Moment in Time
by Michaela Wills
"I don't know
What words I can say
The wind has a way
To talk to me.
Flowers sleep
A silent lullabye
I pray for reply
I'm
ready.
Quiet day
Calms me
Oh serenity
Someone please tell me
Ohmmm, what is it they say?
Maybe I will know one day.
I don't know
What words I can say
The wind has a way
To
talk to me.
Flowers sleep
A silent lullaby
I pray for reply
I'm
ready."
The last note drops off, floating away from me on the air. In this place I cannot call it wind, for there is no movement. I find it strange. This particular stillness is something I'm not used to. It's different than the inactivity of space. The endless expanse of nothing in space feels right, while the deadened air of these ruins feels wrong. Even in space there's a sense of life and energy. This is simply dead.
There is something to this place I just cannot possibly explain, but I can try, although I know words can never adequately express them.
I am lost in this vast world. I have always felt so. With Gilliam and the Outlaw Star and her crew I find a little of myself. I don't know why and I don't know how. It is like everything else in my life. My life began with a sudden conscious awareness. I was never a child, I did not grow up and learn as Jim and Gene did. I simply semiconsciously knew how to walk and speak and navigate from the time I first opened my eyes. I have always been so. Everything about me is based on the instinctive and half-knowledges.
I wish I could be angry for not having . . . a childhood, but I'm not. Even in a continually growing child form I do not think that I could have been a kid. There is too much mystery within this form for me to not have matured at an abnormal rate. In a way I suppose I should be grateful for starting out with the form of a young woman on the edge of adulthood. My strange brand of maturity is not so strange in a near adult as it would have been in a growing child or even a young adolescent. I see how they act. I would have been odd to them: Another Jim Hawking.
Beginning to exist, in a way, it is like waking from an endless sleep. Perhaps it is why I sleep so little: I am afraid I will sleep through the important events. I can sense all that is on the horizons and I wouldn't want to have to start all over again in a couple hundred years after forgetting most of what I have gained now. I know a little about me. It is not enough to satisfy my curiosity, but it is something. I am Melfina. I don't want to forget that after falling asleep.
I say all this, because of this place. I know I'm a bio-android and previous to at most a few years ago I did not exist. Yet I don't feel that way. I think there is something more to my programming than human emotions, feelings and thoughts. There's something alien inside me, a place deep within my psyche that is untranslated, latent and waiting. I, myself, my conscious mind cannot touch it: My own personal Pandora's box. This box contains a mind of its own. It contains my past, the one before I became Melfina the bio-android.
Now here, in these vast and lifeless ruins that latent box is stirred, like something in it is alive and aching to come out. I wish I knew how to release it. I want to free it, I long to. I almost had it earlier; when I unlocked the signal from that wall. I sensed it and I knew it. My actions were instinctive, like everything about me, but this time the instincts came from that hidden part of me. From the part that has been dead a hundred million years. This past life which is stirring.
The lid is ajar, but I cannot reach into the box or look inside. All I know is what slips out, bits and pieces of memories that hang like the remnants of spider webs at the corners of my mind. It gives me glimpses of this place; gossamer strands of faint memories that put plaster over the holes in the buildings and put together the fragments of sculptures. I see a world from years ago laid over the one that exists today in ghost form. To me these ruins and the rubble have two faces: the ruins of today and the exact memory of the majestic place it once was.
It is like the ruins leave and for a moment, just a moment between one blink of the eye, I'm there: back then. When people walked across this land and called it home. I don't see any forms, but I know they were here, centuries ago. I sense the wandering spirits of this place.
Is that part of my programming? The slight tendencies towards the Para-sciences that I continually exhibit could have been programmed. I think it is possible today. But Para-sciences are not well documented and are extremely difficult to replicate from all my research on them. As possible as it is, it is extremely unlikely I was created with such programming. I thought my research would give me answers about my creation. Empathy, telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance: once in a while I'll feel an extrasensory awareness that can only be described in such terms craw over me. I usually don't do or say anything. I never know what to think of them. I try not to think about them.
But never before has anything reacted to me like that wall. Gilliam and the Outlaw Star do, but that is because of my connection; the nitrate/carbon liquid I use to connect to them with. This was completely surreal. It was simply magic. Bio-androids don't have the capacity for magic anymore than they do for Para-sciences: these are just too difficult to replicate in a lab. So then why do I have such displays of abilities that I should not have?
I am alone in this world. I'm strange and different and I am aware of that. I just wish I had some of the answers that I'm looking for. I feel lost in such a way I don't think I'll ever be found. I'm a mystery even to myself. Do others feel this way or am I truly alone?
Will Gene even be able to help me as he said he would? Perhaps I am a lost cause and the answers I seek are lost in time, even to me. I know he's doing his best, I see that and I can even sense it from him in an odd manner of the word. He has done more for me than anyone. I am . . . grateful . . . to him. Grateful. I suppose that is a good word for it, although it seems inadequate to express what I feel towards the charismatic Gene Starwind.
I look back out over this wasteland, this dead planet I could so easily call home because of its familiarity. It could be home, but it is dead. The answers I seek and the life I want are no longer here. They lie somewhere else. This is the doorway, the key. Yet I know now that I had the key before I came here. This trip was useless. True, it made me aware that this is where I come from. That what I'm looking for, the answers I seek are inside of me. Yet it refuses to give answers. It is not home.
The box opens slightly, allowing a thought to escape from the far corners of my mind. 'Home' and my future are with Gene and the Outlaw Star. Why am I searching for my past? It can only be found in who I will become, correct?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's the only way I can feel whole, stop being fragments of unknown memories and be myself. Melfina. The only way to find the right path for the future is to see where you came from. That could be what I am doing. Human, mortals, beings learn best from their past experience. Gene displays this characteristic, Jim, Hilda, even Suzuka. They have learned from their pasts. I have none. I want a past.
I open my mouth and create a little wind: Moving air currents. A minute or two more I'll take to myself. I'll sing the song that comes from my heart and from my Pandora's box and then I'll return to the others. No more knowledgeable about our journey and no more at peace. These musings do almost nothing for me, except remind me where I am going and why. Like this place, this song is from a world long ago. In a way it makes me sad, in another it urges me not to forget while finding what lies ahead. It is a song for thinking to.
" I don't know
What words I can say . . .