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EDITOR'S NOTE: Chinedum Richard Ofoegbu trades in big ideas. A futurist by inclination, the mundane trappings of the ordinary world hold little interest for him. The first chosen "apprentice," he was power without focus, the possibility of a finer world trapped in the circumstance of this one. To showcase his fiction writing, he chose the first chapter of a novel he's working on, and rarely slows down to explain himself or allow the less-than-prepared a chance to catch up. Best to strap yourself in, then ...
I rip through the ass-end of reality like a stray bullet through cardboard. Didn't hurt last time.
Eyes screaming, colors that must never exist assault every sense, synaesthesia burning across my brain like boiling concrete. The crack of doom and the voice of God bless me and annihilate me in endless waves. My skin ripples with thunder and -- somewhere -- I am thankful I cannot see it. The death of a thousand cuts, the fires of orbital reentry, the pain of a billion blue murders; them all and hell itself beside are nothing fates compared to this.
But on a deep enough timescale, all things end -- even this. The universe becomes a white that blinds, my heart beats me into submission and for a time, that is all there is.
Time. All there is.
Surprisingly, my eyes return first. Dazzled eyelids lift heavy as portcullises, frenzied blinking brings something plaid-spotted, something that used to be vision. My ears ring and my throat tastes of tinfoil. At length, clarity comes crawling back, grudgingly.
blue
A blue so blue screamifIcould it's a slap in the face fills the world and cotton, slow as mud, shuffles across. Tactile susurrus follows. Something like a beard bristles all about me. There's too much of it to all be on my face; it would appear that I'm lying in it. Proprioception kicks in. I am prone. Ergo, the blue is sky and a very pretty sky it is. To the best of this one's knowledge, hair isn't alive. Ergo, the beard must be grass. Smells now. A mélange greets these nostrils; odours kaleidoscope through my sensorium. Grass so fresh every inhale cuts my sinuses, air pure as springwater and there are other smells: sweat, pain, blood ...(?) -- a redolent procession that I wish wasn't so familiar.
Slowly, senses peel apart to velcro tunes, to sensation outside of eyes and ears, beyond them in all ways like the white space around comic book panels.
Now's the perfect time to watch some TV.
My Den is exactly as I left it; Sony Trinitron TV in the right hand corner, door to the rest of the Self Mansion in the left, rugged, obscenely comfortable couches everywhere, books scattered over the carpet and, of course, blurred photos on the walls in out-of-print frames. I "inhale" deeply and once-real smells echo in my nostrils. A thought and the TV is on, showing what I want to see: my activities before.
5'7 of muscle, ragged cotton, battered hiking boots; I-that-is-there am doing a kata, looks like a particularly lively Hapkido sequence to these jaded eyes. Surrounded by an uncut copse, it is a tableau from any martial arts movie. All you'd need is a waterfall nearby. Here, a cloud of wood splinters, there the blur of controlled kinesthetic chaos. Knife-hand, block, parry, thrust kick. Wood. Trees shake, leaves fall. I am watching myself watch myself watch myself. Ever stood between facing mirrors?
There!
Something just happened. My guy stops, a bowstring in wartime. His head darts this way and that, alert, alive, dangerously intent.
There!
He whirls, hands at the ready but in no stance that would make sense in a self-respecting dojo: fingers cupped over each other at the hip like something out of a video game. For seemingly dramatic effect, winds sweep away from him as if in retreat. Now that I can see his face, his eyes disturb me -- for they are wide, white and quite insane.
There!
Shadow flits by. He pivots, stance maintained, tense as an unfired heat-seeker. Dust devils wheel madly about him as if in the throes of exorcism, lifting leaves in their wake. Even those on the trees strain at their branches. More shadows ...
Here! There! Everywhere!
Surely, I am under attack, Viewpoint Self thinks, getting into the roleplaying spirit despite myself. The shadows appear again and again, seemingly abandoning stealth. Bizarre as it seems, they are ignoring me/him/us and confronting each other. Even now, one hurtles past on a parabolic trajectory. Trees prove no obstacle; he plummets through them as thought they, and not he, were illusion.
Speaking of which, mine is broken. I burst out of TV, out of Den out of Mansion; there's an impression of narrow escape, doors slamming behind me, airlocks perhaps. I have been struck.
Back on the grass, I note with idle interest that all my senses are back in working order. There is a man across my torso. Apparently, he hit me. Of even greater interest is that the man appears to be dead. For the moment, I blink away the reality of his clothing, ignoring it altogether; a twitch of arms and legs and he's flying off and I'm on my feet. Same motion. Pretty cool.
I take a ride on the wavefront of my senses. Everywhere except in front of me, something is happening; the ground shakes, shockwaves of air and steel blast the day, the contents of veins stain the grass. I see nothing of this because my back is turned, yet little is hidden from me. Of what I can see, a field stretching to the horizon, bounded only by peaks, perspective tricks showing them to be mountains in the far distance. Only the screams and roars finally convince me to turn.
It is war.
Slowly, my eyes angle downwards, reluctant but resigned, and I look at the corpse. I must confront what they rejected moments ago. His head bears a mask, clearly stylized to resemble the imagined face of a mustachioed demon. Red and white. More red now. The mask is set in a helmet, the form of which is well known to anyone who's seen a samurai movie. Or Star Wars. The conclusion is inescapable.
I missed. Goddamn it!
What the heck is this assignment again?
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