A Boring Day

The following story was inspired while writing last week's post on Paradoxes.  In my original plan for that post, I hoped to solve the Grandfather Paradox by claiming that your grandparents actually were a lesbian couple and you didn't actually have a "grandfather" in the truest sense.  However, this felt like a cop-out to me because you kinda need to know who your grandfather is in order to shoot him.  So instead I spent a few hours sitting on my couch pondering a less silly solution.  Eventually it came to me that perhaps the Grandfather Paradox could be reversed:  if you traveled into the future and your grandson murdered you, would you still be alive?  In order for him to exist, you must return to the present and have children, and if that doesn't happen your grandson can't come about and so he can't shoot you.

Unfortunately this highway of thought led nowhere to solving the Paradox - which is why the Grandfather Paradox was not discussed in the aforementioned post.  So instead I found myself lying down on my couch with quite the burning headache and my arm reaching out towards the ceiling, as I desperately reached for the answer (who knows, maybe the literal action of grabbing might give me some unimagined insight).  But though I reached for the answer to my problem, I instead found something very different in my hand:  a story which had absolutely nothing to do with what I was just doing.  I'm not that happy with it myself, but I hope you enjoy it.

It was a boring day.

I laid down across the bed, looking up at the white ceiling.  A three-bladed fan spun around lazily in its lowest setting.  My apartment was silent except for the sound of my own breathing and the constant screams of the horns of the cars below.  The day was hot, even with the windows open and the fan on, I was covered in a thin coat of sweat.  I should have gotten off my queen-size bed and unwrapped myself out of the heavy blankets, to move over to the fan controls on the wall and speed it up, but I couldn't bring myself to move.  As much as I wanted to feel the wonderful breeze of the fan at full power, what the advertisement called "arctic chill", merely moving was such a massive effort.  Boredom had broken every bone in my body and left me a shattered empty shell of a man on his bed, as shirtless as I was helpless.  Thank God I was a male or I might have needed a shirt in order to be "decent".  The walk to the drawer was just as long as the walk to the fan controls, either one would have killed me.  So instead I put my hand on my forehead and let out a moan.  Maybe somebody would hear it and they would rescue me from the monster called Doldrums.  I doubted it.

Boredom is a Hell of a drug.

Wiping the sweat off my brow I reached up with my arm towards the fan.  Maybe if I reached up and grabbed at the fan I could make it move with my mind.  When you're this bored anything could happen.  The fan was at least eight feet above my hand (I loved the high ceilings of my apartment) but I thought my new psychokinesis powers might be able to bridge the gap and get that fan spinning faster.  Not much to my surprise, the fan stayed just as slow as it was before - I didn't have magic powers after all.  What more could you expect from a day this boring?  Instead I rolled over towards the window, and watched the traffic jam below.  If boredom and frustration could have created something fantastic, the poor bastards stuck in their boxes of steel and plastic would have enough magic energy to turn the world upsidedown.  But the annoying laws of physics remained strong, and I remained bored.

I sighed and rolled back onto my back, looking back up at the fan.  "Why, fan, why?  Why did you betray me?"  I don't know if I actually said that aloud or just thought it really hard.  I reached up again this time with my other hand, my weaker right hand.  Expecting to feel nothing but empty air, I jerked my hand back when it actually hit something.  What was that?  A bug?  Scanning the room, I saw nothing but garbage on the floor, cloths on the desk, and a blank ceiling with a fan that moved too slowly.  There was nothing else in here but me.  Holding my breath, I reached again.

And there it was.  It was solid, this invisible thing.  Sitting up, I could clearly feel it with all five of my fingers, then all ten.  The thing wasn't the ceiling or the fan, those were solid objects, this thing was mushy like a rubber balloon.  It moved in when my touched, but didn't break.  This thing was completely invisible, even as I moved my head all around from every angle, the room seemed empty aside from myself and my objects.  But this thing was there, I was holding it.  Could stealth this perfect be possible?  I checked both below and above it, nothing was holding this object up but my hand.  It was floating in the air, completely motionless, soundless, and most of all, invisible.

One million ideas blurted through my mind at once, just around the same time that the honking outside grew louder.  The drivers below could not have found something this amazing, or else the traffic jam they were stuck in would not seem so important.  I didn't care about there predicament, only my own.  Was it aliens?  Was it some kind of spying device?  Who sent this thing here?  The government?  My ex-girlfriend?  Who could be so evil as to bring this mysterious object into my home?  What was it?  I was pretty sure that it had not been in my apartment yesterday or I was certain to have discovered it.  This called for an investigation.  I stepped out of my bed, keeping a hand on the mysterious thing to make sure I didn't lose it, and started to plan my next move.

At that point I noted that I was not bored anymore.

I started to squeeze the object and saw my fingers disappear into the nothing.  Around the holes where my fingers had sunk, the air was just a bit distorted.  The light had been warped just an inch inward, like twisting a flat picture.  I pulled backward, bringing my hand closer and dragging the entire strange thing towards me about half a foot.  The thing was surprisingly malleable, giving only the slightest resistance and stretched like silly putty.  What once was invisible was now a clear funnel of a warped image.  I could see the windowsill twisted to several feet long, and the outside traffic jam now made just a few miles longer.  This object, whatever it was, could only keep up stealth as long it kept its original shape, and I had just pulled it much longer.

Letting go, the object remained invisible except for the one warped funnel sticking out towards me.  I moved my head around each side, and like glass the object's "skin" changed from every angle.  It wasn't invisible, it was see-through, like a perfect prism.  But it was also so flexible, and it was definitely curved in shape.  What kind of prism curved without warping the light behind it?  This object was completely alien to my world.

Whatever it was coated with made it impossible to see inside.  Maybe it I cut it I could find out more about this thing.  On my desk was stainless steel scissors which proudly advertised on the blade "MADE IN CHINA".  I could only hope that the Chinese who had manufactured the shears had prepared their metal to cut through an invisible alien floating blob.  I flattened the funnel a bit with my hand, and decided to cut through the thing's skin.  Taking the scissors in hand, I cut.

God help me, the thing let out a scream - and it bled.  Red blotches covered my sheets as an awful high pitched howling filled my room, it was unlike anything I had ever heard before.  The noise was a scream of pain, I could understand that, but the otherworldliness of the noise killed any sympathy.  It might feel pain, but it was so weird that I could only hate it.  A chunk of the thing was left in my hand.  I gasped when I saw that some of the blood had landed on my bare skin.  Then the howl stopped.  Did my neighbors hear that horrible noise?  Were they even home?  Who cares?

The hole I cut through the thing was completely black aside from the blood that dripped out.  Soon enough the dripping stopped leaving just an empty hole in the air.  The piece in my hand had a hole that was equally as black and empty.  It was so dark I could see nothing within.  Even when I turned the light on and tried to shine light into the hole in my hand, the blackness was no more permeable.  This was a shade that stole light and gave none back.  Though the object in my hand was just a few inches long, the blackness suggested a depth of miles.  I wished now that I was wearing gloves instead of touching this thing with my bare hands.  But gloves wouldn't help me now.

It wasn't black forever though.  Suddenly a green light appeared inside the blackness:  an eye.  There clearly was a pupil and lids, so it had to be an eye, but the light it gave was so awful I dropped the chunk right on the floor.  I checked the larger object behind me.  The blackness was now filled with fingers and tentacles pouring out along with a much longer stream of blood.  Out come alien body parts, perhaps of one creature, perhaps of a thousand.  The screaming began again.  My bed was soaked through with foreign blood, ruining my lovely sheets.  Now above everything else I wished that I had not cut through this thing.  I should have moved - I would have given an apartment away for free if it got me away from this strange blob.

The piece at my feet began to bleed too.  Alien blood oozed over my carpet and onto my feet.  From behind me, more alien body parts came out.  Now thousands of bloody long bloody fingers were pushing foward, the longer ones reaching my bed.  A single finger crawled out of the piece at my feet, slivering slowly towards my bare toes.  It was at that moment I realized I had cut through some kind of weak spot through two universes.  That blob wasn't a blob, it was a four-dimensional bruise in my world.  And now a thousand things were crawling out into my apartment.  The screaming of the things was so loud that I couldn't even hear the traffic jam outside.

"My God...." I whispered.

"My God...." I whispered again.

All at once the fingers hovering over my bed stood up and straightened out towards me when they heard the noise of my voice.  On the ground, the dozen fingers that had crawled out stood tall, ready to strike.  The fingers or snakes or tentacles or whatever they were knew I was in the room, and they seemed ready to pounce.  At first only one came forward in a sudden rapid slice.  It moved so quickly, so jerkily, so strangely that I could not predict where it would cut me.  I tried to jump back, but already a long wound had been ripped into my chest.  I screamed.

Now every finger was in motion, striking left and right, cuts coming from every direction.  All I could do wasa feebly cover my face and close my eyes as I felt my flesh tear all over the place.  No words could describe the pain.  These things were going to cut me to ribbons and devour whatever was left.  I felt something push into me, violating my space.  I never imagined I could feel pain so deep inside my body.  When I tried to scream again, I felt something trap the noise in my throat.  No air or scream could pass through.  My tongue was lashed as a tentacle pushed through and out my mouth.  I opened my eyes for the last time, and saw a tentacle sticking out of my bloody jaw.  What was left of the other parts of my body?  I did not want to know.  The finger stopped for just a second, and jumped right into my sight as one of its brothers destroyed the other eye.

All was left was pain and blackness.

.....

I rolled over again, looking back out the window to the traffic, which had finally begun to pick up.  The fan now spun fast and true, giving me a pleasant breeze.  All ten of my fingers and toes were intact, and both my eyes stared out in 20/20 vision.  I was alone in my apartment, just me and my dreams.

It was a boring day.

ツ