Kari's Funeral, Take 2

     One of the embarrassing things about using someone's computer while they're asleep is that when an alarm goes off, you have to get out IMMEDIATELY.
     Martin, apparently, had a late night date. I heard his alarm going off as I was making that last entry, and he started to stir, so I had to get out.
     I waited, but he didn't come home. He was out all. Night. Long. Which is rather unlike Martin, but I guess everyone has someone out there, right?
     I fast-forwarded to tonight, and now that Martin is asleep, I'm back. So, I guess I should continue the story of Kari's funeral, and everything that happened after.

    “I don’t want to take up the entire funeral talking. If you knew her, you know how good she was.”
    A pause. I moved in closer to her as she spoke, and looked her straight in the eyes. I was surprised to see absolute truth there. As fas she knew, she was telling the truth, and she believed it.
    Usually, you see a little bit of something hidden in their eyes. Something that speaks to the real truth of the matter. Not this time, though.
    This time was absolute truth. Her aura said so, too. She honestly believed this dead girl was an angel made flesh.
    She stepped down from the pulpit, approached the coffin. She kissed her fingers, and gently placed them on the lid, then wiped away a tear. She went back to her seat, and slumped into the arms of the giuy sitting next to her. His arm slipped around her, and gently stroked her hair. The girl’s sobs mingled with all the other sounds of mourning in the room.
    There, dammit. I said I wasn’t going to that. Alright. Moving on.
    The next person up was a lady in her mid-thirties who was dry-eyed, but just barely. She took the podium, looked over the crowd, down at the coffin.
    “Kari... was special. You don’t need me to tell you that. She gave everything she had to help you, to make you happy, whether it hurt her or not.
    “When we were in high school, we both liked the same guy. Will Olsen. Kari probably cared a little more for him than I did since they had dated briefly. He was her first kiss, and, really, her first boyfriend. I’m not sure what lead to them breaking up, but they did, and I became his new love interest.
    “Except that Will was a guy, and I couldn’t figure out how he felt about me. I thought he liked me, but he was always talking about Kari, and he almost never called me or anything.
    There. Right there. Tiny little flicker in the aura. She’s going to lie about something. That little flicker. It's like the little signs before an earthquake. It’s a warning, and I’ve learned to recognize it.
    “Kari and I knew each other enough to say hi to, but we weren’t friends. It sounds crass to say it, but she knew I was her... um... successor, just as I knew she was my predecessor.
    “So I approached her one day to ask her a favor. Would she find out for me how Will felt about me?”
    Another pre-flicker. Getting closer to it. 
    “And she did. A few days later, she came up to me and told me that Will was definitely attracted to me, and she said she was happy for me and wished us the best of luck.”
    There. The aura completely changed, from a blue to green shot through with purple.
    “I smiled and hugged her, thanked her, told her I was sure we would be, and we parted company. She was... saddened by it, but she was happy to be the bearer of good news as far as that was concerned. She was always more concerned with the happiness of others than about her own, and giving me my happiness was what was important to her.”
    The purple and green faded back to the deep blue of her aura. She was past the lies now and moving on.
    “And that was Kari. She was a good person, and she will be missed. By everyone.” The young lady stepped off the dais, and transferred a kiss from her lips to the coffin via fingertips and sat down.
    That made me feel a little better. That lie. No one is that perfect.

Kari's Funeral

Which brings me, I suppose, to the first time I ever met Kari.

    The first time I met her was at her funeral.
    I like funerals. I like to see what people say about a person as opposed to the way they actually live their life. Often, I’ll attend a funeral, and then go back through the life and see the discrepancies. They’re always there. Always. No one is honest at funeral, which is a real shame, because in my personal opinion, the only way to truly honor a person is to be honest. Tell the world exactly what type of person they were and leave it at that. It’s not speaking ill of the dead, or being disrespectful. It’s being honest, which is what every person should want.
    I think that if they were truly ashamed of the way they lived, the speaking would be a penance. They’d pay for it by listening to what others thought of them, hearing the truth, and being forced to face and accept it, and absolve it.
    If they weren’t ashamed, they’d revel in it and move on. Music to their ears, and a balm to their (ahem) soul, which is pretty much what every dead person wants, right?
    Not that I’d know. I’m just a vagrant spirit, and I’ve never seen an actual real ghost. If anyone would have, it would be me, and I never have.
    Anyway, gone off the rails again.
    Kari’s funeral.

    Kari’s funeral wasn’t particularly special or ornate, or anything like that. The pastor spoke for a bit, and then asked if there was anyone who wanted to say a few words. A number of hands were raised, and the first one called was a lady, not that old, who was twisting a handkerchief in her fingers, obviously nervous, but she started speaking through her tears.
    Because I’m a smartass cynical jerk, I’m going to omit all the sobs and sniffs and tears. Enotions are for fleshies, and I don’t have the patience to write it all down. I’m honestly surprised I’ve gotten this far.
    “Kari was my best friend,” she began. “I knew her since first grade. I had forgotten my lunch, and she was kind enough to give me half of her sandwich, half of her apple, and, most shockingly, half of her pudding cup. Just scooped up the top half, put it on the wax paper with her half of the sandwich and gave me the actual cup. And the spoon. She ate her half by bending the foil lid into a scoop and scooping it up.
    “That was Kari, though. She’d give you the hair off her head if you she though you needed it. And did. She regularly donated to Locks of Love.
    “I don’t want to take up the entire funeral talking. If you knew her, you know how good she was.”
    A pause. I moved in closer to her as she spoke, and looked her straight in the eyes. I was surprised to see

Law 1- I can't interact with myself, or impact any events of my "Life."

It’s a basic rule of time travel, that. You can’t encounter yourself. One of the reasons time machines will never be invented There’s no way to reliably prevent it from happening. If the effect is impossible, the cause cannot happen. Therefore, even if you could invent a time machine, and placed no restrictions on where it could travel, you still couldn’t get it to work because you could take it back to enounter yourself, which you cannot do.
    Similarly, you couldn’t go back in time and alter the past. Doing that irrevocably changes the future, and who you are. You would end up not inventing the time machine, and then it all snarls, and nobody wants that.
    Tangential to that, you can’t go into the furure, either. Seeing the future- or rather, being there- no matter how small a glimpse, or how short an amount of time, sets that future. Locks it in place. Everything will end up at that point. Even if the second before, everything is nowhere near how you saw it, everything will, at that moment, snap to the position you saw it in, and proceed along that path.
    Obviously, since such an effect is impossible by the laws of physics, the cause cannot happen. So. No time travel.
    Sorry, geeks.
    But Ishmael, I hear you asking me- or would if my name was Ishmael, which it isn’t, and if you could talk to me directly, which I guess technically you can, but since you don’t know that I exist, and never will, you won’t bother, and you couldn’t hear me replying anyway, because you don’t work on that wavelength, so I will ask the question for you- how can you travel through time?
    That’s where we get, as Mrs. Slocombe was wont to say, into the gritty-nitty. I can travel through time because I can’t affect anything. If I travel to the future, I can observe what happens- the true flow- which I’ll explain in a moment.
    Humans can’t do it, because just by being there, even if they do nothing, affects everything. Their body displaces air, which may effect a developing weather pattern, or a harmless little butterfly, and then, the hurricane that would have sprung up in the atlantic and killed a thousand people, including a future tyrannical world dictator never happens, and said dictator rises up, comes to power, and kills millions more.
    Who wants that?
    I can travel to the future, or the past, because my being there displaces no air, affects no one. The Fleshy Physics don’t apply to me, so I get a pass.
    The displacement of air changes everything and locks it in. It’s the changing and the collapsing of the probability field between all the “What Could Happens” that there are that locks it in. Not the observing.
    As I said, I see the true flow of time. I see what WILL happen. Since humans can’t lock anything in place by traveling to the future, the future is fluid. Anything could happen, depending on what you mortals choose to do.
    I can move forward along that time line, fast-forward if you will, to see what happens next. I can’t just jump from one point to another. I can fast forward incredibly quickly, but I can’t, for lack of a better term, travel through time.
    I see what will happen, and I am powerless to stop it, move it aside, or change it. Which essentially means the future is already set, even though you fleshies have free will and can choose to do anything you want.
    Chew on that, too.
    Anyway, as a result of all this, you would think that I would have to be pretty dispassionate about the people that I meet, and the lives I observe.
    You’d think that.

Part 1. The Laws, and a little bit about life.

There are three basic types of rules, as as I’m concerned. The first type are the rules that govern my existence. There are the ones that no one told me I operated under. I had to work these out as I went along. Sometimes, the lessons were painful, most of the time, they were benign. I tried something, it didn’t work. To be fair, it’s entirely possible I was doing if wrong, and it is possible, just not in the way I was attempting. I know this is true in at least one instance.
    Incidentally, the only reason this little essay is three sections and not four is because it’s only been the once that I learned something I thought was impossible actually was possible and I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out the possible thing was impossible because I wasn’t doing it right.
    Don’t try diagramming that sentence, you’ll only break your brain. Not that anyone knows how to diagram sentences anymore. That’s another thing I’ve noticed over my long life- the dumbing down of EVERYONE.
    Hold on. Stop. Let’s jump back to the original level, before I went off on this irrelevant tangent.
    The rules that govern my existence. They’re not really rules. I suppose that’s a bit  of a misnomer.
    In the real world- the Fleshy World as I derogatorily refer to it- there is physics. Laws of Motion and Thermodynamics and blah blah blah. They cannot be broken no matter how you try, because the universe simply doesn’t allow it.
    Break something down as far as you can but you will never encounter nothing. There is always something else there. Molecules to atoms to electrons and protons and neutrons (oh my!) and from there to quarks and from there?
    Well, I could tell you, but why bother? Humans will figure it out on their own someday, and eventually, they’ll get down to the sub-lyson level, and THEN THEY’LL SEE!
    That was a reference to a movie I saw once. I wonder if anyone caught it.
    By the way, really want to blow your mind? Think about this. Take a rock. Any kind. Destroy it. Smash it. Break it down to it’s smallest constituent bits, then go even smaller- down to the lyson level if you have to. You will not find the smallest shred of anything that can be quantified as “Life.”
    And that’s fair enough. I mean, it’s a rock, right? Rocks aren’t alive, so why would there be life associated with it?
    Take a human. Any kind. Take a living breathing human and examine the body. Break it down to the smallest constituent bits. Go down to the lyson level if you have to.
    Let me know if you find anything you can quantify as “Life.” I’ve never seen it, and I’ve been down there, man. I’ve gone all the way down.
    Some people would argue this is (circumstantial) proof that humans have souls, and thus there must be a God. But if that’s the case, how are animals- which in popular belief (even among the church folk) don’t have souls- alive?
    Chew on that, Fleshies.
    Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I’ve gone completely off topic again. Where was I?
    Laws versus rules. Right.
    The physics of the spirit world are pretty much the same as those of the fleshy world, but there’s a few other laws that can’t be broken.
    Rules can be broken, of course, and I’ll get to the rules, mostly self-imposed, later on, but let’s talk about laws first.
    These laws, by the way? Not in any particular order. As they come to me, I guess. Those of you who like things prioritized in a specific way, or with happy endings, should probably put this down now.

A short prelude, prior to the main subject of my discourse

I think I'm going to have to be leaving Martin soon. He won't notice I'm gone of course, he'll just think that he's started sleeping a little bit better than he's been the last few nights.

That's fair, I think. I don't like taking rest away from people. Especially those whose only respite is the sweet oblivion beyond the wall of sleep. I put it that way, because I've been noticing that Martin has been growing more restless. He didn't shave today, and that's completely unlike him. He shaves everyday.

While watching this particular change in his demeanor, I felt a suspicion grow in the back of my mind, and slowly move forward. I hadn't seen him around, but I strongly suspected the Officiant was here somewhere. That is just sort of the effect he has on people, and Martin doesn't deserve his... attention.

So I spent most of this evening keeping watch. quietly, in an out of the way corner, and when Martin came home from work, I kept an eye out. Not on him. Watching the Officiant's target never does any good. You have to be sneaky.

I watched any reflective surface that Martin seemed to be facing, and sure enough, I caught a quick glimpse of the Officiant in the window of the microwave. Martin turned to see, but of course, there was nothing there. They almost never see him in front of them. Always in reflection, or out of the corner of their eye.

I mentioned it once to one of the Teliki, but they told me that there was nothing they could do. The Laws that I live under, and the Laws that he lives under are two different sets. I can do things he can't, and he can do things I can't, and the Teliki can do things neither of us can do.

So I made the decision to come out of hiding, and once again confronted him.

"You really should be nicer to him," I said. "He's not a bad guy."
The Officiant, as he always does on these occasions, spoke without speaking. It was almost like he could alter reality so that the words he wanted to say had been said, even though he had never really said them.
Nor am I, my little friend.
"Well, yeah, you kind of are. Besides, he's outside of your jurisdiction. You can't do anything to him."
No one is outside of my jurisdiction."True," I said, "but you have Laws you have to follow just as I do."
Without moving, the Officiant suddenly came forward, and was standing inches away from me. One second there, the next dreadfully and terribly here. A tendril of black energy emerged from his body, and lashed out at me, wrapping itself around me, holding me in place and he dragged me forward and upward to look him dead on.
Try. To. Stop. Me.
The tendril of energy was joined by a second. If not for your interference, I would have had the fortune teller, a third tendril, If not for you, I would have accomplished my purpose. But you interfere. Every time. More tendrils, all surrounding me. Then he hurled me away, sending me sprawling. Don't interfere again. I can and will destroy you.
When I got up, and looked around, he was gone.

I turned and looked at Martin, who was nonchalantly sitting at the table, reading a book and waiting for his microwave meal to cool.

So, like I said, I think I'm going to have to leave Martin, and find someplace else. But not yet. I've got some time. And he's not entirely right. He talks big, but he can't destroy me, any more than I could destroy him. We can, in his words, interfere with each other, but not destroy.

And before you ask, no, I don't know what his purpose is. Everything I've seen him do seems to be random. If he's building toward something, I have absolutely no idea what it is, or how to stop it, or even what I did to apparently stop it before.

On Time- for me and others

Time, for me, doesn’t matter the way it matters to others. Most people think time travels in one direction and there’s no going back, but that’s, strictly speaking, not true. Time sits still and everyone else travels along it. It’s like a moving walkway where your feet are bolted to the ground. You have to go where it takes you, because otherwise, you only hurt yourself and those around you. Maybe wreck the walkway, and no one wants that.
    I’m not bolted to that walkway. I suppose that’s the first thing to know about me. I can go wherever I want on it. I can walk backward at the same speed the walkway moves forward, and stay in one place, or I can go all the way back to the beginning, or I can go all the way to the end. I’ve been to both places. I know where it all comes from, and I know where it’s all going.
    I’ve also experienced a bit of it, participated in some. Not often, because The Laws prohibit too much of that sort of thing, but a little. Zak is a lot of fun to mess with. He never seems to get it, even though I’ve dropped all sorts of clues in his face. I feel a strange kinship with him.
    So, The Laws. The Laws are not explicitly stated anywhere. I had to figure them out as I went along, because there wasn’t anyone to teach me. When I, for lack of a better word, was born- when I Came Into Being- I had no idea what to do. I didn’t have a clue  who I was, and I  certainly didn’t know who the people around me were. I thought they were just sort of... you know, me. But later on. I spent a couple dozen decades waiting to Become, but I never did. It was one of those things that was finally beaten into me. It was a little painful, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t have any glands. Emotions, hormones, all that crazy human stuff you all seem to suffer from- I shouldn’t be able to feel any of it. I mean, I don’t have any thing to create that. But I do. I feel pain, and I feel sadness. I feel love and loss. I’m as human as you, except not. I’m something else.
    So, I suppose I’m going to tell you about the rules, and in doing so, I imagine I’ll talk about my life (my unlife?) quite a bit. I’m allowed to do both of those things- the Officiant won’t interfere with me for that, but he does like to interfere with me on a regular basis.
    I guess you could say he’s my other half. I call him “He,” even though neither of us technically have a gender. I think of myself as male, but that’s only because of where I came into being. He’s taken on an affectation of wearing men’s clothing, so I think of him as a he. He’s the only one like me I’ve ever met, and I don’t see him often, which is good. He’s... well, you’ll see. He likes to mess with people, and not in the same way I do.
    Anyway. Enough of an introduction about me, I suppose. You’ll learn more about me, and the Officiant, and probably Zak and Kari along the way. I don’t know that these stories will be in any sort of order, or if this manuscript will make sense when I’m done. I’ve never had a good grasp on what passes for sense among humans. Not being tied down to time gives you a remarkable sense of place. I mean, something happens for seemingly no reason, you can go back and see why it happened, or what will come of it, and it works out, usually, for the best. I don’t know why that should be- whether it’s God, or fate, or kismet or karma or whatever. If any of those things exist, I’ve never met any of them. God is as hidden to me as He is to the humans, and to the Teliki.
    I’ll talk about them more at length later.
    For now though, I suppose I should get to the rules.
    Let’s get started.

A little bit about me and the blog

My host’s name is Martin Grant. He’s an ad executive here in the city, and his life is pretty figured out. He’s thirty years old, single, no prospects, as near as I can tell. I don’t have access to his thoughts or anything, but there’s no pictures in his house, no mementoes on the wall. Nothing to indicate there’s a girl or guy or whatever in his life. He seems completely normal, which I guess is good.

In my life, I’ve met some messed up people. Some come from being born into bad families, some come from good familes and bad friends, some have good families, and good friends, but... outside influences... act upon them. I’ve met a few of those, and there’s nothing I can do to help them.

Martin’s just a guy. Lonely, single, not even a pet. Goes to bed early, wakes up early, works a lot. I stumbled across him one day through sheer chance, and he seems the kind of guy who would want to help me with my particular problem. I know he can’t- he doesn’t know I exist, or that I’m using him for my own nefarious purposes (joke), but I’ve seen him with his friends, and I think he’d be willing to help me out if there was some way I could communicate with him.

Yes, alright, yes. I know I could just leave him a message on his computer, but you know how that would end just as well as I do, and I’d be right back where I am, with no one to help me.

So, this blog. I’m not sure why I’ve taken up my metaphorical pen. I want to tell you about Kari, certainly, and I suppose I should mention Colby, because without both of them, I wouldn’t be currently embroiled in the situation I’m in now.

I also need to talk a bit about what’s going on in my, for lack of a better word, life now, so I may- ha ha- be jumping back and forth between the past and present quite a bit. Hope that doesn’t bother you- whoever you are.

Also, that joke I just made? You don’t get it now, but you will. Part of the fun of being chrono-nomadic (which is what I’ve termed my lifestyle) is that you can make punchlines before the joke.

(I should mention that I arbitrarily chose this date and this year to make these blog posts. I could have made them any time. I chose May of two thousand twelve because why not?)

That doesn’t mean I stay in this date and time. As I mentioned, I’m a chrono-nomad, so I tend to flit around, and visit other times. This can lead to certain amounts of embarassment, as you’ll see. Like the first time I met the Officiant.

So now I guess we’re talking about me a bit. You’ll need something to call me, so we might as well get that out of the way.

Call... me... Ishmael.

No, on second thought, don’t do that. That’s not my name. I don’t even particularly like that name. Bit old fashioned for me, really. Of course, I’m a bit old fashioned myself, so I guess it fits, and you could conceivably get away with calling me whatever you like, since, technically, I don’t have a name, but don’t call me Ishmael.

We’re going to be spending the next little while together, so you should know all about me. Of course, that’s what this blog is all about, I suppose. Who I am. Perhaps, more accurately, what I am. What I am, though, is a pretty simple question. When it comes down to who, that’s a bit more complicated.

It’s really kind of a moral quandary, that question. Jean Valjean asked it in the transcendent novel Les Misérables, and also in that excrementally runny, bloated piece of drivel that Mackintosh threw together. He learned of a man who had been arrested because the authorties thought he (the man) was him (Valjean). Valjean, who had a pretty cushy life at the time, was faced with a quandary: 1, keep up the cushy life and let one man hang for my crimes, even though I’ll get to go free and take care of all the people under my care, or 2, go and tell the authorities they have the wrong guy, because I am the right guy, give up my cushy life, let all the people dependant on me suffer.

Valjean ultimately chose to free the man and condemn himself, except he later escaped, so not really, and I want to tell you that I’ve been faced with that same kind of moral choice hundreds of times over my long life. Maybe thousands. I kind of stopped keeping track after Kari. It’s not like it matters which you choose anyway. Either way, someone is saved, and someone else isn’t, and either way, it tears a little bit at your soul, and when soul is all you have...

Sorry, Kari.

Hmmm. A rhyme. I’m a poet and don’t realize it.

Anyway, I suppose that’s a story I’ll get to in time. It’s not like I really have anything else to do.

An introduction of sorts

He's sleeping right now, so I can come over and use his computer.
He won't know. I always make sure to wipe out any sign of my usage before he comes around again. Clear the cache, erase recent history. You can't erase all of it, because if you erase stuff that HE'S done, and he remembers, he'll suspect something, and then he'll go all paranoid and start recording, and THEN I have to find a new place, and a new computer, and a new guy who's so alone and lonely that he'll let anyone in, even if he doesn't know it.
So I only use his computer when he's asleep and not aware of my presence. Also, it's one of The Rules.
I'll get to those, I suppose, but for now, I need to check and make sure he's not waking up.
Okay, he isn't. Cool. I've still got some time.
I suppose I should tell you now, by the way, that if he does start to wake up, I'll have just enough warning to publish this, and erase my presence before he shows up. If that happens, this'll probably end right in the middle of












Ha. Got you there. Anyway, it'll look like that. Not to worry, though, on the rare occasions when that does happen, I'll fastforward to the next time he's asleep and I'll finish the post. Promise. Unless something interferes. The Officiant might, or the Teliki, but neither of them know about... um... my friend. My host? Let's call it a host.
Anyway. I've decided to sit and write about my life, because I feel there should be some record, even if no one ever sees it, or knows it exists. So, in that way, it's like my life.
No one ever sees me, and no one knows I exist.