Man pasand supermarket

Canadian here seeing Le Mans for the 1st time with 2 others. We’re arriving at the track on the 8th, I’m camping at BSJ with a rental car + tent we’re flying with. (If there’s any other Canadians staying there drop a comment/PM!!). Two of us are avid campers and are bringing portable stoves with small mess kits + sporks in our suitcases (no butane fuel obviously) and are wondering where to buy said butane fuel canisters that thread into those pocket rockets? Ex. I use MSR and GSI isobutane cans…
Also we won’t have a cooler with us, so suggestions on what food to bring for roughly 3 nights from the french supermarkets? I’ve heard brie cheese can be left in the sun for some time and it goes really well with crunchy bread/croissants. Ramen packets, water, granola bars, dried meat and cans of prepped meals/soups are definitely on the list. We’d love to have beewine with us as well but no cooler will be a struggle, unless we meet some blokes with one we won’t mind sharing!
Also is there any way to rent lawn chairs? We’ll be on our feet a lot with all the walking and it’d be nice to take a seat other than the grass from a viewpoint as one of us is over 40 and trying to to stay comfortable. Has anyone ever bought some chairs from a department store and returned them?

There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

Original prompt: [WP] You're just living your life. Calling friends, doing your job, getting groceries. Alas, your narrator is unbearably pretentious, and is trying their best to frame this as a deep metaphor for the human condition no matter how much you try to make them stop. (link)
Catherine walked through the grocery store, aisles extending before her like the endless paths of the eternal labyrinth. Somewhere within this great dungeon of comestibles were the coveted items she sought, to extend the lifetime of her fleshy vessel for a few more moons. Harrowing, it must have been, to walk those aisles, to seek those Cheez-its, knowing that they would offer such brief reprieve for her hard-earned money.
"Okay, I get it, my shopping list sucks, can you please shut up? I just want to get my groceries and go home..." Catherine said, having clearly become delusional from hunger.
She rolled her eyes, almost certainly at her own foolishness, and strolled toward the bakery section of the store. There she spied a box of doughnuts, tempting her to stray from her prepared plans. They reminded her of herself, those doughtnuts, soft and spongy with a veneer of sweet sugar on the exterior, but ultimately devoid of any true nutritional substance. Even the hole in the center seemed representative of the void within her own soul, a yawning chasm leaving her gasping for-
"Jesus Christ, are you my mom or something? Can't I even buy some fucking snacks without you judging me?" Catherine demanded, shouting up at the rafters. They offered no response, obviously.
She placed the doughnuts back on the display with a sneer, the pastries surely reminding her too much of the part of herself she preferred to ignore. Instead she moved to the produce section, and began perusing the fruit. She felt herself drawn to the bananas, which reminded her so much of her good friend Kristine. Soft and sweet on the inside, with a leathery yet smooth and pleasant exterior that meant it didn't need the protective packaging many other sweet treats came with. She contrasted them with the coconuts that brought Charles to mind, with their hairy covering and hard shell that made it nigh impossible to reach the sweetness she was so sure was hidden beneath, but would likely be underwhelming when she finally made it through.
"For the last time, Kristine and I aren't like that, and I'm not breaking up with Charles just because you don't like him!" Catherine said to the lights hanging overhead. One of them flickered slightly, offering the silly girl some response for her trouble.
Catherine placed one of the bunches of bananas in her basket, as well as a head of broccoli, the many florets of which represented her unwillingness to truly let herself blossom for fear that it would make her unpalatable to those around her.
"Oh for fuck's sake! I do not need a therapy session right now!" Catherine said, to the nozzle spraying a fine mist over the vegetables on display. The other customers surely had doubts about her assertion, given her penchant for shouting at random inanimate objects.
Catherine then grunted and began walking off in a huff, snatching a package of ground beef off the shelf. While not representative of a person, the meat being processed to the point of being unrecognizable, which then had to be cooked until it was even more unrecognizable lest it cause health problems for whomsoever ate it, perfectly illustrated the tragic disconnect between people and the food on their plate.
Indeed, as she grabbed a pack of her favorite artificially-flavored fizzy drink, Catherine couldn't help but recognize that cruel irony of spinning her wheels at a job she didn't like to get food she didn't understand to sustain a body she never asked for. All so she could continue working that same job, with her days off being filled with meaningless frivolity and pointless busywork. If ever there was a time when poor Catherine needed to take a few days off, and perhaps reconnect with some family members she hadn't interacted with enough in recent times-
"Yes, I said I was going to help out on my grandparents' farm this weekend! No, I wasn't planning to shirk on it! I already told Kristine I couldn't come to the party! You don't have to guilt trip me on this one!" Catherine shouted at the shelf.
Finally, Catherine walked over to the freezer section, examining the frozen pizzas carefully. Their disk shape appealed to her inner tech geek, while the roundness foreshadowed the effect the food would have on her body.
Catherine stuck her middle finger out, holding her hand aloft and seemingly directed at an angle above her. Finally, she could resist the temptation no longer, and returned to the doughnuts. They cried out to her, spiritually drawing her into their glutinous grasp.
"Fucking asshole..." Catherine mumbled to nobody.
She proceeded to the checkout, where one of the cashiers began scanning her groceries.
"Paper or plastic, Ma'am?" the young man asked.
This drove Catherine's mind into a flurry of activity. Paper, a biodegradable material made from the pressed carcasses of the world's ever-dwindling supply of trees, or plastic, a plentiful waste product which caused more problems after it had served its purpose than it ever did before?
"I actually have my own bag, hang on," Catherine said, refusing her revelations and checking her satchel. She quickly realized that, much like her wallet and her dignity, she had left it in her car. Her head immediately snapped up and she stomped on the ground before yelling, "Goddammit! Now you tell me?!?!?!?!"
"Uh, Ma'am? Is something wrong?" the cashier asked.
"I left my money in the car, give me a minute to go grab it," Catherine said, ignoring the plight of the people behind her so she could avoid facing another harrowing excursion through the endless aisles of the labyrinthine supermarket.
She sprinted out of the store, leaping with a flip over a cart a woman was returning to the corral. This too could be said to represent Catherine's approach to life in general, wildly dodging simple problems that could be easily circumvented without such action. She grabbed her wallet from the car, along with her bag, and rushed back to the store, avoiding any distraction along the way.
Finally, she paid for her groceries, handing over her hard-earned cash for the food she had worked so hard to get, and began heading back for her car. As she went, she realized that the cashier vaguely reminded her of an apple. Sturdy, with a sweetness about him that would surely be easy to find through the thin, shiny layer of-
"Nope, not even going to consider it," Catherine said to nobody. She knew the truth deep in her heart, even if her brain was too stubborn to accept it. Holding another middle finger to the sky, she did what she always did when faced with existential questions of herself, her past, and her place in the world. That is, she left without thought or comment, climbing into her car and pulling out of the parking lot.

DC Next presents:

CYBORG

Issue Thirty: End.exe
Written by Deadislandman1
Edited by ClaraEclair and AdamantAce
 
Arc: Catharsis
 
 
“Are you ready, Victor?”
“More ready than I’ve ever been in my life.”
This high up in the sky, there would normally be wind, its howling loud enough to drown out all other sounds. Had there been clouds, they would have impeded his sight, forcing him to weather the condensed water within. The vast blue of the sky would overwhelm his eyes at every turn. But Victor and V were in the Metal, and no such things existed within the Metal. There was no resistance as they glided towards Thinker’s strange, corrupting compound, no wind to fly against. They moved this way purely because this was how some of the highest beings in the Metal’s hierarchy moved, above the other programs and signals on the ground.
The denizens of the Metal had declared him their hero, their champion, and it was his job to remove Thinker’s influence from the realm.
Gradually, the two began to slow down as they descended to one of the shimmering black walls of Thinker’s compound, whose presence was a tumor within the Metal, threatening to upset the fragile balance of a newborn power. This was enough cause to stop Thinker, but Victor had more reasons to confront his co-creator. He was holding his inventor — no, his father — hostage, a petty act of torture for the gall of standing up to one of the smartest supervillains on the planet.
Victor could not let Silas Stone suffer any longer. He would not let this final remaining door within himself to remain ajar, forever taunting him like a tapestry that could not be finished. Today, this horror would end. Today, Victor would find real peace within himself.
Victor touched down, the true size of the spire dawning on him. V landed next to him, walking up to the fortress and placing a hand on the wall, “My protocols will work their ways through Thinker’s firewalls, but once we are inside, we will be on our own.”
“No use waiting around then,” said Victor, “Just know that whatever happens, we stick together. That’s the only way we’ll be able to get out of this.”
V paused for a moment, clearly appreciating Victor’s faith in their partnership. Turning back to the wall, V closed her eyes and, within moments, a hole formed nearby.
“Woah, that was fast,” said Victor.
“Yes I…” V blinked. “There were only a few firewalls. This seems incredibly illogical. One would think one of the smartest men alive would keep a high level of security.”
“Maybe it’s a trap?” Victor peered inside the fortress, “A way to catch us….”
Victor paused, his eye widening at the sight before him, “...off guard.”
Before the two was not some horrifying death maze, nor was it a vast lair of villainy, or a lab made for suffering. Before them… was a neighborhood, the kind with straight roads, white picket fences, freshly cut grass, and vibrantly painted houses. As Victor stepped across the threshold of the walls, he was immediately hit by a wave of nostalgia. This place was so familiar.
“This… I grew up here!” said Victor, “Or… the real Victor did.”
V stepped through behind Vic and, like clockwork, the wall sealed up behind her. “I do not understand. What is the purpose of manufacturing such a recreation?”
“I don’t… I just…” Victor clenched his fists. How dare he do this. He wasn’t the real Victor Stone, yet there was such anger in the fact that Thinker was defiling the memories of the Stone family. Victor Stone grew up happy here, and this place was nothing but some sham… some charade meant to taunt whoever was inside.
His father.
Like a runaway train, Victor erupted into a sprint down the street, V following after him. She tried to ask him where he was going, but Victor knew she would understand once they arrived. He remembered the place well; his namesake had lived there, after all.
Halfway down the road, they arrived at the Stone family home, which had been reconstructed perfectly. Racing across the front yard that he had played catch in since childhood, Victor kicked down the door, running inside through familiar halls. “Dad? Dad?!”
“Victor!” V barreled in after him. “Perhaps this is a rash action.”
“This place… He had to make it to screw with my dad. He had to!” Victor shouted. “Dad?! Dad, where are you?”
“Who the hell is screaming? What is--?”
Victor whirled around, a voice that felt both familiar and foreign entering his ears. Balling up his fists, he expected a fight, only for his heart to drop.
It was Victor Stone. No cybernetic enhancements, no powers, justVictor Stone, sitting in a chair across the hall, in the dining room, with a laptop in front of him. He stood up in shock, slamming the laptop shut as he stared at Victor in horror, “What the fuck?!”
“Wha– Why–” Cyborg stared in amazement at his eerily accurate counterpart. He didn’t understand what was going on.
“Victor? I heard screaming! Is everything alright?”
An older man stepped into the hall, clearly distressed by all the shouting, and as Cyborg turned to face him, he immediately felt every muscle in his body loosen.
Silas Stone stood before him, as old as Victor had expected him to be. What he didn’t expect was to find the man to be full of vigor, of life. He seemed almost… energized, like he’d lived the last few years in absolute happiness.
Then Silas spoke, and it was then that Cyborg felt his soul truly sink into the abyss, “Who in God’s name are you?! What are you doing in my house?!”
“You…” Cyborg looked to V, “Is he..?.”
V stepped in front of Cyborg, taking a rudimentary scan of both Silas and the other Victor, “He is indeed Silas Stone, he does not have the same signature as the other denizens of the Metal. This Victor however… does.”
“So he’s a fake?” said Cyborg.
“What the fuck are you talking about?!” said Victor, “Who are you?”
“Please, leave my house!” said Silas, “This is private property!”
“You… you don’t understand,” said Cyborg, who turned to AI Victor, “And… I’m sorry. You’re not a… I shouldn’t call you a fake.”
“What do you mean?! What’s going on?!” asked AI Victor.
“Get out!” shouted Silas, “Get out right now or I’m calling the police.”
Cyborg didn’t know why Silas couldn’t remember him, remember anything, but looking between him and the other Victor, a haunting theory moved to the forefront of his mind; this place was an elaborate illusion, a way to keep Silas placated, and if Victor wanted to save him, he would need to wake his father from the dream. The T-Beacons Elinore had repurposed would need to charge, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to keep Silas restrained for that. Besides… it would be easier if Silas knew what was really happening before he left… and he would get a chance to speak to his father in earnest.
Cyborg moved forward, placing his hands on Silas’s shoulders, “Silas, I know this seems crazy, but I need you to hear me out.”
“Stop! Let go of me!” said Silas.
“Please, Dad, just…hear me out!” said Cyborg.
Silas froze…one word completely taking him off balance, “Did… did you just call me Dad?”
Cyborg swallowed, “Yeah… and it’s a long story… but you need to hear it. I promise.”
Silas shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t understand. What are you?”
Cyborg grimaced, “I’m… your creation.”
“But… I don’t remember creating you…” said Silas, “Why would I need to make you.”
“Because…” Cyborg glanced back at AI Victor, who was clearly completely confused by the situation. “Because the real Victor Stone died. He died during a disaster in Coast City and… I was the replacement.”
Silas grew white as a sheet, “What? What do you…? No… no, my son isn’t dead. He’s right here!”
Silas looked to the AI Victor, and Cyborg shook his head, “He’s just code… and in a way, so am I. I’m sorry but… the real Victor Stone is gone, has been for years.”
“No, it’s not true.” Silas glared at Cyborg, “Why should I believe you?! How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“Just… look at me,” said Cyborg. “Look at me, Dad.”
Slowly, Silas felt his breath steady, his eyes locked onto Cyborg. He scanned the metal man in front of him, from the soles of his steel feet to the fusion of flesh and armor on his head. He reached out in trepidation, running his fingers up and down the armor, then running them over Cyborg’s face. The AI Victor watched in confusion, still utterly lost at what was going on.
Cyborg flinched at the touch of his father’s hand, it felt so… alien knowing the context of his own creation, and yet where he was falling into unfamiliar territory, Silas was being brought back into his own past, to memories he had lost.
Then, in a blink, something changed in Silas. He stumbled back, eyes wide, and Cyborg knew that he had awakened what was buried. Silas shuddered, falling to his knees, “No! No I… I did lose him… I did lose my boy…”
“Dad?” AI Victor trudged towards Silas, “Dad, I’m right here, I–”
“No! My boy has been gone for years,” said Silas, looking at both Cyborg and AI Victor. “And try as I might, I know that, in the end, neither of you are really him… really a replacement.”
Cyborg looked between his father and the AI replication of himself, feeling immense pity for both. The AI looked so confused, like a newborn who’d just gotten lost at the supermarket. Cyborg nodded to V, who quickly ushered the AI into another room to explain what was going on. Then, he turned back to Silas and took a knee, “Are you… God, there’s no point in asking the question. Do you remember what happened, after Thinker…”
Silas sniffled, attempting to piece himself back together, “H-He locked me in this place, but it was so… different. There was an army being built, preparations for war. He… interfaced with me, forced himself into the deepest crevices of my own mind! My god, Victor… he knows everything about me, about you! He knows every detail about every single thing I’ve ever built.”
Cyborg grimaced. If he knew every detail, then that meant that he knew what every single one of Cyborg’s tricks were. There would be no surprises, “God, I… I should’ve woken earlier, come here earlier. I’m so sorry.” said Cyborg.
“No, no… don’t blame yourself for any of this, it wasn’t your fault,” said Silas. “What happened here is Thinker’s fault, and his alone.”
Silas began to calm down, his rate of breath slowing down as he stood up. “But… it does confuse me that he would place me in this… illusion.”
“More torture?” asked Cyborg.
“No, I felt… at peace here,” said Silas. “Thinker was always so mechanical, so hyper focused on producing the results he wanted. Building me a… dream land? It just… doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well… whatever his reasons, it doesn’t matter. I’m getting you out of here, then I’m stopping him once and for all,” said Cyborg.
“What?!” Silas whirled around to face Cyborg. “You can’t! In this place, he’s more powerful than he was in the real world.”
“And I’ve been a superhero for three years,” said Cyborg. “I know my way around threats, and whatever his plans are now, that doesn’t change that he has to face justice for what he did to both of us.”
Pulling out one of the T-Beacons, he placed it in Silas’s hands. “Press the ‘T,’ and after five minutes, you’ll be able to head back to reality. Since you came here from the real world, you’ll rematerialize in your own body.”
“But what about you?” asked Silas. “I can’t just leave you alone to–”
“Dad!” Cyborg placed a hand on his father’s shoulders, “Listen to me… over the last three years, I’ve done so much. I’ve made friends, I’ve made enemies, I’ve made a hell of a life out there. Hell, I even made it into the Justice Legion!”
“The Justice… Legion?” asked Silas.
“Yeah, its… it’s like the new Justice League, but nevermind that,” said Cyborg. “The point is, a lot has happened, a lot has changed, but Thinker… he’s the ghost that’s been haunting me. I came here because I needed to finish things, and to save you.”
Silas frowned. “I still don’t–”
“I know you feel guilty about… my creation,” said Cyborg. “And yeah, you threw me into one hell of a world, but trust me when I say that I’ve made my mark… and I wanna keep making my mark with you beside me.”
Silas turned away. “You… want me to be with you… in your life… after everything?”
“Yeah… I do,” said Cyborg. “Because despite everything, I’m a living thing because of you… and the real Victor Stone loved you a lot. I’ve got his memories, his feelings… and trust me when I say that what he would’ve wanted, is what I want.”
Silas stared at Cyborg, at a loss for words. Looking down at the T-Beacon and then back at his own creation, he sighed, “You… you’ll come back to me… right?”
“I’ll always come back to you, Dad,” said Cyborg. “Always.”
Sniffling, Silas tackled his son with an embrace, and Cyborg returned it with a bear hug of his own. For a singular moment, the two stood in silence, tears streaming from both of their eyes. After four long years, they were finally seeing each other, meeting for the first time, yet with memories that spanned decades of connection. Letting go of Cyborg, Silas wiped his eyes, “I… I need to sit down.”
“Take your time,” said Cyborg. “V can keep you safe until we go.”
“V?”
“My…” Cyborg paused, then tapped his head. “My friend in my head.”
“Ah,” Silas nodded, then turned away, but couldn’t help but chuckle. “Heh… he named her. Typical Victor.”
Silas walked down the hall, and as Cyborg followed, V emerged from the dining room, “I have explained the situation. He is… depressed.”
“Yeah… I guess I should’ve expected that. I know what he’s going through,” said Cyborg.
“Shall we go?” asked V. “Thinker must be somewhere within this place.”
Cyborg took a peek into the dining room, noting AI Victor’s downtrodden expression. He sat in front of his laptop, the mundanity of what was likely some kind of school assignment washed away by the revelation that he was not a human being. Cyborg turned back to V, “Can you watch my dad for a sec. I wanna talk to… the other me.”
“I understand,” said V, nodding. “Silas and I have things to speak about in any case.”
Managing a smile, Cyborg then walked into the dining room, pulling out a seat next to the AI, “So… now you know.”
“That I’m fake?”
“That you weren’t born the same way another person was born,” said Cyborg. “That doesn’t make you fake.”
“I was made to… placate someone,” said the AI, “I’m some fucking sham. I’m just part of a circus act.”
“Yeah… I get where you’re coming from. I’ve been there, trust me,” said Cyborg, “Only difference was, I was made to host someone else. I was never meant to have a personality, a real mind.”
The AI shook his head, a brokenness overtaking him, “How… How are you supposed to go on? You know what you were made for, you know what was meant to happen. How do you… deal with that? How are you supposed to even think about anything else?”
“Truth is,” Cyborg took a deep breath. “When I learned how I came to be, I moped, I sat around and did nothing, because I couldn’t think about anything else. What saved me was… the friends I had made in the years before I learned what my original purpose was. I had connections with them, a life with them. They saved me.”
“Huh,” the AI let out a bleak chuckle. “That’s good for you, but I don’t have any of those here. After what your friend told me I… I tried to remember specifics of a life outside this house, friends, hobbies, and I just… I couldn’t remember anything. I’m nothing outside of this house, outside of what I was made to do.”
“Maybe that’s how you were envisioned, but that’s not all you are,” said Cyborg. “Or all you have to be. You can choose to be more, choose to have a life outside your built purpose.”
The AI got out of his seat, “But I don’t have one! Don’t you understand?! I don’t have friends to fall back on, people who really love me.”
“But you can! You can choose to start that life, choose to walk the same path I did,” said Cyborg. “All you’ve gotta do… is come with me. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
Cyborg held out his hand, earnestly waiting on the AI. The AI stared at the hand, and it was clear that despite the arguments, he was still unsure. This was all so new, so daunting, yet what the hand represented was nothing short of a miracle. He would have a guide in the real world.
Reaching out, the AI took Cyborg’s hand, “So… how do I come back to the real world with you?”
“We have these beacons, but since we’re not inherently organic consciousnesses, the beacons won’t reconstruct a body like it would for our father. I’ve got my own body that V and I share, so we’ll probably all end up in it together. From there, I can see if we can make you a body.”
“Sounds a little crowded,” joked the AI.
“Yeah… but it’ll be temporary,” said Cyborg. “And then there’s the matter of names. We can’t both be Victor.” Cyborg scratched his chin. “I don’t have a permanent solution, but for now… why don’t we use shorthand. You’re Vic and I’m Cy.”
“Cy?”
“Short for Cyborg,” he said, gleaming. “It’s… a moniker… and a hero name.”
“Jeez, are you famous or something out there?” asked Vic.
“A little,” said Cyborg. “But that’s a story for later. I need you to stick with Dad while V and I go after Thinker. I can’t close the door on this whole thing until I find him.”
“Then you will not have to look far.”
Cyborg whirled around when he heard the digitized voice, only for both him and Vic to be ensnared in a web of electrical vines that sprouted from the floor, locking them both down. Before them stood the Thinker, a man whose body was composed almost entirely of binary code, 1s and 0s blended together into a strange, green body. Despite the humanoid shape of his figure, he had no features on his face, only the numbers, “I can hazard a guess as to why you are here, creation of mine, but why must you disrupt Silas Stone’s paradise? Surely, you could’ve at least guessed that I would be a master of my own domain, appearing wherever I wish.”
“It’s not paradise,” growled Cyborg. “It’s a fucking prison.”
“To you, it may seem that way,” said Thinker. “But understand that I was simply attempting to ease the pain I had inflicted on him.”
“You’re lying!”
“You are free to think that, and why would I expect anything different from you. I created you out of a selfish desire for power,” Thinker stared down at Cyborg, and the hero could feel the villain’s sheer pity. “But that is no longer my goal. I have learned, and now I wish to help people…help the world.”
Thinker then knelt down, reaching out for Cyborg, “I will erase the pain, erase--”
A blast of energy hit Thinker from behind, sending him barreling across the dining room table. V rushed in, crossing the distance before hitting Thinker with a second, physical kick, keeping him down. The electrical vines withered, allowing the two Victor Stones to break free. Vic ran for the hallway, while Cyborg began to form his arm into a blaster, “Keep him down, V!”
“I am doing my--”
A green shockwave interrupted V, throwing Cyborg onto his back as Thinker surged to his feet. As V landed in front of the villain, Thinker waved his hand, and a green beam the width of a soda can fired from his head, burning a hole through V’s chest. V let out a singular gasp before she herself dissolved into Binary code, like sand spilling out of an hourglass. Cyborg let out a blood curdling scream, “V!”
“Worry not, she is not deceased,” said Thinker. “She is simply-”
Cyborg surged forward, his fist crashing against Thinker’s form. The villain went flying, immediately crashing through the house’s wall before tumbling through the air. He hit the ground a few times, colliding with a mailbox all the while before landing in the middle of the street. Stepping back, Cyborg heard footsteps and Silas and the other Vic reappeared.
“What’s going on?!” asked Silas.
“Thinker’s here,” said Cyborg. “Is the beacon powered?”
“Yes, but--”
“Press it, now! I’ll see you on the other side.”
“I don’t want to leave you!” said Silas.
“You’ve been here long enough,” said Cyborg, looking back to where V just was. “And I can’t lose another person I care about!”
For a moment, Silas was hesitant, prepared to refuse his son’s wishes, when the beacon in his hands beeped. He looked down, finding that Vic had pressed the button for him. He looked up at Vic, “You-”
“See you on the other side, pops.”
And then, Silas disappeared in a beam of light, and it was just the two Victor Stones left. Cyborg glanced back towards Thinker, “Vic, hide wherever you can until this is done.”
“No, if you’re fighting him, then so am I.”
“He’ll…” Cyborg paused, trying desperately to avoid feeling the grief of losing his friend. “He’ll do to you what he did to V.”
“Not if I play it smart. You can’t always bulldoze your way to the touchdown,” said Vic. “You’ve gotta play it smart.”
Cyborg sighed, “Then let’s do it.”
Vic nodded, running further into the house to prepare as Cyborg stepped through the hole in the wall, marching towards Thinker. The villain had finally managed to get back on his feet, “Why do you refuse to listen?! My plans are for the good of the--”
“Plans plans plans, I don’t give a fuck about any of your plans,” growled Cyborg. “I don’t care about your plans in the past, your plans in the future, or your plans in the present. None of it matters, except that you’ve hurt people, and you refuse to take accountability for any of it. You hurt so many people for so many years, and I’m going to make sure that never happens again.”
Thinker sighed, “Then words are of no more use to me, if you are this stubborn, then I will have to save you the only way you have left me.”
Thinker rose into the sky, but Cyborg immediately raised his arm, morphing it into a blaster and knocking him out of the sky with a radiant beam of white energy. The concrete cracked as Thinker hit the street, allowing Cyborg to advance with his fists. Leaping into the air, he attempted to dropkick the villain, only for Thinker to roll out of the way of the attack. Raising his hand, Thinker summoned more electrical vines, but Cyborg dove out of the way, avoiding a second ensnarement. Rolling across some grass, Cyborg raised his arm to fire another blast at Thinker, only for the villain to disappear right before his eyes. A hand grabbed the back of his neck, squeezing tight before lifting him off the ground. Thinker’s voice whispered in his ear, “You cannot defeat me. I have existed in this place for years, and I have understood its own rules.”
“Then how come every time I’ve hit you, you’ve felt it,” said Cyborg. “You react to me, because like it or not, your handprints are all over me.”
Thinker let out a growl before raising his other hand, ready to send Cyborg to V, only for a splash of water to hit him in the back. He whirled around, spotting Vic with a garden hose. He was grinning, just as determined to rebel as his counterpart. Thinker leveled his hand at Vic, only for Cyborg to twist himself out of the villain’s grip, grabbing his arm and forcing it downward before another, larger beam of energy erupted from Thinker’s hand. The ground exploded, fracturing as if it was being hit by an earthquake, and as Thinker and Cyborg stumbled away from each other, the fractures became larger, and the spaces underneath the idyllic town were revealed.
Thousands of deactivated GRID robots and assembly equipment laid in the dark recesses of the underground, trashed and broken like discarded toys. Cyborg glanced up at Thinker, who was shrugging off the damage he had taken from the explosion. His binary code was beginning to splinter, numbers dripping from his body like water spilling over the top of a glass, “Ah…I see. Our code is…similar. We are of parallel wavelengths, owing to my code being imbued into your avatar.”
“Surprised it took you that long to figure it out,” said Cyborg.
Thinker hung his head, “No matter, I will still prevail. I know every weakness you have, every opening.”
“Let’s see if you last long enough to use them then.”.
Cyborg’s body shifted, glowing with pure white light as he powered himself up, preparing for a blow that he knew had enough power to finish Thinker off. Thinker meanwhile, clenched his fists, causing the numbers across his body to scroll faster and faster until they were a blur of characters. Then, the two charged one another, letting out war cries before leaping into the air, their fists raised.
He had waited all his life for this, to attain justice for himself, and for everyone else, and he wouldn’t let Thinker escape, not after all he had done to get to this moment. He thought of his friends, Michael, Exxy, and Cindy. His mother, Elinore, and his father, Silas. Finally, his mind went to Vic, a new being that needed to be made free. He fought for them all, and he would not lose.
His fist met Thinker’s, and with a catastrophic BOOM, the entire Metal was engulfed in white light.
 
 
Silas gasped for air as he sat up abruptly, vertigo invading his head. It was so bright, he could barely see. As he rubbed his eyes, he could hear the sound of footsteps as someone ran to his side, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Silas! Silas are you alright?!”
Silas groaned, his vision finally clearing. He was in some kind of bunker, adorned with all manner of technology. Scanning the room, he spotted a couple of younger people, one was a man in an afro and glasses, while the other was a younger teenage girl with a satchel. The two were at the side of Cyborg’s body, but their attention was clearly stuck on Silas.
Then he looked to the person at his side, and his world, which had already been turned upside down that day, flipped one more time. It was his wife! She was… alive?
“E-Elinore?” Silas adjusted his glasses. “Is… is that--?”
“I am… Though I’m not your Elinore,” She grabbed him by the arm, pulling him to his feet. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I… No!” Silas’ eyes widened. “Our son, he-he went to fight Thinker! I left him! I--”
“Relax Dad, I… I made it out.”
The entire room turned to Cyborg, who had abruptly risen from his chair. He was sweating, the battle clearly taking a toll on him. Exxy and Cindy immediately tackled him with a hug.
“Aw man, you had us so worried!” said Cindy.
“Had you worried maybe, I knew he’d pull through fine!” said Exxy.
Silas felt a small giggle leave his body, “Goodness… how… how did you beat him?”
“Our coding was similar enough that I could harm him in ways the other AI couldn’t, I weakened him before trapping him in a firewall modeled after his own fortress. He won’t hurt anyone ever again,” said Cyborg. “I… I couldn’t save the other Victor AI… and V… she’s gone too.”
“Ah damn,” said Exxy. “I liked V. She was really mean to me most of the time, but dammit I liked her anyway.”
Cindy placed a hand on Cyborg’s shoulder, “We’ll be sure to remember her… always.”
Cyborg nodded, looking to the rest of the team, “So… what… what do we do now?”
“I…” Silas swallowed, “I want to start rebuilding my life… rebuilding who I was before…”
“You’ll have all the help we can spare, Dad,” said Cyborg, “I promise.”
“Yes,” said Elinore. “While I’m still here, I’ll do what I can to get you up to speed on past events.”
“I… thank you,” said Silas. “Though to tell you all the truth… my preferred start to my new life would be… to have some food.”
“Food?” said Cindy.
“Shit man, yeah you’re right. Guy hasn’t eaten in like three years,” said Exxy. “But don’t worry, I’ve got you. I know an amazing Thai place.”
Slowly but surely, the team began to make plans for the dinner, to welcome Silas back into the world again. However, as they began to pour out, Cyborg placed a hand on the machine that had taken him into the Metal, “You guys go ahead. I just… I need to be alone for a sec.”
“Hey, no prob!” said Exxy. “We’ll catch you later!”
The team poured out the door, with Silas taking one last cursory look back at his son before smiling and giving him a thumbs up. Cyborg waved goodbye to his friends and family, keeping his smile until they all left. Then, with a somber face, he turned back to the machine, sighing.
“You almost got me, I will admit… but the creation does not often best the creator,” Thinker grimaced. “For what it’s worth, I am proud to have called you my creation, you lived up to a higher potential than you could ever know, but your plan still had a flaw.”
Thinker looked at Cyborg’s hands, which now belonged to him, “I could take your beacon, inhabit the body built for me. All I had to do was prod your weaknesses and disable you before I did it. It was naive to think one powerful strike could destroy me. Brave… but naive.”
Thinker looked back to the machine, “But worry not, I have put you at peace, like your father was… and now I am free to extend that peace to the rest of the world.”
Thinker turned away from the machine, walking towards the exit to the bunker, “My plan is now in effect. It’s time to save the world.”
 
 
To be continued later in 2023!!!

Hi!
So, I've sent this idea to HBO a few months ago but I still haven't got any answers and I'm dying to know if it's good enough.
if you guys could help me out and give me a reply I would be very thankful !!
ps. I wrote it a long time ago and since I'm not a native speaker the english might not be so good.
Down the Rabbit- Hole
I went to the store this morning at basically,4 a.m. to receive some of the things Brian ordered for the stock. He asked if I was ok with it since it was the meat that wouuld arrive and I contradicted him saying I was fine. I guess I was just trying to train the not barfing routine.
- hi, are you the responsible around here ?
Alice: yes, pretty much. Good morning I’m the owner !
- ok, great I’m here to drop some steaks, chicken,pork..
It’s okay, it’s not for you, you’ll sooner have to learn how to cook these
- lamb,fish and these rabbits I killed yesterday
Alice: rabbits ?
- yes, there’s something wrong ?
Alice: I don’t remember asking for rabbits
- I think that was your husband ? isn’t he the actual owner ?
Alice: yes, but you can...can take the rabbit with you, I’m not paying for it
- what do you mean, you’re not paying for it ? I went in the middle of the night just to hunt these
Alice: well, I didn’t ask you to hunt them, you did it because you wante...
- I did it because my client asked me to, why are you even complaing if you’re not part of the business ? don’t you like rabbits ?
Alice: no, I don’t eat rabbits.
- why not ? it’s delicious !
Alice: do you think so ?
- yes,those are my favorite !
Alice: ok, then you can bring them inside. It happens you’re the only one around and I’m a helpless woman
- alright then, you should try one of these beasts sometime
Alice: uhum, just around here, you can just put them inside the freezer
- did you turn it on already ?
Alice: doing it
I think nervousism was the last thing that went through my mind that time. After turning it on and going straight to the kitchen, I made sure to hide it from him on the way back. He was a big guy, hunter aesthetic. Hard to kill, in a fighting mode at least. So I just waited for him to low down to pick up the fucking rabbit to deeply slither that sharp knife through his neck. No words, just blood. I didn’t even have a regret face after doing it. One thing to be said, he was just heavy. A dead weight,literally. Had to cut him in pieces on the ground.
After it, after turning every single particle he had into ready to pack meat, I brought the rest inside and made sure no one was going to miss that big burden. Found out he was just a cheap hunter, no wife, no kids. Basically a stranger in town. I drove his truck back to his house, and found my place to burn a big chunck of clothes and documents.
I don’t care what people may think, the supermarket opens this afternoon and people will be randomly selected between who eats big boy Jack and who eats the delicious cow.
*phone ringing
Call on
Alice: bello ?
Brian: hi, how is things up there ? everything alright ?
Alice: yeah, of course. I’m just hungry
Brian: you didn’t had any breakfast ?
Alice: not yet, no
Brian: ok, I think I can bring you some.
Alice: thanks,uhm. Brian, that guy you... hired, who is that ?
Brian: he was just inside the list I got, why is everything ok ? you, or maybe the delivery, did he mess up the delivery ?
Alice: no, no is just...he brought, he brought rabbits.
Brian: I’m so sorry, I forgot about that. You can just toss it away I think
Alice: it’s ok, I don’t mind it,Thanks, is everything ok in there ?
Brian:..my..mom is here
Alice: why ?
Brian: she’s waiting for you, asking why you haven’t done breakfast for me
Alice: well, tell her I’m busy
Brian: already taking refuge in the kitchen, I’m serious I should’ve received it today
Alice: believe me, you shouldn’t ( sighs) I’m coming.
Brian: ok,bye.
Alice: bye...
Call off
Alice: let’s hope you’re delicious. blurgh, disguting
Telling Karen I was at work was quite of a challenge. Telling Karen I’ve just killed a man was acceptable. It should mean that if I was able to kill him I can easily kill her. I swear to god that woman is everything wrong in america, and bold of you to think she even knows where that is.
Karen: finally, now could this be any more of an absurd ?
Alice: we’ve finally agreed on something!
Karen: I hope that means you won’t leave this house again,
Alice: I’m sorry I thought we were talking about your intrusions
Karen: intrusions ?! I was talking about you being a bad-mannered wife, this is my son’s house!
Alice: and mine as well
Karen: you don’t own anything !
Brian: this is so nice.
Alice: I remember someone saying of us sharing goods in our wedding day...am I contradicting the truth perhaps ?
Karen:... you are a bad person. And within these prospects you’ll become a bad mother. You ought to learn how to respect and love your husband so that you’ll do the same with your baby!
Brian: mom! That’s quite enough. You shouldn’t even be here.
Alice: love and respect only work in a relationship when they are reciprocate. And basically anywhere else. I respect your son in the same way I want to be respected. Could you please leave ? you‘re poluting the air.
Karen: brian.
Brian: mom, go.
Demon who walks on earth. Could you retire yourself from this house ?
Brian: I’m making breakfast. Help yourself with Eggs and toast, is the only thing i know how to do
Alice: I could teach you some things.
Brian: I have to say that’d be quite exciting!
After it all,I’m happy I married him, but still I don’t want to become all american! I’m better than that, we both are.
June, 18th was the day the supermarket opened, me and Brian woke up at severaly early ,even though he was the one going to open the place. I otherwise, woke up because of his mother...beloved woman. As a celebration of ‘him starting a business’ , her words, I’m supposed to prove myself ‘worthy’ of cooking with her techniques and recipes.....it really doesn’t make so much sense to me, but it’s a way of staying away from it for the morning, that really brought out some real sickness within me, in which was..misunderstood as a ‘promising pregnancy’.......so I couldn’t be luckier ! he’s still worried with it though,I’m worried I might’ve ruined our business before it even started.
I was ‘trained’ for chicken, fortunately, so to have his help on it we decided it’d be best for me to cook it at the supermarket kitchen, I at least made sure to pick it myself, being the only one there who knows how to differenciate it.
And believe me, it sold like wonder ! people from all around the city must’ve had their plans for lunch and their barbecues prepared this morning, the mother of the family goes with her children ot buy the groceries, within a fine piece of meat, steak or a dozen hamburguers and sausages made of whatever, I remenber those days clearly. I always the same thing the family sits around the big rectangle table with the dad at the end, the patriarch. The children play at the pool with a smile from side to side while their mother is inside preparing lunch and the outside table and their dad is cooking the sausages and burguers for the big thing. Starving wolves, really, waiting for the delicious meals to come to their mouths, they don’t even care it’s full of poison it’s a comfortable food for them, it brings out the felling that everything is going to be ok. Everything is going to end well, poor poeple they barely know they’ve put themselves inside a vicious cycle of wanting for more. The biggest, most infectious cycle. I know that if they like what they taste, they’ll grow used to it until there’s nothing left. It’s a true gain for us, they’ll fulfill our lives with money in exchange for more, but they won’t get it. They’ll starve for it and oblige me to go get it. Choose some other victim.
The lucky ones today,buying this delicious delight of meat, will become what I mostly fear. Cannibals. But, as you know, they’ll grow around it without even realizing. I otherwise won’t. I’ll become the mother, going out every night to get some food to feed the little monsters she created,only to protect those she loves so dearly.
It’s mostly not my fault you know ? americans are like that, they love what they can’t refuse. They’re starving already I’m just feeding them. The thing is, what I feared happened.
They didn’t like it.
They loved it.
the story goes around the starting of the 1950's btw.

I am a ceo of a massive line of companies, i have caused a lot of misery to other people and i have lived a almost carefree life and then i met an old woman in a train station.
She looked into my eyes and she spoke in a rough and nasty voice to me and i couldn’t understand her as she let’s go of my arm i went back home to my wife in my luxury apartment in the city.
My wife was getting ready to go on a business trip that her work told her to go to in europe, i helped her pack up her bag and she was excited to go…that was the last time i saw her alive.
I lost the woman who meant a lot to me, i couldn’t believe it as i tried to wake myself up from this, i went back to work assuming it was just bad luck and i looked at my secretary in her eyes.
My secretary was found dead after a car crash had ended her life, on my back i had 2 blood red lines on my back and i chalked it up to more bad luck…until i went shopping in a supermarket and the cashier i looked at was shot dead…
3 blood lines are on my back and i started to decline in my mental health as i started to not look at anyone or anything, i tried working from home which spread it to 6 people and those 6 people died in viscous ways.
My back was then scrawled with 9 scars as i started hearing the voices of the dead as i stopped paying my bills, stopped working, stopped even going outside as my mind raced from how bad my life has went.
My landlord looked me in the eyes and served me an eviction notice, in a day or two he died from falling down the stairs in the apartment.
I had ran out of cash to buy food as i had dressed up in a trench coat and a hat and i went into a supermarket and i started to steal from the bread section, the meat section, i was taking whatever i could get my hands on and this lead to me being arrested.
In the cell that i was in, i was avoiding eye contact from everyone, i hated seeing anything since i was causing a lot of suffering. The last person i looked in the eyes was the cop who arrested me…
(You will be playing any character in the story, i will be playing a cursed man. )

I (20F) live in London and was in a relatively good mood on Saturday and bought a homeless man a pack of bacon and some deodorant. However, since Saturday, he seems to have told the local homeless population about me and they are all acting quite aggressive towards me and asking me for food and money too. I was shouted at up the street by one of them calling me ‘heartless’ for not giving him anything. I’d like to help but I’m a student and need the money to look after myself, this donation was a one time occurrence as I’d just got paid. The guy I originally gave the stuff too, who is at least 30 years older than me, keeps making comments on my appearance and blew a kiss at me before, which has made me even more uncomfortable.
I have never had this issue with the homeless in other places I have lived, so does anyone have any advice on how to go forward. They sit outside the local supermarkets and I do quite a bit of shopping there. I’m autistic too so social situations aren’t my strong point, so any advice would be appreciated!

Sometimes when you look into the mirror, the mirror looks back.
William Bailey's forehead shattered the mirror like a sledgehammer. The last thing he remembered before he blacked out was the feeling that he was falling through the mirror. Sub-cranial hematoma, a concussion, maybe even a cracked skull--that had to be the reason for the strange feeling. The mirror was mounted on the wall just to the right of the bar, four feet tall by about three feet wide. As consciousness slipped away, common sense and his strong belief in the rational world told him that he couldn't fall through the mirror. He must have bounced his head off the wall and be falling toward the floor.
It seemed like just a second or two before William's eyes popped open. He lay on his back, on the hard wood floor of Fausto's, with Johnny Davis towering over him. Big Johnny probably wanted to finish him off, maybe kill him, and finally end their twenty-year-old feud. Either Big Johnny Davis and the ceiling lights above him were spinning, or William's head was spinning, but either way something wasn't right.
He raised his head and looked to his left, toward the bar. Except the bar wasn't there. Instead, he was staring at the bathrooms. That didn't make sense. It must be his brain that had gotten spun around. William turned his head and peered over his size-ten wingtips at the busted mirror. The wooden frame and most of the glass still clung to the wall, the rest sat broken on the ground. The bar had to be on his left. He looked again, and still saw the bathrooms. A brain bruise, maybe some fluid pressure building up might be the cause of it.
"Get up!" Big Johnny Davis said.
William looked up at him. Johnny stood behind him, just beyond his shoulders. Perfect place for him to stomp my head into the plank floor. Except Johnny Davis was holding out his hand.
"Come on, we've got to get out of here."
Davis looked scared. It was the first time William Bailey could ever remember Johnny Davis looking scared. William had always been scared of Big Johnny, but Big Johnny wasn't scared of anything or anyone.
Police sirens wailed in the distance.
Johnny glanced over his shoulder. William craned his neck to look where Johnny was looking, saw he was staring at the front door like a man terrified something bad was going to come through it. Big Johnny looked down at him again and pumped his hand. "Come on, get up. They'll be here any second."
"Who?" William asked. "Who'll be--" But before he finished, Big Johnny Davis reached down, grabbed him by both arms, and jerked him to his feet.
As he was dragged toward the door by the only man in town who truly hated him, William glanced up and saw the rusted metal sign nailed above the door. He had to have a concussion, probably severe; that had to be it, because the letters on the sign were backward. It said TUO.
As Johnny Davis pulled him out the door, William heard tires skid on the pavement.
"Where's your car?" Johnny asked.
William twisted away from the big man's grip, then turned to his left. "In the alley." He started to run, still not sure exactly what he was running from.
Behind him, Big John shouted, "The alley's over here."
William kept running but turned his head back toward Johnny. "I know where the alley--"
Something hit him across the midsection and toppled him to the ground. He got his hands up just in time to break his fall and managed to keep his head from slamming into the sidewalk. When he looked up he saw a shopping cart tumbled onto its side.
Once again, William found himself lying flat on his back, this time amid the spilled contents of the cart. It had been filled with junk: paper bags full of dirty clothes, canned food, bags of potato chips, a diamond shaped, orange road sign, and other trash that looked like it had been collected from back alley garbage bins.
The homeless man who'd been pushing the cart was scrawny, and wafer thin. His skin was the color of old shoe leather, and he wore a long gray beard, tangled and matted with food and bits of filth. He was sprawled on the ground next to his cart, half sitting up, staring at William with his bright blue eyes.
Car doors slammed, men shouted.
"You better get going," the homeless man said, as he cocked his head. "The police after you?"
Police!
Before William could assure the old man that the police weren't after him--he was a respected businessman and family man--someone behind him grabbed him under both arms and pulled him to his feet. William turned and found himself staring into the face of Johnny Davis. "The alley's that way," Johnny said, pointing to the other side of Fausto's. With one hand gripping William's jacket, Johnny dashed across the front of the bar toward the alley. The alley--right there, plain as day--on the other side of Fausto's, right where it shouldn't be, where it couldn't be. William had been here a thousand times. As you stepped out of the bar, the alley was on the left, Brockton's Ace Hardware on the right. Now everything was mixed up and in the wrong place.
Johnny Davis turned down the alley, dragging William behind him. After just a few steps, a spotlight flashed in front of them.
"Stop!" a voice commanded. "Get on the ground."
William couldn't see because Johnny was in his way. "Who's that yelling?" he asked.
Big Johnny stopped and William plowed into his back.
"Get on the ground," the voice boomed again.
William poked his head out from behind Johnny Davis's back. The blinding white light was in his face. He couldn't see a thing.
POP! POP! POP!
Gunshots.
Big Johnny sagged, then crashed to his knees. Instinctively, William bent forward and grabbed hold of Johnny. "What's the matter?"
More pops.
Johnny's big hand reached out and shoved William back toward the street. "Back door," he wheezed, then plunged forward onto his face.
William stood alone. Behind the white spotlight he saw blue police lights flashing. He was totally exposed.
POP! POP!
He saw flashes--little yellow spurts of flame--as something tugged at his jacket.
William had said "back door." What back door? Fausto's had a back door, but it didn't lead anywhere except to the open space behind the building used for trash and deliveries. Twenty feet of asphalt between the bar and the back of the building on the next block. William had parked his car at the end of the alley, but the police cars--or whatever they were--had the alley blocked off. The building behind Fausto's also had an alley that ran alongside it, but the owner had closed it off to keep the bums out. He'd put up a gate, padlocked it, and topped it with razor wire. It was a dead end.
Two more pops. Dead end or not it was better than standing here and getting shot. William turned and ran. He burst through the front door of Fausto's, dashed through the bar, past the shattered mirror, hit the back door at a dead run, and was outside behind the bar within seconds.
He could see the tail end of his car sticking out from the corner of the building, but with the cops blocking the alley, his car was useless to him. William glanced across the open space to the alley that ran next to the other building. The gate, the padlock, the razor wire--all still in place. To his right an overflowing garbage dumpster sat beside the back of Fausto's, jammed against the fire ladder.
The fire ladder.
An iron ladder bolted to the cinderblock wall.
William looked up. The top of the ladder was lost in shadow, but he knew it went up two stories to the roof. Last summer, when the toilet had stopped up, he'd come out back to take a leak and had stood behind the dumpster, peeing against the wall like a kid, one hand draped over the bottom rung of the ladder.
He slipped behind the dumpster. The smell made him gag. The bottom of the ladder was four feet from the ground. William reached up as high as he could, grabbed hold of the third rung, then hauled himself up.
Through the partially open back door came the sounds of heavy feet pounding on the hard wood floor of the bar.
Halfway up the ladder, he was exhausted--and scared. Shaking, he white-knuckled the ladder. Being more than ten feet off the ground terrified him. He needed a break, just a second or two to catch his breath. There was enough moonlight so he could see into one of the second story windows. Inside, junk was piled everywhere. Old barstools, a busted jukebox, furniture stacked almost to the ceiling. Years ago, old man Fausto lived on the second floor, but Jake, who'd bought the place from the old man and had decided to keep the name, used it for storage.
Below him, William heard the back door thrown open so hard it banged against the wall. He scrambled up until he reached the top of the ladder, then hoisted himself over the edge of the roof. Down on the ground a voice shouted, "There he is, up there."
Another gunshot. What the hell was going on?
The unmistakable sound of feet--fast feet, in shape feet, boot shod feet--scurrying up the ladder. Standing on the tar and pebble roof, William glanced around for something he could use as a weapon, shocked he was even thinking of such a thing. A five gallon plastic bucket was all there was. It stood upright, filled with rainwater. He picked it up and peered over the edge. A uniformed policeman was three quarters of the way up the ladder. Two more cops were right behind him.
William looked at the heavy bucket in his hands, thought about just dumping the water onto them but knew it wouldn't stop them. There was only one way to stop them, and that was to knock them off the ladder. He thought about warning them, maybe trying to scare them away. But they were cops. You couldn't scare them away.
So why had they shot Johnny Davis, and why were they shooting at him?
The first officer looked up and saw William staring down at him with the bucket in his hands. Their eyes locked for just a second and the cop stopped. In those eyes that stared back at him, William saw an almost maniacal determination that sent a shiver down his spine. The officer held his grip on the ladder with his right hand while his left dropped to the pistol resting in his gleaming leather holster. In one smooth motion he drew his gun and raised it toward William.
William Bailey tossed the bucket down the ladder. A shot rang out an instant before the heavy bucket thudded into the cop's head. Like a gruesome traffic accident happening before his eyes, William couldn't help but watch as the policeman fell, taking his two partners down with him. The last thing William saw before he turned away was a jumbled heap of black uniforms resting on the concrete below the ladder.
* * *
Hiding in the shadow of a telephone booth, thinking. Home. He had to get home. Had to get back to Marge and the kids. Maybe somehow he could explain what had happened. Vincent, his attorney, he would know what to do--maybe--but he was a civil lawyer not a criminal attorney. He wrote contracts and did personal injury on the side; he didn't get people out of jail who'd killed a cop by dropping a bucket of water on his head and knocking him and his buddies off the side of a building.
As the cab he'd been waiting for pulled up, William stepped out from the dark and climbed into the back seat.
The driver turned around. "Where to?"
William pulled the door shut. "Uptown. 1721 Audubon Court."
"Fare's gonna be about fifteen dollars. After dark, I gotta have the money up front."
"What?"
"Company policy." The cabbie shrugged. "A lot of drivers been getting stiffed."
William opened his wallet, pulled out a twenty and handed it across the seat. The driver took it and almost slipped it into his cash box, then took a second look at the bill. His face tightened. "What the hell is this?"
"Huh?"
With the bill stretched between his hands, the cabbie stared at it for a second then looked up at William. "You're either the dumbest counterfeiter who ever lived or you've been had."
"What you are talking about?"
The driver faced the bill toward William but didn't hand it back to him. "It's printed backwards."
William looked at the twenty-dollar bill in the man's hand. It looked like--it was--an almost brand new bill, nothing wrong with it as far as he could tell.
"Get out of my cab," the driver said.
William didn't know what the man was talking about but knew he didn't want to get out. This cab was his only way home. He reached for the twenty. "If you don't like that one I've got another--"
The driver pulled his hands away. "I ain't giving this back. I got to turn it in to the police." He dropped one hand behind his seat back, then came up clutching a pistol, an old German Luger by the looks of it, the muzzle aimed straight at William's face. "In fact, I bet they give me a reward if I bring you in with it."
William jerked the door handle and rolled out into the street. He sprang to his feet and ran, the driver's yells just background noise. Has everyone gone crazy or is it just me?
Home. He had to get home.
* * *
Rain. Driving, relentless rain. William was just two blocks from Fausto's. In two hours, that's as far as he'd gotten--one block an hour. Police cars prowled the neighborhood, shinning spotlights into every nook and cranny, lighting up every shadow. Everyone in Fausto's knew his name. He'd been going there three or four nights a week after work for years. The cabbie had his address. William had given it to him when he told the hack driver where to drop him.
Ten o'clock at night, with nowhere to go and no way to get there, William sat behind the closed Goodwill store, under an overhang that barely kept the rain off of him.
Huddled in the dark, head sunk between his knees, he hadn't heard anyone approach.
"You don't look so good."
Startled, William looked up, prepared to run again. It was the homeless man he'd knocked over outside the bar. The one with the shopping cart and the leathery skin. William relaxed a little. "Excuse me?"
The man pushed his cart closer. "You're not supposed to be here."
William looked around. "Why not?"
The old man grinned, half his teeth gone.
William found it nearly impossible to tell his age. The guy could be forty and maybe had lived a hard life, or perhaps he was a well-preserved seventy, pickled by a lifetime of booze. William waved him off, expecting a plea for money. "I can't help you."
The old man stopped just a few feet away. "Everything's out of place isn't it?" He had a strange lilting voice. Almost like an accent.
And he was right. Everything was out of place--from Johnny Davis to the cab driver--everything was wrong.
Strapped to the back of the old man's shopping cart was a plastic sign about the size of a loaf of bread. William recognized the sign, the words, the colors, the logo of a local supermarket chain, all were familiar to him, but the letters were backward, unreadable.
Rainwater ran down William's face. He pointed to the sign. "Why's it written like that?"
The old man looked at the sign then back at William. "Like what?" he said, then shuffled away behind his basket.
* * *
The rain came down even harder. William slouched in a darkened doorway across the street from Fausto's. Nothing made sense. Everything was messed up, backward, out of whack. Almost like this wasn't his home, like he was a stranger seeing it for the first time.
But that was crazy. He'd grown up here, gone to Brother Martin High School, dated Jenny Underhill who went to Cabrini, lost her to Johnny Davis, then got her back only to lose her again the first year of college to some kid who drove a Mustang. Two years later William married Marge at Saint Luke's. They had two kids.
This town was his home. He recognized it. He knew the people here, Big Johnny and Zeke, the bartender at Fausto's. But things were different, little things. John Davis for one. In trying to help him, the big man had gotten himself killed. That wasn't John Davis--at least not the one William Bailey had known since seventh grade. Everything looked the same but wasn't. Nothing was quite right.
But they knew him--or someone like him.
A strange sensation crept over him that made the hair on the back of his neck rise. Maybe he didn't belong here. Maybe everything wasn't as it appeared. Maybe this wasn't his home. But if that were true, then whose home was it? Another thought, even scarier seeped through his brain. If he was here, who was there--at his home?
Crazy.
William dropped his head into his hands. Just considering such nonsense was a waste of time. Yet, here he was scanning the street, thinking of going back inside Fausto's, back to that mirror.
Not much time to think about it. The bar closed at three AM and it was already two-thirty. When he'd left--run for his life with Big Johnny--most of the mirror was still in the frame hanging on the wall.
Something about that damned mirror.
But Fausto's was dangerous, so a couple of hours ago William had found another mirror. In the men's room of a twenty-four hour gas station. The Chevron on North Rampart.
He had approached it cautiously, afraid he was going mad. As he peered over the sink into the mirror, he saw what he always saw, his own reflection. Holding up his left hand, he looked at the image in the mirror, at the watch strapped to his wrist. He noticed that the man in the mirror wore his watch on his right hand. Just the opposite.
William stood in the gas station bathroom for twenty minutes before he worked up his nerve. Finally, he took a deep breath, leaned back, then slammed his forehead into the dirt-streaked mirror. The glass shattered and cut his head. Blood dribbled off the tip of his nose into the sink. His reflection stared out at him from the other side of the mirror, blood running down his face, too.
I have gone crazy!
So the gas station hadn't worked out. Ducking police cruisers, William had wandered the streets, his head reeling. What was he doing?
On the sidewalk, he found a sopping wet magazine that the wind had blown up against the side of a newspaper machine. The cover caught his eye. He picked it up. It was printed backwards, the letters reversed, words running right to left. The spine was on the right. As he flipped through the pages, he couldn't read a thing. Then William had an idea.
In the bathroom of an all night restaurant he held the wet magazine up to the mirror. Perfect. The reflected image was normal, spine on the left, words running left to right, all the letters printed correctly. He could read it clearly. But what did it mean?
Then he drove his head into that mirror. The glass cracked. Someone walked in, a skinny waiter wearing an apron. He stood gawking as William leaned over the sink with tears of pain filling his eyes.
The waiter looked at the broken mirror, then jabbed a finger at William's bloody forehead. "What the hell are you doing?"
"An accident," he mumbled, pressing his fingers against the fresh cut.
The waiter turned. "I'm calling the cops."
William Bailey ran.
Now he was huddled in the rain staring at Fausto's across the street. Because he had nowhere else to go.
He stood and walked toward Fausto's. When he was halfway across the street, a police car glided around the corner, headlights reflecting off the wet pavement. The cops in no hurry, just cruising. William forced himself to keep walking, not to run. One foot in front of the other. In the downpour, odds were that the cops wouldn't even recognize him.
But they did recognize him.
The police car slid to a stop as its high beams clicked on and its blue strobe lights started popping. Both front doors flew open.
Like a sinner seeking the sanctuary of a church, William ran straight for Fausto's door. As he burst inside, Zeke looked up from behind the bar. "William! What the hell are you doing here?"
He ignored the bartender, running right past him, eyes focused on the broken mirror and its busted frame hanging on the wall.
Zeke again, "The cops been looking all over for you. Say you killed two officers and--"
Behind him the front door banged against the wall. "Police!" a voice behind him commanded. "Stop."
But William didn't stop. He kept running--running straight for the mirror. Reflected in its fragmented pieces he saw two uniformed police officers behind him, heard their boots pounding on the wooden floor. Just ten feet separated him from the mirror. At full speed he took two strides then dove. He stretched his arms out overhead and tucked his chin into his chest as his feet left the floor.
He felt one hand hit wall and the other strike broken glass. Then his head hit. More glass cracked, more skin split.
Darkness.
* * *
William's eyes popped open. He was staring at the ceiling. Rough voices, even rougher hands. They rolled him over onto his stomach and jerked his arms behind his back. He felt cold steel on his wrists and heard the metallic ratcheting as the handcuffs tightened and bit into his skin.
He tilted his head up and rested his chin against the floor. Blood poured down the side of his face; he watched it pool on the floor then seep between the wooden planks. By rolling his eyes up he could just see the empty spot on the wall where the mirror had hung. Lying on the floor, three feet from his head, was the broken frame and the rest of the glass.
The two cops grabbed his arms and yanked him to his feet, sending waves of pain through his shoulders and wrists. As they spun him toward the door, one of the officers said, "You're under arrest."
"Why?" William asked.
The officer pressed his face into William's. "Murdering your family for starters."
"My...my family." William felt his stomach cinch and his bowels turn to ice. A thought he'd had earlier in the night echoed inside his head. If he was here, who was there--at his home.
As the cops dragged him across the floor, William glanced up and saw the rusted metal sign nailed above the door.
OUT.
He was home.

To multicultural, mixed, and bilingual families. Kudos.
My wife (35f) is from Mexico and I (35m) am from the USA. We have 3 beautiful children, live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, USA, and have been married for almost 9 years. It’s been a helluva journey. After dating for 18 months, we were married legally (within 3 weeks of engagement) and then did the full wedding/reception 6 months later.
My wife is brown and I am white. Our kids are white. There are a lot of things I wasn’t prepared for and I wanted to share because I wish someone would have told me. While I am not an immigrant - I live with/am in love with one. It’s been a long journey with a lot of listening, changes, and sacrifice. Here are some things I wish I was told.

1. Holidays are not the same in other countries...and they can be tough. Why would this be important?? Because so many good memories come from holidays. Who knew that Children’s Day, Grandparents Day, Day of the Dead, Mexican Independence Day (not Cinco de Mayo), and Las Posadas (early-late Dec) were such a big deal?? Just like July 4th or other American holidays - these are cultural staples! Not being able to celebrate a holiday fully can be difficult for someone from another country. They also don’t have an attachment to our holidays so they don’t know the nuances of each holiday like we do. This can be overwhelming because most people want to “get it right” with their in-laws, especially at the beginning of a marriage.
2. Being an immigrant takes a toll on mental health. It can be lonely. I wish I would have known how helpful therapy could have been for both of us in that transition. Mental health is a pretty taboo topic in Mexico. The “machismo” culture is strong but is slowly beginning to change. My wife has no family living in the states but we see her parents at least every 3-6 months (whether we travel or they travel). It’s harder to see friends because it is expensive to travel so often. Maintaining relationships can be very challenging especially with 3 kids and both of us running our own businesses. Also, traveling with 3 kids is both draining and expensive!
3. Co-Parenting with two different cultures and languages is humbling. We all have cultural and family baggage. But man…I was not ready for this! Juggling both cultures/languages in a family can be challenging. My Spanish is ok (allllllways working on it). My wife’s English is fantastic. She speaks mostly Spanish to our kids regardless of where we are. I’ve seen first hand how much more of an effort she has to put into her culture than I do. Our kids are learning my culture without me saying a thing. My wife has to try and teach our kids about her culture at every moment she gets (I help too!).
4. Racism is a constant reality. My wife is native looking and has 3 white children. She is often thought to be the nanny/au pair and has to worry about way more than I do when navigating normal life. Speaking Spanish to 3 white children in public is also something that makes them stick out, especially in a white area. My dad asked me if my wife was legal when we first started dating. At the time it didn’t really register with me as potentially racist (over 10 years ago) but now I realize how ignorant a question like that can be. Sure, if someone is undocumented there can be some difficulties. But is that really important enough to be one of the first things discussed? Does that change how you would treat them?
5. I hear the phrase, “It’s so great that you’re teaching your kids another language! I wish I spoke another language.” My Spanish is not that great but I have been able to help Spanish speakers who are having trouble communicating with others (in supermarkets, CVS…etc). I’ve also been to Mexico at least 15 times and not in touristy areas. I guess the biggest part is actually trying to communicate and learn. Language learning is a part of American culture that we have not prioritized. Many children from other countries are learning two languages at an early age and yet this has not changed in the US. The data is pretty conclusive that learning multiple languages is amazing for our brains.
6. Extended families may not understand what you’re going through. All marriages have their difficulties and extended families can be tough regardless. But a different culture and language can add different challenges. I’ve also come to realize that Americans don’t know much about other cultures unless they’ve experienced them. My wife knew surprisingly more about the US than I did about Mexico (shocker). The most difficult part has been a broken relationship with my parents, mainly my mother. My wife and my mother do not have a great relationship. It has been a very long 4-5 years of getting to a point of stability and it affected my entire extended family. While the door is open for my mother to be a part of our lives, she doesn’t try. I had a very close relationship with my mother and I had hoped that her desire to be near her grandkids would help her to change. But that hasn’t happened and we don’t see my parents nearly as frequently as most would expect. Religion also plays a role in this (my mother is very Catholic and my wife/nuclear family are not). There is definitely some negative bias from this even though most of my siblings are no longer Catholic.

I know that I can only speak to what I’ve experienced and others may have not had these issues in a mixed family. My biggest hope is to find a way to bring others together and not separate. Learning about others/cultures can only help to build bridges (even if we are constantly seeing the opposite in politics/media). Thanks for letting me rant, Reddit. I hope this helps at least one person who is considering a mixed/multicultural/bilingual marriage.

This is my first time dealing with a Karen (well a Male Karen) (I will call the male Karen ‘Kevin’)
Characters. Harry - Me
ER (Entitled Roommate) Kevin
(Disclaimer this story and the situation what this male Karen did may shock you,).
Let’s begin. I had just moved into a new share house back in February of this year, I had quite a lot of stuff to move in for example I had a lot of university books, a tv, my bed and a bar fridge), I am a university student (Estoy estudiando Español para la universidad) my major is Spanish. I also have a ocd disorder and depression which can trigger due to trauma.
Upon meeting my new house mates they were such a delight a few even helped me moved in also helping me to get a very heavy bar fridge through the front door. Now this is where Kevin enters the scene it was around 6pm and I was still moving stuff in (mostly the large furniture) so I had to prop the front door open so I could get my desk in. After I got my desk in through my room I see this man standing in the hall way looking at me, he said to me “why is this the front door opened” so I explained to him “oh, Hi I am just getting a few more things to move in it shouldn’t be much longer…” but before I could finish Kevin just kicked the door stop out and said “I Don’t Care! Keep the F**king door closed” and then he stormed off. I am in shock I had just moved in and this guy just had a go at me for no reason so I said something under my breath (Spanish Swear Word) so he couldn’t hear or understand it and I carried on moving my stuff in. Here is where Kevin really shines it was around 3am and I could hear someone coughing, loudly. It was Kevin now I know coughing can’t be helped so I let it go despite it was self inflicted because he smoked like a chimney there was even a whole jar of cigarette ashes on the outside table filled to the top of the jar. This went on for every morning at 3am, I would hear his coughing but what pissed me off the most he would also have his phone on (without headphones) at 3 to 4am playing YouTube videos and they were loud, the people upstairs could hear them but no one said anything and neither did I.
So around about 8am I am getting ready for university and I am tired from lack of sleep, then Lo and behold Kevin is at my door again, he looks at me and says “You there!, stop banging the front door, I work” and then he left. (I have to mention the doors tend to stick to the door frames due to a storms we had recently in February, the doors are made out of wood, you had to force them open and force them closed unfortunately) So he had the audacity to lecture me about noise while he kept everyone else awake at 3am. I didn’t keep quiet I said “Well don’t be up so late at 3am keeping everyone else awake” at this point he called me a (homophobic slur) and walked off. Now I am gay and I have zero tolerance for homophobia so I just shouted out “eff you” and then I left.
Plus Kevin was a total pig, every morning I would wake up and go to the bathroom and the sink reeked with vomit and the toilet was covered in piss and it was not flushed, I knew it was Kevin because I could hear him coughing in there an hour ago. Annoyed I had to wait for the building cleaners clean it up.
At 4pm I needed to shave my face, and after I cleaned the hair from the sink and made sure there was nothing in the sink but suddenly Kevin approached me and said “You dirty pig, the sink is dirty” now I looked at the sink there was no hair at all in the sink, nothing but Kevin just wanted to complain even more to cause trouble but I said to him and stood my ground “Okay dude, You left the bathroom sink reeking with vomit and you didn’t flush or aim from for that matter, you’re the pig” and I went back into my room not before flipping Kevin off and said to him a few curse words in Spanish.
Here is where Kevin really crossed the line with me. Because it’s a share house we had to share the same bathroom just like a hotel and motel and after I was done using the bathroom I opened the door and there he was, he was waiting other side of the bathroom door and he said to me “you need to lift lid up when you use the toilet, I heard you in…” now I was shocked to hear this, Kevin was listening in on me when I went to the bathroom and he openly admitted it. I said to him “First of I am not your slave, second you sick pervert listen in on me again when I am using the toilet and I will have you reported to the landlords and the police, got it” now this is where Kevin backed off but it didn’t last long.
During three weeks I couldn’t leave my room because I didn’t want to deal with him, he even tried to prevent me from going to university and he succeeded because he wouldn’t let me leave my own room because he was standing outside my door. This went on until March 29th and I finally moved out but I wanted revenge because when I was trapped like that where I couldn’t go to the bathroom or go out to buy food from the supermarket and because of him my academic performance at uni also suffered due to my anxiety issues.
I finally managed to find a new place and my mum even offered to help me move. So once everything was out of my old room into a new one at a new share house. I went into the backyard of my old place and grabbed the jar of cigarette ashes and threw it all over Kevin’s nice clean laundry and I also left the toilet seat down as I left. To add insult to injury, I also filled up his work boots with the cigarette ashes and pour water in them.
Am I the jerk for wrecking his work boots?

(owing to the reddit character limit, I'm posting this in two parts, but it's one contiguous story)
There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

I was listening to Reddit stories on YouTube, wondered about whether or not I had a story to share, and remembered this story of my old coworker.
For a bit of backstory: I manage a small restaurant under a larger company. Sometime in early 2022, one of my coworkers receives a company car, nearly crashes it into another car on the way from the dealership to the restaurant, and gets traumatized by the absolute chewing out he receives from the older lady he almost hit. It goes without saying that he currently avoids driving like the plague. So now, we just have a car sitting in our tiny parking lot. It's a shame, since it was a pretty nice looking car, a Hyundai Elantra I believe.
Around this time, I'm getting into basic car maintenance, such as changing oil, headlights, coolant, and spark plugs. Consequently, I also own one of those little bluetooth code readers that connect to my phone to tell me if there's something wrong with my vehicle.
Now to introduce the star of the story, Kevin. He describes himself as "street smart, not book smart." He's a nice guy to a fault, but lacks a great deal of common sense as it will be apparent later. Kevin longs to own and drive a car of his own, but has yet to make the steps towards getting his license. At this point, he's failed the written exam a couple times and has not progressed on to the actual road test. I give him rides from time to time, such as when he misses his bus.
After the whole debacle with the car, I decide that it'd be essential to install a rearview camera so that anyone driving it would at least feel safer doing so. I've done the installation job before on my own car, so how hard could it be? I buy an okay looking rearview camera kit off Amazon, wait a couple days for it to come in, and quick Google search, and I'm quickly removing panels and wiring the camera to the company car's brake lights in the restaurant's parking lot after work. While I'm at it, I figure that I should check this car for any trouble codes. It's a used car, so it's probably got some issues on it, right? I pop in my code reader into the car and wait for it to spit out data. I finish the camera job and check my phone for any issues. Two trouble codes catch my eye: low battery voltage and a misfiring cylinder. Cool, I can just drop by the nearest auto shop to have the battery recharged and grab a spark plug for the cylinder. Two birds with one stone, easy.
Kevin, done with the restaurant closing duties, steps out to check out what I'm doing. I explain that I'm just installing a rearview camera for the car and making sure it's running properly. I keep in mind that Kevin also wants to own his own car one day, so I go into more detail into car maintenance, quickly explaining about batteries and spark plugs. I give him a little demo of how the rearview camera works. He asks me if he could sit in the driver's seat, and I oblige.
"Man, this car is NICE! I want a car like this," Kevin says. He plays around with the controls on the dash for a little bit. "Can I take it for a little drive?"
I immediately shut this idea down. "Kevin, you don't even have your license. What makes you think you can drive it?" I scold him.
"I can drive," he shoots back. "I've seen you drive before. I think I can do it."
You just asked me the about dashboard controls. As if.
We get out of the car and we get ready to go home. I have the next two days off and I want to spend them relaxing. "Kevin, the car has faulty spark plugs and a dying battery. Under no circumstances, do NOT touch the car while I'm gone. I honestly this this car is unsafe." I repeat this several times before we go home. Satisfied by his confirmations, I throw the keys in the register head home. I feel like you could already tell where this is going.
Fast forward a couple days. I'm just chilling at home and aimlessly reading my emails. My parents borrow my car to get groceries. It's quiet, and I'm at peace. Until Kevin FaceTimes me. Usually, when I get a call from my staff, it's a question about food or where certain items are in the restaurant. It's not often that it's an emergency. I sigh and pick up the phone.
Immediately I see Kevin sitting in the driver's seat of a car. Before he could even say anything, I blurt out, "Kevin, are you in the company car right now?" A short pause and he purses his lips like he's eaten something really sour. "Kevin, I'm not going to ask you again. Are you in the company car right now?" More sternly this time.
Dodging my question, all he can manage to get out is "I messed up..."
One of my kitchen guys told Kevin that we're out of cabbage. Since there's a supermarket about a 10 minute walk away, he decides to go there during his break. He considers walking but realizes that bringing back cabbage would be heavy, so Kevin concludes that he should take the company car there since it would cut his time in two and it'd be more comfortable. Note, we also have a staff member who can drive. Apparently he didn't think about it at the time. He thinks, instead, about how this will get him points for being able to solve a problem at the restaurant without me being around.
Kevin grabbed the keys from the register, turns on the car, and drives off. He makes it about two blocks before the engine starts to sputter and subsequently dies due to the misfiring cylinder. To his credit, he manages to maneuver the car to the curb and turn on his hazards. He immediately calls me right after.
"Kevin, I thought I made myself very clear that the car was off limits," I said slowly. He proceeds to mimic a Mickey Mouse laugh and say, "I made a littly f*cky wucky."
Head in my hands, I sigh again. "Kevin, I have no way of getting to you. You're gonna have to call around to see if anyone can help you out." We hang up the phone and I make some phone calls of my own. The first phone call went to the senior manager (SM for short). It's his day off as well, but it can't be helped.
"What's up?" The SM seems to be spending time with his family, since I hear his kid laughing in the background.
"Kevin apparently took the company car to go shopping for ingredients, the car broke down, and now he's stuck," I explained.
There was a long pause. "What the f*ck? Is he dumb? I thought he didn't even have his license."
"I already told him that he's not to touch the car under any circumstances, and on top of that the car is in need of repairs," I continued.
The SM tells me to call the vice president (VP), since he's working today and he's in the area. Honestly, I don't want to have to escalate this issue that far, but I have no choice. I know that the VP has so much on his plate already, but I give him a call regardless. The call goes more or less the same as with the SM, but the VP says that he's on the way. He's about an hour away, however. God dammit.
In the meantime, I call my friends in the area, explain the situation, and ask them if they could do me a favor and save Kevin. I'm not really sure if it's actually the spark plug, but I think they'd at least be able to give him some extra support while the VP is on the way. Nobody's able to help out, so I give Kevin a follow-up call. Keep in mind it's been half an hour since he called.
"Hey Kevin, did you get into contact with anyone yet?" I ask.
"No, not yet," he responds.
"Uhh, any reason why?"
A long pause.
Fed up, I strongly recommend he call the VP to tell him what he did. We hang up again and I go straight into bed and nap, just completely drained from the entire interaction. I'll follow up later.
I wake up from my nap and call the VP to find out what ended up happening. The VP caught up with Kevin and started up the car with no issues. The VP makes Kevin sit in the passenger's seat and they drive back to the restaurant in awkward silence. He has no words for Kevin, and instead tasks SM and I with scolding him about it. Fair enough.
The next time SM, Kevin, and I are all working together is in a weeks' time. SM and I agree to mess with him a little bit. I tell Kevin that SM wants to have a meeting about what happened. I hype this up throughout the week, dropping hints such as "ooh Kevin, you're gonna get it!" A week passes by in the blink of an eye, but it probably feels like a drawn out hell for Kevin. We let him fester and reflect about his actions. The three of us sit down at a table before the restaurant opens and I open my mouth.
"Kevin, never do that again."
I end the meeting there. Kevin, who's as white as a sheet, has the color return to his face and appear to have a huge weight fall off his shoulders. "Is that it?" He shyly asks. I confirm that's it. He laughs in relief, since he believes he'd be fired. I add that he's young and bound to make really dumb, stupid mistakes. If I tell him something, he really needs to listen. On top of that, since he's working for a business, his actions, noticed or unnoticed, are representative of the business as a whole. "And Kevin, for the love of all that is good, get your license."
TL;DR Kevin drives a car in need of repairs to the store without his license and it breaks down en route. He calls me for help, but I send him my boss' boss to him. We make him think for a week that he'd be violently punished for his actions, but we gave him a life lesson instead.

What kind of sick psychopaths make a potato salad with Miracle Whip just because the supermarket is out of their ONE favorite brand of mayonnaise. Even if they are one of those "I don't like those big name brands" at least Hellman's is better than Miracle Whip (also a big name brand anyway) for that purpose.
Kim's new man is was worse than her old one! Miracle Whip in a potato salad is way worse than getting Howard killed!

I found myself in a blank white room without doors. It was cold and I was sitting alone on a single-seat, white sofa while a big screen played out a presentation
Two things that stood out as strange to me was how I was aware of it being a dream and yet I wasn't able to control it like how a lucid state allows.
Additionally, I felt the temperature of the room perfectly. The texture of the sofa was similar to leather and I sank right into it like it's stuffed with gel.
I didn't see any faces or learn any names. The voice sounded hard to distinguish as male or female and was somewhat robotic. The presentation involved imagery that was strictly familiar to me so I didn't get to see any aliens in it either
What makes think the room was a ufo was it's odd oval shape and the absence of sharp corners. The floor neatly blended into the wall which blended into the ceiling etc
I will try my best to remember what I learned:
Their religion revolves around the pursuit of happiness and the quest for self-actualization and belonging. They believe that true happiness is achieved when who the person thinks they are, who they want to be, and who they're perceived as are one and the same person
According to them, this need is universal across different species, suggesting a pattern in nature
For instance, atoms combine to form biological matter, which gives rise to cells, and cells create living beings with consciousness. Consciousness represents the peak of complexity, but they told me their research has revealed that it continues to evolve into more advanced forms
Collective consciousness forms another chain in the line. A complex form of life called thoughtforms or Egregores in English. They rely on the energy, emotions, beliefs, and thoughts of conscious entities in a wide variety. There is those who feed on negative emotions, positive emotions, beliefs and even abstract things like dreams etc. While we coexist with these beings without full awareness( similar to how nerve cells are unaware of the mind they are a part of) they have realized their profound influence on their society
By becoming aware of these beings and actively promoting positive collective consciousness, they have freed themselves from the harm caused by negative feeding entities. They urge our society to become aware of thoughtforms and restructure our way of life to foster equality and a sense of belonging for all
In their pursuit of equality and belonging, they have implemented a strange system of temporary identities. People can choose specific roles within society, such as a fish farmer caring for an elderly father. They join host families that treat them no differently than any other adopter. To preserve anonymity, and ensure unbiased treatment individuals wear masks and full-body suits for their role. The outfit is the same for every participant who adopts the role. They can switch roles indefinitely, exploring different lives or settle into one they created for themselves. After death, they pass on the identity they created for others. This system has proven instrumental in achieving self-actualization.
Furthermore, their architecture fosters community and social interaction. Park tables, for example, feature small lights that individuals can change the color of to signal their openness to conversation. Apartments have built-in private networks that allow residents to chat with neighbors on the same floor or in the same building etc
In short, their religion emphasizes the pursuit of happiness, self-actualization, and a sense of belonging to improve their collective thoughtform
This was very vital for them to achieve. They say that just how our body's cells don't understand why they get cut or recieve less nutrition sometimes, we have good and bad experiences at seemingly random patterns because of our egregores. By concentrating on feeding the positive energy beings they managed to virtually purge suffering from their daily lives.
This is absolutely bizarre to me but I had to share it to get it off my chest. Another interesting part was about how their economy is designed to achieve equality, less-waste and encourage innovation
They have a system that can be visualized as a pyramid of cards rather than the traditional trickle-down economy. The pyramid represents the structure of wealth distribution, ensuring that no class disproportionately grows over others. To explain this concept, let's consider a lemonade stand as an example.
In traditional capitalism, the owner of the stand and resources would receive the largest share of the profit, while the worker is paid a fixed wage, regardless of their contribution to the business. This system encourages the owner to reduce costs, including worker wages, and increase output, often resulting in poor quality products. Moreover, any unsold or unused items go to waste, which harms both individuals and the environment.
In their system, the worker receives a fixed ratio or percentage of the earnings rather than a fixed salary. For instance, if they split the earnings in a 1:3 ratio, and the stand makes $20 a day, the owner would receive $14, while the worker receives $6.5. By increasing the number of workers, the profits can grow. If two workers generate $40 a day, the owner would get $27, while each worker continues to receive $6.5 (a total of $13). If the owner puts pressure on a single worker to increase output, that worker would receive a higher compensation, such as $13.5. When sales increase further, let's say to $80 a day, the owner would get $53.4, and both workers would split $23.4, resulting in an increase in their wages to $13.5 each. This system prevents extreme inequality and maintains a balance among different wealth groups, akin to a pyramid of cards
Another advantage of their economy is the use of digital currency managed by a powerful AI-operated bank. This bank tracks business profits and determines fair payments. Owners are legally required to register employees on the fair-pay program, and all transactions must go through the bank. This approach eliminates human involvement to prevent corruption. To maintain transparency and prevent hacking, the AI's decision-making process and transactions are publicly visible through a live-feed. Any hacking attempts or discrepancies between reported payments and actual receipts would be immediately evident. Additionally, the system has robust cybersecurity measures, including compartmentalization of information and regular checks by a randomly selected team of developers
Their government does not control the bank or the payment ratio. It runs automatically and isn't staffed by anyone but the publicly transparent AI. Instead, people get to vote on the appropriate ratio for different skillsets. The government's role is to safeguard the system and provide public surveillance of the bank's activities. Innovation and education are highly valued, with scientists, educators, and engineers receiving the highest salaries and belonging to the top layer of the pyramid. They are paid in an exclusive currency that is priced at three times the standard currency
While the private sector has full control over means of production, raw resources have shared control between the private and government sectors. For instance, if a company discovers a copper mine and develops an effective extraction/purification method, they receive a fixed percentage of the profit, while the government sets a fair price for the resources based on extraction costs. People can buy these resources and use private sector machinery and blueprints to create items of their choice.
There are machinery and blueprints available to the general public for free, but they are limited to basic designs necessary for survival. This restriction prevents exploitation during emergencies. Businesses, therefore, focus on innovation and improving designs, ideas, patents, and machinery to produce items more effectively.
Their system has a strict made-to-order process for purchasing items, reducing environmental damage from unsold goods. Only perishable items like food, vital medicines and digital-goods are allowed to have surplus quantities. If a food item nears its expiration date, it would be offered at an extremely low price rather than being disposed off. This discourages businesses from over farming
Additionally supermarkets don't use packaging to sell food. To minimize harm to the environment, they bring in their own reusable containers to fill up from their product of choice, which is stored in large containers within the shop. Weight/volume determines the cost
In politics they don't have a party system and prefer direct democracy over representative democracy because they see the existence of a middle-man as a doorway for corruption. Their people get to vote on individual issues just like what happens in Switzerland. One difference is that they're required to do a lot more than simply tick yes or no. They believe that education is a vital part of successful democracy, therefore the voter has to write a short essay weighing the pros and cons behind their decision to demonstrate that they've learned enough before making a decision
The consequence of this system is that it takes very long to collect and process votes (It's done by AI which also has it's process live-streamed) The person is required to write it while at the voting center (to prevent copy-pastes) The booth provides them with a PC which has all the gathered points and research supporting each side of the decision.
To reduce the time it takes to submit and process votes, they prioritise those who are most affected by a decision. For example if it's about women's reproductive health then only women can vote. The rest of the population can still participate by adding to the information stockpile for the voting booth. Another example is when it comes to war, only those who are enlisted are allowed to vote in favour of it to discourage an eagerness for violence
Just like the bank system the government is also unstaffed. There is only an AI controlling humanoid drones to complete tasks. It's also publicly surveyed (I find it interesting how the government is watched by people rather than the other way around) they also have a randomly selected maintenance team to work on the program running it. They're taken to work immediately to prevent anyone from bribing them. Even more public surveillance goes into their work
There is lots more finer details about their society but I unfortunately forgot it after years passed. I might remember more with time but this post already got ridiculously long. After the dream ended I just woke up home and was in a cold sweat because of how bizarrely detailed it was. My dreams are usually random junk that I forget completely the instant I wake up
Edit: format, typoes etc
Edit: Some people are accusing me of making it all up which is reasonable. All I can respond by is that I want absolutely nothing to do with this "message" and anyone is free to publish a book using it if they want to
Tldr: Had a dream, in which I was on board a ufo and was taught about an alien society. They valued happiness, self-actualization, and belonging. They introduced me to the concept of thoughtforms and how they affect our society. Their economy focused on equality, less waste, and innovation. They had an AI-operated bank and emphasized education and direct democracy

I've noticed that the discourse on approaching women is varied. Women tallma out creepy weirdos and fearing for their safety, men talk about women being rude and demeaning and it's hard to come to a middle ground on this. I want to share something from a man's perspective that I've noticed.
Most men rarely get approached by women so for the most part a woman can try to talk to us anywhere and a man will usually be relatively receptive. Women tend to be much more fickle. They need to feel they look good, smell good, feel good and need ideal conditions for them to be approached. Women whether they know it or not often walk around looking angry or mean or bothered in some way and all this would be fine of a lot of the conversation wasn't "why don't men approach women as much anymore?" If it was just women NEVER want men to approach us then I could absolutely understand but as it stands men are very confused.
Thus I would like women to consider this, if a man sees you at a gas station, or a supermarket, or at the gym or at the the post office or in line at Starbucks... if he is interested, he has to approach you at that time. He may never see you again, he might not have the opportunity tomorrow he's got to shoot his shot or he might miss out. We ask that you give a little more grace to men on where they approach you, it might be awkward to you but it might be his one chance ever to talk to you rather than being like "ugh why is this guy trying to talk to me in line at Walmart?" Just consider it as a man just being bold.
Thanks!