elanya

Wow. I bet some of you didn't think I would do it. I know I wasn't sure I'd be able to... And yet, I just posted my very last chapter to the NuRPG. I had a couple people look it over, Longpig and my friend Max. Max said it was a bit sudden, but that's to be expected. Sas said it was a happy ending, with a sharp edge. I'm posting it here, because I feel it is appropriate, though it is a bit long. I've invested so much into this RPS, and I think I got a lot out of it. Certainly my writing did.

I write this because I hate loose ends, and I felt this was one I could tie up. It was something I had been planning all along, and I am just lucky I could still use it here. I did leave many other loose ends, but Daniel was always my big project. I started out writing first person perspective stories with no personal pronouns. It was hard, technically, but it worked well. As Daniel became more human, and more self-aware, that changed. It always seemed strange to me to go from a more complicated to a less complicated style like that, but it was required.

Anyway, here it is. Please feel free to leave comments, even if you don't really know what is going on...

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Daniel Graves, Closure.


I think I must be dreaming again. It seems important that I am aware of this. I am cutting a piece of steak I just brought in off the barbeque into two sections, one for me, one for her, Anna. My wife. She is dishing out a salad she made into bowls from a set of dishes that we got from a distant aunt of hers as a present for Christmas the year before. She is humming quietly, some bubblegum pop tune she heard on the radio on her drive home from work. At the research station. She is wearing a short sleeved yellow blouse and her favourite pair of faded jeans, because it was a casual day. Her hair is matted with earth, her face a sallow shade of white. There are purple-blue circles under her sunken eyes, and the muscles in her cheeks have begun to shrink so that she can't quite close her lips properly.

"I left a girl in prison today, " I hear myself say. I set the smaller piece of meat onto her plate, beside an aluminum foil envelope filled with slicked potatoes and onions, also barbecued.

She sets the salad bowl back in the centre of the table, and passes me my smaller dish. "Another one?" She takes her plate without even looking at me, sets it down, and reaches for the blue cheese dressing.

"What do you mean?" I wonder if she knows something she doesn't, because we never talk about work. Or at least, I don't. It was something we agreed, or that I made her agree to. I had to. And of course she knows something she shouldn't. This is a dream. That's why she looks like she is dead.

"Oh, well, you know dear, you are always leaving people in prisons of one sort or another."

I frown, because I don't know what she means. I start to ask her, but it isn't that question which comes out. "We have had this conversation before, haven't we?"

She winds the cap back onto the bottle of dressing and sits it down. She pushed her plate to one side, laces her fingers together and leans towards me on her forearms. "You know what I mean, Daniel. You are going to leave Rae too. Look at yourself. Look at me. Look around you. You're clever, you tell me."

But I don't... I stand up and walk towards the patio doors. Outside, there is nothing. No garden, no well groomed lawn, no crocuses, no veranda. The glass doors mark the end of the world. But I came from out there. I walked into my dream, from outside the glass. Anna comes and stands beside me, and laces her mouldering hand with mine.

"Do you see it now?" She leans her head against my arm. I can feel the thinness of her flesh...

"Are you really dead?"

"No more than you are, Daniel."

We stand there for a minute, looking out the windows. Can you have deja-vu in dreams?

"Is this when things started to change?" I turn to look at the woman on my arm. She already looks more alive. She looks at me searchingly for a moment. There is a flash of calculation behind her hers. Anna was never calculating, but this isn't really her. This is a dream. My real Anna, my real wife... I left her, someplace. I never meant to, but it wasn't my decision, was it? I can't imagine wanting to leave her, or making that decision. But I let someone else make it. Why?

"Yes," she answers after a moment. "And no. Not how you might think." She reaches up and brushes my cheek with the back of her hand. "Your face is like a statue. But you are right, this is a dream.... almost a dream. And I can read you anyway."

"I'm starting to figure things out now."

"Yes. You did. Now. In this dream." She is trying to direct me, make me figure something out. And I remember this dream, as it unfolds, and this isn't it. I know how it unfolds from here.

"This... is a memory of a dream?"

She hesitates again, and nods. She bites her lower lip, and remains silent. She acts like Anna, or, her mannerisms are the same, but she doesn't think like her. She speaks like her, but says things Anna never would. Is this just another dream? Or something else?

"You broke barriers here, Daniel. Remember?"

And I do. I remember Anna, as a corpse, standing here, talking to me, preparing me. Like she is doing now, only not. The dream replays itself, briefly. I remember anxiety. She told me that I had to move forward, or things would never be alright. She squeezed my hand and stepped back. I reached out to the glass in the patio doors, and it shattered, and the house disappeared. And I stood in the middle of a great black void, with her at my side, and watched as things came rushing back. Things I had forgotten, or been made to forget. Parts of my mind that had been cut off. Parts of my life. Standing in that landscape, I could see the ruins of the barriers that had been erected, weakened on the outside, and shattered from within.

And the shock of it hits me again, as if for the first time.

My life.

I had been recruited by the New World Order in University. It had also been when I met Anna. She had been dating someone else at the time, but it hadn't lasted. I had been working on a joint degree in philosophy and computer science. She was attending medical school to become a veterinarian. We fell in love. She introduced me to things worth having in life that I had never considered. She was full of life, and loved freely and completely. She animated in ways that I still can't understand, any more that I can understand what she took from me in return. This was at the same time I was being approached by the Technocracy. They told me things about the world that made me want to protect it, to protect her, especially. Most of those things were true, I think. But they realized that I wouldn't join if it meant losing her. She drove me, more than anything. And maybe it was good timing, but my life has taught me never to believe in coincidence.

A new program had been developed, to test the psychological strength of the New World Order agents. The working theory had been for years that it was best for operatives to work completely outside of society, to police it but not to belong. And someone wanted to test that theory. It had been hypothesized that having a life connection to the world would give people more drive and focus to deal with the kinds of situations we did. Cults, reality deviants, all sorts of things, some believable and some not, trying to control the world for their own nefarious purposes. Whoever developed this hypothesis also believed that encouraging this sort of attachment would make it harder to see through the lie that the Technocracy was really any different. The stress of living a double life would keep them distracted, and also make them stronger...

But not everyone would be an appropriate candidate. They needed people with a strong anchor. And so I was chosen, because I seemed promising, and Anna inspired me to blind acts of... She inspired me. I was her hero, though she could never know. We were married, we agreed to some rules. She knew I worked for the government, and that I wasn't allowed to talk about it. She respected that. She got a job at the Seattle Institute for Veterinary research, which was actually a Progenitor lab, though she had no contact with any of the projects. Then she became pregnant.

And everything was fine until her brother, who had run away from home when he was fifteen, came home. Home to her, at least. He had continued over the years to send her postcards from exotic locations, such as Brazil, Mexico, Greece, Turkey, and other closer places such as western Canada and east coast USA. He arrived just after our son was born. I wasn't there, I had been called away on an emergency raid on a vampiric snake cult in Victoria who had begun to mass produce and market narcotics with particularly nasty side effects to children. It seemed important at the time, and Anna wasn't due until later that week. I missed his birth. I don't even know what she named him.

When I arrived home, I got her messages, and went directly to the hospital, even though it was the middle of the night. I wanted to see her. I felt anxious. I thought it was nerves, or guilt. It might have only been.

I found her room with no problem. No one stopped me in the halls, because I didn't want them to. On her floor, there was no one to stop me, anyway. I wasn't really aware of that at the time. There were people in her room. I heard them before I saw them, speaking some language I didn't understand. It may have been Greek. The language itself didn't make me as nervous, or angry, as the way that it was being said, almost chanted. I opened the door, looked into the room. I had nothing with me, nothing at all. I had been going to see my wife, my newborn son. What would I have brought a gun for?

Two of the people in the room appeared to be human. The other was not, it was a large black-furred werewolf, watching my Anna sleep. It looked relatively old, and scarred most likely from battle. Anna's brother, David, who I recognized from photographs was holding my child in his arms while a strange woman in a grey cloak stood over him, chanting in Greek, marking his quiet infant face with a feather dipped in black mud. The wolf noticed me first. They were probably all the same. I don't think Anna was even aware they were there. But I don't know. Maybe she did.

I ran, because I couldn't think what else to do. That sort of dangerous strangeness wasn't supposed to intrude on my life, not my life with Anna. I was unprepared for the shock. I called my superiors. I had to report it, to keep my child, my wife safe. And I never saw them again. Someone made the call that the project was a failure. And it was erased. Blocked, at least. Until now. Or then. This is a memory or a revelation, not the real thing.

Being sent, or brought, to Nas Unara meant that I was beyond their control, and that world was so different than mine, that I had to learn to think in new ways. I had to learn to think again, to become a person instead of a tool. To realize and discover my Self. And more. And to change things there, too. And finally, to return.

Home, Earth. Back to the Ivory Tower, for debriefing. I didn't want to find myself here, but I didn't initially cope well with the rules I had learned to live without. I'd become a reality deviant myself, and so, they had caught me.

I open my eyes, I realize they are already open. I understand. The equipment, the lights, the people hiding behind their one way glass. And I am not going to tell you any more. I am going to go home.

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"We've lost it."

"I told you it was only a matter of time, that he would fight another intrusion.

The observers watched Agent Graves carefully unstrap himself from the chair, really taking in his environment for the first time. He had been dressed in grey, a mild irony due to his
technical rank, track pants and t-shirt, and slide on shoes.

"I'll call security."

"No."

"He is dangerous! We can't reprogram him, and we certainly can't let him walk away!"

"He isn't dangerous. He understands."

"This is against regulations. We can't-"

"Yes we can. We know where he will go. We can monitor him. This is a delicate time... We can't force anything on him, not any more than we already have."

"What? You can't think he'll come back to us! Not after what we just saw..."

"I don't know. It is possible. In time."

"So we just let him go?"

"I'll take the responsibility, but I am in charge. I say: let him go."

"Yes doctor. I'll assemble an amalgam to track him."

"Good. But as I say, I know where he will go."

"Where, then?"

"We know where the woman is. He'll want to find her. He'll want to go home."

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END.