Dream: I Am The Dizzy Television (Weekend Edition)
Sunday, June 18th:
beltramgregor brought home several large Tupperware tubs of Indian food after visiting his parents for dinner. I swiped a piece of brown naan flavored with lentils and olive oil. A sweet, tangy paste of red beans and spices filled the half-pitas in the refrigerator; I wanted to try them, but there were only two left.
Familiar voices sipping from demitasse cups in the living room told me I should try the tea. (Their tone said I'd been left out of a casual secret for a while now.) I returned to the kitchen and asked Ytinas for the next cup. She filled a grinder the size of a garlic press with diced green onions and crumbly tan things I guessed were dried flowers. She passed me the cup and began filling the next.
Salt overpowered the unusual flavors. 'Is it supposed to be like this?" I asked, even though I already knew it wasn't. It felt like an honest mistake, though; maybe it was the end of the last batch. A canister of Norton's table salt stood on a counter gritty with stray granules.
nemoren walked in and opened the refrigerator. She grabbed the red-bean bread with a grin and took a bite while walking back to the living room.
Silly laughter bubbled from a nest of cushions on the soft kitchen floor where ytinas and I rolled suggestively. An onlooker would've expected kissing and grappling, or at least tickling, but we just laughed and rolled some more.
The next afternoon, I realized the Indian desserts were a debased American shortcut, a quilt of colorful Gummi Savers suspended in a firm, rubbery Jell-O product. Someone said they might be made with Cheerios instead. Just as well we never tried them, I thought.
I visited the house of a family friend. The elder of their two daughters was barely 17, her sister several years younger. I couldn't tell which one of them had a crush on me. I did my best to be entertaining in a "I'm marginally closer to your age than your parents'" sort of way. Their nun tutor arrived and the younger girl whined softly. I joked with her about it, but I could tell I was missing something.
My folks asked about the Indian dessert, and I explained as I carried a stack of six synthesizer keyboards into the library in our old house. I set them on the corner of my dad's long desk, a hollow-core door held up with clever braces and a half-dozen C-clamps.
"See what you make of these," I said.
He plugged a pair of quarter-inch cables into the top keyboard, then flipped dials on an old black and white TV near the top of the book case on the opposite wall. Gray horizontal bars slid into place on the screen, awaiting input.
'I think they were made for the Chinese market,' I offered.
He doodled a hasty scale on the keyboard while watching the bars vibrate and flex on the monitor; clipped electrical notes played fuzzily from the library speakers. We'd lost the first fraction of every note, the part that established much of the tone for each instrument. Resistors, I thought uselessly, it's... something with the resistors. He added a 50 Hz filter and played again, studying the display.
'Let's crank it up to 2200,' he said.
That did it; he got the full sound without any extra buzz. Mom said they'd probably distribute them to small churches that didn't have their own organs.
I watched the security monitors in my cubicle. The three other desks in the windowless office were equally sedate, and the overcast evening soaked through the plaster to bathe everything in blue-gray dimness. beltramgregor asked why I had three cameras and only two monitors. I explained the front door had an extra infrared camera, and the vault door only needed one.
A pair of cops in heavy riot gear gunned down a handful of college kids in a hallway across town. Days after the police were gone, the victims' ghosts returned to the scene. They were oddly transparent, not just the semisolid photographs popular in Hollywood. I could see the backs of their ears and all the layers of their clothes. Solid stains of indigo ink hung in their bodies, traced trajectories that splayed into exit wounds, encompassing the flare of hydrostatic shock. The vengeful spirits tracked their quarry to a wide, dark corridor. Unfazed, their killers only sneered at the impotent phantoms. (Somewhere across town, malcubed explained that their deaths had caused a mutation event a la X-Men.)
A ghost stunned the cops with luminous spheres she hurled from nowhere, while another gathered menacing swirls of color into her hands. A third fixed each with an indigo beam and slowly circled her targets, binding them in ribbons of cerulean force. By now, all the ghosts wore classic-era costumes.
Back at my office, beltramgregor and I heard a rumor that this had been happening all over the city. The mutant ghost squads were to be empowered as a new police force, and everyone feared they'd walk through too many walls without the proper warrants.
We changed channels on the TV and my head spun as the television's mind rushed through space to find the next channel. We heard a babble of current political news. The envoy from China in 84 A.D. happily announced that his time frame had been officially recognized, and he hoped a passage would be opened soon so they could trade with the modern era.
I packed my gear and left the office. I hurried through the city to a long sidewalk where an endless line of (re-purposed) school buses awaited their passengers. A signal changed and they began pulling away. I ran to find the right one. Some that I passed had a double-rear, as if the back section of a small bus had retracted into the back of a slightly larger bus, ready to redeploy when needed. I pushed through a knot in the crowd and smiled with relief to see a friend holding the open door of my bus. I nodded gratefully as I climbed the steps, and the bus was rolling by the time I found my seat.
I checked the bulky band-scanner in the inside pocket of my jacket and adjusted the dials. The bus was barely more than half full, and I had the seat to myself, but I noticed a nine-year-old girl in the seat ahead of me. For her sake, I unloaded the cylinder behind the hammer of my magnum. I wouldn't need it for a while yet, and it'd be a shame to accidentally blow her arm off or rupture an engine block.
Later that evening, I leaned out the window on the left side of the bus. Red lights revolved atop a phalanx of blue-black Chinese State Police cruisers. (We weren't even in China, but they'd been ranging farther every year.) They covered all eight lanes less than a mile ahead of us, and they were headed in our direction. I needed to organize something before we got in range of their assault rifles.
beltramgregor brought home several large Tupperware tubs of Indian food after visiting his parents for dinner. I swiped a piece of brown naan flavored with lentils and olive oil. A sweet, tangy paste of red beans and spices filled the half-pitas in the refrigerator; I wanted to try them, but there were only two left.
Familiar voices sipping from demitasse cups in the living room told me I should try the tea. (Their tone said I'd been left out of a casual secret for a while now.) I returned to the kitchen and asked Ytinas for the next cup. She filled a grinder the size of a garlic press with diced green onions and crumbly tan things I guessed were dried flowers. She passed me the cup and began filling the next.
Salt overpowered the unusual flavors. 'Is it supposed to be like this?" I asked, even though I already knew it wasn't. It felt like an honest mistake, though; maybe it was the end of the last batch. A canister of Norton's table salt stood on a counter gritty with stray granules.
nemoren walked in and opened the refrigerator. She grabbed the red-bean bread with a grin and took a bite while walking back to the living room.
Silly laughter bubbled from a nest of cushions on the soft kitchen floor where ytinas and I rolled suggestively. An onlooker would've expected kissing and grappling, or at least tickling, but we just laughed and rolled some more.
The next afternoon, I realized the Indian desserts were a debased American shortcut, a quilt of colorful Gummi Savers suspended in a firm, rubbery Jell-O product. Someone said they might be made with Cheerios instead. Just as well we never tried them, I thought.
I visited the house of a family friend. The elder of their two daughters was barely 17, her sister several years younger. I couldn't tell which one of them had a crush on me. I did my best to be entertaining in a "I'm marginally closer to your age than your parents'" sort of way. Their nun tutor arrived and the younger girl whined softly. I joked with her about it, but I could tell I was missing something.
My folks asked about the Indian dessert, and I explained as I carried a stack of six synthesizer keyboards into the library in our old house. I set them on the corner of my dad's long desk, a hollow-core door held up with clever braces and a half-dozen C-clamps.
"See what you make of these," I said.
He plugged a pair of quarter-inch cables into the top keyboard, then flipped dials on an old black and white TV near the top of the book case on the opposite wall. Gray horizontal bars slid into place on the screen, awaiting input.
'I think they were made for the Chinese market,' I offered.
He doodled a hasty scale on the keyboard while watching the bars vibrate and flex on the monitor; clipped electrical notes played fuzzily from the library speakers. We'd lost the first fraction of every note, the part that established much of the tone for each instrument. Resistors, I thought uselessly, it's... something with the resistors. He added a 50 Hz filter and played again, studying the display.
'Let's crank it up to 2200,' he said.
That did it; he got the full sound without any extra buzz. Mom said they'd probably distribute them to small churches that didn't have their own organs.
I watched the security monitors in my cubicle. The three other desks in the windowless office were equally sedate, and the overcast evening soaked through the plaster to bathe everything in blue-gray dimness. beltramgregor asked why I had three cameras and only two monitors. I explained the front door had an extra infrared camera, and the vault door only needed one.
A pair of cops in heavy riot gear gunned down a handful of college kids in a hallway across town. Days after the police were gone, the victims' ghosts returned to the scene. They were oddly transparent, not just the semisolid photographs popular in Hollywood. I could see the backs of their ears and all the layers of their clothes. Solid stains of indigo ink hung in their bodies, traced trajectories that splayed into exit wounds, encompassing the flare of hydrostatic shock. The vengeful spirits tracked their quarry to a wide, dark corridor. Unfazed, their killers only sneered at the impotent phantoms. (Somewhere across town, malcubed explained that their deaths had caused a mutation event a la X-Men.)
A ghost stunned the cops with luminous spheres she hurled from nowhere, while another gathered menacing swirls of color into her hands. A third fixed each with an indigo beam and slowly circled her targets, binding them in ribbons of cerulean force. By now, all the ghosts wore classic-era costumes.
Back at my office, beltramgregor and I heard a rumor that this had been happening all over the city. The mutant ghost squads were to be empowered as a new police force, and everyone feared they'd walk through too many walls without the proper warrants.
We changed channels on the TV and my head spun as the television's mind rushed through space to find the next channel. We heard a babble of current political news. The envoy from China in 84 A.D. happily announced that his time frame had been officially recognized, and he hoped a passage would be opened soon so they could trade with the modern era.
I packed my gear and left the office. I hurried through the city to a long sidewalk where an endless line of (re-purposed) school buses awaited their passengers. A signal changed and they began pulling away. I ran to find the right one. Some that I passed had a double-rear, as if the back section of a small bus had retracted into the back of a slightly larger bus, ready to redeploy when needed. I pushed through a knot in the crowd and smiled with relief to see a friend holding the open door of my bus. I nodded gratefully as I climbed the steps, and the bus was rolling by the time I found my seat.
I checked the bulky band-scanner in the inside pocket of my jacket and adjusted the dials. The bus was barely more than half full, and I had the seat to myself, but I noticed a nine-year-old girl in the seat ahead of me. For her sake, I unloaded the cylinder behind the hammer of my magnum. I wouldn't need it for a while yet, and it'd be a shame to accidentally blow her arm off or rupture an engine block.
Later that evening, I leaned out the window on the left side of the bus. Red lights revolved atop a phalanx of blue-black Chinese State Police cruisers. (We weren't even in China, but they'd been ranging farther every year.) They covered all eight lanes less than a mile ahead of us, and they were headed in our direction. I needed to organize something before we got in range of their assault rifles.