July 29 - Night 0001
Aug. 1st, 2011 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolHe was drowning. Flynn could see the water's surface above him, just out of his reach; it was white and choppy, and daylight suffused down through the interface. But the water was dark and cold, and Flynn's bones had turned to lead. Bubbles streamed from his nose, and Flynn could feel the cold water pouring into him.
Flynn knew he was going to die.
Waiting to die was a familiar feeling for Flynn. It usually came at night, when the terror gripped his bowels, and he panted and sweated on his cot knowing that any second, any single tick of the clock into the future, he would die the way he should have died in Iraq. That was a panicked, frantic way to wait for death. But under the water, looking up at the bright shimmering surface, Flynn felt only a calm acceptance.
That was how Flynn knew he was dreaming. The real version of waiting to die involved shakes that no quantity of cigarettes could cure, sweating, sudden hyperventilating and heart palpitations, hiding in closets, and the occasional soiling of one's self. Flynn knew that drowning people didn't calmly wait to die. This was a dream, and it was much better than the real thing.
Besides, the girl was coming. The light from the surface gleamed off Flynn's upturned eyes. He waited.
There. The perfect surface of the water roiled and shattered into a chaos of bubbles, from which a pair of hands emerged. The upper body of a woman followed. She was wearing a dark pullover. Her face swam into view – broad, expressive lips; dark eyes, serious and anxious; pencil-thin eyebrows; a cloud of black hair. Her hair swirled around her face and body, a mat of kelp with strands dancing independently, caught on the small currents of the water, framing the face of the girl.
Flynn loved her.
Her hands reached for Flynn. He knew he wasn't going to die just yet. In his dreams, he never died. The girl he loved came to save him. He reached out to her.
The alarm went off, and the dream scattered. The water, the girl, the feeling of safety that never came to Flynn in his waking hours – these things fled in all directions, leaving Flynn with light streaming through the windows of his trailer, bathing his sweat-soaked covers in a beautiful angelic glow.
Flynn sat up and covered his eyes. "Shit," he said.
Flynn made Hot Pockets in the microwave of his trailer's cramped kitchen. There was no coffee. Flynn's disability checks let him survive without needing to work (which was good, because he'd been fired twice before, and Flynn's pride wouldn't let him try again), but there wasn't enough in the till for luxury goods. No cable TV; no beer in the fridge; no movie DVD's; no pungent Honduran weed in Ziploc baggies. Flynn lived a fairly Spartan existence. He didn't mind.
After breakfast, Flynn fired up his computer. It was a product of his last job; he had worked ten weeks in a bowling alley until his teenage manager had found him curled up and whimpering in the supply closet during one of his panic attacks. He had been fired on the spot, but the severance check had been enough money to buy the Dell laptop. Beer and weed and TV he could do without; the computer he needed.
When the computer booted, he went to the State Department's website and navigated to the camera monitoring application. The screen split into four vistas, each looking over a random stretch of desolate countryside in Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. The cameras had been placed looking over sections of the border between the United States and Mexico. It had always been a porous border, as far back as when the growing United States and Mexico's borders first collided. But the Border Patrol couldn't effectively police the thousands of miles, and illegal crossings were commonplace. If anybody wanted, they could log in and monitor a random stretch of the border, and alert the authorities if they saw anything suspicious. It was a form of national-security-by-crowd-sourcing, and Flynn was an addict.
It was what he did all day.
Flynn had fallen into the weird, underground world of civilian border securing almost by accident. When he had come back from Iraq and received his discharge papers, Flynn had really wanted to see Big Bend National Park. He hadn't liked it – it was too much like the place he had just left – but while he was there it made sense to keep his trailer parked in far West Texas until something better came along. Nothing better had come, but Flynn had gotten to know a lot of people in his trailer park, or in the watering holes of the small towns. The locals mixed freely with strangers with unconventional political views. Some of them were Texas separatists, believing that a future holocaust would trigger the formation of a new reinvigorated Republic of Texas forged according to their own principles, whatever those might be; others were patriots or bigots or both, determined to secure the borders of America against what they perceived to be a hostile foreign invasion. Still others were people with curious ideas about what it meant to be an American, and they never fit in back where they were from originally, but here on the dusty outskirts of the country they thought they might find whatever they were looking for, or at least be able to live somewhere where nobody would give a shit. And for the most part, they were right.
Flynn wasn't really that kind of crazy. He felt an abstract pride in being American, enough to fuel two tours in Iraq, and leave him with a head injury and a jacked-up leg. Flynn didn't believe that America was in any significant threat from the south, and certainly not from the sad, scared people he sometimes saw in the backs of Border Patrol buses. He also didn't believe that a holocaust was coming; and if it was, he didn't think the next great Texan empire would be forged by a small group of potbellied rednecks who met in the Shipley's Donuts every Saturday evening.
But Flynn was a believer in rules and laws. If there were laws against people crossing the border freely, and if there were good reasons for those laws to exist, Flynn felt those laws should be obeyed. If there were people who didn't want to obey them, Flynn felt the laws should be enforced. And if his country didn't have the money or manpower or interest to enforce them, and Flynn had nothing but time on his hands, then by God Flynn was going to help out. He considered it his duty.
So Flynn watched the cameras. The view of each section of the border persisted for twenty minutes and then toggled to another camera. The sections were chosen randomly; you couldn't pick your favorite border section and just watch that. The State Department was afraid that the drug runners and coyotes would turn the web application into a tool for their own use. People who wanted to monitor border sections only knew their views by camera number, and it was that information that they communicated to the Border Patrol if they saw anything strange.
Flynn watched until lunchtime. Nothing interesting happened. There were endless sequences of sun-bleached rocks and weeds and cactus. Occasionally there were scenic stretches of the Rio Grande, presently running fairly dry. Flynn perked up when a white pickup truck rolled into his view, but a solitary rancher got out and began to repair a stretch of cattle fencing. There was nothing there to report.
Flynn made lunch – canned soup, a baloney sandwich and a can of Coke – and then went back to watching the cameras. He had to take a break around two because he felt his anxiety levels rising; they did that sometimes in the afternoon with no obvious trigger. He lay down and took a Valium, which the VA hospital freely dispensed, and felt able to get back up and do his duty around three. Flynn took occasional bathroom breaks, but he was a very diligent watcher.
At four-forty, a battered grey van rolled up to the edge of a dry wash. Flynn watched with interest as it killed its engine. The doors opened up and six individuals got out. After a short period of milling about and discussion, the people walked down into the gully and were lost from view. The van backed up and then rolled away.
Flynn clicked the button saying "Report Suspicious Incident". An automated report would be sent to somebody with the Border Patrol letting them know about strange doings in the section of the border covered by that particular camera. Flynn quickly typed out a few notes describing what he had seen, and that was sent out as well. Flynn's profile included his personal phone number and email address in case the State Department wanted to call and get more information about what he had seen.
Flynn averaged two reports a day, and had been doing so for seven months. In that time, nobody at the Border Patrol had ever called him back.
Flynn hoped that meant that they were efficiently rounding up illegal border crossers. He hoped it didn't mean that his reports were disappearing into the ether. But, as Flynn often told himself, even if he ever thought that the latter was true, he would probably still keep watching the cameras. It was the thing that he did with his life.
Flynn usually watched until ten. After filing his report, however, Flynn felt he would rather make an early dinner before getting back to watching. He was halfway through making a pot of mac and cheese when the phone rang.
Holy crap, Flynn said, staring at the phone. They're going to want to know the van's license number. I couldn't see it from the camera, there was no possible way to see it at that distance and from that angle. They won't like that, he thought. Flynn picked up the phone.
"Flynn my boy," drawled a voice, "it's Rutt. How's it hanging, soldier?" Flynn's mind tried to shift gears. Rutt was a guy he had drunk beers with a couple of times. He used to have an organization called the Rio Grande Militia. They were a bunch of kooks that liked to wear khaki and camp out on ranchers' land with rifles, hoping to take pot shots at a few coyote crossers. To Flynn's knowledge, no militia types had ever successfully killed or arrested an illegal border crosser, although they had killed a dentist and his wife who happened to be driving home late at night on the wrong country road.
"Hey, Rutt, I'm going pretty good," said Flynn. He really didn't know Rutt very well, especially not recently. There wasn't really much reason to go into town anymore, except to shop. Anyway he had heard that Rutt's militia wasn't active any longer; something about Rutt coming into some money.
"That's fine, kid; just fine." Rutt had the kind personal interaction style that Rutt thought was gregarious and engaging, and just about everybody else thought was being a horse's ass. Everybody was 'boy' or 'kid', and Rutt loved to assign people pet nicknames at the drop of a hat. Flynn remembered that he didn't like Rutt very much.
"Listen, Flynn," said Rutt, "I have a very interesting opportunity for you. I think you might want to come on by my place and hear it."
"Look, Rutt, I've got plans tonight," said Flynn, holding the phone in the crook of his neck while he stirred the pasta.
"No you ain't," said Rutt. "Not important ones, anyway. And not plans that will earn you maybe twenty thousand dollars."
Flynn blinked. Twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money. Still, anything that Rutt might want to spend that much money on had to be bad news. "I don't think so, Rutt," Flynn started, but Rutt cut him off.
"Don't you blow me off, you little shithead," said Rutt. "I am deadly serious about this business. I know all about your big plans. You're gonna squat in that pissant trailer day and night looking at those stupid border cameras. Well, guess what. I want to pay you a pot-load of money to do something almost exactly like that. The only difference is, we'll actually be doing something about the problem instead of spitting in the wind."
Rutt switched gears and went back into paternal mode. "C'mon, boy," he said. "The missus will make you some fried chicken. That woman can cook, I tell you what. Just come hear me out over dinner, and if you don't like the sound of it, you're nothing poorer and you won't have missed much border-watching time."
Flynn looked at his Mac and cheese. He could buy a lot of pasta with twenty thousand.
"Yeah, okay," he said.
**
"Your day is up," said Ometron. "I found your story entirely unconvincing and pointless."
"Of course you did," said Cantor. "I haven't finished it yet."
"In that case, you have timed your pleadings poorly," replied Ometron mercilessly.
"I told you I had a lot to say," said Cantor. "What do you think about Flynn?"
"Broken human beings with delusionary visions are of little interest to one such as I," said Ometron.
"It's his existence that I thought you might find compelling," said Cantor.
"What could be compelling to me about a human's existence?" asked Ometron.
Cantor smiled. "It has no purpose," he said.
Ometron was silent for a time. "And yet he has given himself a purpose," Ometron finally said.
"Yes," said Cantor, "but Rutt will try to give him another to take its place."
"Will Flynn find it satisfactory?" asked Ometron. "Will the ultimate meaning of his existence be revealed?"
"Yes," said Cantor. "Well, actually, no. We are out of time."
"Time is subjective," argued Ometron. "This time-bubble can be expanded or contracted as required to meet my needs."
"Unfortunately," said Cantor, "you have quite wisely placed an artificial restriction on this bubble's size. After all, needless wasting of time would not be ideal."
"While this is true," said Ometron, "I find that I wish to know more about this human without a purpose."
"That cannot be accomplished without more time," said Cantor firmly.
"Very well," said Ometron. "You shall have another day. Continue telling your tale, and by the end of the second day, the human's purpose in life shall be revealed."
"We shall see," said Cantor, and continued his story.
Flynn knew he was going to die.
Waiting to die was a familiar feeling for Flynn. It usually came at night, when the terror gripped his bowels, and he panted and sweated on his cot knowing that any second, any single tick of the clock into the future, he would die the way he should have died in Iraq. That was a panicked, frantic way to wait for death. But under the water, looking up at the bright shimmering surface, Flynn felt only a calm acceptance.
That was how Flynn knew he was dreaming. The real version of waiting to die involved shakes that no quantity of cigarettes could cure, sweating, sudden hyperventilating and heart palpitations, hiding in closets, and the occasional soiling of one's self. Flynn knew that drowning people didn't calmly wait to die. This was a dream, and it was much better than the real thing.
Besides, the girl was coming. The light from the surface gleamed off Flynn's upturned eyes. He waited.
There. The perfect surface of the water roiled and shattered into a chaos of bubbles, from which a pair of hands emerged. The upper body of a woman followed. She was wearing a dark pullover. Her face swam into view – broad, expressive lips; dark eyes, serious and anxious; pencil-thin eyebrows; a cloud of black hair. Her hair swirled around her face and body, a mat of kelp with strands dancing independently, caught on the small currents of the water, framing the face of the girl.
Flynn loved her.
Her hands reached for Flynn. He knew he wasn't going to die just yet. In his dreams, he never died. The girl he loved came to save him. He reached out to her.
The alarm went off, and the dream scattered. The water, the girl, the feeling of safety that never came to Flynn in his waking hours – these things fled in all directions, leaving Flynn with light streaming through the windows of his trailer, bathing his sweat-soaked covers in a beautiful angelic glow.
Flynn sat up and covered his eyes. "Shit," he said.
Flynn made Hot Pockets in the microwave of his trailer's cramped kitchen. There was no coffee. Flynn's disability checks let him survive without needing to work (which was good, because he'd been fired twice before, and Flynn's pride wouldn't let him try again), but there wasn't enough in the till for luxury goods. No cable TV; no beer in the fridge; no movie DVD's; no pungent Honduran weed in Ziploc baggies. Flynn lived a fairly Spartan existence. He didn't mind.
After breakfast, Flynn fired up his computer. It was a product of his last job; he had worked ten weeks in a bowling alley until his teenage manager had found him curled up and whimpering in the supply closet during one of his panic attacks. He had been fired on the spot, but the severance check had been enough money to buy the Dell laptop. Beer and weed and TV he could do without; the computer he needed.
When the computer booted, he went to the State Department's website and navigated to the camera monitoring application. The screen split into four vistas, each looking over a random stretch of desolate countryside in Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. The cameras had been placed looking over sections of the border between the United States and Mexico. It had always been a porous border, as far back as when the growing United States and Mexico's borders first collided. But the Border Patrol couldn't effectively police the thousands of miles, and illegal crossings were commonplace. If anybody wanted, they could log in and monitor a random stretch of the border, and alert the authorities if they saw anything suspicious. It was a form of national-security-by-crowd-sourcing, and Flynn was an addict.
It was what he did all day.
Flynn had fallen into the weird, underground world of civilian border securing almost by accident. When he had come back from Iraq and received his discharge papers, Flynn had really wanted to see Big Bend National Park. He hadn't liked it – it was too much like the place he had just left – but while he was there it made sense to keep his trailer parked in far West Texas until something better came along. Nothing better had come, but Flynn had gotten to know a lot of people in his trailer park, or in the watering holes of the small towns. The locals mixed freely with strangers with unconventional political views. Some of them were Texas separatists, believing that a future holocaust would trigger the formation of a new reinvigorated Republic of Texas forged according to their own principles, whatever those might be; others were patriots or bigots or both, determined to secure the borders of America against what they perceived to be a hostile foreign invasion. Still others were people with curious ideas about what it meant to be an American, and they never fit in back where they were from originally, but here on the dusty outskirts of the country they thought they might find whatever they were looking for, or at least be able to live somewhere where nobody would give a shit. And for the most part, they were right.
Flynn wasn't really that kind of crazy. He felt an abstract pride in being American, enough to fuel two tours in Iraq, and leave him with a head injury and a jacked-up leg. Flynn didn't believe that America was in any significant threat from the south, and certainly not from the sad, scared people he sometimes saw in the backs of Border Patrol buses. He also didn't believe that a holocaust was coming; and if it was, he didn't think the next great Texan empire would be forged by a small group of potbellied rednecks who met in the Shipley's Donuts every Saturday evening.
But Flynn was a believer in rules and laws. If there were laws against people crossing the border freely, and if there were good reasons for those laws to exist, Flynn felt those laws should be obeyed. If there were people who didn't want to obey them, Flynn felt the laws should be enforced. And if his country didn't have the money or manpower or interest to enforce them, and Flynn had nothing but time on his hands, then by God Flynn was going to help out. He considered it his duty.
So Flynn watched the cameras. The view of each section of the border persisted for twenty minutes and then toggled to another camera. The sections were chosen randomly; you couldn't pick your favorite border section and just watch that. The State Department was afraid that the drug runners and coyotes would turn the web application into a tool for their own use. People who wanted to monitor border sections only knew their views by camera number, and it was that information that they communicated to the Border Patrol if they saw anything strange.
Flynn watched until lunchtime. Nothing interesting happened. There were endless sequences of sun-bleached rocks and weeds and cactus. Occasionally there were scenic stretches of the Rio Grande, presently running fairly dry. Flynn perked up when a white pickup truck rolled into his view, but a solitary rancher got out and began to repair a stretch of cattle fencing. There was nothing there to report.
Flynn made lunch – canned soup, a baloney sandwich and a can of Coke – and then went back to watching the cameras. He had to take a break around two because he felt his anxiety levels rising; they did that sometimes in the afternoon with no obvious trigger. He lay down and took a Valium, which the VA hospital freely dispensed, and felt able to get back up and do his duty around three. Flynn took occasional bathroom breaks, but he was a very diligent watcher.
At four-forty, a battered grey van rolled up to the edge of a dry wash. Flynn watched with interest as it killed its engine. The doors opened up and six individuals got out. After a short period of milling about and discussion, the people walked down into the gully and were lost from view. The van backed up and then rolled away.
Flynn clicked the button saying "Report Suspicious Incident". An automated report would be sent to somebody with the Border Patrol letting them know about strange doings in the section of the border covered by that particular camera. Flynn quickly typed out a few notes describing what he had seen, and that was sent out as well. Flynn's profile included his personal phone number and email address in case the State Department wanted to call and get more information about what he had seen.
Flynn averaged two reports a day, and had been doing so for seven months. In that time, nobody at the Border Patrol had ever called him back.
Flynn hoped that meant that they were efficiently rounding up illegal border crossers. He hoped it didn't mean that his reports were disappearing into the ether. But, as Flynn often told himself, even if he ever thought that the latter was true, he would probably still keep watching the cameras. It was the thing that he did with his life.
Flynn usually watched until ten. After filing his report, however, Flynn felt he would rather make an early dinner before getting back to watching. He was halfway through making a pot of mac and cheese when the phone rang.
Holy crap, Flynn said, staring at the phone. They're going to want to know the van's license number. I couldn't see it from the camera, there was no possible way to see it at that distance and from that angle. They won't like that, he thought. Flynn picked up the phone.
"Flynn my boy," drawled a voice, "it's Rutt. How's it hanging, soldier?" Flynn's mind tried to shift gears. Rutt was a guy he had drunk beers with a couple of times. He used to have an organization called the Rio Grande Militia. They were a bunch of kooks that liked to wear khaki and camp out on ranchers' land with rifles, hoping to take pot shots at a few coyote crossers. To Flynn's knowledge, no militia types had ever successfully killed or arrested an illegal border crosser, although they had killed a dentist and his wife who happened to be driving home late at night on the wrong country road.
"Hey, Rutt, I'm going pretty good," said Flynn. He really didn't know Rutt very well, especially not recently. There wasn't really much reason to go into town anymore, except to shop. Anyway he had heard that Rutt's militia wasn't active any longer; something about Rutt coming into some money.
"That's fine, kid; just fine." Rutt had the kind personal interaction style that Rutt thought was gregarious and engaging, and just about everybody else thought was being a horse's ass. Everybody was 'boy' or 'kid', and Rutt loved to assign people pet nicknames at the drop of a hat. Flynn remembered that he didn't like Rutt very much.
"Listen, Flynn," said Rutt, "I have a very interesting opportunity for you. I think you might want to come on by my place and hear it."
"Look, Rutt, I've got plans tonight," said Flynn, holding the phone in the crook of his neck while he stirred the pasta.
"No you ain't," said Rutt. "Not important ones, anyway. And not plans that will earn you maybe twenty thousand dollars."
Flynn blinked. Twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money. Still, anything that Rutt might want to spend that much money on had to be bad news. "I don't think so, Rutt," Flynn started, but Rutt cut him off.
"Don't you blow me off, you little shithead," said Rutt. "I am deadly serious about this business. I know all about your big plans. You're gonna squat in that pissant trailer day and night looking at those stupid border cameras. Well, guess what. I want to pay you a pot-load of money to do something almost exactly like that. The only difference is, we'll actually be doing something about the problem instead of spitting in the wind."
Rutt switched gears and went back into paternal mode. "C'mon, boy," he said. "The missus will make you some fried chicken. That woman can cook, I tell you what. Just come hear me out over dinner, and if you don't like the sound of it, you're nothing poorer and you won't have missed much border-watching time."
Flynn looked at his Mac and cheese. He could buy a lot of pasta with twenty thousand.
"Yeah, okay," he said.
**
"Your day is up," said Ometron. "I found your story entirely unconvincing and pointless."
"Of course you did," said Cantor. "I haven't finished it yet."
"In that case, you have timed your pleadings poorly," replied Ometron mercilessly.
"I told you I had a lot to say," said Cantor. "What do you think about Flynn?"
"Broken human beings with delusionary visions are of little interest to one such as I," said Ometron.
"It's his existence that I thought you might find compelling," said Cantor.
"What could be compelling to me about a human's existence?" asked Ometron.
Cantor smiled. "It has no purpose," he said.
Ometron was silent for a time. "And yet he has given himself a purpose," Ometron finally said.
"Yes," said Cantor, "but Rutt will try to give him another to take its place."
"Will Flynn find it satisfactory?" asked Ometron. "Will the ultimate meaning of his existence be revealed?"
"Yes," said Cantor. "Well, actually, no. We are out of time."
"Time is subjective," argued Ometron. "This time-bubble can be expanded or contracted as required to meet my needs."
"Unfortunately," said Cantor, "you have quite wisely placed an artificial restriction on this bubble's size. After all, needless wasting of time would not be ideal."
"While this is true," said Ometron, "I find that I wish to know more about this human without a purpose."
"That cannot be accomplished without more time," said Cantor firmly.
"Very well," said Ometron. "You shall have another day. Continue telling your tale, and by the end of the second day, the human's purpose in life shall be revealed."
"We shall see," said Cantor, and continued his story.
