Are you implying that my telepathy is contagious?

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Dariel McBride
Race: Human
Age: 50, physically about 25
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 773 words
 

---

At times, I stray from fiction and step into non-fiction. It’s not something I do often, there’s just something a little odd about reading non-fiction. Reading about all these historical events that took place before I was even born, reading about people who have long since passed on—long before the world became what it is. It’s strange to find out more about any of that, really. At times, I feel as though it would be easier to learn about any of these things through the virtual reality system but I’m really more a book person.

I lost count of the short texts I’ve read about people trying to explain their views on one thing or another. These weren’t so much books, as they were archived forums where people used to discuss things with other people. These were things that were still around when I was barely a teenager, and I didn’t really get to wander through that online mess before the world came to its end. Thinking back, I might have been eleven when it happened, and I had more things to think about than the online world at large at that point.

People were bigoted back then. I don’t know that there are any other words for it. Not everyone was bigoted, but it feels like such a big part of the world was. People who thought that anyone who might not have been straight had chosen to be; anyone who wasn’t seen as normal could be cured. How some people seemed to think that blindness was contagious and just—reading through it all felt like a bit of a mess.

I don’t know how deep I really went on that forum. I just found that one particular thread where people discussed their views on the possibility of gifted people and just, wow. Things being a mess doesn’t even begin to explain any of the things that I might have ended up reading on that particular thread.

At one point, I think I read something about someone claiming that someone they knew was telepathic and that they’d kept as far away as possible from them because they hadn’t wanted to get infected. That one, like a good few others, made me roll my eyes so hard. Telepathy isn’t something you can catch. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s a trait someone might be born with and you can’t change that. Just like being gay, bisexual, asexual or anything else out there doesn’t make you a bad person and it doesn’t make you contagious.

With how few of us there are here in Atheria—compared to the population of the world before it ended—and how diverse we all are, I don’t know that anyone bigoted would make it very long here. I’m not saying that everyone is accepting of everything, and we all believe in the same things but I’m still saying that if you’re not open-minded while living here, you’re not going to have too good of a time, let me tell you.

I believe that we’re all good people. Our parents, our grandparents, they came to live here because they needed to be here and I still think that if they hadn’t fit in, in a lot of different ways, they wouldn’t have stayed here, and we wouldn’t be here. I’m not going to judge anyone for being different from me. Honestly, if we all were the same and we all thought the same way, things would just be so bland, it’d be like living in these so-called perfect future worlds that some people have written about.

Some of these writings make that potential world seem so bland that I don’t know how anyone would survive in there. No emotions, no attachment, just little robots doing their tasks day-in and then day-out with little to look forward to. I don’t know that I care at all about this idea. Our lives here are pretty idyllic, but we still have free will, we still can do all of the things we love, there’s no cap on our emotions, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting something a little different from one day to the next. We’re supposed to be different from one another.

I don’t know if it makes me a bad person that I’m sort of glad that bigoted people are most likely pretty much all gone. I know that there are pockets of people living all around the world still, surviving despite everything that has happened; even with that in mind, I still think that the way people were way before just isn’t a thing anymore.

The only advice I can offer is this: stay out of the lake at all times.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Foreign Songs – Over the Rainbow
Characters: Kaede Mori
Race: Human
Age: 35
Current residence: Moscow, Russia
Final Word Count: 815 words
 

---

I only have very vague memories of my life before the NISD, and my time spent there is something I spend very little time actually thinking about. I don’t want to remember what they put us through while we were there, so I try not to think about it. I don’t know whether or not I should consider myself lucky, or unlucky that they picked me up on that day. I was so very far from where we ended up, I don’t know why they snatched me.

I mean, my parents had just died, they’d had no family other than one another, and I was going to end up with who knew how many other kids in a group home and even young and at that age, I knew I didn’t want to be there. I’d heard plenty of horror stories though they very well could just have been rumours that my parents had told me to make sure I behaved. I lost track of how often they threatened to send me off if they had to.

I was seven when they took me away and the rest of that is history.

For years, when I was floating away during their studies, I think that my mind floated back to my parents. I floated back to the life I might have had before. One of the places that my mind often took me on a ride to, while I was dealing with the effects of the drugs. In a way, I think I held on to those memories to try and ignore the effects that withdrawal had on me. It was one of those things I hated. They’d dose me, watch the effect, keep soft-dosing me for a few days usually and then they’d let me come down and take more notes. They’d repeat the process.

At least, that’s what I remember of it, but I know I might be wrong. That’s okay, though.

In my memories, I often found myself on the edge of a lake that I distinctly remember my mother telling me to never go anywhere near. This is one of the only memories I truly have that paints her as possibly being a good mother.

I don’t why she was so adamant about keeping away from that lake. In a way, I think her words were more about how I had to stay out of that lake but in the memories, I had while I was high, it really was more about just keeping away from it in a general sense.

After my release, I stopped thinking about it at all for some time. Then, some years ago, for reasons I’m still not even completely sure of, I read a text or a study somewhere about a lake up here and it brought back the memory I’d had of mom and her warnings about the lake back home. It all seems just so random, I’m not even sure why I dug deeper about it all but I did.

I can’t even really find any information on the lake from my memories. It’s as though it never existed, and my mind might have made it all up. The one way to really make sure would be to get a ticket and go back home, back to that one place that I hadn’t really thought of or seen as home in a really long time. At this point, it’s not something I even really want to do. I just want to leave ‘home’ far away. That home, the house of my childhood, the place where I grew up until I was moved to the group home, it’s not home. Not in the sense of where the heart is.

My little, cold and bitchy heart calls this place home, right here with my friends. Right here with these other souls who have gone through things similar to mine and know how effed up life can be because of that study they put us through. I know that this is one of the reasons why we’re all still together. While we weren’t all in the institute at the same time and for the same number of years, we did spend some time together and it just created a bond.

I’m not about to buy a plane ticket to go back to Japan to try and find an elusive lake when I know that it’s not going to give me any of the answers I might want or even need at this point. So, what if I don’t ever find out if that lake from my memory is real? So, what if I don’t find out why my mother was so adamant that I never step into its water? My parents are dead, it was decades ago, I don’t know that going back to this tiny little village would offer me any answers, so I just won’t bother.