Sidewalk Conversation part 2

Sorry that it's been such a long time between posts. I wanted to thank Ben for reminding me that people actually do read this stuff. So anyways, lets get on with this.

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"Let's get something to eat." Mandy motioned to the Student Union building. "And you can tell me all about him."

Alice wasn't sure she wanted to do that. Actually, she was pretty sure she didn't. But still, she found herself following in Mandy's trail. Is this how my entire life's going to be? Am I going to spend everyday just changing my mind, or following other people?

They made their way through the crowd of students that hovering around the cafeteria. "You know, maybe we should just get some coffee."

"Um... actually I want to get some food." See, I can make decisions for myself. But she wasn't entirely convinced. In fact, that sense of wrong that was hovering around her started to get a bit thicker. Forcing her way through the crowds, she made it into the cafeteria line.

"Hey, wait for me." She heard behind her, but she didn't stop. Snatching up a tray from the rack, she started looking through the food. The tin foil wrapped hamburgers and hotdogs, the plastic wrapped salads and the trays of slightly warmed french fries stared back at her. She stopped. Her head swiveled, trying to take it all in.

"What's the matter?" Mandy spoke from near her shoulder.

Heart jackhammering in her chest, she held her hand above each of the sandwiches. Tears hung on the lower part of her eyes. Why am I going to cry? It's just lunch. "I can't decide on what I want."

"I thought you were hungry. Why not just grab a salad?" she nudged Alice. "Or are you too nervous to eat?"

Shit. What do I do now? If I take the salad, then I'm doing what Mandy told me to do. If I take a hamburger then I'm just doing it to spite her and then she's still controlling my actions. Closing her eyes for a moment, she reached out and touched the warm tin foil.

She picked up the hamburger and put it on her tray. "I guess I'm having meat today."

Sidewalk conversation part 1

Alice had a squishy sensation in her stomach all day long and she couldn't shake it. She'd decided to go to her two o'clock class, but her mind kept drifting back to Dustin. Why did I say yes? I hope he doesn't have any ideas that something is going to go on. Do I want something to go on?

No. Squeezing down on her pencil, she heard a creak from it. The professor droned on for a moment more before dismissing the class. Scooping up her books, she scurried out. Trying to outrun her thoughts.

She was halfway out the door of the building when she heard, "Alice! Wait up!"

Swinging around she almost headbutted Mandy. They both stopped for a moment and laughed. "Hi Mandy. How are you doing?"

"Well better than you. Did you even hear me? I've been yelling at you since you walked out of class?" The other girl grinned. She was always grinning, which Alice never thought was a good look for her, since her teeth were a bit crooked. Boys said that was part of her charm, but they didn't lift their eyes far enough to look at her face.

Alice smiled, "Sorry about that. I just have something on my mind."

"Problems with Ryan?" The other girl started moving toward the outside doors. "Come on, lets go get some coffee?"

They stepped out into the main thouroughfare on campus. Students milled around, heading for their next class. When Alice glanced around, her stomach churned. Why didn't I just say no? Maybe Ryan is right, that I don't have any real direction. "It isn't a problem with Ryan exactely."

Mandy stopped, raising an eyebrow. "Oh really? Wait I know that look, you've found somebody else."

Brushing a hand through her blonde hair, she paused to wrap a strand around a finger. "Maybe. I don't know. It's just so wierd. Everything's been going great with Ryan. We don't have any problems. And I really like him."

"But?"

Tugging on the strand for a moment, she let the hair fall back into place. "I saw this guy in the hallway. And he asked me out to dinner."

Making the Barrell

The man in the black sunglasses examined the display. Parameters set, flashed across his vision. Stability in shift around Prime at 70 percent. Better than expected, Prime was helping to establish the shift. He grinned. In the end, it was all too easy. He couldn't have asked for a better set of circumstances. He'd established what should be happening and brought the target around to believing that this shift was possible. And the target had done the rest of the work for him.

The bastard would be pleased.

Then he noticed a flashing light in the corner of his vision. Twisting his head, he read the warning. SEP field violated. Prime locking onto position. Crap. His heart started to speed up. But the man in the sunglasses had been in worse positions. His fingers danced across the deck, plucking the parameters defining this reality. Readjusting variables. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. SEP field violated. Can not restart.

Taking a deep breath through clenched teeth, he let the field collapse. There wasn't anything he could do about it now, except play it by ear. But by now he was good at it. After all Ryan Almacodi would be the seventh member of the Covenant that he killed.

And the way this was going he'd be the easiest. Stripping off the Mitsubishi goggles, he stared straight at the target and smiled.

A Barfly admist the Rubble

"What the..." Ryan hopped off of the barstool, almost bumping into, no, almost bumping through a girl carrying a pitcher of beer back to a table. The entire place was hazy like it was still being constructed. The walls wavered for a moment as Ryan checked it out. The hipsters in the corner discussing poetry, the too-cool geek in the back wearing shades typing on his computer, the sorority girls giggling in the background - everything seemed in place for a Friday night at the bar.

Only it wasn't supposed to be Friday night. I was supposed to be Friday afternoon.

"Dude, are you okay?" Chad stared at him for a moment. He was dressed in his normal plaid shirt (not tucked in) and jeans.

Ryan was definitely not okay. Heart racing, palms sweating, he paced slowly back to the bar. Making sure to rub his feet across the carpeting, so it wouldn't disappear on him too. He held onto the back of the leather barstool for a moment, rubbing the cow hides, listening for the squeak. He had to be going crazy, there wasn't any other explanation.

His friend got out of his stool and took a step over to him, picking up his forgotten drink from the bar. "Here have a drink. Look man, it's not the end of the world. And it might just be nothing."

Lifting the pint to his lips, the black beer seeped down his throat and into his stomach. "What might be nothing?" He managed after putting away another slug.

"Um... Dude are you sure you're all right. I know it might be a shock and all, but really. I've heard of post-traumatic stress and all, but this might be going a bit too far." He clapped Ryan on the shoulder and then went back to his stool.

Then Ryan remembered the alarm clock. The conversation he'd heard through the tinny speaker. No, that couldn't be here, could it? Chad couldn't have just told him that he'd seen Alice cheating on him? Sliding down into the seat, he noticed the bar seemed as solid as it had when he was sitting with Havelin.

He took another sip. Searching the bar again, his eyes stayed on the too-cool geek in the back with the leather jacket and the laptop. He'd seen him somewhere else.

The Meeting Part 2

A chill crept up Ryan's spine, working its way down into his hand until his entire body felt cold. For a second, he tried to move his mouth, but then stopped. What the... He should be getting used to this by now. But he the entire world seemed to be tipping on its side, spinning around him.

The red-haired man tilted his head, his words mushing together, first fast, then slow. "Are you oooookkkkaaaayyy?"

"No..." He managed to get out. "Who did you say you were? And why are you looking for me?"

"Havelin DeCourt. I'll explain everything, but first we need to get out of here. The paradigms have been altered, that's why it took so long to find you. You aren't supposed to be here?" He said it all like he was talking about a Math problem.

"Wait? What do you mean? I'm not going anywhere until you start making sense." Ryan gritted his teeth. His heart raced and his head swam.

Havelin's brow wrinkled together. This time he spoke a bit slower, drawing out each word. "We need to leave. You can trust me."

For a second, Ryan thought he could trust him. The guy seemed nice enough, even with his leather jacket and the scar across his face. His heart started to slow down, the chill that had covered his body started to fade.

And then everything went to hell.

A flash of white boomed inside of the bar, making everything seem like a reverse echo. White turned black. Black turned white. The guy across the table tried to reach out for him, but Ryan looked down and saw that the other man was fading. He reached out to try to grab him, but it was like he was being pulled apart. Strings of ones and zeroes leaked away from him.

Ryan's fingers went straight through the other man's hands. He tried to decipher the rhyme and reason, but it felt like he was missing a variable. Something vital was being leached away and he needed to figure it out, or it would be lost.

But then the other man was gone. And he was sitting at the bar. It was night. People crowded around him.

And Chad was talking... "Are you going to be okay?"

The Meeting Part 1

Ryan had settled into a table in the back of the bar and was working through his homework. A soft jazz soundtrack played in the background, while he glided through the matrices, shifting numbers so everything made sense.

The bar was styled like an Old World pub. A stuffed goat's head hung over a black and oak bar. Leather stools sat empty except for a professor puffing on his pipe. But he had managed to slip into the problem, wiping away all of the earlier struggles of the day.

In fact, he was so engrossed that he didn't notice the man sidle down in the chair across from him. He didn't pay attention to the way that man adjusted his leather coat, or unbound his red hair and put it back into a pony tail. It wasn't until he leaned forward and looked at the math problem that Ryan started.

"Shit, you scared me." He managed after he caught his breath. Tilting his head, he tried to place the man who sat across of him. He could have been any graduate student who'd taken a little too long to finish their dissertation. "Do I know you?"

"No, not yet." The red-haired man leaned back in the captain's chair. "My name's Havelin DeCourt."

What She Thought She Heard

Alice stepped into the hallway after taking her shower. She really did need to get to class, her philosophy teacher counted class participation. That was a joke, she was the only person who ever raised her hand in class.

But still, this was her second year at college, she couldn't afford to screw up now. Plus, she would end up hearing about it from Ryan if she didn't pass this class. He still got on her about changing her major to philosophy from psychology.

She was still thinking about the reading that she should have done last night, when she bumped into the guy in the hallway. Stopping to say excuse me, her heart sped up when she looked him in the eye.

He was tall, at least six five, wearing a button down shirt and tie, that didn't quite cover the way his muscles bunched under her shirt. But most of all when he stared at her with his grey-blue eyes, there was a smile there like he was laughing at some kind of joke that only he knew. But part of her right at that second wanted to know so badly what he was laughing about that her knees could hardly take it.

"I'm sorry." She managed.

He paused, running his eyes down her for a moment. "That's perfectly fine. I haven't seen you around here. My name is Dustin."

For a second, she swore she heard something else, and then pushed it out of her head for the childish nonsense it was. "Hi, I'm Alice. It's nice to meet you."

Part of her was screaming that she should get to class, she had grades to make and, hell, she already had a boyfriend. "Really. I'm sorry for bumping into you, Dustin. I really should get to class." Why did she have to say that?

Grinning, he said. "Of course. Say what are you doing after your class?"

The part of her that was still trying to figure out the joke in his eyes kept her feet firmly planted against the carpet. "Um... nothing." Her stomach turned a bit on that, but Ryan was a distant thought in her head.

"Good. Why don't we have dinner?"

Her mouth dried out, legs shaking a bit she managed to spit out. "Okay."

The Fun

Ryan set the notebook back on his bed and closed his eyes. People don't go crazy in twenty minutes. There had to be something going on here. Standing up, he started to pace his bedroom. Occasionally he tossed a look at the notebook on his bed.

Maybe if he went out all of this would stop. Slipping on his coat and shoes, he started for the door. For a moment, he stared at his math homework. Sighing, he snatched it off of the bed, stuffing it into his backpack. Then he left the room.

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The man on the lobby chair slipped the brand new pair of Mitsubishi hi-res, full-emersion goggles off. Truely, they were one of the best things he'd found. They really let the player get into the game. The gasping and hard breathing had come through in surround vision. He was going to enjoy this. Smiling, he snapped the deck closed.

He heard a thump from the desk. The "girl" who'd been standing up there smiling had collapsed. These sims were so weak-willed here. No wonder the target had managed to get the girl and start to have the good life.

He didn't bother checking on her. Instead, he got out of there before the target managed to traipse on through again.

Adjusting his sweat shirt and jeans, he mumbled to himself. "Ryan, the fun is just starting."

Prime

Ryan set the alarm clock back on the shelf as the noise went dead. Between Christy, the elevator and now this he couldn’t get his mind to settle down. It kept looping the conversation over and over again. Was he going crazy? He’d gotten enough sleep. He’d brushed his teeth. He’d gone through his morning ritual like he always did every day.

I need to stop thinking about it. Reaching behind him, he picked up his book bag. Homework, he would do homework. Math would salve all of these problems.

Yanking out a textbook that could have doubled for a club, he started doing his homework. A notebook laid across his lap, he started sketching down the first problem. Variables splayed out on the page, he tried to make sense of them.

Dude, she's cheating on you.

His pencil stopped on the page. Somewhere along the way he’d made a mistake and now variables weren’t making any sense. Flipping his pencil over, he furiously erased what he’d written. He kept erasing until he wiped the lines away from the page, wearing the paper thin.
And he started again. Working through the problem step by step, switching through trig laws and derivations and integrals, his pencil scratched along the page.

Don't get angry.

The pencil tore through the page. “Darn it.” he muttered, tearing away the page. Starting the problem again, the symbols looked foreign. “Come on. Just focus on the problem. You’re just imagining things.” And now he was talking to himself.

Sucking in breath through his teeth, Ryan closed his eyes. Math had never failed him before, it wasn’t going to now. All he had to do was open his eyes and the follow the formulae. All he needed to do was take it a step at a time.

Opening his eyes slowly, he stared at the wall for a minute. He followed the pattern of the acoustic tile on the wall. The darker tiles made a diagonal traveling to the ceiling, six tiles up. Six was a good number, divisible by two or three. Two and three were good numbers too. Both of them prime and only divisble by themselves and one. Prime. He was prime, indivisible and unshakable.

And when he looked down at that paper he would be able to work through that problem like he’d worked through so many others. Why? Because Math was his life.

He lowered his eyes to the page.

He looked up and shook his head. Tearing the piece of paper out of the notebook without looking down at it again. His fingers shaking as he pulled it against the rings. He didn’t need to see that.
Because when he looked down at the paper, all he’d seen of his problem was a single line: Ryan divided by Alice equals one.

False Signal

She's cheating on you.

Ryan checked over his shoulder trying to find out where the noise came from. The words still boiling around behind his ears. He stood up and checked his bookshelves (all neatly ordered and alphabetized).

"She's cheating on you," The voice said again. It was louder this time and broken by bits of static. The only piece that was out of place on the shelves was a palm-sized blue IKEA alarm clock.

He stared at the tinny speaker in the back. Noise floated up through it in staticy chunks. A few notes from a saxophone peeked out between the bursts. A voice that was barely recognizable muttered. "What?"

Then he heard it again. "Dude, she's cheating on you." Then some more static, this time it was a lot louder. "... I didn't mean to see it... you should know."

His fingers started trembling, while his heart slammed in his chest. But he wanted to know, what these people were talking about. He needed the data. This time he could definitely hear people in the background, the sound of a band playing smooth jazz floating between them. Again the responder said. "I can understand."

"Don't get angry." Was that Chad?

"I'm not angry... I'm... I don't know what I am."

"You're pissed. I can tell. Just don't do anything stupid."

"Do I ever?"

Ryan's mouth started to dry out. He could picture the image in his mind, butt planted in the pleather bar stool next to Chad. People swinging around him, getting their drinks. He would be looking deep into a cup of coffee - watching the creamer swirl, fall down and rise back up to the top. As Chad answered. "Of course not. But you're kind of a golden boy, if you know what I mean. You haven't had something like this happen to you before."

"I'll be fine." The way he said it made Ryan know that he wasn't all right. That things would be heading south really soon.

Then the feedback kicked up, lancing him in his ear.

Better than...

Ryan hopped out of the elevator as fast as he could. The whole experience left the hairs along the back of his neck standing on end. Shaking his head, he jammed his thumbs into his eyes and worked them around in circles until he saw a golden pattern form in his vision. He opened them up, blinked twice and turned away from the stainless steel doors.

The hallway to his room was just another example of institutional planning at its best. The white walls blared underneath the long tracks of flourescent lighting. Most of the doors were closed, except for Derrek's, but he had his face planted so far into his computer he didn't even wave when Ryan passed by.

He took out his keys and unlocked his door. The surrealness of the morning started to fade when he saw Alice still tucked underneath the covers. A few blonde strands of hair drifted in the breeze from the heater. Sucking in a deep breath, he went over to her and pecked the top of her head. Her hair smelled like canned peaches.

A hand snuck out and pulled the comforter higher over her head, turning her into a lump. "Go away. Haven't you had enough?"

He smiled, despite himself. "Oh I can never get enough of you. Especially when you first wake up, didn't you know that?"

The blanket came down an inch and one red-rimmed eye peeked out. "Flattery? This early in the morning? What's the matter? Did Martins drop another quiz on you?"

"No, just had a wierd morning." He plunked down on the edge of the bed, close enough to Alice's legs to feel the heat coming from them. "Or at least I've had a wierd twenty minutes."

She cuddled next to him, wrapping her legs across his back. "Oh, poor baby. You really need to lighten up though."

"As you keep telling me. I think I'm pretty light, though. It really was a wierd twenty minutes." He stretched, laying down next to her feet.

She sat up, staring down at him with that crooked half-smile she always had before she said something smart. "We're not talking about your skin tone, buddy. Really though, you get rattled by the strangest stuff. It's like you have this great plan of how everything is supposed to go and when it doesn't you fall to shit. Happens every time."

Ryan groaned, sitting up again. He couldn't explain the elevator too her, or that wierd look Christy gave him. "Sure, sure. So don't you have class?"

"Skipping it today. It's too nice of a day to waste not sleeping. But I got to get back to my room. So are you going out tonight?" She hopped out of the bed and stood in front of him. She still had her "sleeping clothes" on, which consisted of a T-shirt and boxers. Right then, with the sunlight playing with her hair and the smirk on her face, she was beautiful. Ryan's heart cramped in his chest. For a second, he almost loved her more than he loved Math.

Then she giggled. "You know, I never have to worry about you though. I can always tell what your thinking." She leaned down and pecked him on the cheek. "And I love you too."

"You really shouldn't skip class though."

"Nope your right, but I'm going to anyway." She winked as she sauntered over to the door, pulling it open and walking right out.

He collapsed back into the bed. A smiled stretched across his face. She really was better than he deserved, but he was glad he had her. Running his hands across the blankets, he soaked up her smell.

"She's cheating on you."

Surrealevator

When the door opened, Ryan hopped in. Almost instantly he found himself pacing the edges of the box. Going around as the elevator pulled him up. The pockmarked, grimy tiles passed beneath his polished tennis shoes - four steps on the left, six steps along the back, four steps on the right, six steps across the front.

And he went again, four steps along the left, six steps along the back, three and a half steps along the right. He stopped, taking a look at the side he just crossed.

Wait a second. That can't be right.

Counting the tiles along both sides of the elevator, they matched. It had to be wrong. He knew it had to be wrong, just a miscalculation made by taking a step too long. He turned and counted his steps, making sure they weren't any longer or shorter than a normal step. One, two, three, four... and a half.

He searched the walls for some sort of camera. Someone had to be playing a joke on him, but no one could make a trick elevator car without something showing up, like some scraping across the floor or a wall that didn't quite match. Shaking his head, he went back to the first wall and started counting steps again.

One. The hairs on his arms stood on their end. Two. A chill went down the base of his spine. Three. The colors of the walls washed out for a moment as he stared at the distance between him and the wall. Would that be enough for one more step? It should be. He lifted his right leg up to make the step and...

The elevator stopped.

And his foot came down.

As the doors clanked open, he stared at the space between his toes and the back wall of the elevator. There couldn't be more than a couple inches there. But he remembered his toes crunching there, bending back with a satisfying solidity. No way. There's no way that this is any different than what it was.

He walked into the hallway when the doors opened.

An Average Day in an Average Life

Ryan Almocadi lived for math. In fact he loved math so much he liked to capitalize it in his head - Math. Everything from the likelihood that the trees lining his campus would grow healthy and tall, to the chance that he would walk into his dorm room and find Alice still curled underneath the blankets could be defined by Math.

It wasn't that Ryan even consciously thought about it. At times he did, like when he was doing his Differential Equations homework or was watching his teacher explain an example on the chalkboard. He loved the elegance of it.Almost as much as he loved Alice. It wasn't her fault that even with her sleek thighs and full lips, that she couldn't compete with Math.

But she was his second love, and when he stepped through the steel and glass door of his dorm, he found himself primping in the reflection between the doors.All in all he wasn't a bad looking man. He was thin, but not anorexic thin. The long hours in his dorm had left him a bit pale, but not pasty. In fact the worst any one could say about him was that he was average.

Stepping through into the lobby proper, he smiled and waved at a few of his friends. They waved back, a few shouting a hi across the lobby. A group of them from his floor had clustered around the mail counter, he walked up to them. Alice could wait. She never liked it when he came into the room before she got up. Especially on the random nights when she decided to stick around.

Christy, his RA, smiled when he stopped at the counter. "Hi there Ryan, how are you doing?"

He shrugged, "I could be better, I could be worse. You know how it goes. School, life, homework, some more school again."

"Really?" Her eyes narrowed, and there was a hint to her voice that sent a small shiver through Ryan's stomach.

For a moment, he pictured the probabilities about why she could be giving him that look. Bell curves and F-tests floated through his head. His mouth picked out the next words carefully. "Yes... why?"

"Well... It's nothing really. Don't worry about it." She waved her hand.

But it was something. Something that brought color to her cheeks, making her lips tremble a bit like the words were stuck right on the edge of them, waiting to tumble out. "Come on. Something's bugging you. I'm not going to freak out or anything."

She smiled weakly. "Really, it's nothing. I'm just having a rough week."

"Okay. I'll see you later then. I hope it gets better." He walked away from the counter, barely registering the guy with the laptop in one of the uncomfortable lobby chairs. Instead his mind played with the possibilities of what he would find when he went into the elevator. No, it was probably nothing. In fact, there was only a four percent chance that it could be something.

But what kind of something would it be? Was there another guy up there in the room? Did Alice get another call from her mother and was now sobbing her heart out in the lobby? Were his parents in the hospital? Anxiety looped itself through his brain.

He was still playing back the questions in his head when the steel door of the elevator slid open.