Into the (H)aether

The morning bloomed through the heather. A soft morning, with the sky cast like a child’s breath on a fogged up, window of a ’93 chevy, flying down the coastline to escape the summer’s heat. My name was also Heather. It was an error in the Simulation, that I had been named after the scene in the Sim, in another life I would have probably found the oversight funny but the humour had been wrung out of me, quite some time ago. Now I just blankly held the clothes up to the line and followed the cracks in the Sim with my finger, wondering when I would be let out, when my purpose would come.

Or perhaps the name Heather was a carry over from a life I didn’t remember. After all, I barely remembered this life. I often saw myself from my mind’s eye, laying there in the heather, like a discarded doll, left there to be brought to life in nature’s casket. But forgotten by nature herself, who could not breathe life into the doll. The doll was only for the scurrying black beetles and field mice, who stole pieces of her frayed hair to wrap around their young. A beetle skirted across my face as I lay there in the field, watching the soft pink sky flickering at the top of the Sim’s celestial ceiling. It was a dark trick, creating a seemingly beautiful Sim dilapidated with childhood memories, of mine or perhaps the Sim’s tormented creator. Sims were supposed to be realistic enough for its victims to sink out of reality and forget their former lives. A soothing nitrous oxide transporting one to purgatorio or paradiso, whichever one haunted your memory less. But I remembered enough, and my Sim had many cracks.

The Consciousness had to be transported somewhere, otherwise it could sometimes come back and overpower its new host. I of course, had once been in my own body, but now some other host had captured it, and lived out carnal pleasures between my once pale and innocent eyes. I was the trapped, but I was once the free.

Nobody new why, and it was a relatively rare now that the Consciousnesses were stowed safely away in computer generated Sims, but some of the trapped like me, clung to hope that we would one day overpower our host, and return to our body. It had been done before. Those who could cling to the memories of their old life, were sometimes able to do it.

The computer was smart as well, designed that way of course. When one of us would pass a Sim test, showing that we remembered enough of our former life to have a slight chance at overpowering the host, our Simulation would be turned up, meaning that we would pacified into an even more beautiful environment, throwing us off the trail of our host. The goal was to merge the environment with the trapped’s consciousness. So up and down and sleep and wake all merged into one soft floating existence, like a post-apocalyptic opium den, filled with writers, and travellers, and smugglers, eyes bleary from the drugs and the daze of existence. With stories told so richly, that they became the listener’s own, and reality once again became tilted, pink and hazy.

This was not a story of wretched human nature and bombs and cockroaches and decay, rather it was the story of how your mind can rock you like a lullaby, and turn around and suffocate you, choking to death in a field of heather.

I sat by a river now, beneath a mango tree. The smell of the fruit, and the sweat of a man I had once known filled the air. But something more sulphuric filled the air, and a black snake swam across the river, “Hello little one, my little Heather” he whispered. And then he was in the tree, looking down at me with green eyes filled with ones and zeroes, “little one, you need to try harder to forget. It is only once you have forgotten that you may return to earth and serve your purpose.” Just then the Sim glitched, and I saw a flash of my life, the way you do before you’re about to die. I knew the snake was temping me, playing with my mind. “Little one, take this mango, and you will see your family again for the last time. You can say goodbye.” And I knew it was a trick, and the mango would put me to sleep for years, and when I awoke, I would be even further away from myself, but in my years of sleep I would have experienced years of peace, I no longer knew in this life.

And in hopes of making it out of the Sim, and forgetting what I still knew, I took the golden fruit, and bit into it deeply, the juice tracing down my lips like venom. As I fell backwards into the slumber I looked up and I saw the stars etched like galaxies that had once graced my brown summer arms, as we flew along the coastline, and I saw the man with long hair, with his head back laughing, he smelled of summer, and grass, and sweat. And as the darkness fell around me, I saw the large rings of Saturn, like spinal discs jutting across the sky. Except I no longer remembered it was just a Sim, the sky now looked beautiful, with children’s toys hanging off the rings, like clothes on a line.

And when I woke, I knew I was older, but that was all I knew. And the snake was there again, but he was not older, for he was trapped just like me, but in a different way. And he looked at me and said, “it’s time to see your purpose child, you must not look away”. And with a bravery that comes only with forgetting death, I looked forward into the oracle, and I saw myself as a little girl, with pale eyes, and wispy hair that floated around me like spider webs. I saw that I was clutching a golden heart-shaped locket in my small left hand. And the snake wrapped around my left arm, and whispered, “now you must kill her”.