Confessions of a drinker student abroad

Friday, August 26, 2011

Home

It isn't every day you realize that you're leaving home, and that the place you're going to, is so familiar and so alien. The roads remain, I remember the trees, but something is gone.
It isn't every day you realize that a good friend and childhood hero isn't away on vacation, you haven't seen them not because they're away at school, but because you never will.
It isn't every day you question your existence, your quality, your worth, and come up wondering what exactly it was that made you into this mediocre copy of your imagined self.
It isn't every day...just today.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Doctor Gatsby the Great

Bear with me, you will understand in the end.
Dedicated to my Dad and my older Brother.

When I awoke I was on the freeway, standing in the interior breakdown lane along with a crowd of people. I wasn't sure what we were all doing there, everything in my life up to that point had been a rush and a blur, I knew I had to cross the lanes of speeding cars, but not matter what the stream of metallic pace never let up. I ran along side them, trying to match pace, trying to go one lane at a time, but it was worthless.
Suddenly there was a commotion farther along the highway, a crash, an explosion, and the river of traffic came to a halt, I seized my opportunity and raced across and up the gravel path at the roads edge. I could see the mansion up ahead, the front garden strewn with children's toys. Something was wrong with the statues guarding the gate, they were different, and one was missing, it should have been there, I knew it, but it was gone.
I was in the lower garden now, alongside the pool, chaos decorated the patio, someone was missing. As I came up the steps I heard them talking, he was gone, the cybernetic servant, he had staged a daring escape, even destroying the statue of ____ the Gray that guarded the front gate, and whose ghost now stood in the garden demanding to know what had happened to his body.
I knew who would know, the Doctor, he always knew. I raced up the building to his suite and entered. He was kneeling by a case, he explained that in the case was a meteor fragment, taken from the one that had caused the earlier explosion. It contained oil, similar to our oil, but infused with cyclamates, he was very clear about that, the combination of nitrates and something else caused the oil to become enriched with cyclamates, which was what made it more potent. He took a sample that had been expanded into an orange fuzz and dropped it out the window, when it hit the ground there was a powerful explosion. With this oil we could change the world. But they were coming, they were after him and his children, there wasn't time to explain, the robots would be there soon.
I ordered the children into the back room and hit next to the door, waiting for them to enter. When they came in I was totally unprepared for them, they looked like us, only with sparking wires extending from their cheeks and across their mouths. I let them come in, only when the entire squad was in did I attack, rampantly destroying their horrid countenance. In the bathroom one of them entered the mirror and hid behind the Doctor's daughter's reflection. I stepped to the side and fired at an angle that would pass by her reflection, killing the assassin. "Geometry, bitch!" I muttered.
Suddenly he was there, the servant who had escaped, he lifted the body of one of the assassins up for me to see, it was a man, not a robot. When I turned the Doctor was smiling at me, his children were the robots. It was then I understood, Dr. Gatsby was trying to take over the world, the oil was for a bomb.
The servant grabbed me by the hand, we had to escape, we ran out to the balcony, the servant jumped into the gap between this and the neighboring balcony. As he fell he used his hands to check his momentum at each story. I knew my human hands could never take the battering of descending that way, so I jumped to the neighboring balcony one story down, descending by this method I fell one story at a time, but the building began to curve inwards, I wouldn't reach the ground in time to escape. I dropped myself faster and faster, but by the time I reached the bottom I had curved in to an interior basement, directly in the path of the escaping Dr. Gatsby and his robotic children, all looking for revenge upon 'The Evolved'.
I fled through the side door, reaching a car park, and raced around the corner of the brick building, trying to hide behind the smokestack as the army of children marched past. Suddenly there were lights everywhere, the servant had gone to fetch the military, they shot the evil doctor and captured the children. I asked the servant how he had gained his independence, when he had learned to think for himself and recognize that destroying the world was wrong. He looked at me and responded, "It's because when I was created I was made using PYTHON." I was incredulous, he adamantly repeated that he was different, because his AI was developed using Python. Everything froze.

It was at precisely this moment that my brain called out, "Bullshit!". It wasn't when the cars were driving the wrong way on the freeway, it wasn't when a statue had a ghost, it wasn't when The Great Gatsby was about a robotic servant abandoning his family because Dr. Gatsby was a maniac. It wasn't when I shot a guy in a mirror, it wasn't when the children were robots, it wasn't when the building curved in on itself, it wasn't when outside gardens became industrial parks, no, it was precisely when a robot told me it was developed using Python that my conscious self rose up and said, "I cannot take this anymore, I must be dreaming, and it has grown too farcical." Not even mentioning the the servant was the guy who played Johnny Storm, or that one of the kids was Sean Young from Bladerunner.
None of this was invented after the fact, none of this is exaggerated or in anyway stated other than as it happened and I experienced it, proving that 1: My subconscious is geekier than 99% of people and 2: Inception ain't got shit on me.