#and also i blame myself for reseting my monitors setting...

[miyku]

[oculusius]

Desk Jockey

“I want that report on my desk at 6 AM tomorrow or your ass is on the street.”

I look up from my keyboard, from the sickeningly modern, blank desk to the even worse face of my branch manager. Picture what you’d expect the person saying this to look like, and you’re probably right. Tall, dark hair combed back, slicked back with just enough gel to not be disgusting. Attractive, but only conventionally, because it hides his fetid interior. The rotten, wriggling insides of the kind of guy who relishes other’s misery, especially when he’s snorting high grade blow on the weekends. Though he’d probably prefer orphan’s tears (But that’s a story for another time).

I’ll do my best, you fucking cretin.

I mumble out some garbled excuse. I won’t even tell you what I said because I forget, or rather, it was so insignificant that I never committed it to memory in the first place. “Sorry Eric,” (He’s one of the ‘hip’ bosses that makes us call him by his first name), “Won’t happen again”, Please don’t take my healthcare away I will literally suck your dick to keep it. He shakes his head and walks away. We’re the last ones in the office, one of the tallest buildings in our shitty, Midwestern town; all glass and steel like some gaudy San Francisco startup. The only lights still on are in the lobby; besides that the only other illumination is from the sickeningly crisp glow emanating from my monitor. As soon as the elevator doors close behind Eric, I grasp my hair in my hands; it’s drenched in sweat and I’m balding already, despite being in my late twenties. Flakes of dandruff are appearing on my scalp, but by the time I get home from work I’m too damn tired to remember to get that special shampoo. Stress related? Probably. Did I have time to fix it? Fuck no.

I swear to God you motherfucker I’ll name you when I eat a fucking bullet you shit fuck…

Stop. The more rational voice in my head. Finish this shit in the next—5 hours? Shit, it’s already 1 AM! I’ll smash bottles and get proper wasted when I’m finished. And when the following day is over, seeing as I’d probably be pulling an all-nighter. Fuck. I take two caffeine pills from the nondescript tin in my top drawer.

Alright. I need to get the excel sheet from that old email inbox the intern left when he quit (not that I blame him). To do that, I need to go through my inbox and find that time I CC’ed him about scheduling that conference call. But to get into my inbox, I need to reset my password because company policy is to change passwords every 3 weeks, and it can’t be a past password…

Alright. One step at a time.

 It’s two hours later. I found the file, finally. I feel like I crossed the fucking Rubicon with no limbs to get here. Now, to get the shit I need from it and send it to Eric. I hope he chokes on it. While bleeding. From every orifice, and then some. I open the file, and I’ve never been so goddamn happy to see the sickening green of excel. Document recovery—what’s that? Fuck it, I’ll deal with it later. I ctrl f the account name. Beads of sweat are dripping off my forehead. Outside, it’s still the vaguely pinkish black of night in any big city. I might actually get some sleep tonight…

WHY IS THERE A FUCKING HYPERLINK HERE?

Oh boy, this better not cost me my job. I get sent to a greyish webpage, the kind of soulless portal that screams ‘high finance’. A nondescript login page for “Kleene-Rosser Accounts Management LLC”. I roll my eyes. Management occasionally threw us these shitty platforms because their friends from way back developed them, and they wanted to help them out. Because God forbid we use Citibank.

There’s no login, but there’s a support number on the bottom of the page. Maybe if I call, they can help me? It’s worth a shot. I mean, I had nothing but time, and if it actually worked and saved my job, I would fly all the way to India or some shit to kiss that phone technician on the lips. Alright. God, when I was an undergrad did I ever imagine this would be my waking life (or lack thereof?) I should’ve joined the military. Better to be blown up overseas then mentally scarred over here.

4-887-612-393: 24/7 Live Support

I call from my office phone, in the hopes that it’ll lend credence to the claim that I fucking need this login. The phone rings for what seems like half an hour, but I can tell from the clock on the wall that it hasn’t been a single, godforsaken minute. Maybe I’d died and gone to purgatory? Seemed believable enough—although, I wasn’t sure what I’d done in a past life to deserve this. Maybe I was a Mongol slavedriver, and…

“Hello, this is ZenDesk, my name is Robert. How may I help you today?” My crisis of existential spiraling instantly, mercifully, shatters. I put on a cheery voice.

“Hi, I work at [company name]. I really need to find something for my boss, and in this accounts payable excel file, it says that I’m supposed to login to a ‘Kleene-Rosser Accounts Management?’ I have all my company info if you need it, I was just never told we used this firm before.”

A beat passes. I hope he heard the desperation in my voice, because if I had a guardian angel, it’d be on the other end of that phone line. Why did I tell him I never heard of this place? He doesn’t care! He isn’t paid to care!

“Of course, sir. Just a moment please. What’s your name sir?”

That thin veneer of politeness again.

“Uh, Keith Sanders. I also have my company email, if you can send the password there…”

“OK sir, what’s the address?”

I spell it out for him. My fingers are digging into the faux-leather of the chair. I’m starting to sweat. If this doesn’t work, I’m fucking hosed…

I tell him the address, and soon I have the URL to reset the Kleene-Rosser password. Surprisingly, my company email works for the username. Lucky guess I suppose? I thank him, truly from the bottom of my heart, and wait for the page to load.

According to the web page, the site was some kind of file storage service. Besides a few nondescript tabs on the top leading to “Home”, “Support”, etc. there’s nothing but a grey background set behind a very basic file directory.

[company_name]/Accounts/Accounts_Payable/2019/May/.

There it is! So deceptively close. 05.19.19.xcl

When I try to open it, I hear the most awful of noises: the Windows 10 error sound, impossibly loud. File corrupted. WHAT THE FUCK? HOW DO YOU CORRUPT A FUCKING EXCEL FILE? SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS?

I dig my fingertips into my temples. I can feel the faint outline of an engorged vein on the side of my head. I imagine it, an angry, vibrant purple, the shooting representation of my immense, earth-shattering frustration.

It was as if every cog in the infernal machine that was my work place was designed specifically to drive me fucking bananas. Like my life was some cosmic joke to see how much I would endure before going postal, or at least smashing my monitor. Jump out an office window, strapped with speakers blaring “FUCK THIS PLACE” over and over again, even when they’re scraping me off the pavement with a comically large spatula. Every little thing piled atop one another to form the worst shit tsunami eternally suspended above my head. Every wriggling, squealing fucking cell in my brain…

Alright, let’s think of solutions. Eric wanted the file, and if it was corrupted, I’d just tell him the truth: that it’s how I found it. Man, why did I drive myself up the wall earlier? So stupid… I log into my email. Actually, I don’t. As soon as I hit enter in the URL bar, I get that fucking google “no internet” error dinosaur. At this point, I try to keep rolling with the punches. Alright, network diagnostics, here we go. After what feels like centuries, after windows resets the router, etc. I finally get an answer. Sort of. An error code. I had two hours left before I was unemployed. I take another caffeine pill and keep going, determined to see this shit through to the end.

Hidden on the fifth page of the search results is my answer. It’s on an obscure, early 2000s web forum that had a grand total of 2 users online, probably bots. A post from a literal decade ago has my same issue, and one of the commenters mentions he had the same thing. Apparently, it’s a hardware issue with the router. Despite being woefully underqualified to deal with IT issues, I have no other choice. No fucking way Eric will believe that the internet cut out 2 hours before my deadline. I find the tech support number, and pray that the information is up to date and that they won’t have to send a technician out to fix it.

As the phone rings, I ponder my situation. I was unlucky enough to find what I needed right as the Wi-Fi died, and it was probably one of those issues that fixes itself in an hour anyway. There it is again; I can almost see the shadowy gears of the universe working against me, trying to crush my psyche beneath their teeth into bits of mental scrap. When I finally get a response, I’m caught off guard. This guy seems American. His voice is a bit hoarse, and I picture him as the fat comic book guy from the Simpsons, gut and all.

“----- tech support. How can I help you?”

I don’t like the way his voice trails off every word, leaving a breathy wisp behind like the tail of a comet. It makes me want to shudder.

“Yeah, uh—“

My mind blanks for a minute. I’ve been derailed, and it takes an agonizing few seconds for me to decide what I want to say.

“I was trying to email my boss, and—“again with the unnecessary details “I got this error code, and I saw online that it was an issue with the router.”

“Uh huh.” He sounds skeptical. And disapproving. I imagine he’s wrinkled that gob of cartilage clinging to his face he calls a nose. “What’s the model number?” He finally asks.

I read off the name, and he laughs. He fucking laughs. Is my suffering amusing him? Arousing him?

I have a clearer image of this guy now. Pervading my mind, filling the gaps in my brain, covering my synaptic gaps with fucking cement. He’s grossly overweight, in some dark room somewhere. He smells like BO and he is sweaty milky beads off his forehead that are landing into his keyboard and congealing. The scent is odious, like a corpse coated in mayonnaise and left in a tomb for five millennia, except it’s still wet.

“Sir?” That subtle tone of annoyance again. “Do you understand me, sir?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. Would you mind repeating that? I was just—talking to someone.” Idiot he can tell you weren’t.

I write down his instructions, but first he pontificates about some issue with a chip in the router or some shit. Apparently I have to call the manufacturer? And they can help me dust it off or some such?

He’s fleshy and sickeningly soft, like a malformed, hairless puppy. That shirt’s been pasted to his damp stomach longer than you’ve been on Earth. It’s just a crude impersonation of the kind of people that run this industry. And you’re just his plaything, to be antagonized and fucked with until…

As soon as my attention is re-centered, I say “Alright thanks bye” without even knowing what he was rambling about before. He laughs. No, cackles. I can practically smell the stale coffee and tobacco on his breath. I slam the receiver down. It was starting to stick to my face with sweat and I really wanted to switch to my cell anyway. Peeling it away was orgasmic.

I examine the napkin I had scribbled on. I’d written it down in a haze, and it almost felt like I was reading someone else’s handwriting. Was that a 5, or a 6, or what? Doesn’t matter. I plug in the numbers, to some obscure fucking company I know nothing about. There’s like 12 digits, not like any number I’ve ever dialed. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to make the worst fucking mistake of my life, worse than taking on that debt to go to college or that time I puked on grandma’s casket at the funeral. Light years away, I imagine, some metaphysical blade was eagerly, sexually, preparing to scoop out my insides and flay them across time and space, flicking its imaginary tongue back and forth in anticipation.

I had expected that infuriating error code, but instead, I feel it. All of it. The other side is cold, and every hair on my body stands right on edge.

“Hello?”

The phone’s definitely connected.

“Hello?!”

This time it seems to echo. I’d opened a door, a beaming ray of light into a place that hasn’t been graced by it in eons.

“Is this Infolink appliances?” I gulp suddenly. My throat is impossibly dry. Everything that made me me, my identity, my memories, my interests… were spilling out into space, into an impossible void far blacker than even the darkest of nights. Please. Like my brain was a plastic bag full of air, but now it’s been punctured. It’s getting sucked out like a breached spaceship, and my body is curling around the now torturous void. I am a husk.

I drop the phone on the ground, and the screen cracks. But I’m far beyond caring about that screen now. The spiritual, inky black is billowing out of the phone like an endless wave going out in every direction. And there’s something else. A raucous laughter, and sneering, they’re laughing so hard somewhere backstage that their mouths, or whatever they call those fucking gullets, are overflowing with sickening white foam with streaks of yellow bile. Dark silhouettes that have been eagerly waiting this whole time for this horrible climax. I’d played my part. Everything else was out of my hands now.

[tessatechaitea]

Doomsday Clock #5

Nostalgia's branding efforts might be a little off the rails.

Dammit. I had almost forgotten how everybody blamed and mistrusted superheroes!

Of course there's always been a long history of Gotham Police mistrusting and hating Batman (if only because he does their job better than they do and obviously has way better pay and benefits). But DC really fucked up when they decided that level of mistrust should be applied more broadly so that every citizen suddenly turned against even Superman, the universally acknowledged boy scout. I'm not a comic book historian so I don't know when that attitude began but I think it's generally acknowledged that it was a byproduct of Watchmen and similar comic books of the time. "Look at how more realistic this is! Why should a world embrace and trust masked heroes?! And Watchmen was so popular, that aspect of it must be what made so much money!" But, of course, that's the kind of thing people who didn't read Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans believe. Because if I had to pick a starting point for when the mistrust of heroes seriously got rolling (I'm not saying it wasn't there before! It just wasn't the standard reaction of the public), I'd point to Wolfman's work trying to adapt The X-men feel to DC's superheroes. In the X-men, the "heroes" were actually mutants enrolled in a school where they could feel safe and learn to control their powers. They were hated by the public due to bigotry and a misunderstanding of what they represented to humanity's future. They were constantly attacked by "evil mutants" due to a disagreement on what mutants meant to the world. This worked as a plot point because of the bigotry aspect and the underlying difference between mutants and superheroes. But translating that to DC's world where mutants don't exist completely missed the mark. Wolfman's world became a place where The New Titans formed to help the world but never actually did. They simply created a headquarters in New York where they were constantly attacked by family members. Of course the people of New York would begin hating them for bringing danger and destruction to the city. Because they were actually doing that! And since The New Titans became DC's biggest seller for quite some time, every comic book writer on Earth learned that Wolfman's model was acceptable to readers. Instead of having heroes exist for saving the world, they could just exist to be targeted by super villains. And if that's all super villains seemed interested in then isn't it true that heroes are the root cause of all the problems with super villains? It's one thing to comment on bigotry in America by portraying people's hatred of mutants. It's a totally stupid other thing to have people hate heroes because of the destruction caused by the heroes attempting to simply save themselves from their enemies. In the first one, you side with the mutants because the people hate them for irrational reasons. In the second one, you have to side with the citizens because who wouldn't be upset if their house was destroyed and their dog was killed because The Joker was trying to kill Batman? I've said all of that before. Sometimes, I feel that's all I have left to say about DC. At least when Priest recently had the public hating the Justice League, it was because the Justice League was racist! Not in the regular racist way where Batman is using slurs and Superman is flying around in blackface and a sombrero but in the systemic way where they don't realize they're being racist but they just are. That was at least different (even if I still wasn't happy about it). I don't understand people who prefer heroes who are mistrusted and hated over heroes who are inspiring, loved, and embraced by the public. Wasn't the latter version the whole point of them in the first place?

Dammit! I should really read ahead before I go on a rant! Although, technically, I think this somehow proves my point about how this is all supposed to fix what went wrong with The New 52.

This issue is called "There is no God." I'm guessing at the capitalization because the font actually reads "THERE IS NO GOD". But it doesn't end in an exclamation point (or any other kind of punctuation, being a title and all) so I'm assuming it isn't meant to be yelled and it's just DC's perverse avoidance of lower case letters. Anyway, "There is no God" is the perfect title to ruffle religious feathers. But I bet it's a set-up! I bet Geoff Johns is going to write a story about how God does exist, even if only in a metaphorical way that gives hope to people who need more than a few decades of random, chaotic life! I mean, I would like more than a few decades of life too! But I wouldn't mind if it remained meaningless. Who needs a purpose? That's just adding obligation to this precious gift! Why do people want that?! I think that's why "being inspiring" has become such a huge achievement for so many people. Because it seems to give meaning to your life without you having to actually do anything except exactly the thing you want to do. So, say, I was coming up with a completely hypothetical situation where a guy I know survived an IED attack in Iraq but the four other people in his Humvee were killed, he might want to find meaning in why only he survived. He might feel somehow responsible for carrying on in a meaningful way to make their deaths less random and nonsensical. He might also become religious because it's too painful to believe that those four other guys simply winked out of existence in a meaningless war that didn't do anything for anybody (aside from some people making a lot of money (and aside from opening up the country to more chaos and instability)). And the meaning he might find in his life is becoming the center of attention just like he always wanted but could never attain. He became a comedian who also inspires people because he's so badly burnt and disfigured, how can he tell jokes?! Now his life has meaning even if his jokes and his poetry never get any better because the people who hear and read them are Christian and patriotic supporters who can't be critical of anything he does. So if he says in a poem that his daughter is crying "alligator tears," nobody tells him that they're "crocodile tears" and that if his daughter is crying them, it means she doesn't actually care that he's off in Iraq. And when his only joke is that he was blown up and set on fire, nobody minds because he was blown up and set on fire and—look at that!—he can still stand up and tell jokes! So inspiring! Now if my thought process were better than it is, I would delete all of that so that I don't sound like a jealous and bitter friend. But I explained my thought process earlier so you can judge me but I've got my Oreos ready to go after you misunderstand the hyperbole and facetiousness. Also, I'm not jealous and bitter. I'm supportive but critical! Which is why I didn't post what I just wrote on his wall. Because he can take supportive but I don't think he's up for critical. Especially hyperbolic and super truthful critical. Hypothetically, I mean! Back to how this comic book is doing its part to reset the DC Universe into the Post-Zero-Hour, Pre-New 52, Post and Pre a bunch of other stuff I can hardly guess at because DC Continuity is super fucked, a news report on a hospital television reports on Hawk, Dove, Red Star, and the Rocket Reds. So maybe I was wrong about Post-Zero-Hour! Maybe this reboot is post-Crisis only? And I might be wrong about that too! Isn't the current Superman from the Crisis timeline where they actually beat the Anti-Monitor? It's hard to remember Convergence because it was super boring and terribly written. It rated 5 Flaccid Penises out of 5. Unless you're totally into flaccid penises and then it rated zero of them. Along with the Rocket Reds and Red Star gearing up for an anti-west battle, Pozhar has stepped up to the plate as well. Or whatever you step up to in Russian baseball. Do they have something akin to baseball in Russia? Maybe cement-block-call? If we're going by themes, it's beginning to look like we're headed back to the eighties cold war, so a reboot to pre-Crisis levels of continuity isn't completely off the table! If I didn't know Geoff Johns was writing this, I'd be tempted to guess it was Dan Jurgens. The Cold War of this ear isn't about nuclear superiority but about metahuman superiority. But that's just a superficial difference, really! What's actually happening in Watchmen 2: Doomsday Clocks is identical to what was happening in Watchmen. Which means everybody will get along at the end not when Mister Terrific teleports a fake space creature into the middle of New York but when an actual cosmic threat attacks Earth and all the American and Russian metahumans have to team up to save the day. Then everybody will be inspired and begin fucking. Right on panel! I hope. In Moore's Watchmen, there was a thread with that kid reading the pirate book. I wasn't smart enough to know what that was about. Maybe it had something to do with how, to survive, the lead turned himself into a monster the way Ozymandias did. Or maybe it was just about the kinds of things media used to distract the populace. Who can tell?! Not me! Anyway, this series has Nathaniel Dusk stories as the story within a story. I guess it's the only way DC could get people to read them. So boring! You can tell they were boring if you read them in 1984. Also because an old man really loves them in this comic book. That old man is Johnny Thunder! His name makes him sound exciting but you'd be wrong! More boring! And he's trying to get the Justice Society back into continuity. Most boring of all! Some of you might be bristling at my description of the Justice Society as "most boring of all." But you've forgotten about the hyperbole and facetiousness! There's a twenty-five percent chance that I actually liked the Justice Society and own a bunch of their comic books! The Superman Theory states that the American government is in the business of making metahumans to make sure they retain control on the world stage. Most of the heroes deny that they were made by the government because they were actually made when they were exposed to Nth Metal. Duh. Everybody who believes The Superman Theory must not have read Metal. How did they miss it? It was the biggest and longest blockbuster ever produced! Anyway, Lois thinks Lex Luthor is the one behind this propaganda. But Lex denies it. In fact, he says somebody in the government is creating metahumans and that person was once a member of the Justice League! So, um, like Lex? Hopefully the reveal of the person behind The Superman Theory doesn't wind up being somebody like Commander Steel. With a twist like this, it's got to be somebody you generally associate with the League, like Martian Manhunter or Gleek.

Here Ozymandias lectures Batman thanks to years of terrible comic book writers.

By the end of this issue, Rorschach and Saturn Girl have caught up with Johnny Thunder who finally found Alan Scott's lantern. Batman has been captured by The Joker. And Geoff Johns is well on his way to telling comic book fans how dumb they've been accepting the bullshit narrative they've been fed for years that super villains only exist because super heroes exist. Rating: This issue was called "There is no God" and it had nothing to do with the story inside. But it was used because it was part of the Eugene O'Neill quote that closes the issue: "When men make Gods, there is no God!" Is that how every issue has been titled so far? Using a bit of the quote at the end? I haven't been paying close enough attention to know. Anyway, I have a few issues with that quote. First off, you shouldn't capitalize "Gods." I suppose you can argue that you would capitalize "Johns" but if you choose to do that, I probably don't like you and would discount your argument on that basis alone. I mean, the point is that men are making little gods which kills the proper noun God. Second, why does it end in an exclamation point? Is the second half of that statement such a huge twist that it needed the surprise element of the exclamation point? Maybe Eugene knew it was a fairly week turn to the phrase and thought the exclamation point would bolster the sentiment. I know that trick! The third problem I have with it is that I don't understand it in the context of this story. Is Johns saying that super heroes have replaced God? Are fans now supposed to feel reprimanded for being blasphemous monsters?! Am I supposed to believe that if we rely on heroes, we have lost our faith in God? Is Johns saying inaction through faith is better than relying on super heroes? Or is he saying that we lose our own motivation and free will when we expect heroes to save the day? How is that any different than expecting God to save the day? I guess in that context, I understand the quote! "When we come up with something more entertaining that still doesn't actually help or save humanity, we've forgotten the original concept we came up with that doesn't actually help or save humanity!" Hmm, good quote! I've won myself over! Five out of five stars! Not for this issue but for my twisted logic! For more of this sweet, sweet writing, subscribe to my newsletter: E!TACT the Newsletter.

[aka-willow]

Familiar

gif

Words: 1041

Characters: Willow Wren, Ethan Kim, Gooblin, Pip, Pingu, Burr, Spark, Danny, Manny, Dew, Fanisimo, France, Sabbath

Prompt/Tag:

“You’ve got to be more careful.”

“You can’t keep ignoring this.”

Summary: Willow hacks the fourth ex-Facility scientist but doesn’t confront them

Timeline: November 2015

Song: 4am - Bastille

A/N: i love them all they’re so stupid

—————————————————————————–

I sat in my room, video chatting with the other Lab Rats as we briefed each other on the last few weeks. I found myself leaving out parts, like the fact that instead of just going through the files we had and leaking one scientist’s information at a time, I was confronting them in person. Which is why I won’t be doing that anymore. That incident at the library was way too close.

Still, confronting them had yielded some interesting results, such as the one-worded memory I had regained, and the theory that a book had been involved with our project. Pingu and I had told them about Subject Zero, but none of us remembered her and there were no leads on her besides the few random references in the files Fanisimo had uncovered.

“Okay, guys, I need us to all put our one braincell to work on this one,” I said. “Think really hard. Does anyone remember a book? Or—” I rolled up my sleeve “—this word?” We can’t keep ignoring this.

“For the thousandth time, no,” said Manny. “Look, they’d take us into the Blue Lab or whatever and that’s it. I remember nothing from there.”

“There’s twelve of us,” I said. “I mean, out of all of us we should be able to piece something together, right?”

“There was a test…a… what’s the word…” Sabbath said suddenly. “A… process? They had a name for it. I heard it once and I remember thinking that’s what’s wrong with us, that’s why I don’t remember. It was around the time we escaped, so there was no reset to wipe those memories.”

“So, what’s the name of the process?” Burr asked.

“Well, I don’t remember,” said Sabbath. “That’s the point. I just remembering knowing.”

“Anything?” I asked. “A letter, the way it sounds…?”

“It began with F,” said Sabbath. “Like flower or frost…”

“Poll the audience?” I asked the others, checking the time. “I have to go in a few minutes.” Ethan would be over soon.

“Fuck? That’s an F word,” France says. “Or… hey… me. France.”

“Think about this logically,” said Fanisimo. “HYDRA’s naming of things was like a whole department. It would have to have meaning. Think things that might relate. German names, or…”

“Beethoven,” said Pingu. “That’s German.”

“That doesn’t begin with F,” said Gooblin.

“He’s Austrian, isn’t he?” Pip asked.

“God, we’re braindead,” Dew said. “Uh… frost-y? That’s the thing they have a Wendy’s. And like maybe it has something to do with the cold?”

“I had Wendy’s for the first time last week,” Spark interjected. “That shit’s good.”

“These words seem too easy,” said Danny. “Too… what’s the word… not formal enough. You know?”

“Colloquial,” Burr supplied.

“I’d know it when I hear it,” said Sabbath. The conversation drifted to a 4am call that some of the boys were trying to get together, and Burr berating Danny and Manny for exposing their powers in Vegas as part of a magic set. Special effects could explain the display, but some of the Lab Rats were still on edge about it.

“You’ve got to be more careful,” she said. “Stop posting those videos on Youtube.”

“Dew posted on Youtube,” tattled Manny.

I heard our apartment buzzer ring and when I checked my phone, I saw Ethan had texted me.

Ethan: Here!

I hurried to clean up my mess of a desk and leaned back into the camera view for a moment. “Got to go,” I said. “Let’s talk soon. Keep spitballing words. If we got the name of whatever they did to us, well, it’s a start. Also books. Get on that.” I heard one of the other Lab Rats say something along the lines of ew homework as I disconnected. I was slightly jealous of a few of them because it seemed that they had moved on from the Facility faster than I had, especially considering they left after me. Pingu seemed to be doing well with her family in D.C., Gooblin had started some writing project, a group of the boys were still doing tricks in Vegas, Dew had just launched the music video we had helped him film, and on and on and on. It seemed like I was one of the only ones really fixated on getting back the memories we lost and figuring out what really happened. I needed that to move on.

The others were content to just forget, and I really couldn’t blame them.

After checking myself in the bathroom mirror, I nearly tripped over my backpack in the entryway as ran over to buzz Ethan in and let him up. I surveyed the apartment while I waited, making sure everything looked normal. Of course it would look normal. Why wouldn’t it?

In the final minutes before Ethan got upstairs, I double-checked the leak on the fourth Facility scientist I had planned and activated a VPN just before I hit send. Seconds later, Ethan was knocking on our apartment door and I slammed my laptop shut as I let him in. “Hey, dude.”

“Hi,” he said, waving in the awkward way he always did, which I had become accustomed to in the last few months. “Ready to make some babies?” He gave a nervous laugh. “Sorry… that was stupid I meant like do the baby project with the Punnett squares and stuff. Don’t know why I thought that would be funny…”

I laughed, despite myself. “You’re good. Let’s go sit.”

As Ethan and I worked through our biology homework and I tried to figure out how bat wings would play into our fake child’s genes (not that I would tell Ethan), I spent the other work time discreetly monitoring the file leak and the aftermath. The Lab Rat group chat finalized plans for a virtual sleepover and discussion session the following night. Even though we annoyed each other tremendously, I was still excited about the call.

I still had other things on my mind, though. I wanted to confront this scientist, Taddeo Moser, and ask him my questions but I knew it was too risky. This can work just as well.

But this fourth leak wasn’t nearly as satisfying. I found myself wanting a piece of the action. I need to look them in the eye.

[aspire-to-the-light]

Executive momentum 5

(Previous)

I’m still a far less powerful rationalist at 19 than I was at 17.

I get far less done. I miss more deadlines. I am late more often, fail to attend more appointments, skip more events. I get upset more easily, and spend more time lying around sniffling when I’m sad. I get angry more easily and find it harder to refrain from yelling at people when I’m angry. I am distracted more often by a wider range of things. I read less and find it harder to maintain a curious truth-seeking mindset. I feel less self-aware, less capable of introspecting and self-hacking into being better. I’ve failed to practise various skills that I used to have, so now they’re rusty and I’m less good at them. When I think of a new habit I’d like to acquire or new recurring commitment I’d like to make, my follow-through is worse. Distractions - social media, gaming, following links down an internet maze leading to reading Marxist analysis of plot synopses of the Saw films, chasing butterflies - feel more salient and more tempting.

It’s been this way for a while, and yet I’m still expecting myself to be as good as I used to be. I can barely manage my schoolwork, yet I keep taking on more commitments because I feel convinced I can handle them.

I constantly feel like I’m on the brink of fixing the problem. Or I think the problem is definitely X, so it will go away once I take a particular step that fixes X. But X goes away and instead of being better I just decide that the real problem is Y.

Until I looked at the data, I was beginning to suspect that I was just making excuses. Something happened to me that made me a way worse person than I used to be, and I’m just blaming it on anything that sounds plausible so I don’t have to face up to being fundamentally broken.

My current hypothesis feels simpler. I am constantly on the brink of solving the problem, and I’m constantly being whacked back to square one.

My last two years of school (A-level years), just after I fixed my diet problem, I had an insanely strong positive feedback loop. I did a lot of stuff and succeeded at lots of it. Then I spent summer in Boston, and then I had my first term at Cambridge, and then I spent part of winter break in San Francisco and part of it in Boston, and then I had my second term at Cambridge, and then I had Easter break in Hampshire, and then I had my third term at Cambridge, and then over summer I hopped between Hampshire and Cambridge and London and Oxford, and now I’m on my fourth term at Cambridge.

I haven’t stayed in the same place longer than eight weeks.

And I’m beginning to notice the same pattern, over and over - I get to a place and I’m useless, but then I set up my coping mechanisms and begin to be able to get stuff done but it’s hard and I procrastinate a lot, and then I eventually build up my home base enough that my positive feedback loops sustain themselves, and I begin to be really competent - meeting deadlines, getting work done, attending appointments, having a consistent schedule, succeeding at stuff, getting my inbox down to manageable numbers… and then I’m back to square one, because I went to a new place and it didn’t have a “don’t forget to eat some food” post-it note on the door so I forgot to eat for a couple days and had a really shitty time with being miserable and unable-to-focus before I realised what was up and replaced my “don’t forget to eat some food” post-it.

Executive momentum is:

Being in a positive feedback loop - you keep doing good things that allow you to do even more good things.

Having a steady flow of work, so there’s always something to do next when you finish the last thing, but there’s never a huge overwhelming backlog.

Small improvements to your environment building up into something impressive - every aspect of your environment making you better in some way - because you’ve stayed in the same place for long enough.

Routines and habits that have been undisrupted for long enough that they’ve become easy; you always get up in the morning and get on with your important tasks, it doesn’t require effort any more.

Having done lots of work recently, so you feel interested and engaged with the work, you know exactly what your next steps are, and you’re confident in your ability to do the next steps.

Not having done distracting things recently, so distracting things don’t feel very salient or available, so they’re just not very tempting.

The ability to be proactive, rather than reactive; you’re working on your goals, not intending-to-work-on-your-goals-just-as-soon-as-you-sort-your-life-out. Maintenance tasks (getting groceries, showering, eating, renewing your prescriptions, paying bills) fade into the background. There are snacks by your bed and you get more food delivered on a regular schedule, there’s a box to drop your keys in so you don’t lose them, you remember to stay hydrated because there’s a water jug by your computer and an alarm that bleeps to remind you, etc.

Constant improvements to your workflow which build on each other - not like switching from one to-do-list software to another to-do-list software every few months, more like you get a to-do list software that makes you more organized, and then you get some inbox software that automates lots of email processing, and then you get an extra monitor that lets you multitask better, and then you have enough screen space to constantly display a pomodoro timer and a reminder of your current task…

A positive feedback loop which is stable and sustained enough that it’s hard to break. A single small distraction, like a loud noise outside, might break your focus but won’t break the loop.

Mental purity; focus on your goals and the things you endorse, without disruptions from distressing thoughts and attention-grabbing distractions and manufactured temptations.

Having a self-image as a person who is good and does good things, and having that self-image backed up by lots of recent memories of doing good things, so you expect yourself to do good things, so it’s easier to do good things.

Having a reputation as a person who is good and does good things, so people expect you to do good things and give you opportunities to do good things, so you end up doing good things because you feel like you’re expected to.

An alief that getting work done is normal, confirmed by a recent history of getting work done, so you don’t feel disappointed and put-out if you don’t have time to take off, and you don’t feel like starting work is some massive exertion of willpower, and it feels sort of weird if you don’t do some work.

Which is not quite the same thing as executive function. It’s about fluctuations in someone’s level of executive function, not about the absolute level. Someone with low executive function can become a capable human who manages to take care of themselves and handle a part-time job with sufficient executive momentum. Someone with high executive function can conquer the fucking world with sufficient executive momentum.

My current priorities, as a conclusion of this:

Figure out a way for executive momentum to survive huge disruptions, like moving to a new place.

Figure out better ‘reset points’ that interrupt negative feedback loops, but don’t interrupt positive feedback loops. (Alarms every hour remind me to stop playing overwatch, but also tempt me to stop working on essays.)

Figure out a faster way to build back up executive momentum after huge disruptions, like moving to a new place.

Either make my home base more portable, or find a way to never leave Cambridge again.

Figure out a way to ensure I keep my executive momentum even when bogged down with lots of maintenance-type tasks (get prescription, go grocery shopping, answer emails, fix hole in shirt…)

Cancel all vacations forever

Seriously, ASAP, figure out a way for executive momentum to survive huge disruptions like moving to a new place

(Next)

[jerryliufilmsblog]

Putting Him To Rest - An Essay About 2014

This guy was one of my first friends in college, and he was a good soul. He really cared. He cared a lot.

Yet he was lost. He was so lost, and depression was a thing for him. School wasn’t doing it for him, and he didn’t feel like his friends could do anything for him, so for four years, he turned to South Asian spiritualism and mysticism to try to find himself. Between the Hare Krishnas and the Chakras and the gurus and the chants, he found a new vocabulary and a new way of looking at the world. He found new friends too.

He started all these meditation communities all through Philadelphia, and he was so popular and well-loved by everyone. My Russian friend often loved to joke, “Yo, this guy had his own cult basically.” Nobody knew that this mystical white boy was still so lonely, still so suffering behind his friends and communities and everyone in between.

To everyone else, it seemed like his path was working, but deep down at heart, I knew something was missing. I could see it in his eyes. His dark hazel eyes that seem to hide everything from everyone around him. I could see it in his text messages too. But I had problems of my own. And I couldn’t open up. My heart just didn’t feel strong enough to open up. There I was, having my own existential crisis, and I feared that hearing his problems would set me over the edge. I had to find contentment internally first. I had to fix what’s wrong with me internally before I could understand him. And I wish I could have told him that.

There’s really no external thing to help you find contentment. You have to find it from within. I don’t know if anyone ever told him that.

So two years after college, after going to the gym one last time to exercise and excise his demons, he killed himself. He jumped off a bridge and broke every bone in his body. He died many hours later in the hospital. For an action that was meant to end it fast, he sure didn’t die fast. I wonder if he regretted the decision as he laid there motionless in ICU. They say almost everyone who tries to commit suicide and lived to tell the tale admits that they regretted the decision. Thoughts are fleeting, like all our desires and all of our bodies on this earth.

We all cried when we found out about his death. In fact, I left Philadelphia because of this to reset my mind.

We did our best to memorialize him. I created a video, and his other friends, his cult, so to speak, put on this amazing two-hour memorial service for him a few weeks later. It was an emotional ceremony. We all loved him. I hadn’t cried so hard since my last friend died a few years ago.

During this ceremony, there was this lady. I met this Chinese woman the year before through him. She was very involved in one of those pseudo-religious communities that my friend built, and she had been trying to recruit me to join since meeting me.

During the memorial service, she mentioned to me that she wants me to do one of the programs. If it were only that, then maybe I would have forgotten about it.

However, a few weeks later, I get an email.

It was an official program invite for this little cult, and she wanted me to attend. $395 bucks, the price was.

“Fuck that,” I said. The only thing I had in my mind was blame.

“If only he didn’t hang out with you losers so much. If only he didn’t open his heart so much to all your fucking problems,” I thought to myself. “Maybe he wouldn’t be so depressed and would have lived.”

And yet, she forwarded that email to me, as if wondering if I saw it. As if the devil were baiting me to sink deeper into my hate.

Hey Jerry,

We would love you to join us at our next [cult event] in honoring J----- How're you? I hope this is the right email address for you. I know you said your phone might not be receiving text.

So after telling her I’m not in the area and not interested, I give her very blunt words to express to her my displeasure when she asks me about how I was job searching and interviewing:

It's actually quite simple, really. Just be genuine and let people see your talents and intentions. Every time I interact with you, all I ever see is a person who wants to recruit me for [The Cult]. That makes all our interactions very disingenuous and very annoying because I can never tell if you really care, or you just want to fulfill a quota by gaining my trust so that I can sign up for some program. Think about this and apply it to any job interview.

Unless you genuinely care, there's no reason we should reconnect. And even if you do genuinely care, ask yourself this: can I think of Jerry outside the context of an [Cult] hopeful? I'm a blunt person, in case you didn't realize, but I'd rather prefer everyone reveal their cards and embrace vulnerability than play games with each other. So I'll tell you now, I'm not going to do [The Cult Program]. If you can accept that, then we'll continue our interactions.

Instead of trying to listen, she uses my friend’s name again to try to recruit me.

Thank you for the honest answer and gives me a reflection of myself. I did not realize that how you and maybe others proceeds me.  I can accept you will not take the [Cult] course and I have friends outside [The Cult]. I remember we had great connection talking about our Chinese background and you suggested me classics to read to improve English. I don't see you just as [cult] recruitment person. [The Cult] has helped me a lot and I wish more of my friends to explore it. Whether you take the course or not, I always accept you. Just wonder if J----- asked you about taking the course and do you have the same reaction.

And that’s when I got mad. I got really mad. If I could reach across the computer, into her computer monitor and shake her a little, I would have. Shaken the lack of empathy, shaken the lack of communication, shaken my own anger out of her. Our friend broke every bone in his body, but you are breaking every bone in God by turning the death of one of his beautiful creations into an ugly recruitment device. Let our friend live in peace in heaven. Let his broken bones return to the earth.

But then again, what’s new about any of this? When God’s son, his own flesh and blood, died, his disciples used his death to recruit too. So I guess that’s just being human. We’re all the result of Eve eating that apple.

It breaks my heart to repeatedly hear J----'s name brought into this conversation. J---- brought up the program once or twice, and I thanked him for telling me about it. This isn't about J----.

I know you're well intentioned, but to use the friendship between J--- and I repeatedly to promote [The Cult] is an insult to him. I'm glad [The Cult] has helped you. That's all I needed to know. Celebrate what J---- did and stop using his name for everything.

Hi Jerry,

I didn't mean to use J-----'s name as promotion. I know it is also a program he valued. I was curious how J----- mentioned about it to you.

Jerry, I value your friendship beyond just signing you up for [The Cult]. I accept you will not take [The Cult] course. I hope we can move beyond and have open conversation when we meet again.

And yet, she still didn’t seem to get it. She’s still mentioning his name like he’s just some commodity in her quest to recruit me. So one more time, I try to explain my perspective to this lost Chinese woman:

I'll just hope it was a problem of language. After all, I'm not talking to a native English speaker. In general, I highly recommend you use J-----'s name carefully in the future. When I read the first email sent to me a few days ago, it said, "We would love you to join us at our next [cult] Happiness Program in honoring J-----." And during the memorial ceremony at Penn a month ago, you came over to talk to me for the explicit purpose of trying to recruit me into [The Cult]. AT J-----'S MEMORIAL. It was about him then, and you had to come over to talk about [The Cult] to me. He was the one being honored. I get that J---- was a very important member of [The Cult] and that all of the AoL community values him greatly, but the memorial was not about [The Cult]. [The Cult] was just one small part of his life, much like my friendship with J----- was one small part.

He's dead. Let him rest in peace! Embody the spirit and awesome attitude that J----- had, but refrain from dropping his name whenever you can to all the people who knew him. That would be like me putting RIP [My Friend’s Name] in every single one of my future videos.

I'll end this by saying this. I know that I'm talking to someone very well-intentioned, but well intentions do not automatically equate to right actions. I know deep down at heart that you're a very good person. That's why I'm taking the time to write back.

She never mentioned that cult again in her reply. She tried once more a few weeks later to get back in touch with me, not mentioning my friend or the cult again. I refrained from responding to her. No matter what, I associated her with trying to use our friend’s death to recruit. I just couldn’t forgive her for what I saw as a repeated slight to my friend’s legacy. Fuck that cult. Fuck those people. Fuck you. My friend would be better off if he never opened his heart to you and any of your people. In fact, he would be better off for posterity if his legacy never associated with you people. I never replied to her final email trying to get in touch with me because all this stuff would have been in that email. I just moved on and never forgave.

So why did I choose to finally forgive? Why did I choose to finally try to understand?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity, maybe it’s just a sign of time passing, but what I try to do now is to step into her shoes.

Everyone’s experience with a person is different, and since her experience with my friend was almost completely through that cult, in her mind, it probably really seemed like that was one of his most important priorities. Knowing she thought that he cared so much about this cult, honoring his commitment by continuing to build the cult would have been her best way of continuing his legacy. She was the head of the recruitment team, after all. It’s possibly this simple, but it took me many years to even attempt to see it from her view. In 2014, all I could see of those pseudo-religious people that my friend cared so much about was a bunch of weirdoes who were lost, Aspie and draining my friend’s positive energy. But maybe they offered things back that I never saw. Maybe my friend was actually happier with them than with anyone else. Maybe I wasn’t as good a friend as I thought. I was the one who never really opened my heart to his problems. Maybe these people did, and maybe that was why he kept trying to build that community and that cult. We don’t know what my friend’s thought was because we don’t have our friend here anymore to ask him. His dad kept his suicide letter from everyone too. The only thing we can do is to honor his legacy.

He was lost, and maybe he was too quick to accept someone into his life, but his most important attribute was that he never judged. Maybe that’s what I could learn from him. I’ll never stop judging, but at least I will be more open to allowing the passage of time to re-examine and empathize.

I eventually did go back to Philadelphia to give it another chance. And in this little monologue. This little spoken word. I put my friend and all the rest of negative emotions resulting from his death to rest.

[islandofkiwi-blog]

Time’s Mirror Episode 9 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 9

 I woke up for the second time in less than twelve hours on the bed inside the guest room with a pounding headache. I opened my eyes and saw a tiny bit of pale light leaking in through the blinds on my right; it looked like it was just after dawn. My lips were cracked and dry and when I sat up my chest muscles flexed and all the events of the previous day came rushing back. I could hear Lacey’s voice in my head, telling me I’d made a horrible mistake. I heard something stirring on my left and I looked to see Doctor Valentine dozing in a chair with his arms folded across his chest. He looked cold, tired, more vulnerable than I ever imagined he could look. I almost couldn’t blame him for almost killing me.

           I got out of bed and went to go brush my teeth. I wondered what my play was here. I had owned it for less than a day but the microchip in my head was responsible for two, blackout experiences already. Still, it wasn’t like I could just leave. I signed up for this. I knew there were risks. But I had also felt the accelerated healing on my neck. I wanted to know how to control it, because even if it hadn’t worked perfectly, I knew I had the power to gain strength without working for it traditionally.

           I turned on the light in the restroom and I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was a mess but that was exactly the last thing I noticed. My arms were huge, like twin towers of sculpted muscle. I had chest muscles that were so big that the collar of my shirt pulled tight against my neck. I could see the V-shape of my back from the front. The transformation had worked. My shirt hadn’t ripped like I had hoped, but I struggled to take it off as I tried to get a better image of new body.

           I could see the striations of my shoulder muscles, like thick cords cresting the socket joint. My belly was segmented into six, defined blocks. I looked away from the mirror at my forearms and I found I couldn’t even fit my hand around my wrist. I could trace the lines of all the veins in my arm, and my skin was so tight that I could barely pinch it together.

           Despite how strong I looked, I found my range of motion was pretty limited. I flexed and the light danced off the contours of my new muscles, but I could barely lift my hands above my head and I couldn’t reach past my knees when I bent my back forward. I couldn’t turn my neck past my shoulder and I almost fell a couple times as I was moving because my legs couldn’t balance the weight.

           I must have been staring at myself for a while, because Doctor Valentine snuck up while I was still examining myself.

           “What do you think?” he whispered and I almost fell over, startled.

           I laughed nervously. “It’s incredible. It worked.”

           “Yeah.” He nodded solemnly and then went silent, avoiding eye contact.

           “So how did you fix it?” I asked, knowing he probably felt guilty from before.

           He met my gaze through the mirror as he spoke. “With the accelerated growth process, every muscle in your torso started expanding all at once and that sent your system into shock. Your nervous system kicked into overdrive and started contracting every muscle to test the connections, but the growth continued so rapidly and for so long that there was no time for you to rest. Your initial reaction to hold your breath was what caused the problem. Once you tightened the muscles in your neck, your nervous system wouldn’t let go until I forced it to. I hijacked signals from your sympathetic nervous system to stop the contractions. I also killed the original signal there, but I can only guess what would have happen if your muscles kept growing.”

           Explaining the situation seemed to relax him. I tried to take it in, but it was hard to focus because I was too busy sneaking glances at my reflection in the mirror to listen.

           “Bailey, I promise you I won’t let that happen to you again.” He said my name and I snapped to attention. “I was too excited. I didn’t think about all the possible outcomes. I’m sorry.”

           I shrugged. “Hey, it worked. As far as I’m concerned this was a win. I thought you’d be happy.”

           He shook his head. “The ends don’t justify the means here. You’re not some expendable test subject.” He looked away from our reflections and faced me. “You’re my partner now. I need to earn your trust. We both need to understand what’s going on when we start an experiment.”

           His eyes were unwavering. He was being way too serious so I tried to change the mood. “What do I need trust for when I have biceps like these?” I flexed.

           He chuckled. “I mean, obviously, you can’t keep the transformation. We have to return you in a normal state.”

           “What? Why?” I asked defensively.

           “It’s a little conspicuous don’t you think?”

           “I’ll just tell everyone I did pushups over break.” I made a pleading face.

           He shook his head. “We need a control sample anyways. We can do some strength tests today, but we will have to reset before you go home.”

           I frowned. “Fine, but we better be working towards laser vision.”

           “That’s not going to happen.”

 School was canceled due to the snowstorm, so I spent most of the day with Doctor Valentine doing some tests with my new body. In the basement laboratory, the doctor had machines that could measure my vital signs, and after breakfast he attached cold, metal stickers to my bare chest that monitored my performance as we went through the tests. We found that with just the muscle I had gained in the short minutes of the transformation I could generate about as much force in a punch as a trained boxer. I could comfortably lift about three times as much as I used to, and I wondered how much stronger I would be if we had let my muscles grow even a minute longer.

           Still there were plenty of downsides mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t accustomed to my new body. I fatigued very quickly and my balance was terrible so that when I threw my strongest punch, I basically tripped into the target dummy and gave myself a head injury. The doctor patched me up with the Time’s Mirror healing commands, and by the end of the two-hour session I was pretty much ready to be done with the giant muscles.

           Before we went upstairs for lunch, the doctor set the Mirror to return me to my normal state based on the back-up copy of my original DNA. The restoration process was only ten minutes of tingling while my body reabsorbed and redistributed the muscle mass and it was much less painful than the building process. When it was over, I was back to my normal self.

           I was mentally ready to be done for the day, but after lunch, Lacey threw a change of workout clothes at me and told me to meet her in the basement. I put on the grey, hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants that were a size too big. When I looked at myself in the long mirror in the guest bedroom I was immediately infused with inspiration to punch frozen meat and drink half a dozen raw eggs.

           When I met Lacey in the basement, Doctor Valentine was scrolling through the data he had gathered from our tests and the machines around the room were spinning loudly so he barely noticed me. Lacey led me to the door that was opposite the room where I had been cut open and turned into a cyborg the night before. She opened the door and revealed a rectangular room with red, padded squares arranged in a smaller rectangle on the floor about three feet in from each wall. There was a punching bag in one corner and some free weights on a rack against the opposite wall; there was also a strange, wooden contraption with three arms and a leg that looked like it was out of a martial arts movie. Other than that, the room was free of clutter and looked to serve for tumbling or sparring practice. The walls were wooden but even from outside I could sense that the room was quiet and soundproof. I stepped inside, and Lacey closed the door and the sound of the whirring laboratory machines went silent.

           “What are we doing?” I asked.

           Lacey stepped onto the padded surface and began stretching her arms. She was wearing skin tight sweatpants and a zip up hoodie but her feet were bare. She motioned for me to join her.

           “My dad wants me to teach you how to control your body.” She instructed me to cup one elbow with the other hand and guide my arm across my body back and forth to engage my shoulder. “He said something like ‘Time’s Mirror is a thought experiment, but he needs to know how his body works first before he can comprehend what is changing. Why don’t you teach him, Lacey? It’s not like you have anything better to do.’ Pff.” She did a mocking impression of her father.

           “He really said all that?” I asked, switching arms.

           “Pretty much.” She sighed. “I guess the murder in Savannah will have to wait until after your training is complete.”

           She directed me to stretch one leg straight out ahead of me, and she rested my foot in her hands to help me balance.

           “So you’re going to, like, teach me transcendence?” I asked jokingly. “Like the ‘know yourself in the face of doubt’ kind of stuff?”

           She smiled. “My sifu was really into meditation for clarity, but I think we’ll take a more measured approach.”

           “Wait, so you actually know kung fu?”

           “Oh, I know a lot more than that.” She winked at me. “But we have to start with the basics.”

           We finished stretching and she sat down cross-legged and patted the floor in front of her to indicate that I should follow. I mirrored her and she looked me directly in the eyes, her unwavering, emerald irises peering into my soul. She went silent, and for about a minute my eyes darted between the equipment around the red room to the purple of her sweatshirt then back to her unblinking, green eyes. I was expecting her to direct me, or for something to pop up and hit me on the head to test my reflexes, but nothing happened. I looked at the way she was sitting. She had her back straight up, her hands resting on her legs with her fingers lightly interlaced. Her breathing was the only sound I could hear; her belly was the only thing I saw moving. There was a way about her breathing, a sort of effortless rhythm that pulsed with the movement of her abdomen. I focused harder.

           She was showing me how to breathe. In through the nose, expanding your stomach like you’re making room for the air. Out through the mouth, contracting your stomach like you’re expelling everything from your lungs. In. Out. In. Out.

           I saw her looking at my shoulders, and I noticed that my upper chest was moving much more than hers. I tried focusing on breathing out of my belly instead of out of my rib cage and I actually felt the difference in quality of breath. She smiled and then closed her eyes, keeping the steady rhythm of quiet ins and outs. I joined her.

           Goddamn. Who knew breathing could be fun?

 Over the next couple of weeks, I spent every waking moment thinking about Time’s Mirror. When I was in school – which was only occasionally because I skipped at least one day a week to spend it with Doctor Valentine and Lacey – I daydreamed about transformations we could do and practiced my thought commands. A couple people caught me doing the strange, memory dance, but I tried to pass it off like I was just twitching, or comically demon-possessed. I’d meet Doctor Valentine after school and he would take me through more scientific analyses of transformations we could do with the Time’s Mirror and once in a while we’d actually do one. He made good on his promise that he was never going to let a near-death experience like the muscle growth happen again, and he made sure both he and I knew every scenario that could happen before we changed something in my DNA. I began to long for the days when we could just jump into the action without the prep work.

           One of my favorite things Doctor Valentine taught me was how to control my own biorhythm. I could use Time’s Mirror to play with the levels of neurotransmitters in my brain, and the doctor helped me figure out the functions of each of them. I could regulate cortisol and melatonin to find restful sleep, or I could make histamines to stay awake for days at a time, I could drown in a dopamine high, or I could relax with a boost of serotonin. I was a walking cocktail of chemical reactions that changed my mood depending on what setting I chose for the day. The saying, “hormonal teenager,” didn’t even begin to describe what I could do to myself.

           Lacey continued my training to help me gain control of my physical body. She took me through a series of different martial arts, trying to find a good one that fit. The diversity of the different styles: from grappling judo to striking karate to free-flowing taichi kept my body confused and sore as I worked muscles that rarely worked. I could use the Time’s Mirror to soothe the soreness, but Doctor Valentine suggested that the healing command might reverse the training so I probably shouldn’t use it aggressively.

           Lacey’s training was routine only in the time that we spent each day: twenty minutes of breathing, followed by thirty minutes of Lacey showing me the forms and stances for the style of the day, and finishing with about an hour of sparring where my mentor would demonstrate all the different ways she could kick my ass. She was good. I always ended up on the floor, and the doctor refused to let me patch my bruises, saying that each one was a lesson.

           One particular day, I found myself caught in between both Lacey and her father for a practical exam where Doctor Valentine wanted to pit his unhuman creation against his cute, albeit very skilled daughter.

           All my life I had been told never to hit a girl, so when Lacey was in front of me, circling me menacingly, saying “just hit me you sissy,” I experienced a bit of what the psychologists like to call “cognitive dissonance.” It wasn’t unusual for Lacey to taunt me during our practices, but I had a harder time concentrating with Doctor Valentine watching over us. Our previous training regimens included a lot of close quarters grappling and I always got a little flustered when she showed me on her body where I was meant to place my hands in the execution. But she seemed to have opted away from showing Doctor Valentine all the precarious positions of my hands on her body since we were boxing that day.

           The concept of boxing always seemed fairly simple to me: hit the other guy until he’s down. But there was a subtle grace to the sport that I only recognized when Lacey was teaching me the boxing form. Chin down, elbows in, jaw clenched, face your opponent at a slant to give them less area to hit, stand on the balls of your feet for mobility with one foot in front of the other. Generate power from your rotating your hips and twisting your arm as you aim straight at your target.

           There was even more nuance in combat. Lacey postured aggressively, dancing around me in a circle, shifting her weight unpredictably except for when she approached to send explosive punches at my face. Whenever she came forward she would change her stance suddenly so that her back foot came front, purposefully giving me a tell that the fist on the same side as the new leading foot would throw a jab followed quickly by a cross punch from the opposite side. Sometimes it was right then left, I noticed more often that it was left then right. My forearms were aching from where she had been hitting me repeatedly to try and break my guard. Even through her padded gloves the impact was enough to make my arms feel like they were about to snap with each strike, but I still couldn’t find the courage to throw a punch back at her.

           She came in again, and this time I tried stepping towards the right and throwing a hook aimed at her side. She read through my lumbering movements easily and deflected my punch upwards, following with two, quick blows to my exposed chest and a right hook to my chin. I fell to the padded surface of the training room with my jaw feeling displaced and my ears ringing.

           She took a step towards me, but just stood over me, and I looked up at her with a pained expression on my face. Her posture relaxed and she had a lopsided grin on her face like she was about to start laughing.

           “Finally decided to take a shot, I see.” She extended her hand and helped pull me to my feet.

           “You could have told me the rules before you started hitting me,” I said sullenly, rubbing my jaw.

           “Oh, where’s the fun in that?” She took a step away from me and removed her gloves to redo her ponytail while the doctor came over from where he was standing at the edge of the room.

           “Okay,” he began, talking to me like he was coaching me on how to win the next round. “It’s obvious that you’re no match for her in a normal state. I’m going to dull your pain signals and increase the elasticity of your tendons and ligaments. It should make you quicker and more resilient. Don’t be afraid to take a hit if you can give one back.”

           He seemed completely unfazed by the implications of his words as he busily scrolled through commands on GRegg.

           “You’re not scared that I’m going to hurt her?” I asked tentatively.

           “Why would I be scared?”

           “She’s your daughter.”

           “So?” he said dismissively. “It’s training. You have to focus on trying to hurt her. You probably won’t.”

           He finalized his commands on GRegg. “Sending the signal.”

           I sighed and sat on the floor and waited for the shock to touch down. I felt weird. I liked Lacey. I didn’t want to hit her even if it was part of the training and even if she had hit me without reservation. I looked over at her. She was stretching, breathing, striking at the air.

           I felt the signal run through me, like electricity gathering in my spine and then dispersing outwards through my fingers and toes. When the sensation passed, the difference was immediate, my arms felt limber and my legs felt loose. I felt flexible and acrobatic just from popping up to my feet. I punched at the air in front of me and my motion was fluid, less rigid than before. I tested a high kick just for fun and found I could almost reach a vertical angle. I exhaled excitement. This was pretty cool.

           Both Lacey and Doctor Valentine watched me, intrigued. Lacey stepped back in the ring with me and we continued where we left off. She started circling me again, but this time I took Doctor Valentine’s advice and tried to see her as my rival in training instead of the girl I maybe had a crush on. I matched her movement, keeping my distance, not allowing her to dictate the action. She came in with the same tell as before, stepping forward with her right foot and a jab. My reaction time was still too slow to keep up with her speed and she connected with the first blow, but I was able to clumsily brush away the second. It didn’t hurt my forearms as much this time and I knew the pain suppression was active. She disengaged and resumed circling me.

           She dashed towards me, and this time I focused on the spot where she seemed the weakest. I aimed a kick at her shin when she stepped forwards and the force was enough to send her off balance. She rolled past me and wheeled angrily.

           “Hey!” she exclaimed. “No kicking.”

           I ignored her. This was kind of fun when I could find a weakness.

           She came in again, this time without any of the circling. I kicked at her foot again, but she twirled towards the side, swiping at my leg with her gloved fist, and then sending all her momentum in a punch that collided with my chest. The force knocked me back a little, but I barely felt the weight of her glove. I quickly brought my leg down and threw a punch at her face. I felt my glove connect with her cheek and she moved her body with the line of the punch to reduce the impact. Now she was the one kneeling on the ground but when she raised her head I saw a wild look in her eyes.

           “Bailey,” she seethed. “I’m going to break that leg.”

           “Come and try,” I said presumptuously, returning all of her previous taunts.

           She stood slowly and started circling me again. This time she didn’t move with the light feet of a boxer. She stalked me like a tigress, looking for an opening to go for the kill. I tracked her movement, remembering to keep my feet pointed towards her.

           She pounced, keeping her body low. I went for a front kick to keep her out of range of using her fists. She caught my heel with her wrist and pushed up, sending me off balance as she spun into me and struck at the back of my planted leg’s knee. I fell backwards and felt the air knocked out of me. She was on top of me in an instant, one knee firmly pressed right below my rib cage and her other leg twisted around both of my legs so I couldn’t leverage them. She started pummeling my face relentlessly and I instinctively put my hands up to protect myself, but she had already broken my nose. I could feel blood dripping from my nostril, though the pain suppression was still working so I barely felt it.

           “LACEY!” I heard Doctor Valentine shout. “Quit.”

           She was deaf to his command and through the gap between my forearms I could see her face filled with rage as she continued to rain blows onto my guard.

           “LACEY!” Doctor Valentine shouted again and he rushed towards us. “STOP!”

           The doctor put his hands on her shoulder, but Lacey shook him off, sending an elbow into his gut.

           “Xiaohu!” Doctor Valentine spoke in a foreign language. With the word, Lacey stopped mid-strike with her fist raised in the air.

           She got off of me slowly, and I lowered my arms. She stood and turned to her father and glared at him. He glared back and they stared each other down for a couple, tense seconds.

           “Li kai,” he commanded.

           Finally, she breathed a primal growl and she left, slamming the door behind her.

           I put my head back against the mat and pressed my arm to my nose. Warm blood continued to flow and I could taste iron in my mouth. I breathed in short huffs, knowing I had broken the rules and I deserved everything I got.

           Doctor Valentine sent the wound healing signal on GRegg, combined with a reset process to turn me back to normal. I sat quietly for the ten minutes it took to finish and guessed we were done for the day.

           “You okay?” He asked, helping me to my feet.

           My nose had stopped bleeding and the blood on my lip was starting to dry. “Yeah,” I said quietly.

           “She’s under a lot of stress.”

           “You don’t have to apologize for her.”

           He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Standing with his back against the wall, he spoke gently.

           “I know you’ve probably wondered what we’re doing here and why we act the way we do.”

           I licked at the blood on my lip. “It’s crossed my mind once or twice.”

           “I guess…” He paused, looking unsure of how to begin. “Well I guess it’s time I told you everything. My story starts almost twenty years ago.”

TO BE CONTINUED!