Hando

"Is it on?"

"Yes, Mr....ah..."

"Hando, you can just call me that."

"Of course, Hando. Well, just start whenever you’re ready."

"I hate being recorded, but we might as well get it over with. I am getting a check for this, right?"

"Yes sir. Your story will be a great contribution to the civilization of Zyemlya and a wonderful edition to our magazine. It really is quite remarkable after all."

"Yeah, well, whatever. As long as I get my check. Social Security just doesn’t cut it these days. Seems if my story was so remarkable, this ungrateful generation wouldn’t have stuck me in this home, after all I’ve done."

"Most have forgotten. Maybe you’ll get the respect you deserve after your story is published."

"Maybe. Just maybe."

"What exactly is it you did?"

"Well, I’ll get to it. You want something to eat? Nothing but hospital food, but what can you do?"

"No thank you."

"Suit yourself. Let’s see, where to begin. We obviously won the Conflict, since we’re here talking to each other right now. After that victory, there were lots of questions about what to do now. There were only about 4 or 5 hundred of us left. Thousands had died off, most of the population of Zyemlya. They resisted the change. Most of them still couldn’t believe what was going on, even after all that happened. They didn’t actually die; it was more that they faded out with the Being. We all lost loved ones; I lost a sister and a groundhog, but we knew it was necessary to destroy the Being.

"We had never had our own world before, our own will, our own lives. The Being had made sure of that. We never really knew exactly what it was, or where it came from, or if it even was an "it." We just knew it was there, and what it was doing.

"I’ll take credit for that one though. That was a long time ago, and me with my slipshod memory, I don’t know how well I can recount it all. Now you young whippersnappers come in here and want to scoop out my brains to put in your magazine. The way things work around here, this will probably turn into a half page section in some fifth grader’s textbook.

"I guess I’ll start with the dreams. I hadn’t always had them; they started when I was about 16. They weren’t so vivid at first, either, just a bunch of blurred images that didn’t seem quite right, they didn’t fit in with the normal pattern of my dreams. Eventually, they got clearer, and more frequent. Soon, they got to be every night, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

"The strange thing was that the dreams seemed to make a lot more sense than reality to me. Or, at least, reality started making a lot less sense once I started having the dreams. Maybe everyone had these dreams and I was the only one who made sense of them, everyone else just ignored them. Who knows?

"Crazy dreams, they were. Things made sense in them. People had repercussions for their actions. In the beginning it was mostly just simple things: riding a horse, a family going out to dinner, using the bathroom, eating ice cream with my mother. But, it wasn’t my mother. But it was.

"It didn’t make any sense, but it did. All right, this may be getting a little confusing in here, so I’ll tone it down a notch. I’ll talk some about what it was like living in the time before the Conflict. Keep in mind, young man, that probably you and a good many of your readers won’t believe a lot of this. There’s so much order now and so many have forgotten all about the Conflict, it seems impossible.

"The time, by today’s standards, was a strange one. You might even say it was a bad period. People were quite docile then most of the time, even me. No one questioned much; we didn’t think there was anything to question.

"One of the subtler abnormalities of the time was that people had wild mood swings, incredibly wild. Many violent outbreaks occurred. The quietest woman in a grocery store could suddenly go berserk and bite into someone’s neck nearby and watch them bleed to death. People walking by would just look on nonchalantly, and then the woman would go back to her quiet shopping. She wouldn’t be reprimanded; it was just something that happened. It was as if we were all blind, or numb.

"Physical strangeness was another characteristic of pre-Conflict times. I remember a time I was walking with a co-worker home from work and all of a sudden he burst into flames and just disintegrated in front of me. He didn’t even seem to mind; he just looked over his disappearing body as though he had expected it.

"Animals like dragons and unicorns and flying snake horses roamed the planet at that time too. We did away with them, though, after the Being was gone. I’m not sure why we got rid of the unicorns and flying snake horses, but I can see about the dragons. They were just one more menace left over we had to deal with. You sure you don’t want something to eat? I just remembered I have some left over soylent blue. A little stale. Made out of smurfs."

"No, but I appreciate it."

"Where was I?"

"Dragons."

"Oh yeah. After the Being was gone, we still had a lot of junk to deal with. The planet was still infested with many of its little traps and pitfalls, not only physically dangerous, but psychologically as well. There were numerous viruses that affected the nervous system. There was one that reversed brain growth, intellectually stunting many. That sure was a nuisance. It only came in chicken though, so we did away with chickens.

"What is this so-called Being you keep talking about, if I may ask?"

"Well, that’s a little tricky, so bear with me. He was, in a sense, our creator. He made all there is to this planet and all of us."

"Like a god?"

"By no means should you confuse it with a god. No god would have perpetrated the things the Being did. God grants free will. We had no will of our own here, it was all the Being’s will."

"I’m a little confused."

"Well, you should be. Let me put it this way. We were a product of its thought processes, a figment of its imagination. We were images inside its head. Every thought we had, every emotion, they were all implanted by it inside each of our image. It controlled us. We were just playthings within its head."

"How is that possible? What was this being?"

"That was one of the many unanswered questions about it. Prior to the Conflict, we had numerous scientific inquiries as to what, exactly, it was. We got close, but we never really figured it out. We just know that it was some highly sophisticated being. It had to be, with the advanced imagination it had. To create substance with its mind, at least to a certain degree, would require a high degree of sophistication.

"What do you mean, ‘to a certain degree?’"

"Just what I said, ‘to a certain degree.’ We weren’t complete beings. We were for a long time just a product of its imagination. I’m sure the Being would have gladly granted us that if it was to its benefit. I have a feeling that it knew that whatever physical pain it inflicted on us, it would feel as well. Of course, during the Conflict, it made the sacrifice and implanted us with the capability of feeling pain. It must have figured it would make us easier to control.

"Our civilization could only have been alive as long as the Being was. We have no idea how long that could be. We still can’t even rely on our memories from before the Being was destroyed. We have history books and videotapes, but they could have all been falsified by the Being. Hello, nurse. Time for my medication again?"

"Yes, Hando. Which option would you prefer, the straight intravenous injection of painkillers, or a special organic herbal remedy?"

"Nurse, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that. Dope me up real good."

"Very well."

"Oh yeah. This story ought to get a lot more interesting. Bye, nurse."

"(Sigh) Bye, Hando."

"So, how did you figure out what was happening?"

"Ah. Yes, yes. Like a good journalist, you ask the important questions my boy. Well done. To answer that, we have to go back to the dreams again. I said before that the dreams became more intense and frequent. Allow me to elaborate on that.

At one point, they became more than just random images. One of them had a story to it.

*SMACK*

"AHHH!! What was that for?"

"Oh, sorry. A couple butterflies were eating your eyes. Must be the painkillers. Back to the dreams. Dreams. Dreams. Now, this story was the first in a line of stories. This particular story was about a boy stealing a bag of candy corn from a grocery store. He got caught by one of the clerks while he was trying to walk out. He didn’t get arrested, but the manager did call his parents. The boy had to go back later and apologize for stealing the candy. He was more embarrassed than anything else. That was the end of the dream. Seems like a pretty normal dream, doesn’t it? But for back then, it wasn’t. It was too perfect to be normal. Awwwww. Aren’t you a cute little puppy? Yes you are."

"That’s a pillow."

"Yes, of course. Well, after that, the dreams came every night, and they would get longer, and more detailed, until eventually I had a suspicion of what was going on."

"And just what was that?"

"Well, everything I told you about the Being for one thing. I realized this wasn’t our planet; it wasn’t my life I was living. Our thoughts weren’t our own. The dreams were a window, symbolically anyway, into the world of the Being. I dreamt its reality, maybe not exactly the same in imagery, but in content it was the same."

"This is pretty heavy stuff."

"Heavy. There’s that word again. MCFLY!! MCFLY!! 1.21 Jigawatts? What was I thinking?"

"Are you all right, Hando?"

"I’m quite all right, now that the painkillers are really kicking in. Back to my story. I started telling a couple of my friends my theories. At first, no one would listen to me. They thought I was crazy, or something of the sort. I knew I wasn’t, so I kept at it. I explained how much of our reality didn’t make sense, and seemed to be rather whimsical. Keep in mind that at this point, we were all still a part of the Being, mostly anyway. I thought for a while that perhaps all my figuring and conjecturing were the Being’s thoughts interjected in my image. I knew somehow that they weren’t, though.

"Eventually, I persuaded a few people to believe me. After that, many joined the group of believers. We waged war on the Being in a sense. It lasted around 7 months. It wasn’t a physical war, but a mental, almost spiritual, one. We started by exercising our own will for small things. We knew that any urges we had originated from the Being, so we would try to resist them, unless we thought they were somehow inherently good. Each day, I could feel the Being weakening. It would try to force us to do and think things, and for the majority of the population who didn’t even believe what we told them was going on, it could. For those of us with the strongest will, it was extremely hard for the Being to manipulate. The more we exercised our own will, the less power it had over us.

"We had worried that it might just destroy us, but it seemed as though the world had gotten too much for it. It had become something somewhat outside of its control. It still had much influence, but as a whole, it had lost it. Soon, we had total control, and as I said before, it was destroyed, as far as we could tell, and we had our own Zyemlya."

"That’s quite a narrative."

"I thought so."

"Hando, it’s time for your nap."

"Finally, Nurse. I was wondering when I could stop talking."

"I’m sorry, sir. But he needs his sleep."

"That’s all right. We were just finishing. I acquired all the information I need. Thanks a lot, Hando. You were quite helpful."

"No problem. You sure you won’t have some soylent blue before you go?"

"Maybe just a little."

"You get nothing, cause I ate it all."

"Um, ok. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, sir."

The reporter walked out. Under the influence of the painkillers, Hando immediately passed out, and he started to dream just as quickly. After two minutes of restless dreaming, Hando quickly opened his eyes and sat up. "He’s one."

Hando quickly rang for the nurse and asked her to wheel him to the entrance of the nursing home. She obliged. When they had reached their destination, Hando stood up out of the wheelchair and walked out the front door. He looked around the parking lot desperately, but the reporter was nowhere to be seen. He sighed. As he turned around to walk back into the building, he thought he saw a flying snake horse from the corner of his eye.