the audience got caught in the tempest around him and were pulled toward his body. Decon stopped and everything was black.

After a minute, the floors began to radiate their light. The stage was empty. Decon was gone. Everyone in the audience threw up their hands in applause and held it for several minutes before the first started to head toward the exit.

Jo and I were the last to leave.

On our way out, following the same path we followed before, my arm was around her and hers was around me. Our free hands intertwined.

At her car, she pulled me close and I could smell a mix of her sweat and the light perfume her of her clothes.

I looked up at her. She leaned down to me. We kissed.

And she tasted yellow.