The Attic (1998)

posted 1998.01.30 at 19:19 by solios

Buildup to a mind-dive that doesn't happen. Excursion of the higher self outside the confines of the conflict.

Written at the bottom of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, in the summer of 1998. School, as one can doubtless infer, can get pretty stressful.

After a brief skim of a few segments, I've decided I don't mind this one too much- though the end of it sucks, in my opinion, as there isn't one. Also, it could do with a thorough edit, particularly run up against a thesaurus... but that's not what this is about. These documents are here to be preserved as-is, with a few minor adjustments for clarity and/or exposition.

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The Attic : A conflict of Wills | 17 August 1998

The attic room was hot, humid. The house, rickety and ancient, had been constructed years before the advent of climate control. There was air conditioning, but it had been retrofit into the lower levels long after the house had been built, and was poorly suited for it. An ancient ceiling fan revolved slowly on one side of the room, its kinetic energy spent for naught. The heat was everywhere- the fan by the bedside, propped upon an ammunition crate, contributed slightly more, stirring the baked air into a whirl of warmth, blowing over the body that lay upon the bed.

The room was sparsely furnished- in any of the rooms below the volume of material goods would have filled it out quite nicely. But here, things were spread out. The room may as well have been empty. Space traded for comfort. As the other inhabitants of the house slept below in cooler rooms less than half the size, the young man in the bed took the burden of heat, having an entire floor for his own.

In the heat, the darkness, the pressure began to drop. Within seconds, the temperature had declined from its sweltering high to a lower, cooler mean. With the cold, waves of distortion flowed around the sleeping form. Waves of bent light flowed free from the unconscious body, breathing quickened. Slowly, the waves began to take on a more solid form, changing from a mid-August heat shimmer through wavering gel to finally the form of a man, sitting on the edge of he bed next to that from which he sprang. The heat absorbed into his form now flowed freely from his naked body in waves, and the temperature began to slowly rise again. Gouts of heated air poured in from the open windows as the figure stood, looked down at his counterpart in bed.

At a glance, the two figures were identical. While they were both about six feet tall and sparely built, the one who now stood was more muscular, more defined. Abdominal muscles clearly stood out beneath his flesh, as did biceps, high musculature. The faces were similar, but not exact. The man in the bed had a crooked nose, a scar above the left eye. He was shaved clean. The recent arrival looked down a strait nose at his source, the eyes below an unscarred, unblemished brow. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, scraping several days worth of stubble. The body in bed slept fitfully in a green T-shirt, large enough so that the sleeves dropped to elbows, the bottom past his crotch. As the eyes of the man in the bed flitted rapidly under closed lids, he who stood reflected upon his own nakedness and looked about the room for a suitable garment.

Thunder clashed deafeningly, the strobe of lightning casting an electric blue glow about the room. With a roar, water cascaded upon the roof, trace amounts flowing in through the windows. The blast of electrical discharge was enough for the man to make out a switch on the wall. The room collapsed into darkness briefly, only to be re-lit seconds later by the ignition of a ceiling lamp.

The figure in bed recoiled turned and buried its face in a pillow, still lost to the world. The man almost tripped over an ammunition box at his feet- a laptop was laid out on its surface, forming a small table next to the bed. A mess of cables lay between this and the fan behind it, sitting on a darker box of the same make. Above the cable were the lights activated by the switch- the man reached up, adjusted the beam, swinging the light away from the bed, onto the rest of the room.

Now lit, finding clothing was a small challenge. Taking care to quiet his movements, the figure went slowly through the pile of clean clothing at the foot of the bed. To his delight, he found his uniform amongst them, and readily donned it. Faded blue-jeans, torn at the knees. Grey undershirt, sleeveless. Over that, despite the reheated room, he threw an army issue BDU shirt-sleeve, olive drab. His dark blonde hair hung to his shoulders, but he made no move to the pair of hair bands he’d noticed sitting on the disk drive of the laptop. Combat boots, hikers, dress shoes, sandals- he decided on the last, slid his feet into them with soft a shripp of velcro.

He was dressed. He knew who he was. But he didn’t know where he was. Things stood in his mind, things that wanted to run screaming. It wasn’t natural. He knew what he was, a union of fictional character and pre-existing personality traits. Those traits, those parts he had of the mind of he who made him. He knew about those. And because of them, he was able to understand that he was a figment of imagination, however real that imagination might be. He wasn’t a real person, no matter what the deja-vu he felt might say. He was half of the man in the bed. Or maybe a third? It would explain the mood, the feel of the room. Something else was expected. When it would be, he didn’t know. Had to have something to do in the meantime, right? He turned on the desk lamp, flipped off the light of the overhead.

It was hot in the room, but for the moment he didn’t mind. There was much to keep him busy. The notebooks were where he thought they would be. The worlds of fancy sat upon the floor, bound in gray and maroon. He ignored those- role playing and the things that went with it had never interested this version of himself much. On the bookshelf he found what he wanted- the thick black binder. He pulled it out, away from the video game guides and the graphic novels, and sat down at the desk, opening it in the back. Mopping sweat from his brow, he began to skim through the pages.

The binder contained several hundred pages of notes, loosely bound, printed and sketched on notebook paper with blue ink, black ink, pencil. His life, or what he thought of as his life was laid out there. Rough drafts of poems, an epic concerning something that had never happened; a short story about a bullet wound he had never received. Pages of outline, events that had happened, things that hadn’t. The invasion force from another realm, come to reclaim the promised land. Made up. The incident with the car- greatly exaggerated. And here it all lay, waiting to be crafted into a novel, short stories, poetry. Something notable. But the finished work- there was so little of it. Why?

Near the front he came upon maps, printed from a computer program. Sparse outline, via major roads, of the Safe Area. Williamsport, Welsboro, two other towns. All of it real, all of it tangible, if you knew where to find it.

But he didn’t.

It was in north-central, he knew. But the roadways eluded him. No matter- where he was now didn’t exist anyway. Not that it should. On the floor by the desk was a rattan walking stick, sadly neglected. He picked it up, spun it expertly as he looked outside into the night. Rain continued to pour down, obscuring all. He knew the room was in a suburb of Pittsburgh, but he didn’t know where it was, nor how to get there. Didn’t matter. His life lay out in notes on the desk, becoming more and more removed. The affair with that older woman, a soldier in that unreal army. An encounter with a troubled blonde young man, much like himself, and his supernatural battle with his tormentor, cast mere miles from here. And what of that? It was a better story than his own. Why hadn’t it been told?

He set the stick back down, exasperated. He looked next to it, on the floor, at the comic book pages, the roughs. The script next to that. It had been there for over a month, he knew. Why was it still lying there? If he had his way, the work would have been done months ago. And yet here it lay. It served as a monument to laziness, a temple to the third party, which had yet to manifest itself. Would it?

Did it even matter?

If it did, it was no concern of his at the moment. Figment of the imagination he may be, but he was hungry. He put the binder back, arranging things so its movement would go unnoticed. The clock on the stand in the corner, as far away from the bed as it could get, caught his attention. It glowed redly in the new dark as he doused the desk light, the readout displaying the numbers 1:28 as if it were nothing special. He reached over to the clock, pressed the button that would display the alarm time. If all was as he thought it was, there were five hours between where he stood and oblivion; his inevitable return to the ether as his physical side awoke. Fine. He could deal with that. After a snack. There was work to be done, but not on an empty stomach.

He walked lightly down the stairs, to the door. There were two on the other side, both asleep. He opened and went through, exiting quickly into the hall and closing the door behind him. It was so much cooler out here in the hallway, a good ten degrees less than the attic. He didn’t want to go back, but it wasn’t a choice. The house was old, in fairly good conditions for its advanced age. The bathroom door stood open behind him as he descended the stairs, into the living room.

There it was even colder, a temperature approaching hospitable. The kitchen was trough the living room, after the dining room. Behind the stairs, from his orientation. It was dark, unlit. There was someone in the basement, also sleeping. He opened the door of the refrigerator and looked inside, listening to the soothing sound of the rain as it pounded on the outside of the house relentlessly. The icebox was loaded- knowing there were no consequences to suffer, he liberated a can of soda from the lower shelf, a bag of nachos from atop. He took his snack out to the living room and sat down at the faded blue couch to eat.

He surveyed the room as he popped the tab on the soda, missing nothing. The loveseat was unoccupied, as was the couch- neither had been occupied for several hours, the loveseat most of the day. How he knew it was beyond him, the fact was that he did. Psychokinesis was something that had been frequently mentioned in the notes, something that was fairly accurate, if amplified a bit. The roommate in the room he hadn’t passed through was restless, uneasy about his morning class. The two over his head were comfortable in each others arms- fine by him. And he tossed and turned above, trying to conjure the other party into the dream, get the dialogue going. Find some answers. He laughed aloud at that, a sharp peal into the silent house.

Find some answers? Why did he need to find them when they were there all along, under his nose? Why waste a dream on hapless self-pity when things could be changed for the better? It would explain to great lengths why he was this aware, felt this doubling of awareness with each motion. The answers were there. The sleeping version of himself just didn’t know what the questions were. Idiot.

The questions had gone unasked by his presently conscious self- the answers were plain as day, would be to anyone unless unduly distracted. Why didn’t he have control of his conscious form? To bend the frame of the waking body would be divine- to get some work done. And speaking of work? There was plenty of it going on, for sure- but none of it related to the issues at hand. There was a computer upstairs, in the room next to the stairwell, by the undisturbed roommate. It was armed and operational, power coursing through its systems just as blood flowed through the veins of his sleeping form. And what was it being used for? Nothing constructive, that much was clear. Slowly rendering a handful of animation frames for a project that would never be assigned, wasting power, wasting time. In the darkened room, he smirked. What concern should it be of his? He had only a third of a share in the matter- a share that had been wholly overridden lately. A threesome was always a problem, it had been historically proven.

Oh, there were other shadows of self. They were there, oh yes- hiding in the back, underdeveloped, ignored. Until recently, he had been the strongest, the dominant. Then work had started to slip, decay. It had never been strong to begin with, but now he may as well schedule the funeral. If something didn’t happen soon, the project, his vision, would crumble by the wayside like another uninteresting story notion.

A crackling sound rent the still, cool air of the living room.

The soda can oozed fizz from it open mouth, forced out by the pressure of his hand as he crushed it in anger. There would be no slacking, god damn it! He had a dream and he would live to see it realized, or else! He threw the can across the room, at the television. The shot went high, hit the stereo. Damn it, he’d wanted to hit the infernal television set- a readily recognizable source of the evil that had slowed his dream to a notion. The TV glared at him in the semi-dark, lit by street lamps, shining through the cascade of water. The shot had been true- something else had deflected it. Upstairs. Damn, the conscious body needed to be lobotomized. Cut out whatever was infecting it, cauterize what remained so that the cancer couldn’t grow back, threaten success again.

Wishful thinking.

It wouldn’t happen- the majority had ruled against him. The main will and a secondary will, nearly as strong as his, one that had somehow managed to insinuate itself into the operating network of the main consciousness. Defective software. The brain had a virus. And there was no counter-software for it. The problem with wetware was that you couldn’t just pull the board, reinstall everything, and reboot. No, that was too easy for a computer and completely unattainable for a human- especially when you were a part of the program code that needed to be edited.

He groaned internally at his lapse into computer terminology, but it was appropriate. Computers had begun to evolve into a semblance of life, their software structure an ecosystem of programs and files, their bodies analogous to that of their creators in many ways- and just as prone to disease.

His awareness doubled, tripled- his mind felt, briefly, as if it had split over time. to him, time felt as if it had passed. The rain continued to pour down outside, the room was just as dark as it had been the day before, last week, thirty seconds ago. Call it a feeling. As that time had passed, something had changed. He knew somehow that his conscious body had awoken, passed the day away, and returned to sleep, picking up where he had left off. Somehow, it was that urgent. Memories floated beneath his awareness, music beating inside his head.

Paint it black.

And if he didn’t want to?

The render in the computer room had stopped, the computer shut down. In the room above there was only one, minus the lover. Twice, maybe three times before, he had forayed out into the world. The last time had been in an apartment complex over a period of what had seemed to be several weeks. He remembered his conscious self being miserable, tormented. Leather jackets and chains came to mind at the thought- it explained their lack of use in the fiction he’d helped to create. How easy it was to let ones negative experiences dictate fantasy life! His conscious self had issues, was bent up inside somehow. There was that whole transgender thing- it was a feature in all four major stories that had been plotted. Heck, it was even slated for him, eventually. And while it had been plotted, he knew his own emasculation was a long time off- it wouldn’t happen until his conscious side went through with it in the real world.

Could that be part of the problem? He knew several of the Modes were female- he was one of relatively few males in the planes of the body’s mind. Contact between Modes rarely occurred, being confined to the event of a mood swing. He’d met many this way, coming and going. The flaming torch of the body’s anger was one of the other male counterparts- not a pleasant boy to be around. His pain was male, and racked up a great deal of time on the dominant log until a few years back, when he had come to the fore. Shortly thereafter, the conscious state feminine side had emerged: the positive emotions, the love, the happiness. She was a treat to find, and he welcomed her arrival to relieve him on duty. Hadn’t seen her much lately, however. Pain had peeked out a few times, but the female persona seemed lost for more than six months now. There had been that experience in the bus station, maybe that had done it?

That had been a doozy. He hadn’t actually been fully present for that, had been there in a wrenched null-awareness, experiencing it as if from beyond the grave. Something had latched on, poisoned the body, allowed the negative Mode full reign over the system. For all he knew, the damage had been permanent. The injured areas were in sections of the mind he rarely accessed- there was no way to find out for sure. The bus station, the house of a friend who had sunk into moral decline- poisoned with negativity as recently as three months back, the stuff took longer to flush clean than marijuana. It was a self-propagating poison from an older Mode. The one he had replaced, right?

The man stood up and stretched, went back into the kitchen for some more nachos. Back in the living room, he unplugged the television and turned on the stereo. Faint and rife with static, a station over a hundred miles away came in through sheer force of will, playing an afternoon radio show at three in the morning. He wondered how much time was left on that alarm clock. Three hours? Two? Or had the face changed again? The only way to find out was to go back up and look.

So he didn’t.

He picked up the crushed soda can, took it to the kitchen garbage can, dropped it in with a dull ting. Took another from the refrigerator. He was here to confront other Modes, but he’d be damned if he was going to do it on their time. Forget that. The only one running out of time around here was the conscious body. If he wanted the meeting, he should have the courage to show up for it.

In the dark, the man laughed. With a sharp clack the soda cracked open. So much to dream about, so much to do, and here he deliberated, wasting valuable time, when he should e sleeping, only to wake up and do something. The Modes had too much influence on each other- normally he’d be using this time to physically condition himself, go on a jog or do some calisthenics. Damn body hadn’t exercised in months. A year, actually. He wanted to kick him- but then more time would slide down the drain, and he might slide out with it. He sipped the soda. It was phantom liquid, sliding down his throat with no taste, no real existence.

His awareness hiccuped again. The internal timesense of the mind was amazing- here he had passed through three entire days of the conscious world without breaking stride at all here, barely two hours by his estimate. But this time the reality had folded a bit more, his own mind had access to parts of the conscious body he rarely, if ever saw: file names with restricted access were in his head now. Somebody had left them open. Was it deliberate, or a moment of weakness?

Did he even need to ask?

The computer room. If this house was analogous to the mind that slept in it, the hardware would yield access to the wetware. Leastwise, it should be designed that way. The body was a bastard sometimes, but it kept its interface nice and tidy. He stood, started up the stairs, the can of phantom soda in hand. Time to run a diagnostic, see what was going on. Now, while the mind was open to suggestion. Maybe the brain would have an easy-to-use GUI. The last time he’d hacked the brain had been a mess: the body was in high school, taking a programming class for the GWBASIC language, and a lot of the thought subroutines manifested themselves for alteration as scraps of programming code and ASCII language. That had been fun.

As he mounted the stairs, Déjà vu hit him hard, staggered him. It was the third time in two weeks- clearly something was on the right track. The flash had been the doubling of awareness, of his mind overlapping twice at one point in time- harmonic hiccups. But the images that assailed him were wrong. Instead of seeing the staircase as if on a movie screen form the third row, his mind reeled from his own motions, displayed in narrative as though written for a story. The room was chill, filled with computers. The monitor was above head level, he had been looking up. And as he’d looked to the left, two people he felt he knew were seated at another computer, on the other side of a counter.

The vision was too clear to be Presque Vu- it was Déjà vu to the extreme, something that wasn’t dreamt. The scene he’d seen had been, several years ago: a faint memory in some dusty storage file, piled under the astral bed with the old fantasies. No it had just flowed through the Now. Was the body awake? Good gods, how could that be? Were his experiences in the back of the mind being recorded by the conscious body even as the events happened? The Déjà vu would make sense then, seeing the stair climb typed out as it happened, seeing the recording of his pondering s in his minds eye, the body failing to correct a higher paragraph to reflect the fact that he now stood on the landing, lost in thought. Dam this was weird.

But if it was being scripted, that was a good sign. Sort of. It meant at least two separate things, which meant that it stood for several more he couldn’t see at all. It was good in that his mind had a channel open to the conscious body, and was managing to get the point across. That was great- he just had to climb the next three stairs, turn to his right, walk into the computer room, and make a few changes. Address the crisis to the conscious mind. Easy. On the other hand, it was bad that this was happening. He invariably ran the show one of two ways- he was either in the command seat doing the driving, the talking, the socializing- contributing to the shared knowledge pool that the Modes had access to. Problems would crop up when a Mode refused to contribute information to the pool, resulting in a lack of knowledge for the other Modes to work from. He was operating outside the mode system- that meant someone on board the mind was in the cockpit.

He slammed his fist into the wall. Again. Slammed his head against the plexiglass window. This wasn’t right! He had no conscious control! He was in the mind and operating, but not in control! How was this possible? Usually the Modes were relegated to limbo in the back of the mind- they had a communal box outside the central file clusters, where each slept in a respective containment box. That was how he’d gotten this far up the ladder- he’d woken up ‘early’ one day and ambushed Anger when he was coming back in to let him out. Once, late at night, he’d taken a look at the construction of the box. The doors were rigged, so that there was only one open at a time. Maybe the architecture had changed? That would explain a lot. He turned, climbed the rest of the stairs.

There were two computers in the room. Great- which one to use? Sure, the body was a Gemini/Cancer- that went a good distance to explaining why all of these Modes were running around doing god knows what. And two interfaces made perfect sense- Mode One and mode Two, one of which was Primary, the other reserved and interchangeable with the other Modes. And upstairs was the laptop, the access to the ultimate ethernet: the Id. So which of these was Ego, and which was SuperEgo? Both were armed and operational, screensavers up and running.

The one directly in front of him had a camping chair at the keyboard, and was installed on a full desk. There was a scanner and speakers on top, the scanner drive light dead. The screensaver was a 3-D Rubic cube, rotating random faces to solve the equation. His ears picked up a slight distortion from the speakers. He reached over, turned them up- waste pumped from them, heavier than usual. He’d been out for the KMDFM show in October of ‘97- it was the lie version he’d seen. Probably the piloting console, then. He jostled the mouse the desktop popped up, wallpapered with Catwoman from the Batman cartoon. Odd- the mind seemed more for a surreal landscape or a starship promo-shot in the background.

Number two was the Zone rings screen saver, and he couldn’t hear any sound. Had to be long-term memory, Mode storage, and all the other goodies on system architecture of he brain. If he wanted to find out what was going on with his own independent existence inside the mind, this would be a good spot to go. He nudged the mouse with a finger, tentatively. The screensaver popped out of existence, replaced by the desktop, with a 3D rendering of a machine as the wallpaper. He recognized that- the Psi Drive from the body’s homework assignments. He’d helped with its creation- in fact, it was the last clear memory he remembered contributing to the cache files. Got it all done in two days- a four week assignment. He’d been proud of that one. Hmm… which to dive into first?