BP&G - The Mad Wizard

[joegoda]

Pockets sat in the deep black of the space between everything and pondered... everything. "I want to see the world", he though to himself.

He let his mind drift between packets of odd color and bubbles of shifting spectrum. In those moments, he remembered he was nothing but his mind, body left sitting in a chair in a mountain, tied by wires to what he was now.

He chucked a deep purple color, and somewhere on the planet, he felt a cloud build and rain small yellow flowers on a field of bright green. He reached a hand he knew he didn't have and felt the rain as it fell, velvety soft on his non-existent hands.

The rain came to his vision as tiny bursts of sparkling gold and he smiled. The world smiled with him and there was a valley where the people, for no reason at all, stopped and laughed at how fine life was.

This valley interested him, and he focused on it. It was more than just a valley, he noticed. It was an oddity where the stuff that made up the quantum universe he was in bubbled to the surface and flowed up, up and into the air. He could see the energy connections of the trees, the grass, the rocks, and the trees, connected to the people, the animals and the very buildings.

He was amazed to find that there were inhabitants, living in the valley, who could manipulate the very same quantum material that made up the energetic void in which his consciousness was floating. Raising a curious eyebrow, Pockets watched invisibly as the flux was manipulated and bent, twisting into other shapes and merging back onto itself to form... other things.

"Interesting," he said. He filed this information away to look at later.

Turning his attention north, he flowed as a wind across a mountain, and at the spot where the immense forest met a wide plain, he came to a large village. It looked vaguely familiar, and so he lingered, a small cold spot hovering above the peak of one of the houses.

He watched the people come and go, and finally saw a face he remembered and he knew where he was. This was Forest End, the place where he and Bags had met Grizelda. The familiar face belonged to...

"Cookie!" he whispered, and flakes of purplish snow formed and melted.

Long ago, and far, far away his memories drifted, lemonish and yellowish and tartly sweet, liquid gold upon his tongue. It was the last place he could remember having a decent glass of lemonade. Cookie, who ran the kitchens for the cathouse there, had always had a warm spot by the fire, a fresh glass of cool lemonade, and conversation mingled with old wives tales and homilies. She was the closest to a mother he could remember.

She looked up at the clouds, at the sky, at the place where Pockets' focus was sitting. He saw her squint against the sunlight. She was older, of course, but he couldn't tell how old. He knew he could find out, if he checked the records for her birth, but somehow he felt that would be cheating. He moved from his airborne spot and drifted down until he was next to her.

"Grizelda lives," he whispered. Cookie started, dropped the basket she was carrying and her mouth formed a big 'o'.

Clapping her hands to her ears, she shook her head and cried aloud, "No! No more voices!" She fell to her knees and a few of the other women gathered around her concerned.

"Cookie!" one of them asked, "What's wrong?"

The old cook looked up at the girl with tears in her eyes. "Nothin'." she said. "Just old memories coming back to haunt me. Just voices in my head again." She got painfully to her feet and said, with a weak smile, "You know how we old women get." Cookie tapped the side of her head. "Crazy, you know? Hearing voices."

She picked up the basked where it had dropped, and looked fearfully back toward the spot where Pockets' voice had come from. "Just hearing voices, from the past. That's all." She walked carefully back toward the house.

Pockets, shocked by Cookie's reaction, withdrew far away. It was a curious thing, her being frightened like that. It was something he had not expected. He had expected her to be... he realized he thought it would be like an old family reunion. He also realized he should have known better. Cookie probably thought he was a ghost. He drifted through the walls, exactly like the ghost he wasn't, to check on her.

She was sitting in the kitchen, and Pockets could see her old shoulders shake. She was crying, quietly, so the other women couldn't hear. In her hand, she held a small golden locket, which contained a tiny bit of hair.

"Aw, my Grizelda," she was whispering, "I hope it is indeed true that you are alive, and I hope you are well." She sighed mightily as she stood and moved to a large cook pot, bubbling on the stove. "I know why you had to leave, girl, but I do miss you greatly, that I do."

Assured that Cookie wasn't suffering much more than sad thoughts, Pockets pulled back to give her privacy. He drifted through a doorway into the large dinning room. A thought came to him then, and he moved over the table.

Focusing a very tight beam of thought on one of the linen napkins, he caused the fabric to grow older, turn brown in a very specific pattern. The pattern created rough words and the words read:

"Cookie. Grizelda is in a kingdom whose name is Tears at the northern edge of the great desert. She is well and with child and married to Bags. I miss your lemonade. Pockets."

He turned his focus to the air around the napkin and cause a bit of wind to blow it off the table, across the floor, and through the doorway to the kitchen. He heard the old woman say, "Now, how did you blow in here?" A few moments later and from the kitchen Pockets heard a gasp, and a cry.

He flew back into the kitchen to see Cookie, with the scrap of cloth in hand, yelling at one of the girls to come attend to her. Pockets hung in the corner of a cobweb while he watched and listened. The young girl read what was on the napkin and asked Cookie what it meant.

"It means," Cookie said, "That perhaps I'm not all that crazy after all." She hobbled toward the doorway, and said as she went, "It's time I had a vacation." She stopped and turned to the girl. "Tell the masters that I have a... family matter to attend to. My girl is going to have a baby."

Pockets let go, and drifted up, up, through the roof, back to the clouds. He was tired. Bone tired, if he had bones. Brain tired, if he had a brain. He felt good though. He drifted in the void and realized he had done something very, very right.

This tiredness, though, bothered him. It bothered him a lot. It was something he had never felt so intensely before. He had been unconscious. He had been dead, or nearly so, and nothing had been as... painful as this. He had questions. He searched the great memory that was available to him, and found no mention of what being in this quantum state was like. Apparently, neither Shockley nor Overhill had thought about making personal observations about how they felt.

"What stupid heads." Pockets said to the pulsing flashes of nothing. "I would think that there should be something left behind for those of us that have to go through it. Something like a journal or a diary." There was Fletcher, though. Fletcher, in one incarnation or another, had been here since the very beginning.

Pockets opened his eyes and looked up at the bearded face. "Fletcher, we need to talk." Pockets realized that he was very cold and that he had been sweating.

"I daresay we do, Chester." Fletcher was wringing out a towel. "If you continue to do... whatever it is you are doing out there you will burn yourself out in no time." He clucked his tongue, disapprovingly. "There isn't enough time to find a replacement you know. Probably won't be another one like you for a generation or so."

"Are you telling me that I can't talk to anyone? That I can't touch my friends? Ever again?"

Fletcher shook his head. "Ever again, Chester." He paused. "There was a time, before this planet was very old, before the matrix had become so ... diversified, that Richard Shockley could speak and show himself, briefly. Even he found it difficult."

"Since then, however, this planet has developed pockets where the energy has pooled and places where it has weakened. There simply isn't anyway to stabilize enough energy to maintain anything remotely physical without causing permanent damage to you. There is something about the physical interaction with other living creatures that causes a feedback loop and will literally short circuit who ever sits in the chair." He placed a hand on Pockets shoulder. "I'm sorry, Chester"

"Well, hell." Pockets said. "That just sucks." He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. He was going to have to figure a way out of this.

"Fletch," he asked. "This... quantum matrix stuff. It can only be powered by a human?"

Fletcher stopped polishing a dial faceplate. "Are you still here? You should be out there making sure that the matrix doesn't disorganize."

"From what I've seen, it's doing pretty good all by itself. Answer the question."

Fletcher appeared to think about it. "When Shockley set it all up, in the beginning, it was designed to use the imagination of the chair's occupant to push the flow of energy into a coherent form that would stabilize the ecostructure of the planet."

"Making the place livable." Pockets nodded. "Okay, I can see that."

"There was a side effect, however." Fletcher continued. "The imagination of a human being contains a good deal of... oddities. Shockley called them dreams. These dreams created a great deal of some of the stranger things on the planet."

"Like Gods and Goddesses? Like six-legged orange stripped animals with really big teeth?"

"Oh, if that was what was created, I'm sure that was probably considered mild." Fletcher paused again. "Shockley had an associate, Charles Pentell, who was transformed by one of Shockley's dreams in to a satyr."

"Full body transformation?" Pockets asked.

"Indeed. It was a demonstration of what full focus of the matrix can do."

"Sounds like an unfocused demonstration of what a focused matrix can do." Pockets pondered. "And you say this happened while he was dreaming?"

"According to the oldest memories I have, yes."

"Did he ever create anything like that when he was not dreaming?"

"Nothing appears to indicate so."

"So...," Pockets mused, "It was a totally subconscious reaction." He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "Okay, Fletch. I'm going back for a bit, but I'll be back if I can think up any more questions."

Fletcher nodded. "Just to let you know, Chester, your body temperature is one hundred and three. Do try to take better care of yourself. I don't think you can take much more of this abuse."

Pockets smiled wanly. "I'll do my best, Fletcher... Say, next time I show up, think you could have some lemonade?"

Fletcher looked puzzled. "I'm sure I can do something..."

"Good," Pockets said. "I promise it won't be for a while though. I've got some thinking to do." A tiny smile came to his face. "I do have one more question, though."

Fletcher seemed to sigh and asked, "Yes?"

"How smart was this Shockley guy?"

-*-

In the vastness of space, above the planet, hung two moons. The largest was marked with a large number of craters, and was named Bigun by the human inhabitants of the planet it orbited. The other, a smaller moon, hung like a pearl in the sky, not a crater or a pit was on its airless surface. It was called Lilun, simply because it was the smaller of the two.

At one time, the moons were roughly the same size. They carried an orbit that positioned them near enough to each other that their combined gravity was treated as if it was from one source. The two moons spun and danced around each other in a wondrous oddity of galactic Siamese twinism, and, had there been any one on the planet to remark on it, they would have been hard pressed to determine which moon was which.

The planetary system continued this way, this incredibly balanced way, for millennia and all was as happy as an airless, lifeless planet can be happy. But the Universe, in its infinite wisdom, or perhaps its incredible perversity, decided that this should not be so. There was, at one time, a space-faring craft carrying inhabitants to colonize a new world in part of the known human universe. There was also, at one time, a cluster of meteors, or to be quite truthful, a broken comet, hurtling through space at it's own leisurely pace of a couple of thousand miles a second. It just so happened that the two times coincided, and it also just so happened that the directions the two, the inhabited craft and the wandering comet, were diametrically opposed to each other and the trajectories were such that they were indeed, destined to meet.

Punctured and limping, the spacecraft had lost its ability to navigate, and had the crew no idea where they were going. This was not a funny situation to the crew, and no passenger was even a little joyful over the prospect of being lost in the vastness of the Universe. They were able to continue their journey because the propulsion of the ship was the careful metering of a particular quantum particle, or wave (there is still some debate), called the graviton.

The concept was to point the stream of gravitons toward your destination and have it pull the craft at near light speed, and in some cases, beyond light speed, by twisting through pockets of energy between the universes, because, as everyone knows, there are more than one. Consequently, the craft found that it was moving further and further away from the known universe, moving faster and faster as the gravitonic stream latched onto objects further and further away.

Now, the Universe does indeed have a sense of humor, and the universe also has a sense of justice, and what the Universe found to be very just indeed, was that on this hazardous and lost flight, was the man who discovered the method of gravitonic manipulation. This particular man, a very bright man, it can be assured, knew that eventually the ship would find its destination and come to a stop. As anyone can tell you, it is not the fall that kills you. It's that stop at the end.

As all good things and all bad things do, the journey did come to a stop after a rather frightening time. The destination was this airless, uninhabited planet. The planet was too close to its star, so the surface was not only very hot, it also had a rather disturbing tendency to shake violently at times. In other words, it was not something that the colonists on the craft would like to live on, or in fact, could live on. Regardless, it was destined that a crash would happen, and that is exactly what... um... happened.

The particular man, who was also a peculiar man in being so very bright, had formulated a thought since the beginning of the events that caused the craft to lose it's navigation and find itself so very far from home and so very far from ever being found. The thought was simple, to those who thought it. And since he was the only one that thought it, it was simple only to him. The thought was in the form of questions and the questions were these:

"What if the gravitonic stream was manipulated in such a skillful manner, was fine tuned in such a way, that rather than reaching out and taking hold of far distant planets, the stream instead focused upon very small things, such as electrons, protons and neutrons? What if, using the incredible amount of skill derived from a combination of the computational power of a computer, which adds and subtracts numbers at an incredible rate, and the pure imaginative power of the human mind, which can conceive of things that no computer could ever conceive of, these tiny parts of matter were combined, or indeed, recombined to form the very matter that would sustain human life? Things such as air, and water."

Those were a couple very large of questions, indeed. And they were being asked by perhaps the only man that could answer those questions. This was just as well as the questions may have been fairly simple, in the sense that they were in a language most people spoke, the answers were something that had very little language, as the answers were done in the form of action at the speed of thought.

So, using matter from one of the moons, the planet was recreated into a form that would sustain life. The man had hardwired himself into the massive computer that controlled the gravitonic stream and set about the task of saving the crew and colonists. To those on the ship, this was nothing short of magic as they watched an arid and lifeless planet sprout green and liquid.

Of course, an inhabitable planet was one grand effect. Another was that the moon, from which the borrowed matter was taken, developed not only a surface as smooth as a bald man's pate, but was decreased in size by a third. Because of this, this peal onion of a moon gained the name Lilun.

One other affect that became rather notable was the rather unusual sprouting of things that heretofore had been relegated to the realm of fairy tales. Richard Shockley, while in the chair on that very first creative night, fell asleep, and when he slept, he had dreams. Wondrous dreams of childhood stories of magic.

When he awoke, and realized what he had done, he reprogrammed the system to recognize the sleeping human mind and to ignore the creative force that sprung from it. The effects that had already been done, however, remained unchanged, and so, magic had come to the planet, as well as all the odd beasts and wonders of that one night of dreaming.

Richard Shockley, the man in the chair, who was doomed to stay in the chair until his death, had created a living planet from a dying one. He sat there for hundreds of years, letting his mind hold the planet together. He believed that, if left to its own devices, the planet would revert to a lifeless state again in the matter of a few centuries, as the web of the gravitonic matrix dwindled without the motivation of a human imagination behind it.

There had been one other. Robert Overhill, who dreamed of overthrowing Shockley and recreating the world in his own image. A world run by Centaurs, which, coincidentally, Robert Overhill happened to be. Shockley allowed Overhill to kill him, knowing that it was the only way that Shockley would ever find rest.

Overhill found that the job was a bit larger to get a grip on than he expected. Robert Overhill was nowhere near as bright as Shockley was and could not grasp even the smallest nuance of gravitonic matter manipulation. Indeed, it was quite possible that there would never be anyone that would be able to come close to the sort of control that Shockley had over the gravitonic matrix.

It has been mentioned that the Universe tends to have a sense of humor.

-*-

Pockets floated above the crumbly surface of Bigun. He focused his attention on the airless and grey surface and, in his mind's eye, he could see himself squint with focus. If his bodiless state could have had any sort of human form at all, the tip of his tongue would have been poking out of his mouth and his fists would have been scrunched up tight. Pockets was very, very intent.

Moments passed with no results. Suddenly, a tiny, microscopic moon pebble, smaller than the smallest grain of sand, winked out of existence with a poof of dust. A few seconds later, a pebble, the same size and shape as the one that disappeared, winked into existence with pretty much the same poof of dust.

"Woo hoo!" Pockets whirled where he was hanging. Or, he would have if the ability to whirl, to hang or to say the words "Woo hoo" were something he could do. As it was, he could do nothing of the sort. He was just a rather tightly focused combination of things that had no definition other than that which he, himself, gave definition too. He only knew he was Pockets because, after all, who else could he be?

"Woo hoo!" he said again. "Well... maybe just a small woo hoo. It wasn't very impressive considering the size, but damn, that was impressive because it could have been nothing at all!" He focused his concentration... or it could be said he concentrated his focus once again. And waited. And... waited.

Again, after what may have been hours, or seconds, or minutes or weeks, another pebble collapsed with another poof of dust, followed by the recreation of another pebble and even another poof of dust.

"Well... Woo hoo," he thought to himself with a little less enthusiasm than before. "I was hoping for something a bit... bigger." If, floating as a named void above an airless moon, Pockets could have had a body that had lungs, he would have sighed. He would have rubbed his hands together, and squared his shoulders. He would have once again, squenched his face up and focused his eyes.

"Baby steps, Pockets ol' boy. Baby steps."

Comments

[journiey.livejournal.com]

GO POCKETS GO!!!!

[capi.livejournal.com]

More, please?

((hug))

[joegoda.livejournal.com]

Of course, Dear. I'm writing slower because this was a totally unknown part to me. I had no idea what Pockets plan was and he was very slow in telling me.

Truth is, I had the other story I was working on, I suffered some Burn Out from the November 50 thousand word competition, and I'm just now getting my literary imagination and joy back. I had to read 2 Terry Pratchett books to get there too!

}}Hugs to you!((

[joegoda.livejournal.com]

The general concensus from the four people that read this story was that it was a horrible thing to have Pockets fade from the story. Pockets agreed, so he has decided to fix it himself.

[capi.livejournal.com]

((( hugs ))) i'm sorry the Nov competition made you burned out! I was hoping it would, instead, have fired you up!! Ah well. ((Hug)) If Terry Pratchett can help, so be it!

I've been reading whatever i can get my hands on, and i've been frustrated that it's mostly junk. I have read too much during my ten year illness; i'm too picky. *snort* I rarely *don't* finish something i start, but sometimes i fume a lot getting thru it. *L*

Anyway, i'm glad your joy returneth!! Very glad!! Can i share it with you?? We've got sunshine here, but joy is slower. Spending the afternoon with you would do it, tho. *grin*

[joegoda.livejournal.com]

If a doppleganger would work as well, sure! Unfortunately, I've got to be at work very shortly. You can have whatever part of me you can grab, regardless of the fact you might not be able to grab any of me. I mean.... I'm yours!

The November Nanowrimo is a very intense competition. I was also working in a genre I've never worked in before, and just like last year where I pushed out 87 thousand in a month and a half, this one drained me. After all, I'd been writing steadily for about a year, give or take. Like Forrest Gump, my running was done, for a while. I won't say I'm entirely back, and my writing will still be a bit slow (Happened when my shift at work changed), but Pockets needs to finish his journey, for sure and true.