four white walls. [trigger #281]

No one believes that Bob is a wizard, they all just think he’s crazy. They keep him in a single room: a bed, a terrible flickering fluorescent light, and four white walls. They believe that any other embellishments simply disturb him and increase his delusions. Soon after anything is added to his room he soon begins chanting over it or dismantling it or staring at it intensely while muttering. To them, everything he does is just more proof he is completely out of his mind. To Bob, everything these infuriating dolts do keeps him from obtaining the ingredients he needs to perform a spell to escape, leaving him stuck in this terrible place.

Bob needs more than just the bed and the bulb to perform any of the spells capable of releasing him from his imprisonment. He is left without the means to prove to them he isn’t insane. Bob doesn’t look like wizards in the stories we most often see in America, he isn’t the sort of guy you would notice, nudge your friend and whisper, “Ha, that guy looks like a wizard.” That’s sort of the point. Wizards have been carefully adjusting public assumptions about wizards for a long time, to ensure that no one thinks they exist, and that even in the most open-minded moments would be expecting a wizard to be a tall white man with a great white beard and a pointy hat, or else a little English boy with glasses. No one suspects a very short, 30-something black man with a neatly trimmed goatee. Of course, even with all the work of disinformation wizards have done over the years there are still centuries of stories before they started their public relations campaign. Thus, there are all sorts of stories of wizards who are short black men throughout the history of the world, many of them true, but no one on staff at St. Albert’s Mental Hospital have ever heard or read or seen any of these stories.

Of course, his once pristine goatee is gone since the unfortunate event of his being institutionalized, now he just has a growing beard. The beard makes him look more stereotypically wizardly than he had before, but unfortunately for Bob wizards have done an excellent job convincing everyone that wizards are imaginary. They’ve done such a great job that now the best way to convince someone that you’re not a wizard is to tell them that you are, in fact, a wizard. It leaves Bob in a bit of a predicament.

under the bridge and over the dam. [trigger #280]

I told her it was water under the bridge. Over the dam. That it had slipped into the past and was out of our reach and lost to us. It’s what she wanted to hear. She wanted it gone and lost forever. To pretend that it had never happened. Yet while it may be past it has still changed us. If we look at the metaphor more closely it reveals the truth of things. Water under the bridge or over the dam has still changed everything forever. Just a small bit of erosion, imperceptible, yet undeniable. The metaphorical water may be gone, but the change is something we must still deal with each moment. We can ignore it. We can attempt to live in ignorance with the use of flippant phrases, specious aphorisms that lie by helping us ignore the deeper reality. The truth remains that we are changed by every moment, even the ones that seem innocuous and unimportant.

the judgment ray. [trigger #279]

We still don’t know who gave us the judgment rays. People speculate that it was God, or aliens from the far reaches of space or another dimension, or humans from the future, or even a mashup of more than one of those options. All we know is that the rays were delivered to Jeanine Collins 14 years ago.

Following the instructions given to her upon receipt of the impossible objects, she approached the media and told them she had been given seven items. She explained that they operate like guns, but instead of launching a projectile they hit the target with an energy we still don’t understand all these years later. She claimed that the guns cause the target to see what is, clearly and entirely. It breaks down the well-constructed mental blockages we create to shield us from painful truths, it floods the mind with perspective, and momentarily eradicates everything that we use to justify ourselves. Excuses, prejudices, cognitive dissonance, and all the other things that help us round off the sharp edges of reality are made impossible. All the shadows in the mind are overcome by one moment of intense light. We see ourselves as we are. We see others as they are. We are made wholly compassionate in the blink of an eye, truly knowing and feeling the suffering and joy of others without the filters we normally use to insulate ourselves from others.

At first, of course no one believed her. The idea is insane. The technology impossible. The woman clearly unhinged and hysterical. Our disbelief couldn’t last long however, because all she had to do was use the object and any skeptic was turned into a believer; a weeping, blubbering, overwhelmed believer.

Some go permanently insane when the judgment ray is used on them. Almost all go temporarily insane. We do have mental safeguards in place for a reason after all, and our minds are not equipped to deal with full knowledge of ourselves and how people are impacted by our actions. And so most do go mad for as long as it takes for the individual to come to terms with seeing his or her life as it is. More commonly people don’t come to terms at all, and go mad for as long as it takes for a person to reconstruct a network of lies and bullshit where they can take mental refuge.

One major aftereffect of delivery of the judgment rays is that the world now has a perfect judicial system, at least in any case large enough to warrant use of a judgment ray. No punishment or rehabilitation could be more effective than for the guilty to be forced to see their actions as they really are. The judgment ray lays bare the act as it really is. The perpetrator sees the real reasons for their actions, they see the pain and suffering caused, they see unvarnished and unqualified truth. Never again will an innocent person rot behind bars or be put to death, although it is still hard on the wrongfully accused when they are shown all the ways they are beautiful and guilty, broken and strong (the positive and the negative are both overwhelming to see in such terrible clarity). The guilty also always confess once the judgment ray has been used. Confession is too important as a release valve for a mind bursting at the seams with truth.

the ghould of baghdad. [trigger #278]

As the world of humankind strides forward into progress, much is gained. We grow in our understanding of so many things in the universe, things before undreamt of. However, the more we know, the more arrogant and self-impressed we become. We stop wondering about the things that don’t fit with our newfound discoveries. As our knowledge brightens, the shadows grow darker, and we only become less inclined to explore those shadows, lest we discover we know less than we want to believe.

These sorts of shadows, dark corners obscuring our view of the world as it actually is, are where monsters live. Such it is with Saalua, the ghoul of Baghdad.

Saalua has always been a creature of the shadows, has always been a being living on the edge of our awareness. Parents have used her as a phantom to frighten misbehaving children, but mostly because making her a children’s story helps adults ignore their own fears. Stories have been told describing her as a succubus who tempts men into eternal service. She has been rumored to feed on the dead or dying, to lurk waiting for unsuspecting travelers, and to steal away infants. In truth, the darkest stories about her pale in comparison to what she actually is. Her spirit is far blacker, her methods more heinous, her ends more treacherous than we imagine in our nightmares.

Just know this: be wary on the streets of Baghdad. For that matter, be wary everywhere. Baghdad isn’t the only city to have a ghoul. The things that go bump in the night are not harmless. The darkness hides even more than we fear.

before we became the host, they never… [trigger #277]

They have asked us to call them the Travelers, which is quite the euphemism in light of their history. One can only hope the name is meant to describe the future of their race. For millions of years, the tiny parasitic aliens have traveled the universe, taking over various sentient beings on planets where such a thing has emerged. The entire race travels together, from planet to planet, seeking nourishment and satisfaction.

The Travelers are very, very small. Imperceivable by the human senses. We didn’t know they were there until they attached themselves to the appropriate places within our brains and revealed themselves to us in dreams and visions, which is something they normally would never have done. The plan, as was always the plan throughout their long history of space travel, was to carry out their entire mission without us ever becoming the wiser.

Find a planet with life. Identify whatever number of species have achieved sentience. Discover the internal mechanism by which that sentience is maintained, then leech off of it to feed their own voracious hunger. Leave behind a planet of empty sacks which once had the power to think and feel. The best simile would be that the Travelers are like vampires, but instead of feeding off of blood or life-force, they feed off of the energy of sentient thought and feeling.

The specific result doesn’t always look the same on every planet. On earth, they would have left behind billions of drooling invalids and blankly staring fools, as an entire species waited around to die.

That’s what would have happened. Instead, the Travelers had their entire race as they knew it changed forever. They revealed themselves to us, announcing their repentance and transformation at our unwitting hands.

In order to feed off of an organism’s sentience, one must allow for a two way process of change. Just as a blood transfusion carrying certain forms of illness will make the recipient ill as well, so will feeding off of a particularly violent or cruel or kind or lustful or courageous host impact the mindset of the Travelers. Most often, this is temporary, but not always. Once, the species was not so destructive. Contact with a particularly war-obsessed species several million years ago is what resulted in their lack of concern for their genocidal tendencies.

Sometimes the traits of a host species will not translate in a way that makes any changes at all. Other times, they will lose huge numbers of their species to malnourishment because of the aftereffects of a particularly dangerous thought pathogen. Mostly, they see the same things over and over again. Across the universe they have fed off of rage and love, hunger and obsession, violence and peace, hatred and apathy. Many feelings and sentiments are shared across the stars. They found all of these familiar traits in us. Yet, before we became the host, they had never known a species with the capacity for hope that humanity has. It rewrote their beings to the very core.

The Travelers had encountered hope in smaller forms, in vaguer and less clear varieties. Never before humans had they tried to feed off of a species so capable of such a diversity of hope, of expectation and anticipation of something that hasn’t come and may never be. Blind hope. Foolish hope. Stupid hope. Unrelenting, stubborn hope. Subtle, barely perceivable hope. False hope. Grounded hope. Measured and reluctant hope. Bruised and broken hope. Wild, mad hope. Passionate and intoxicating hope. Beautiful, dangerous, irresistible hope. It shocked and rewired their entire beings.

They were infected with hope, suddenly incapable of separating the species they fed off of and destroyed from the potential futures that species might make. The Travelers revealed to us their plan to work on earth to discover a way they can feed and live without destroying another race. Temporarily taking over the minds and bodies of our comatose and insane, they have spent the last 43 years working with volunteers from Earth’s science community to find a new way to be and live.