Captured in ice

Njoro opened her eyes.
A throbbing pain radiated from the back of her head.
At first, she couldn't orientate herself at all.
It was dark, apart from a small, strange light shining out from atop a tall figure standing in the middle of the floor facing her.
The light was as cold as the walls of the snow cave she gradually recognised as the place she’d been in before something happened to her. She'd never seen such light before.
"Who are you?" she said to the lightbearer.
The figure said nothing.
She could sense an intense negative energy filling the cave. All blocked-up. Nothing flowing freely. The creature was human like herself, but was totally out of balance. She could sense this effortlessly, so the imbalance must have been very apparent.
"Do you want something from me?" she asked.
The lightbearer still said nothing. It just stood still, radiating fear.
Then it said:
"When I want you to speak, I will ask you to."
She thought this behaviour most peculiar.
She decided to shut up anyway.
The off-balanced human was preoccupied with staring at, and fiddling with, some small device it wore on its left wrist. The device let off the same kind of cold, lifeless light that shone from atop its head, but this one seemed to have a wider spectrum with different frequencies of color radiating from it. The flickering dead colourplay lit up the face of the strange human. Judging by the body build and voice, it was a male, and she saw that he had covered large areas of his face with more artificial-looking materials like the one on his wrist. He also lacked all traces of facial hair, something she found quite repulsive for a grown male.
She decided to give up gathering further understanding of the intruder from the exterior, and rather examine this thing from the inside.
Assured of his total immersion in whatever he was doing with the strange instrument, and content after he rudely assumed that she would not speak unless he wanted her to, she closed her eyes and reached for the Innerworld.
She could see the flickering of millions of lights like tiny stars as the veil tore, and suddenly another world opened up before her inner eyes. She moved towards the hairless device-man. His soul looked even more stark than his exterior. It was as if all his yin energies had been blocked out of the system. Suppressed. Suffocating. Dying.
Njoro had trouble breathing as she got closer to him. She knew it was lucky she was in her dream-body and didn't need air.
Very strange. His whole being seemed uncontrollably dominated by male powers. Just as she was about to look further inside, her mind suddenly broke her concentration:
Pi!
She'd been so preoccupied with trying to examine the intruder that she'd forgotten all about Pi.
Where on Earth was he?
She abruptly left the Innerworld and opened the eyes of her physical self.
She could hear her body breathing faster than when she left.
The light-head didn't take notice. He was still staring into the thing on his wrist, touching it with the fingers on his other hand in tiny, rapid movements.
Insect-like movements, she thought. Not very graceful.
She grabbed the chance to look around inside the cave.
Then she saw it.
Mungpuk.
The Eskimo's dead body lay on the cave floor in the darkness by the wall. She hadn’t noticed it before. A gaping wound beneath his chin led to a wide patch of dried, dark blood covering his upper body.
It was horrible.
She could feel a terrible sorrow fill her soul, and tears pushing through.
What a primitive, savage creature this must be. She couldn’t even imagine how a living thing could do this to one of its own. To take another human's life required the ability to totally block out all one's birth-given empathy and natural connection to the collective consciousness, and by performing this action the Savage proved that he had long since crossed that line.
This meant that she was facing a great danger.
If all empathy and connection to the Soul of Everything was blocked, she had no means of communicating with the creature on any profound level.
She hastily blessed the soul of her passed-on friend and travelling-companion, and then decided to leave the matter of grieving until the situation allowed for it, and instead search for Pi’s whereabouts.
As there was no-one else in the cave now but herself, the Savage and Mungpuk’s dead body - no other presence, living or dead - she felt great relief.
But she was still anxious about wherever else Pi might be.
He had to be somewhere out there. Alone. Hopefully not hurt.
She decided to take another look from the inside as the Savage was still busy.
Eyes closed. Mind still. The flickering of lights, and once again the Innerworld opened its gates to her.
She was floating across the vast, blue landscape. She could feel the tiny pinpricks of crystal icicles penetrating every pore of her facial dream-skin as she flowed through the chilling air. She filled her lungs with the clean coldness, and even though she knew this was her senses on overload giving her sensations that weren't really there, as they were on the physical plane, she enjoyed every second of it.
Njoro simply loved sensing. It didn’t matter what her senses told her, as long as they were present.
As she crossed the ice-clad dreamland she looked all around thoroughly for any kinds of tracks, like recent movements of life-force, imprints on the dreamweb of passing emotions, basically any trails she could possibly follow. But there was nothing there. Not even signs of a stray bear or some other lost polar animal.
And certainly no sign of Pi.
He had to be somewhere out here.
At least he had to be alive, as there were no signs that any being had crossed over to the far side as she could see, and she knew the Savage wouldn't have been able to move him or his body to a very remote location in so little time.
"Hey, witch! I'm talking to you."
She rushed back to reality and opened her eyes.
"What do you people eat?"
The Savage was standing in front of her, shining his cold headlight straight into her face.
She felt very uncomfortable.
He spoke Global quite well, but with a very strong Middle-Northern accent. He must be from the Nova Baltica area, she decided. That's where the most fierce outbreaks of revolt against the House had taken place over the last few years.
It would also explain the strange devices he was carrying.
The main argument in the Middle-North for declaring independence from the Global Unity Circle was down to the resistance they met against their urge to speed up the technology race.
"You probably wouldn't enjoy it very much", she answered.
"So it's all stuff like the smelly lamp here, then? That'll be lukewarm seal-gut stew for dinner, then?"
“Actually we had plans for whale blubber tonight”, Njoro said. “Whale blubber and lime-juice. It’s very nutricious and keeps the scurvy away.”
The Savage said nothing. Then he pointed the headlight down, and she could once more make out his hairless features. His attitude was as unpleasant as before, but at least he had decided to stop blinding her for now.
He pulled some boxes out of his sack, opened them, and started eating the contents.
When she kept looking at him without a word, he said:
"You hungry?"
She shook her head.
He raised his eyebrows and just continued eating. After a while, he said:
"So, tell me. Where's your other friend? You travel in threes and twos, don't you? Law of five.”
Njoro said nothing.
He continued: “The first entourage had two sorry souls in it, so that automatically makes yours a party of three, right? Funny how your superstition makes it all quite easy for me, isn't it?"
Njoro froze from the inside.
"Are you going to tell me, or do I have to make you?"
"I don't know." Njoro said. "I honestly don't know."

04-08-2008

Vix woke to the alarm of his old bedside clock.
It showed 06:55.
The date showed 04:08:08.

He rushed out of bed, opened his laptop, and there - just as he had feared ever since the weirdness went down in April, but never actually suspected would happen: his blog had already been updated.

It read:

Hi,
Can you see me here?
Am I now?
Or am I in the future looking back?
In case I am, please try sending a confirmation from the past.
If I'm not here, then no problem.
Thank you.

"This is totally fucked up.", he said aloud to the empty room.
Beneath the text was a link to the track by The Barry Cack Ensemble he'd uploaded back before the summer.
Or in the future.
Back then.
Which meant just now, actually. A few seconds ago, to be more precise.
The link showed zero plays and zero downloads, so it must have been just posted. Not that his blog had many hits anyway.
Maximum weirdness.
He knew he had to do something. And quick.
He hit the 'add comment' button, and wrote:

Oh shit! Yes. I can. You are most certainly there. Or I am, or was there... Or here? Double-shit! Possibly looking back, yes, but more probably from the past, as I'm here now - in the present, I mean. Oh, this is so totally out there.

He gave up, and decided it was better to make a new post, in the present time, as if to cancel out the one he just had read from the future of the past.
He wrote:

I don't know if this is good or bad.
I am here, I was here, and I will probably always be here.
All at the same time.
Maybe there's still hope?

Then he posted "Disco Computer" by The Hex Pistols.
The lyrics went:

Disco Computer
Take me to the future

Never before had a song felt so in place.

What the hell was going on?

The Savage exposed

Mac moved slowly towards the second camp of the House of Lhasa entourage. He had taken out the first party at the previous camp a few hours earlier.
The Eskimo back there had given him quite a hard time, but the House Warrior had been an easy prey, once the dogs had passed out due to one of Mac's gas-tubes. The gas only meant they would sleep for a few hours, but in temperatures like these sleeping almost definitely meant never waking up again. And anyway, sleeping or dead, they were out of play. Without the dogs, the House Warrior had no waking fellow souls to connect to with his mind, and therefore no-one to alert him of the intruder.
"That's the problem with his kind", Mac thought to himself. "Too bloody dependent on others. No self-sufficiency."
He had quickly taken the Warrior out with his knife.
Effective and to the point, and once again aided by the goggles he'd been provided, together with all the other goodies from the R.O.S.E. arsenal of tech: Another hard argument in the ongoing debate among these Ancients concerning their fear of technology.
The Eskimo had been more difficult. He reacted in a split second to Mac's attack on his cave-mate and had been on him in the next moment, trying to wrestle the knife out of his hand in the darkness.
The very darkness that Mac didn’t have to worry about.
Eventually he had managed to win over the knife and swiftly slit the Eskimo’s throat, blood pouring out all over and making crazy fireworks of blue and green flash inside his infrared goggle view.
It had been kind of pretty, Mac thought.
Now he was moving in on the dogs of the second party.
The direction of the wind came straight towards him, and the canine watchers had no clue of the intruder sneaking up on them.
Same strategy, he thought as he closed in, gas-tubes armed and ready. Why change it if you keep winning?
He felt the blood rush to his head.

Njoro woke with a feeling of total terror filling her entire soul.
There was no sound of the dogs. Everything was quiet. Not even the wind was there anymore. The whole cave was still dark.
Still, and filled with the most terrifying fear.
Then she realized it.
Someone was inside the cave.
But it was far too late for a warning now. As the thought hit her, something else did, too.
Hard.
For the glimpse of a second she felt the taste of blood spreading in her mouth.
Then everything went black.

Mac double-checked every inch of the cave through his night-vision. There was no living thing in there except the unconscious House Witch lying at his feet and another dead Eskimo.
He could sense that something was wrong.
These people never used to travel in twos. They avoided too many even numbers in their entourages, and as the other group consisted of two members he expected this one to be a threesome. The Lhasa people were much too entangled in superstition to go easy on these matters, so something must had happened that made them take extraordinary measures on this trip.
It just wasn’t right. They were far too dependent on both their superstitions and eachother to take risks like these.
He couldn’t help but wind himself up on the topic yet again.
All this was their own fault.
Their ways didn’t allow people any kind of privacy or individuality, and that’s probably why the climate in the Middle North had changed like it had for the last decade. People were ready for something new. They were tired of the talk of 'the old ways' and the constant reminders of how to live, how to breathe, how to fucking stand when pissing. It was all 'well-meant advice' of course. Nobody was obligated to do anything at all.
That was also part of the problem, maybe the biggest one of all.
This endless struggle for harmony.
And their eternal mantra of how fucked-up things were before the 'Age of Restoration'.
More like the Age of bloody regression, if you asked him.
Nobody did, though.
He was a simple man who had a simple job to do, and that's how he liked it. No questions asked. No headaches.
But he had to admit that now that new groups like Mr. Sykes' organization Research On Soul Evolution had started working on unraveling the past in a more thorough way, he felt that some kind of progress might once again be the steps for mankind.
It was merely the question of dealing first with the obstacles to progress that these people represented. They never seemed to give in their resistance towards the world spinning around, and what irritated him the most was that, in spite of their shortcomings, the Traditionalists always seemed to be one step ahead of the game when it came down to digging up information from the past, even quite useful information.
But when they did find something that could have been of value, it was always all about 'making it work for the common good of mankind' - if they dared to take a closer look at whatever they found. Most artifacts were just given silly names and put it on display in one of their sacred spaces in the Golden City, located far away from most of the globe’s population high up in mountains of the Far East.
What's the problem with wanting to exploit knowledge?
To advance? Get ahead?
They would probably never understand the claustrophobic boredom they evoked in any middle-northerner looking for some excitement or change.
Couldn’t they at least recognize the worth of just some technological advances R.O.S.E. and their competing organizations had come up with during the last few years?
Which reminded him:
Why the hell couldn't he pick up the missing third person on his WristSat?
He couldn't have gotten far if he had left just before Mac arrived, something that must have been the case. Could it be that they had some kind of warning anyway?
It was weird still.
They were so afraid of the weather that it was very unusual that they would dare to move anywhere in a storm like this.
He decided he would just have to wait here in the cave.
They wouldn't let a pretty young 'Sister' like this behind.
He’d best keep her breathing, but tied up. She would most certainly try to use her skills to call on her missing companions when she woke up.
The smell was killing him. Burning walrus blubber.
"What the hell is wrong with electricity?" he thought, tied up the unconscious House Witch and lay himself down to have some rest.

As he was sure the R.O.S.E hunter was sleeping, Pi came out of the dream-hole.
His body had been standing beside the Savage ever since he entered the cave. He had been warned of the attack from pictures Sha-Ton had sent from the far side of the Dreamtime. His blessed brother had also given him the message that he himself wouldn't be coming back. Not this time. Not with the broken body the Savage had left him with.
Not until it was time to struggle through another birth would they meet again.
Pi looked forward to see him, and wondered what lives they would hold on their next crossing of fates.
He had also been given the message that most probably the Savage's attack wouldn't harm Njoro more than that she would be thankful to have been so lightly hurt, but that she'd surely would become furious when she - in the close future - would wake up and eventually know that Pi had let it all happen.
Surely she would forgive him when she understood his plan.
Surely.
He would have to move fast. The third party who took the alternative route would have reached the destination by now.
The R.O.S.E. hunter would have to meet his fate, and Njoro would be scared, but would come out of this stronger than ever.
He quietly went outside. The dogs were all dead.
It was not a good situation at all, but the weather had lightened up, and he could use the moonlight once again.
He started walking.
“You’ll be fine, Sister Njoro,” he whispered to the freezing night. “Just fine.”