K's Blog

“Him who, at one blow, had chest and shadow shattered by Arthur’s hand.”

Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXII

Sky.

My consciousness is boundless, without identity.

Sky.

That voice feels like a part of me. A strange lifeline, drawing whatever I am back to something familiar.

I feel something warm brush my face, the contact reminds me of my body.

The memories flood back with my self awareness.

“Sky.” It’s not the same voice that pulled me back, but the voice is familiar. I open my eyes. Everything is still dar...

Their tactics have thrown me off. I won’t risk shouting because that could warn them that Red and I are expecting them. Instead I clear the water in one long leap. I land stop the airplane wreckage just as Red dives. I feel the wreckage rock, unstable. Carrie swings her gun up, startled, but is well trained enough that she didn’t panic fire.

I hand gesture at the water and her eyes get large. She jabs Brian in the shoulder with the butt of an elbow. He gl...

Red and I take turns scouting ahead. With her ability to read my thoughts we work in perfect conjunction and silence. Our coordination exceeds what is possible for all but the longest of paired human teams. Furthermore, despite her newness to being an Archaea, Red seems better at being an Archaea than I am. Likely another perk of her joining with the Avatar she calls the Constellation.

Hours have passed without any sign of m...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. – Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

…Her tongue traces the blood along her lip line.

The overwhelming smell of the dead Archaea on the ground is intoxicating. I’m starving. The thing within me stirs. Like a some ancient predator, awakened by the familiar scent of a kill. I remember this feeling from five years ago. I am guessing that I know exactly the state Fiona’s archaea must be in righ...

…It can come in a variety of forms. There are as many types of hope at there are possibilities, potentials, and perspectives in the world. Often it goes unnoticed, taken for granted like water. Ever present, ever shaping our future. And like different bodies of water, hope flows underground and across the surface of our lives, shaping the world we traverse. Sometimes hope reveals a path that didn’t exist before, and sometimes it opens our eyes to something that...

…just staring as nature slowly dilutes and washes away the blood.

There is only a finite amount of blood in the human body.

I should check his ID chip, or at the very least feel sick.

I don’t.

Brian running past me to check the guy’s ID is what draws my attention back. He mutters a few soft curses and then holds the guy like one might hold a sibling. Brian’s eyes are clenched tightly closed, hands balled into fists.

I finally manage to find my voice,”We need to...

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

- Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland, The Pool of Tears

As I watch, the entire plane becomes a blinding light. I have the vague sensation of being belted in to a harness by my rescuer.

What follows next is pure chaos. We are tosses through the skies like a cork on stormy seas. I try to shout out a warning to anyone who might hear me about the cloaked Archaea. My voic...

Her face reveals no fear, only cold calculation. It makes a certain amount of sense. My need to reassure her stems from 16 years of emotional ties to other humans before I became an Archaea. Her only experience with humans is her mental ties to her host, who sacrificed both their lives to save someone the Archaea had never met.

“They’re after me” Fiona’s archaea speaks in a whisper.

Our eyes lock. “Over my repeatedly dead body.”

As if happy to a...

They burn, but I’m relieved to find they aren’t wet. Crying won’t accomplish anything while I’m stuck on a quasi-public plane.

To distract myself and avoid thinking, I make a point of stretching on the way back to the room I left Fiona in. Right about now I’d welcome sleep as an escape from my humiliation.

It would be bad enough if I merely had a crush on Matthews and had been kissing Johnny. But to top things off, I’m supposed to be a trained field agen...

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

- Bertrand Russell

The cabin of our tiny room has been dark for hours. Fiona’s archaea hadn’t understood the human need for sleep. Before joining with that scary female Avatar, when Fiona was asleep had been the only time that t...