It seems like there'll be solace
for every tear we've shed...
it looks like there's an answer--
alas! it's gone! our hope is dead!

What makes things real? What separates the mundane and proven from the uncertain and fantastic? Is it the majority that decides; the viewpoint shared by the most people declared true? Would that make a delusion real, then, to the population of an asylum?
Who decides what is real, and how can you tell if they actually exist or not?
Senses, logic, faith? They don’t prove a thing. There’s no way of being certain if what you see, along with everyone else, is true. Still, there is a point to be made. If I—along with everyone else— “saw” a chair where there was none, it wouldn’t matter. Yes, we could smell it, touch it, taste it, hear it—presumably…and I would still fall down if I tried to sit in it.
There’s got to be something that can be taken for granted, some given information in the proof. Without it, you can’t ground the assumptions; you can’t ever hope to find a true solution…
So are we all drifting, then, since we don’t know exactly what the given information is? Even the ideas of gravity and the ideas behind the stars are still theories—there just hasn’t been anything to disprove them yet. All we have is mist that we’ve been able to cup in our hands, separating it from the fog around us. Until something more solid comes along, that’s it.
What am I trying to say here? I honestly don’t know; I’ve forgotten, or maybe I didn’t know where this was going to begin with. But what I keep thinking is…you can’t be certain what you see is what everyone else sees. Even if it’s real to you—even if you’re the only sane one and the rest of the world is sharing the same madness, it can’t be real.
If we do give in to another reality, though, we lose. Isn’t that what MNU has done for all these years? Created a world populated by humans and bizarre, violent monsters called prawns? That isn’t true—not to me, since I am a “prawn” and I would never harm someone—but goddamnit! How am I right either? Both ideas could be madness, just a different delusion masking a truth we can’t understand. The Truth…the given information, the perfect, undeniable facts that give sense to all the ethereal worlds out there. If we are to find ‘real”, we must find truth then! Yes, yes we must…but can we?
That’s for another day, I guess. Another wild jag of thought and doubt…this post is too long already and I have other things to do; the “real” world and all its responsibilities are beckoning and I have no choice but to answer the call. If I didn’t--haha!--I’d be considered insane.
It’s true that we can’t live in our own dream worlds, I know that, but we can’t sunder our thoughts and observations from our interactions with the outside world. Without madness, I believe, there wouldn’t be insight—there wouldn’t be those jolts of understanding and creativity that provide for advancement and change. There’s got to be some kind of diffusion between worlds—perhaps not equilibrium, not even a dynamic one, but some form of balance.
We can dream, we can ponder, we can doubt and ask for other opinions, but there’s still got to be a happy medium.

I don't know what's going on...am I asleep and dreaming of typing this, or am I typing this and dreaming of sleeping? I swallowed a few tranquilizer pills, enough to knock out something at least my size, if not more, but I'm awake now and still thinking. I'm seeing, in some odd way that makes no sense. George is next to me, maybe he knows.
"You know I don't. I’m here, but I know what you know. Nothing more, nothing less.” He grins and flickers out of sight, pops back in so I can see him, vanishes again. “I just look at it differently.”
What is it? “Everything. Life, un-life, the things between.” Things between? "Of course. There's black and white, then the shades in between. Not just grey, everything."
Thomas said you were a "muse". A part of a process, along with a vision and a message. Messages. That’s why you’re here, and that’s it. If there was no message, there wouldn’t be you.
“Of course. The same goes for you, too. If you didn’t have a reason to be, you wouldn’t be. The only problem is finding out why you’re here.”
The ideas. The loa, they use me like a horse, a draft animal for labor. The ideas need to escape. That’s why I’m here, to…what? Capture them? Inform others? Teach--guess--live--prophesize?
“No. Provide a viewpoint. Prophecy is misleading--the future never changes, it just repeats, so as long as you understand the pattern you can see what lies ahead.”
What lies ahead? We’re in a war, aren’t we? People on two differing sides, fighting and killing each other to prove that their idea is better, more right then the other. What comes next…a ceasefire? No…no, that wouldn’t make sense, the ratio is too uneven. Maybe if one side loses followers, or the other side gains fighters, it may happen, but for the time being there is only one thing.
“Persecution. The ones on the smaller idea’s side will be tracked, killed, followed to the best of their opponent’s ability.”
So we have to hide. “No. That would let the foe win. We cannot hide or back down, but must continue forward.”
But that will lead to our doom. If we continue to fight, we will die, we will be struck down.
“Yes, but remember what happens next in the pattern; the ‘renegade’ idea takes hold, gains followers, and there’s a revolution. What happens next you know.”
Yes, yes I do know…don’t I?

After a long time using acid, you get used to the feeling of going off on a trip. You learn to recognise the signs; sight and hearing blending together, touch fading, everything feeling too far away. Finally the world drops beneath you and you begin to drift...
My feet met solid ground--cold tile, to be exact. A whiff of cool, air-conditioned air caressed my antennae and I looked around. People dressed in suits and formal clothing bustled down the hallway, ducking into cubicles, trading papers, chatting around a water cooler that bubbled like a plastic cauldron. Where was I?
"Welcome to MNU. Or, at least, an MNU building." George jumped up and sat down on a fax machine, ignoring the human who passed through him as she went about her work sending some sort of a document. "See everybody?"
"Uh..." I looked around, analyzing the faces swarming in the hallways. "Yes."
"Alright." George held up a hand and began counting down with his fingers, ignoring my bewildered gaze. "Three...Two...One."
A resonating bang exploded somewhere underneath me and orange bloomed all around. Like the last time I'd been "spirited away", it was sensed only as a mild, dim warmth--a fraction of what others felt around me. I had time to count to two before the walls shook and smoke billowed out, blocking the view. The flames roared and there came loud crashing, banging, shattering--
Scream. One scream, choked, gurgling, female. It was the fax machine girl, her document now just ash. Most of her was ash, too; a leg, an arm, half of the twisted, reddened lump of flesh that had once been a torso. Black, charcoaled meat, cooked well done.
I could feel her pain, I really could. The struggling boom-boom of her heart as the pauses between got longer and longer. Boom-Boom Boom. Boom. Boom...Boom. Boom...
What's going on? A voice at my ear, sibilant and quiet. I don't understand--what's going ON? She seemed to understand what had happened and dull panic set in, pushing into my heart like a butter knife instead of a razor. Funny how everyone says that pain cuts clean; it really crushes your organs and thoughts, drawing them in and compressing, compressing, smaller smaller smaller...
No. Nononononononono. Was it the prawns? The--prawns? Did this? No. John-- I saw a man, blond hair, laughing. --alive? Pleasegod let him be okay...ohgod. ohgod.I didn't ask--badbadbadwhy? whybadwhybadwhybadwhybad--
"Shut up!" I couldn't take it, the sluggish trickle of thoughts, so i started to yell at her. "Shut up! I can't--I can't listen to you! Shut--"
The stream of thought cut off, the trickle of emotion and pain died down. I froze and stared at her as she stopped moving. I'd told her to shut up, but not like this. "No--no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry--!"
Others joined in my screaming, as if the one cry of pain had broken the ice and everyone was free to give voice to their agony. I could hear them too. All of it, the thoughts, the straining of lungs and hearts as they struggled to work. Most gave out without completing what they set out to do.
I turned away, facing George, who was still glowing and outshining the embers. "Get me out of here."
"That's not the way it works, bud." George snickered. "You're here now, and you'll never leave. You can't kill a ghost, and this will stay with you wherever you are."
"Are you a ghost? Is this a ghost?" I wanted to strike out at him, but I somehow knew it would do nothing. My blow would pass through him like a blade through mist, or would hit him and not damage him; a feather against steel. "Or are you just another hallucination, like those people--" The memory of their strained thoughts
what'sgoingonohgodohGODpleasehelpIdon'twantthis
flooded my brain again and I sobbed.
George's antennae flicked, but he did nothing to quell my lamenting. "It doesn't matter if it was a hallucination--nobody knows what happened, and most likely nobody cares much. Ryan sure as hell doesn't." George's words pierced into me like bullets, or the shrapnel that had most likely pierced those people when the bomb went off. "Only you know what happened. Does that make it real? I don't know."
"But--" This was Ryan's doing? This is when he blew up the building? I'd known it had happened, but I hadn't thought of the pain this had caused--
"Do the technicalities matter? Stuff like this happens on both sides. The specifics aren't important, what matters is the idea."
The idea. The idea that there are casualites on both sides? No. There are casualites, but there are also families left behind. That was the point George had tried to make. These people worked for MNU, and did awful things, but they weren't bad. They just had bills to pay, mouths to feed. They helped kill poleepkwa, both indirectly and directly, for good reasons--as good as reasons could be--and we kill them for it. We still do.

Is integration possible anymore, in both this world and the one we left behind? We've become different then the race that touched down almost three decades ago, bewildered and confused. The years have given us time to adapt and understand this new land we've found ourselves in, but it's also robbed us of what we once were. All the conflict and knowledge and pain our race has experienced has impacted us, not for the better. Whether we like it or not, we've become "prawns".
Maybe that's the wrong term to use; it's not just the hate, but trying to fit in and become part of a different culture--hell, a different planet--that has made us something different. Prawn, along with Outlander, Non-human, and Alien are just names the humans have given us in an attempt to understand what we are; to put us in easy-to-define, commonly known terms. Even "poleepkwa", the "correct" term for us, is a human attempt to pronounce our native tongue. We've been lost in translation, so to speak...something not-quite poleepkwan, but definately not human.
We'll never be humans, and that's a good thing, but will we ever be "poleepkwa" either?

Names.

What’s in a name? It’s a title to distinguish yourself from the masses, but what happens when you have the same name as others? What if there are crowds of people who share your name, but not your looks or manners or memories? Are you a separate thing that happened to be classified under an umbrella term—it’s a “Jill!”, it’s a “Jack”!—or are you doomed to conform, to slowly sink into the grooves left behind by the ones who came before you so that when you state your name people say “oh yes, you look like a—” and pay no more mind to your self, who you really are.
That seems to have been one of the ways MNU drags us down, or at least it has become that. Never mind the names being in a foreign tongue; humans simply cannot speak our language, even if they tried and wanted to. But by being grouped in with the mobs of Johns or Alices or Roberts or Christines, even though we are drastically different in both appearance and mindset, we lose our identities. We become “just another”, just as the stamps poleepkwa are forced to wear classify us by numbers and “behavioral classes” instead of our viewpoints and feelings as sentient, emotional beings.
But will it be enough to wash off the tags and pick new names? No. No, because choosing who you are to prove someone else wrong isn’t choosing at all. You can’t choose your self—that is something that evolves over time, with everything you go through and think and ponder every moment in your life. “You”, who you are, is never static, but dynamic and quick to change as the earth and the living things on it. The only time you will ever know for sure, I think, is death, and then it may not do much.
Jack, Jill, don’t be so quick to give up your names and your lives. I will help you the best I can to overcome what D10 has taught you and shown you…admittedly that is not much. But don’t think for a minute—for a second—that you can walk away from the past unscathed. The tags can be taken away, but the mark they leave takes much longer to heal and be gone. It will take time for you to figure out who you are and what you want to do; remember, it took Odysseus twenty years. Hopefully, it won't be as long, but it won't be instant.

A trip to D10.

When I realized that my consciousness was separate from my body the first thing I felt was irritation, like when you drop something because you had too much in your hands and you can’t pick it up without letting other things fall. My hands sunk through the plates of my corporeal body as if through quicksand and I pulled them out, annoyed and vaguely horrified at the feeling of my own organs at my fingertips. So much for that.
Then logic set in and I realized I was having another trip. That was great, as long as my physical body didn’t do anything stupid. I stared at it, sitting there as if in a coma or asleep. Highly unlikely, unless you counted not doing anything as stupid. Then I was an imbecile.
“Well, long time no see, if there is time and you are seeing this.” George snickered from behind me. My friend clapped a glowing hand on my shoulder and smiled. “How are you?” He froze and cocked his head to the side; it seemed like he was listening to something--or someone--I couldn’t hear. “Oh--right--” He looked at me. “No time for swapping stories. I’ve got to show you something.”
“Show what--” Time and space warped and shivered into multiple images before reforming into a totally different scene. Skeletal trees had been replaced with an open space, dirt ground and row upon row of uniform white tents. An air of hatred and bewilderment hung over the uniform grid like a fog. I knew where this was.
“Yeah, it’s D-10.” George blinked and swished his antennae at me. “Also known as Awshitz, also known as District 10, also known as despair. Like the view?” He pointed to the tents and an MNU guard tower in the distance. “It’s best from there.”
Nearby, a poleepkwa with plates painted grey was scrounging through a trash pile. He looked up for a moment, as if sensing our presence, then went back to his search. An MNU truck rolled by, the driver and passengers silent and immobile from what I could see. Immediately the poleepkwa bolted, scurrying off and running through me. I felt the brush of a heartbeat, a twinge of fear--he didn’t seem to notice anything.
George snorted. “Weird, huh? I never seem to get used to that, even with you.” He gestured to other places. “Here, let me give you a tour.”
We continued in this fashion, George showing the injustices and cruelties of D-10 while I followed him and watched. Each second there made me understand more and more why Sherry and the others are so adamant about leaving--it was hell, it was a shithole, and above all it was a place of terror. You didn’t know what could or would or might happen next; poleepkwa and people were slowly beaten down into more fundamental codes, more basic needs. Strikingly, horrifyingly, I could understand how MNU made drones out of our people--living in the chaos, coupled with the “education“, would break even the best of us if given enough time. If I was actually there in a physical sense there’s no doubt I would have died from my stupidity.
“Oh. Oh shit…’ George paused as we walked past a tent. MNU guards swarmed the thing like black flies on a carcass, chatting and arguing. They seemed to be waiting for someone.
I saw the tongue of flame slither inside the tent, hiss in pleasure and explode outward into a sheet of orange that covered the eggs inside. The white skin of the tent was lit from within and very object inside was visible, silhouettes against the orange and yellow. I could dimly feel the heat, but it was too much for the small sacs of life within--I could hear the young onesalready broiling and getting ready to pop out of life. Damnit--I tried to put the fire out, I really did, but how could I? I didn’t exist on a level that could do anything.
“That’s what happens to us, every day.” George gently yanked me away from the flames and guided me out of the shack, his plates never being outshone by the firelight. “You had to know. You believe that we can coexist with humans, no matter what? Try being civil to Kurt after seeing this.”
“You know about Kurt?” was the question almost on my tongue, but then I realized George had probably noticed when I was near-death. Besides, that wasn’t important--Kurt and I were individuals, and a race was at stake. Instead, I sighed. “I hoped--”
“Hope has nothing to do with it. Get to work, otherwise all those born prawns will die as prawns. I don’t know what you plan to do, but you’ve gotta implement it fast.” George waved. “Until then--”
Feeling returned. I let the shutters over my eyes lift up, relieved that I was home. But when the world focused I didn’t see the familiar walls of my place in the warehouse where I lived; there were walls, alright, but they were grey, dank, and cracked as the foundations had settled over the years. I remembered measuring the cracks every day, charting and keeping track of their growth and wondering how long it would take for the house to collapse.
I was smaller, the green of my plates paler and the plates themselves somehow ill-fitting, like a suit of armor that was much too big for the wearer. I knew this place, too.