Warren was a bald man with a wiry red beard. He stood across from the dead screens in the dim room. The florescent lights suspended above flickered sporadically like boot-crushed stars mashed into strobe-light boxes.
'HERE THEY COME!' he belched, puzzled. His face was bolted into a permanent scowl. He carried a pre-laser era projectile weapon. It was called a machine gun, and he held up to his chest as though it were a vital extension of his nervous system.
'Why am I so bald?' he asked. Silence met his voice. He said no more.
The Steam-Thing was a multi-engined frigate. It lurched free from a plastered teal green warehouse of rusted rivets and tin capped ventilators. Once the ship rose high enough, tethered cables shook loose from its anchor-ports. The hallways and engine rooms within echoed like the metallic clack of gears churning like clockwork. The crew braced for ascension.
'SHIVVY THE BALAST SCOPES, AND RUDDER UP THE GRAY SHILLINGS,' yelled the captain, who was very dignified., though it was hard to say if anyone really knew what the man was talking about. His face bore the mark of a thousand missions and a million psychic wars. His strategy was both adaptive and unbreakable. His name was Captain Stan and he was a survivor of the Apple Wars, which had taken place more than 80 years ago. He knew that televisions were involved in that war. Stan didn't remember those days very well, but his memory was improving. He knew if he remembered too well, it would shatter his mind. They thought his brain had deteriorated so much that it had been replaced with a block of tofu, a highly electro-active tofu equipped with pre-programmed neural circuitry. Even the hospitals had written him off. But even then, he remembered things he wasn't supposed to, and every time he did, a backup program dug through his subconscious mind. The program felt like death, suicide, and impending doom. It promised termination, one way or another. It promised humiliation, embarrassment, and mockery for not following the narrative. It didn't matter what he remembered. Blue flags. Stars. Geometric shapes. None of it had even been real. There'd been no tank, no man with a distinctive dark crow's peak hair who uttered strange things in words that at the time weren't able to be formed into distinctive images and feelings. He didn't remember the water or the screen, or the faces or the fog, the frog, the steam, the ripples of the water. The smell... oil. The branches or the tree on the tv screen that grew and shrunk in different patterns. It was a state of unreal consciousness enhanced by psychotropic drugs that prevented future recall. The spiritual ones would tell you that you couldn't access them without significant training and understanding of how to access higher levels of consciousness to reconstruct mental imagery from sensory perception encoded even though it had been so long ago. What was on the screen? Failsafe triggers cut away the images and grabbed away at the mental imagery like black hands with white outlines. Cartoon voices. The water. The tank. Falling in and out of consciousness. The trigger words and colours being used in unison - the script being read - to evoke feelings of unity and one-ness, One peace ... etc... repeated - the recorder repeating the same phrase over and over again, rhyming endlessly, endless loops of rhymes and phrases cues with colours, triggers, and images. Flashing and strobing. Color programming - sheets of expanding stars - burning towers - liquid steel - blue and white flag - one piece - one peace - the whole world unite in one piece for the greater good and everyone will be there - holograms - secret - blackout - 4th level - sign - bird = hawk = blue = air conditioning --- fan... deep rhythmic hum trigger -
He tried to map out the way memories were formed to understand how to access them. Something to do with action potentials, electro-chemistry, magnetism - changes in of spatial arrangements of genes within neurons transcribe 'engrams' accompanied with a crude array of scribbled notes
The bridgemark was in the air for no more than five minutes before the engine started to catch fire. Captain Stan tried to remedy the fire by smothering it with engine lackeys, but their malnourished bodies only served to feed the flame. It was a disaster waiting to happen.'HAUL THE HEAVE HOES AND BLOCK THE ROLLAWAYS, AR' IN FOR A RAGGLEPATCH!'
None of it made sense, even to the engine masters.
The shadowy assassin crouched in preparation for the assault. His mind was a black diamond rubix cube compared to the surrounding cacophony. Sucked away, again and again, like spectre ghost ice-cream vans. His eyes shone like twisted metal, and his spine bridged out like a blue hedgehog. 'Cotton candy,' he whispered. 'Tone dead.' The catch-phrases invoked a spiral of light., and the vortex opened. It was a temporary bridge into the fortress, but only to the outside. The gravity well wasn't strong enough to penetrate its ensorcelled walls of the ivory fortress. Enchanted by ghosts, he thought, as the vortex consumed him. Like most wormholes, it was kaleidoscopic and fancy like a merry-go-round, but the wench was there, with her Godzilla head. 'I HATE THIS MOVIE,' he decreed. The Bridgemark lurched dangerously to one side before crashing into an Orphanage factory. The assassin made it out through the vortex no less than one macro-second before everything exploded.
Into the ivory fortress~
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