I didn’t say you could laugh at me. Only they can do that.

Timeline/World: Newfound Worlds – Erisia – Tiered Lives
Current Date: December 1, 1400

Character: Mikhail Hastur-Lanart
Race: Human – Genetically Modified
Age: 28
Current residence: Upper Level – Yenson
 

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Animals aren’t common, but I learned some years ago that they are necessary. I’m still not sure I really understand why they’re necessary, but it seems as though they are. Whether or not I understand doesn’t change the fact of their presence.

When I try to think back to my time on the lower level, I don’t know that I remember seeing animals. It’s hard to really focus on anything I might have known, however. My time down there was either spent being experimented upon, with clients, or, well, hunting down food. The idea of trying to locate any animals of sorts—not that I even know what they could have been—wasn’t anywhere on my mind.

Maybe there were rats? From the reading I could get my hands on—learning to read was hard and it still is stupidly difficult—it seems that places like the lower levels, which are a bit like slums—would possibly have rats. I just don’t know. What I do know is that our neighbours might have cats. I know that I saw what I think what a dog being walked by someone some months ago and in the sky, coming and going, I’ve seen things that are supposed to be birds. I’ve never seen them up close, though, so I don’t know if they’re really what they’re supposed to be. That’s fine.

Anyway.

This is where things fall into a bit of a muddle; I’m pretty certain that the animal I think I saw a few weeks ago, standing by one of our windows, and looking like it was possibly mocking me, was only in my dreams. I still don’t completely understand my dreams and there are times when, after I’ve woken up and only hints of that dream linger, I tend to be unable to tell if what’s left of the dream was part of just that, a dream, or if it was something I saw in reality.

I don’t like the way my mind seems unable to put everything together the way it should. I do understand, through the doctor who still sees me monthly, that my brain is somewhat fractured. That the experiments I was put through have done damage to more than just my body and thus the way I have to live. The fractures aren’t life-changing, not in the way the physical changes are, but they can leave me with confusing memories like this one I’ve been trying to make sense of.

The more I think about the memory that could be a dream, the more I’m at a loss and it leads me to feel frustrated. Mostly because I don’t know what to make of what I do remember. Of the small furry thing on the windowsill, looking at me and while I don’t think that animals can be this intelligent, I still feel as though in this memory, the thing was laughing at me somehow and it frustrates me because there’s only one person who is allowed to laugh at me and, if I stop to think about it, he’s never laughed at me. He’s laughed with me; especially when teaching me new things; he’s laughed at the situations I got myself into, but he never laughed at me.

In the end, I suppose it might be why I feel as though whatever this thing is that hovers at the edge of my mind is part of a snippet of a dream more than a proper memory. I haven’t even been able to describe the animal well enough that Cory might have been able to tell me what it could be. Even through whatever there is in the system for us to dig through, we can’t find anything. The memory is too vague and centred on what I felt, more than whatever it was that was on the sill looked like and it frustrates me.

This is one of those things that even now, more than ten years later, I struggle with. I have a hard time letting go of these things. When something doesn’t make sense, it’s as though I don’t know how to let go and while I haven’t lost sleep over it, it’s still present enough in my mind that I zone out at times, trying to figure things out even though I know that I just can’t at this point.

I know we’ll find means to distract me well enough but during the quieter moments after these distractions, the thoughts tend to come back with a vengeance. I know I’ll eventually let it go but, for now, it’s just an annoying part of my almost daily routine.

Final Word Count: 771

I can be romantic! When I feel like it, of course.

 
Timeline/World: Newfound Worlds – Erisia – Tiered Lives
Characters: Mikhail Hastur-Lanart
Race: Human – Genetically Modified
Age: 28
Current residence: Upper Level – Yenson
Final Word Count: 778 words
 

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I don’t know if people are still disappearing. If they are, it has crawled to a near-stop. We don’t really hear about it anymore and while our population has diminished, I don’t know that it has become as bad as some people used to talk about. Life seems to have returned to what might have been considered the norm and I’ve let it be.

It’s no place of mine to try and figure out what happens out there. It’s no place of mine to go digging and find more about the ones that have passed. There was no one in any of the levels that I might have cared about in any way whose disappearance would have changed my life.

Now, if Cory had disappeared, I would have lost myself. If the doctor I still see once a month for my treatment were to disappear, I don’t know what I’d do. I know we’d adapt but it wouldn’t be fun. These two, I feel, are the only two people who hold any importance in my life. Cory is at the very, very top of this list and there’s no changing that.

Over the last decade, I’ve learned more things than I thought there were to learn. I’ve learned about love and affection. I’ve learned about this thing they call romance though there are times when I’m still not really sure I understand it fully. I’ve learned that there is more to companionship than physical pleasure. It was all I’d ever really known before Cory stepped into my life, in the end.

Romance has many meanings but the one that sticks with me the most is about this relationship we have and how, at times, I feel as though I want to do these little things for him. I couldn’t really understand where these feelings came from. Why did I want to do something to make him smile, something more than the usual thing? Being together with him, just there, at his side, seemed enough to make him smile, so why this sudden desire for a little something more?

The first few times I asked him to explain these sudden feelings to me, I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that he didn’t explain it perfectly well but coming from someone who’d only ever known what I had, it felt impossible to wrap my mind around the notions he was trying to impart to me.

Eventually, I think I sort of just let it go. I could somewhat understand—it was just about wanting to see him smile because his smile made me feel good—and I allowed myself to be swept into these feelings.

Those romantic moments were translated into simple enough things. Picking some of the flowers that grew in the garden—only those that had enough so that it wouldn’t really show, and they would grow back. Trying to prepare him a snack—something much more complicated for me as I still can only eat a little bit of food due to my condition, but I do try my hardest. Little things that seem to, indeed, reach their goals, that being, make him smile.

I’ve realized that there are such simple things to love about life that it makes everything beautiful. Life down there was different, it was about the physical aspect of things and that was about it. Up here, there still is quite a bit of the delightful aspect to our love but there’s more now. There is the falling asleep with him breathing against me part, there is the waking up with him just there at my side part. Watching him sleep part. Watching him slowly come to awareness part.

In a way, I feel as though I’ve become much softer in the years that I’ve been here with him, but I can’t really complain about any of it. I feel alive when I’m with him and I can’t say that this was something I really felt down there. They made me into a monster, but he’s shown me that there’s more to me than just being that monster and I repay that knowledge in any way I possibly can.

It might not always be huge things, but I’ve also learned that most of the time, it is the much littler things that actually do count; they count much more than the big ones. It is easier to do more, meaningful, little things than it is to try and focus to do one very big thing. As with the rest of our lives, I take things one day followed by the other. As long as I have him with me, all will be well.

Everything I do has a purpose. You’ll have to find out if it has a deeper meaning or not.

 
Timeline/World: Newfound Worlds – Erisia – Tiered Lives
Characters: Mikhail Hastur-Lanart
Race: Human – Genetically Modified
Age: 26
Final Word Count: 694 words
 

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Where do dreams come from? Are they meant as something to fill in a void? I don’t remember dreaming before they modified me and during those modifications, I know I didn’t dream. It’s only since we’ve been up here that things have changed. Maybe it’s something in the air; it certainly is fresher up here than I ever could be down there but somehow, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

Though I’m sure, some would roll their eyes at me and my line of questioning but I feel like it’s a valid thing. I know that, supposedly, the people and faces—and things—we see in dreams are based on things in our memories but none of what I’ve seen in my dreams has ever rung a bell. They’re usually not bad, these dreams, they’re harmless but some leave me so puzzled that I end up staring off for a while until Cory snaps me back to reality and then everything just evaporates right out of my reach as though I hadn’t been meant to remember.

I did have one recent dream that stayed with me just enough for me to not get lost in trying to tear it apart, so even as I went through my day, it still was somewhat on my mind. Even now, a few days later with other dreams in between—most of them forgotten upon waking up, I know—I still remember bits and pieces from that one other dream and it baffles me a little. It doesn’t baffle me in a bad way but it still confuses me a little.

I think that the part that confuses me isn’t so much the scene in general but the fact that most of the time, I can see myself in my own dreams if that makes sense. I can look and say ‘there I am,’ in this dream, though, I can’t see myself. I can only see through what I assume are my eyes and I’m talking to someone else about how everything I do has a purpose. We’re just walking while we talk.

The scenery just drifts on by as we stroll through along a country road, something I shouldn’t even really know about as country roads don’t exist in here, not really. There are some parks in the upper two tiers but no country roads. I’ve read about those in storybooks and I don’t know if they’re even a real thing since I assume the author probably didn’t even know what those were either.

So we’re just walking, there’s someone at my side and I can only catch bare glances of them because they’re right next to me and most of the dream is nothing but the scenery, the birds, the water along some brook gurgling away somewhere close by.

The person next to me just keeps on asking me why I do ‘this’, and ‘that’, but I have no idea what either ‘this’, or ‘that’ even means. My answer is always cryptic and even now, thinking about it, frustrates me. Had someone else been answering my questions this way, I would have clubbed them over the head with a heavy book.

‘Everything I do has a purpose,’ the voice coming from potentially my mouth in the dream says. It goes on to say, ‘you’ll have to find out if it has a deeper meaning or not,’ and the rest of everything is pretty much just that rehashed. I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that people are still slowly disappearing. Not as many up here and there have been enough birth that it seems to balance out but I’m pretty sure it’s not the case.

In a way, greedy people would claim that it’s quite okay, it means fewer people to feed but that just seems like a cruel way to look at things. I still don’t know what’s happening as far as this is concerned but I’m still worried; not that there’s much I can do about any of it, in the end. I’m just me; insignificant to everyone but Cory and, in the long run, I’m okay with that.

There’s no such thing as a point of return. You make your choice and you have to stick with it until the end.

 
Timeline/World: Erisia – Tiered Lives
Characters: Mikhail Hastur-Lanart
Race: Human – Genetically Modified
Age: 25
Final Word Count: 622 words
 

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Most people likely won’t notice until it’s too late. It’s just one of those things. It’s also not even a top-tier sort of thing because I know that people down below on the bottom most likely wouldn’t realize either, but it would be for different reasons.

Down there, it’s everyone for themselves. Family doesn’t really mean anything—as far as I’ve ever been able to see it—and even employers might not care if their employees somehow go missing. They might mostly just get pissed because their income has dropped some. That case is particularly true for brothels and there are so many of them down there that you’re left to wonder if there’s room for anything else.

I know people are going missing. I’ve seen it, noticed it. Survival, when you’re down there, is a case of paying attention to everything that surrounds you and the fact that my genes were fucked with made me doubly so careful, I had to feed while I was down there and I had to be aware of everything. So it’s not been too hard to notice that particular people who had particular habits are gone and, in some cases, it’s like they never existed.

Up here, it’s different, though I’m different now too. Cory took me to see this one doctor, he’d been down on the lower tier before and he had this seriously calming aura about him and while it was hard to open up about the problem at first, I eventually did and while the options he’s offered me—and the treatments—aren’t perfect, they’ve done me some good and I’m healthier now than I was when Cory first took me up here and I’m grateful for it.

Sure, I still have to go in every month or so for treatment and some blood ‘transfusion’ but that’s that and I can even eat a bit of his normal food. It’s always nice to be able to eat at the same time as him.

One of the things I’ve come to understand in life, too, is that there’s no such thing as a point of return. So often, I’ve heard people down below talking about hitting that point of no return but it’s all lies. There’s no point of return. You have to make your choice and stick with it until the end. For example, this thing where I finally decided to open up to the good doctor about what had been done to me. There was nowhere in that whole scene where I crossed a point of return and beyond the one of no return. There was no going back once I started talking, you know?

I think the same could be said for those missing people. If I were to start looking deeper into things and if I were to start asking questions, I think I’d fall in deep and there would be no crawling back out of that hole. The question here, though, is easy enough to ask. Do I want to do this? Do I want to throw away everything I have now because some people I might or might not have known are disappearing?

I don’t want Cory to be drawn into this whole melodramatic thing. I believe that if we’re due to all just eventually disappear into nothingness, we will. This kind of life, this dome, this planet, I think it’s eventually just all going to collapse but I’d like for that to happen at least decades away from now so Cory has time to live a long, fulfilling life. I’ll be with him through it all and that’s all I want. Once he’s gone, I don’t mind what happens to me. He’s what matters most.

There’s not nearly enough food in here for me to deal with you right now.

Timeline/World: Erisia – Tiered lives
Characters: Mikhail Hastur-Lanart
Race: Human – Genetically Modified
Age: 24
Final Word Count: 537 words

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Seven years is a really long time. I never thought I’d live through seven years. I honestly thought I’d last all of a few months up top, there with him, just trying my best to keep him happy but as it turns out, I made it past seventeen, into eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and so on. I’m twenty-four, how the hell did I make it to twenty-four with the genetic modifications they forced me through?

Surviving while I was down there wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I mean, I thought I was doing a favour to all of the ones who were sick and dying. I was easing them out of their misery and I was getting a free meal out of it at the same time. Not that it always sat well, my body could handle dealing with bad blood but it still wasn’t easy. When the man who claimed him as his own did just that, I came as part of the package, I was brought up to the top level and my life changed but, for close to a year, it wasn’t pleasant.

The fact that I don’t need food and only survive on blood—thank you, freak-ass scientists, who have done this to me—was an issue, it wasn’t exactly easy for him to get me food and I didn’t want to take from him for fear of being unable to stop once I started.

As I said, that first year was rough, we tried several different methods until we found one that worked. It’s unpleasant, it makes me sick for about a week but I can go about six months without feeling the craving for blood and I can actually stomach a little bit of food so it’s actually pretty nice to be able to sit down with him while he eats and nibble on a little something myself. I can’t remember ever being able to eat such sweet, delicious foods.

Everything up here seems to taste so much sweeter. Though I suppose I should be called a liar for that one because I have no memories whatsoever of eating food while down there on the bottom level. I know I did because this gene-mucking up they did with me didn’t happen until I was a teen but I can’t really recall any of it. I suppose it might not be such a bad thing, life down there is unpleasant and people just can’t seem to bring themselves to care.

Despite the fact that we’ve settled comfortably here, I know we don’t go out of our ways to live like kings, though we could. Now and again, we pack up a few things and we drop them down there. Clothes, some food, some medicine. It’s not much and I feel like it’s nearly not enough but it’s all we can manage without anything beginning to look suspicious.

Looking back to the life we used to lead, I find it hard to think that I’m now giving away to those who need it more. I used to mostly think about just surviving another day, back then. It’s something to think about. How everything just changes.