John Wise

Somewhere in the future, not sure if I am in China or America. It is the time of the Olympics, and China is the host. The opening ceremonies are getting underway to much fanfare, but strangely, American citizens are becoming horribly ill and are discretely trying to return to their rooms. I followed a couple back into their room to determine what was happening; the woman all of a sudden came down with stomach problems.

In a second, the authorities are at the door, and they are looking for me, the spy. I need to get out unseen. Using a finger-shaped stone and a pencil-thick inch-and-a-half-long thing that looks like a quill, I am able to change form. I rapidly change from the image I have of myself as John into a series of shapes and devices that create enough confusion to allow me to throw myself out of the door, which the authorities have blocked to apprehend me.

The ability to change form has been taught to me by a Shaman as the physical world is under assault, and I am one of the people who are trying to bring our senses back to a simpler reality.

Mankind has learned to alter reality by creating a programmable viral life form whose substrate is shared with the space occupied by oxygen, the skies. This genetically designed organism takes on the form and shape of any other organic form it is assigned to mimic. The effect doesn’t last long as the life span of the organism isn’t stable yet, but in the time that it does exist, it is enough to create severe problems.

Thus, it may be that the people who became ill did not eat what they thought, but actually, something quite putrid or poisonous wrapped in a programmed layer of what appeared to be common or known to the victim.

My role is to understand and report back what I am finding regarding this mutation. For now, though, I am quick to disappear. Back in Washington, someone has pulled a pirate veil over the city, which is an illegal façade blanketing a space, used for making a protest, entertainment, or terrorism. Today’s veil is a time-lapse of Washington over the ages; buildings rise, weather, and are disappearing. Scenes of public hangings come on and fade quickly. The changes in transportation are a blur of progress forward.

While this hijacking of reality takes place, finding your destination can prove difficult and often impossible. When I arrive at the building I am looking for, I see Ronald Reagan tending to a state event and then realize that the people or things chasing me are back. With a rub of the stone and quill, I shift form and quickly go up to the center of the building, finding an exit near the top. My escape was timely as the building was being flooded, or was it? Was it just another part of the reality distortion? As Reagan had been out of the office for many years and was obviously another part of the veil, so too was the rest of the imagery. The problem with these charades and illusions is that panic and adrenalin push the senses to accept the altered reality as actual reality even when the rational mind knows what it is seeing is not real. Under these circumstances, one might get tricked into doing dangerous things, which could lead to accidents or worse.

While I am pursued, a new, previously unknown element has been added to the organism; it is now communicating between forms. This raises the question of whether the hackers who are altering these life forms are giving them logical ability. Will they spawn new entities inheriting the knowledge to replicate forms with increasing intelligence, possibly to disrupt life as we know it? But then, how much of this is a mutation, how much is programmed, and how far and how fast can it go on before spinning out of control? The alarm sounds, and I awake.