Latest Posts by artificelux - Page 8

Experience Junkie

                I fell in love with an experience junkie.

You know the expression, “Those who burn twice as bright, burn half as long”?  Well, that was her.  She got off on always doing something a little better, a little crazier, a little more dangerous than what she did the day before.  Immediately, I knew I was in over my head; if I didn’t keep up the pace, she would get bored and move on to the next guy, hoping he could fulfill her insatiable thirst for experience.

And yet, I’m not the kind of guy who just throws in the towel when the going gets tough.  Especially not with a girl like her.  She might have been wild, but to me, that was a good thing.  There was something exceedingly special about her, an untamed quality that had long been extinct in the human race.  She intrigued me.

So keep up the pace I did.  For almost eight months I kept up the pace, working tirelessly to find something new and exciting for us to explore.  I never would have admitted aloud how worn down I was from keeping such a frantic, unpredictable lifestyle, but the fatigue was definitely beginning to creep in.  I was certain it would only be a matter of time before it all caught up with me… or before she noticed my inability to keep up any longer and drifted away.

Then, and only then, did I make the jump from normal thrill-seeking to something new—crime.

Doubtless, our actions had always skirted the edge of the law.  Driving much too fast, skipping through skylane levels like they were green-lighted intersections, polluting the regulated-atmosphere by smoking cannabis down in the bowels of the Dive, brightening up the dour metal walls with colorful, if not entirely appropriate, graffiti… we’d even gone so far as to get some unlicensed body modifications.

But never once had we actually committed a crime of force, an aggravated assault per se.

“You wanna rob a bank tonight?”

She rolled over lazily until she was on top of me, heart beating achingly against mine.  Her skin was warm, slightly sticky with sweat, just like the walls of the dingy flophouse room, and her movement was tired.  Despite the languid motion, however, I could see the fire that had suddenly sparked behind her eyes.  Taking the hand-rolled joint from between her lips, she let a thin streamer of blue smoke trail out of her lungs.

Silence, other than the slow whisper of her breath.  It was something we had come up with, something just between the two of us.  Silence was often the best answer, when you couldn’t trust words to express how you felt.  I suppose it also could have been the worst sort of answer, when anger or hatred was too strong to speak… but I knew that wasn’t the case here.

So, without a word, I knew she’d said yes.

Then, voice hazy with smoke and the thought of a smile, she raised the stakes a little higher.  “An oxygen bank.”

Escape Real Life

It’s that feeling you get far past the noon of night, when, as your day comes to a close, things begin, at last, to make sense.

It’s that urging that, if you could just grasp that feeling and hold its heart close in your hands, staying up through the dark and into the second day, you could achieve everything.

It’s that hastening of sleep which fights that urging, telling you that everything can be left for the morning.

It’s that pleading in the back of your mind; it begs you to push past the hastening, for in the morning, nothing will be as clear as it was in this moment.

  And yet, every night, you always give in, knowing that real life will not forgive your whims.

And every morning you await the end of the day; you await that clarity and the chance to try again, assuring yourself it will be different this time.

  Define insanity.

  Then… turn the music a little louder and put on a fresh pot of coffee.

Open

Is it weakness, the compulsion to live one’s life openly with others, to readily expose our faults and frailties? Or is it strength, a spade to rip out the weeds that would love only a false version of ourself? Or perhaps it is neither… not inherently good or ill; instead, only a danger. For to live so openly requires trust. And trust, no matter how great or how small, is merely an invitation for the world to break a little further…

Golden Kill

Visual artists do sketches... I'll sometimes sketch scenes.  This is just a rough something I came up with today...

        A pair of cool blue dots lit up on the bracelet about her wrist, mirroring the pair of lights just above the trigger on the gun.  Just as she’d ordered it… the weapon recognized her touch.   Only her touch, as it were.  She could almost feel the life beneath her finger, coursing through the palm of her hand, urging her to squeeze the trigger.  If anyone else tried to wield the heavy-automatic rifle, the chamber feed would seize, effectively locking all function of the gun until an authorized user attempted to use it.  But for her…

        Carefully, she set it back on the table, and both pairs of lights were extinguished.  The bracelet was just a bracelet again, and the gun was now little better than a heavy club.  For a moment, she considered how effective the vastly expensive hunk of metal would be as a simple blunt force weapon.

        She looked up and across the table.  “You do impressive work… for a doctor, that is.”

        “You are pleased, then?”

        Her silence was as much confirmation as if she’d actually spoken.  If she’d been displeased, she would have been sure to let him know, and in none-too-eloquent of language.

        Yes, silence was good.

        “About payment, then…” he began.

        She held up a bullet, one that glimmered in the dim light like gold.  In fact, it was gold, solid all the way through.  “Do you know how much this is worth?” she asked.  She tossed it to him, allowing him to weigh it speculatively in his hands.

        “Maybe ten-thousand?  At the shiest mark, at least… it could be even more.”

        “Exactly,” she said.  “That’s more than half your fare.”

        “What about the…?”

        Before he had even able to finish, she had whipped a small, silenced pistol from the small of her back, and fired a second bullet straight through the man’s forehead.  “There’s the other half,” she growled.  “Plus a little extra.”  As he slumped forward over the table, blood leaking down between his eyes, she stood to leave.  “Keep the change,” she tossed over her shoulder.

        The lights on her personalized rifle were already lit as she exited the back room of the bar, the live weapon nestled in the crook of her arm.

        Maybe silence wasn't so good after all.

Jovian Sunrises

The lightning played freeze tag throughout the looming thunderheads, flitting first here, then there, capturing an image in the blaze of an instant.  Forked fingers reached like hands to touch each other, missing by what seemed to be, from the shoreline at least, only the narrowest of margins.  But the clouds weren't all that threatening, despite their distant, insistent rumbling; their color was a salty white against the charcoal sky of night, making them seem more like clumps of cotton than angry bruises.

Plus, they were receding, chased by the starlit heralds of day.

I had undertaken to race the sun, to beat it at its own game, spinning around the Earth as it does.  And I had succeeded in my challenge, arriving at those dunes nearly an hour before its initial hues began painting the backdrop of the world in pastel color once more.

But this dawn was unlike any other.

It wasn't the ire of Jupiter that broke the night.  No, it was the faces of the other Jovian gods--Uranus and Neptune--that melted the black in pools of cool sapphire and jade. They caught the sky in marbled perfection and turned it, ever so carefully, to day.

Night Sky

Have you ever seen the Milky Way...

The Milky Way with naked eye?

Where all these other Earthly lights

Don't push and pull to cloud the sky?

The dusty trail

Like speckled paint...

In barren places

All but faint.

From nothing--Life.

From life--Nothing.

Beginning of a Totally Unrelated-to-Anything Scene

The place was called “Executive Hotel”—it took a conscious effort to keep from thinking what sort of low-life executive would choose to stay in such a pisspot.  It looked more like a prison compound than the “Most Comfortable Stay,” as the sign out front bragged.  Sleeping beneath an overpass might have been better.

White paint peeled from the exterior walls, streaking the dingy surface with scars of brown.  Either it was the paint peeling to reveal half-rotted wood beneath, or it was mildew caused by some awful roof runoff.  I was certain to stay far enough away so the distinction couldn’t be made.  And the cars parked in the lot were in much the same condition, nearly every one of them a beater joint fit to throw a piston and clatter to a stop at any moment.  Paint jobs all dull tans, beiges, and sickly olive greens—or at least they had been, before the rust had begun to corrode the old steel frames—did nothing to improve my already low opinion of this fine establishment.

It was enough to make a man rethink the choices he had made in his life.  And as the shoddy suspension of my loaner car—only earlier that day, I had saved it from the scrapper with a quick exchange of five, crisp one hundred dollar bills—bounced over the broken cracks of the uneven lot, rolling like a drunken mule into the space outlined by two non-existent yellow stripes, I found myself doing exactly that...

Genome Circuitry

So, I have quite an otherworldly wound on my arm.  Not only did it leave a large patch of my skin strangely hairless, it cut out a pattern that seems to belong in some science fiction representation of human DNA.  But not entirely.  It also resembles an abstract understanding of a circuit board.  Probably the strangest part of it all, however, is that what little it bled was not blood...

It bled ink.