Western Psychologist

The Psychologist sat in his big leather armchair drilling his small eyes into the next patient who sat shyly on the opposite side of a giant wooden desk. Despite the amount of years he had spent pursuing this juicy career the Psychologist felt extremely tired. It truly had been a long long day and all the people that came and went all took their time, all spoke too much, and all spilled out their problems one after another, one after another, one after another.

The Psychologist exhaled a hard sigh.

"How old are you?" he asked the young man.

"Nineteen. Will be twenty, soon"

In the minute of silence that followed the Psychologist blinked once, at most. His eyes were pulsating as dust landed on them but the Psychologist was far, much-much too far from all that. He stared across the giant wooden desk at his patient and couldn't help but welcome the blood rushing to his face.

"Get up," the Psychologist said.

"Escuse me?"

"UP!" barked the Psychologist.

The young man jumped to his feet, startled.

"OUT!" yelled the Psychologist. His face wasn't red anymore, it was PURPLE. His eyes flashed long hairy bolts of lightning and large droplets of spit jumped out from between his distorted lips and flew across the room. "Get out! Get out! Go!"

The patient staggered backwards, stumbled a small piece of furniture, fell with a loud crash, by a sheer miracle did not break his face, scrambled back onto his feet and ran, RAN for his dear life.

"And don't come back! EVER!" the Psychologist bent in half over his side of the desk as he yelled after him. He shook his small fists in the air and, as the door slammed, he added: "You come back when you're forty! You hear me?"

Never a Second Chance

As Sarah Argon opened the door to her living unit, and the latter with a fizz wheeled sideways into the wall, she thought that perhaps today was not the best of her days. For starters, she felt groggy and tired because her body had gotten too little REM sleep the night before. The dormitory chamber had yet another flaw last night.

She could, of course, have used a dream simulator that very morning or one of the famed soul regenerating pills but that, in today's standards, would have been equivalent to intaking about fifty cups of coffee worth of caffeine. Her physical self mentally protested.

It was a fun thing to do back in the days of her youth, to experiment with the ways that one could trick their own brain into thinking they were positively productive. And while many of them had indeed worked, even for adults, being twenty-eight years of age Sarah was way past the point when her body could safely rehabilitate from a harsh session of experimental masochism. She was way past the peak of her biological development to, for instance, engage in the famed and medically prohibited uberman sleeping schedule or searching for REM sleep replacements all for the price to stay awake during the twenty-four hour period of the day.

Tough was the life she used to live where she came from. It was even tougher here. It wasn't always easy to tell others that all was well when it wasn't. It was even harder to achieve intimacy in an acquaintance with somebody. The whole idea of friendship had been obscured and drifted far from what she had been used to. But hardest of all was to accept the idea of life behind masks itself, to live it freely and never seize wearing one, to show trust to those that had been born into this world, those that had it in their blood all their life, those that could easily deceive and sometimes even lie to those they loved.

Sarah stepped over the threshold, threw the heavy bag off her shoulder and leaned with her back on the surface of the door as soon as it stopped sliding back into place. She closed her eyes and exhaled blowing away some threads of black hair hanging down in front of her forehead.

She could bet she would have had the same thoughts 5000 years ago when the world was no different. A bad day was a bad day and, no matter how technologically advanced, sophisticated or beautiful the world had become, nothing could change the way she felt.

She woke up that morning feeling perfectly normal and refreshed. The dormitory chamber in which she slept that night had located the moment in time during which her brain passed through a stage of sleep most comfortable to wake up from, calculated it to be most optimal with respect to the hard-wakeup timeout she had set the night before and sounded the alarm, which, quite innocently, was two hours too early.

Sarah was half way through her second cup of coffee when she saw what time it really was. She could barely help herself not to spit out the mouthful all over the kitchen table. She felt a great fatigue as she watched the clock for the next several minutes along with the quite vivid and realistic images that played in her mind, images of her cracking up just after the noon.

She knew it was too late to go back to bed as she was already half way through her second cup of coffee and although she could compensate for that amount by counter-caffeine pills she knew all too well the impact the overall effect would have on her body would be more that devastating. And logically enough the next thing she did was pack her things and get out the balcony door onto the exterior platform of her apartment on which herflyer was parked.

She peered at the dawning sky that roared from civilization. Traffic was extremely heavy at this time and even after all the years she went through in this world, Sarah was still not a morning person. She wasn't used to maneuvering her vehicle through the vast rivers of flying machinery that rampaged through the city at this early hour. She could, of course, have used public transportation but the last time she had waited for an empty vertical capsule or a vacuum train had her even more so appreciate the incredible luck she had had on the day she received her flyer license.

As the years went by she did very much get used to getting around by her own means, as far as that didn't involve waiting in traffic for too long. Apart from her time at home and apart from her time at work as long as there was little traffic steering that machine through the space of the city had been a thing of leisure for Sarah. As she turned down the opaqueness on her flyer windshield and stared out into the three-dimensional maze of flying caravans she knew that the leisure she would get would actually be closer to a nightmare. How she wished these silly vehicles had autopilot built in!

Truth was that in the far past, as far as several thousand of years ago, such self-piloting vehicles had been introduced to the human society on numerous occasions. They had quickly become popular and much quicker they had become too popular. The number of vehicles on the roads, and eventually in the air, exponentially increased over the following years as society became richer and the demand for public transportation fell like a rock as both a cause and effect of the new technology.

However, it had always been in human nature to develop technology that humans themselves couldn't fully understand. To satisfy the upset automobile market the manufacturers had been installing cheap and relatively unreliable autopilot computers. Unsophisticated as they were, a vehicle possessing one would be more likely to cause accidents than as if it was driven by the most inattentive and unskilled of all drivers in bothprematural or overelderly age category. Consequently the number of accidents both on the road and in midair skyrocketed and the United Government of Earth had soon agreed that perhaps there had been a good reason why obtaining a driver's license had been such a painful task.

Following the worldwide ban on the autopilots for personal vehicles the real auto pilot systems, the ones that actually worked, would henceforth only be installed on large aircrafts, and, eventually, spacecrafts such as interstellar cruisers or heavy transport ships. The issue of their accessibility to the general public was decided to remain closed until better times. Those times never came. And even now, in the year 7000 AD, no vehicle carried a system capable of letting its driver to take on a role of a passenger.

And now sitting behind the wheel of her flyer Sarah wanted nothing more than to feel like a passenger.

"You could use public transportation," she said to herself.

But the thought of waiting in that line up just to see the unwelcoming doors open of a train stuffed with people like a box full of tiny cereal finally made her step on the gas.

Metal Threat - Chapter 1

I didn't know where down was. I could feel a cold hard surface on the back of my head. But there was no point of reference. I could have been standing up against a cold wall, I could have been attached to a cold ceiling or I could have been lying on a cold floor. All was indifferent. A thick fog lay over my mind.

I am going to have to get used to it, I thought.

What happened? How did I come to be so disoriented?

But most importantly, WHO AM I?

My head was empty. I couldn't remember who I was, WHAT I was, nor where I came from. I didn't even know how to move!

Darkness. I could not see a thing. Seeing things? Yes, I had a sense of sight. I had other senses too. I FELT the cold surface against the back of my head. I SMELLED the air which was... inorganic, unnatural, unpleasant. But the sense of sight was the most important one of all of them, I was sure of it now. If only I could see something beyond the void in which I was submerged...

Enough, I though. I have to acquire my sight. What must I do?

I didn't know.

Darkness... Silence... Void... Why was my head so empty? Why was this discomforting?

Silence. Yes, there was now silence. I was aware of it. Something was missing from around my head. I more and more sensed the discomfort at this absence.

Wait! All this time I had a head! What is a head? It is a part of the body... I have a body also?

And I somehow knew that the head was the more important part than the rest of my body. Because I was seeing from the head!

WAIT, NOT SO FAST!

Pain. Thunder. Beyond the darkness was light. It was white and blindingly bright. So bright that it pierced my eyes like a blade of a knife... Eyes? Yes, I had two eyes. And I had to close them, fast. It HURT!

I didn't know how to close them.

I didn't know how to move!

I screamed. It was probably the weakest of the moans but to me my scream seemed like the sound of all suffering in the entire universe. Because to me I was the only thing in the universe. Because to me I WAS the universe.

My scream came from within me and made me aware of my throat and lungs. I felt like an ancient machine, grown with rust, that was now put back into crackling action by its old and forgetful master. And as the long-aged gears creaked back into action the master would recall their sound from the backs of his century old memory.

I tried lifting my arms... Arms? Yes, I had two of them. But why two? It didn't matter, the picture was getting clearer. And I was indeed lying on my back, on something hard and cold.


...


At last, I got up. At last, I was STANDING. Indeed, STANDING, which meant on my two FEET. The word FEET was associated in my mind with a pair of lower limbs that were somehow convenient to STAND on. Although seemingly illogical and irrational but standing on my two feet did not throw me off balance.

I tried to WALK. I tried to move my left leg forward. WALKING, I thought, means alternating the stance between the two feet in hopes of achieving a velocity and performing translation on the surface of the flat ground. I did just that, but found the idea to be incredibly inconvenient as a moment later I lay flat on the ground with the metal surface making an imprint into my face. If this is called WALKING, then I am no good at it.

I used my arms to get up. With a loud grunt I pulled myself back onto my feet and stumbling made another attempt at moving forward. As I fell again, I came to a logical conclusion that I wasn't moving my second foot fast enough. My philosophical feel on this matter, however, was sharply abrupted by the pain of my chin smashing back into the metallic ground.

I grunted again, even louder. Swinging my head from side to side, I reconsidered this. If walking meant throwing the comfortable two-feet stance off balance I wanted no part of it. Maybe CRAWLING would do, I thought. Yes, CRAWLING, which meant moving on all fours. I wouldn't need to work so hard on keeping my balance and trying to remain only on two or more often, should I say, ONE foot.

And I started crawling. Slowly, moving limb after limb (it was very difficult to coordinate their motion) I was able to provide myself with SOME vector of velocity. Not a fast one, I must add, but it was good start. Very soon, however, I found myself inconvenienced by the inefficiency of the moves I was making. It occurred to me then that trying to walk had indeed been worthwhile.

With a grunt I got back onto my two feet. It was much harder to keep balance this time, maybe because my muscles were tired from crawling. I fought on and moved my left leg forward. A thought sparked in my mind, as to why did I always start moving with my LEFT leg? I wondered if it meant something. I also wondered if my having such peculiar thoughts meant anything too. How do I know that a creatures such as myself should be walking on two feet and not on two arms or all fours?


...


Presently I was running. I didn't bother asking myself how it came to me so quickly, after being unable to walk, not for a meter, not for half a meter. It was not relevant. Not at this point. It seemed to me that I was build for doing just that, RUNNING. Nothing else made any sense.

RUNNING meant walking so quickly that at each step I would be lifted in the air for a split second or two. This, in effect, allowed to acquirea significantly great speed at a relatively cheap labour. And if it had been so damn efficient, it made nothing but sense to use it for traversing the length of the world I found myself in.

I suddenly felt a great passion for exploring and analyzing this world, for taking in the information about all the geometrical shapes that stood rising out of the flat ground, for feeling and smelling the textures they were made of. I felt like a small child who had just learned to crawl, a child that would satisfy their curiousity about the surrounding world at any cost.

How was I able to draw these analogies? I wondered where my knowledge came from? I wondered how I knew about children at all, or how they develop. What was a CHILD?A small, tiny youngling of the same species as myself. But what species am I? I did not know.

It brought me joy as my position changed with every flying second, as I took in new things, new textures, new smells, new surroundings. Then, like a wave, it passed and my curiosity was gone. I sensed the uncomfort that one usually senses when they take in redundant information.

I stopped and looked around. All around me was the same metal desert, long, flat and grey, smelling distinctly of metal, the unnatural and inorganic fume. Not made by nature. Alien to me.

I was PANTING. PANTING meant breathing heavily. Indeed only now I noticed how tired I was from running. My sprint, it appeared, was not the most optimal way of transporting myself around.