I’m a purple bipedal creature, vaguely humanoid, under a pretty broad definition of that term, somewhat stouter and shorter than humans. I have two five-fingered hands and two five-toed feet. The planet is significantly colder than Earth, but livable in the tropics. The technology level is roughly early 21st century by Earth standards.

I, my good friend Paul, a couple passing acquaintances, and several other people who were complete strangers to me were convinced by various of our friends to help them run one of those interactive entertainment events. We didn’t know our friends were associated with such a thing, nor had we ever heard of this one. We were invited to a free run-through of the event so that we would know how it was supposed to work.

I’m Lisa Wilson, biologist. In the winter of 2079, a viral cold swept the world. It caused people to briefly experience spots of blood in the urine and feces, but otherwise was unremarkable, and people recovered from it like any other cold, so not much was thought about it at first. But it was persistent, with more and more outbreaks among people who had not yet suffered from it throughout the year.

I’d been living in my two-story house for many years before I discovered the top of the closet.

When the children were all in the equivalent of middle school or high school in the education program we had adapted for life on New Mars, when kids on Earth might have had sex ed, we introduced them all at once to the breeding program.

So all that was really left at this point was to get the women pregnant. In this first round I could only speak for my two assigned women, but neither of them shied away from this duty. However, Lakshmi quickly got into a mood of “let’s get this over with.” She didn’t want to worry about enjoying it, just to get me to come inside her. She ended up not getting pregnant that first month. Sarah, on the other hand, was a sex fiend.

“Computer, tell me the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

There was no response.

“Computer, tell us the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free,” Chen echoed.

It started into the history, but Chen asked it to stop.

“Computer, how many people are in this building?”

“One.”

“Computer, how many life forms are in this building?”

“Five.”

“Computer, can I register the other life forms here as people?”

“Yes.”

Discovering New Mars

After hundreds of years of space exploration, we finally located signs of civilization out there. Mankind had had about 8 generations of space telescopes of increasing power, culminating with placing stations all over the far side of the moon to act as a virtual telescope almost as large as the moon itself. This scope swept across the plane of the Moon’s orbit for two weeks each lunar month and then shut off to recharge when the Sun’s light blinded it the other two weeks.

Over time I did actually manage to assemble theories to support large parts of what happened with dreamwalking. I gave Jenna some dumbed-down (that is, not for physics majors) versions of a few relevant concepts and then in one of our dreamwalks together in World of Dreams I went over the theories with her.

“I actually have a good explanation now for a lot of what we do and experience. There are still gaps, but some of your ideas helped before, and I hope you can help me again.”

“I’m all ears,” Jenna replied.

The work on the papers and other ideas had brought me near the end of my freshman year, and that was the time to plan next year’s classes and, ideally, to declare a major. Since I couldn’t progress on the goals within dreamwalks, I tried to figure out what classes would help me in other ways.

Herren was there as the leader to introduce me into advanced training, and I got my new room and all. But it was advanced training in name only, because the first thing there, intermediate trainers I’d worked with before were back, putting me into practicing level 3, 4, and 6 dreamwalks properly, using the isolation of the privacy chamber to let me hover on the edge of sleep.

Umberto didn’t respond to my note. I guess I wasn’t too surprised. Elissa never interacted with the notes I left in Tommy’s game; it was Tommy doing so, though he thought my responses were coming from Elissa at first.

Oh my, Tommy thought upon awakening. What did I do last night? I kind of remember getting up and walking around, and yet, it didn’t seem like I was doing it.

While getting dressed, he saw the note next to his computer. Wow, Tommy thought. The amulet really works! Or more likely, Sarah’s gained control of her powers but just needed to be encouraged to visit other places, which was what I hoped for by lying to her about the amulet.

When I next returned to the dream, I pulled the pad out of the pack and was glad to see I’d established communication. But I was confused by the content of the message. “Dear Sarah,” the message began. “I’m Tommy. I’m also in high school. I named my character Elissa.”

So somebody responded, but it’s somebody else who visits here like me and not the girl herself. And it’s a boy. Being a girl here might feel strange to him.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

My recent thoughts got me to get back onto the dating site again. I updated my profile to explain I was now a splitter who kept male and female bodies around all the time, and I was looking for a woman who could love both of me and would bear my children. That was the original intent of my splitting and staying in opposite sexes, and I felt it was important to find somebody quickly so I didn’t get addicted to sex with my other self.

I opened the dating site, where my profile has been set to not looking and not subscribing to send messages for months, since I started dating Brenda more regularly. I had it find me some matches, and some of them looked potentially OK, but I realized I couldn’t even get myself to send a message to one of them, and I shut it off again.

I probably do need the counseling, and sooner than I thought.

I distracted myself by reviewing the state of knowledge about the syndrome. There had been a lot of fascinating studies, but they were no longer headline news and I had to go look for them.

Friday, August 4, 2006

It happened one morning. Like most mornings, I woke up and went to the bathroom to pee.

It started normally. I got a good stream going into the bowl as I stood in front of it.

But I was feeling drained. While a little residual tiredness in the morning was OK, this was more than that, and it was getting worse. And something weird was happening in the bowl. I leaned forward, one hand against the top of the toilet tank to support myself.

It was for the start of 2010 that I’d made a resolution to spend more money on myself. Little did I know what the action I took to satisfy that resolution would mean starting months later. It changed my view of reality.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

George

This was NANA’s anniversary, or the weekend closest to it, anyway, and there was a big party. The magical members cast a special spell for the event. Anybody in town who didn’t know about powers would simply not be interested in what was going on in the park, on top of the usual spell that would cause them to not see anybody flying or with green skin or whatever. So it was an event where people could let out their powers in public more than they normally could.

Some people announce the arrival of their powers to the whole town... by exploding into little pink bits that go everywhere!

David gets transported to another place when he hears music.

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