Mornings
The day has not yet arrived; it is that quiet time
when life hangs suspended between the night and the day. The world is quiet, disturbed only by the
gentle rasps and creaks of a sleeping house.
If you can release them it is in these times all the worries of the
world seem to slip into that darkness that surrounds you. The still quiet offers the space to clear
your mind and imagine what can be, not what is or was.
So many cannot stand the emptiness found here. They try to fill it with anything, or
everything they can. For normal people,
this is the time they dig deep into the comforters on their beds. Monty, on the other hand, cherished it. It renewed him as he prepared for the
day. He took comfort in routine; a place
for everything and everything in its place was his motto. In this time of dark the world seemed ordered
and precise to him, even if it was anything but!
The motorway was just beyond the next hill, and if
he strained hard enough he could hear the automobiles and trucks as they sped
along, oblivious to the world just beyond the fence. But then why wouldn’t they be oblivious? Hadn’t technology replaced the humans who
guided them with automatic systems some years earlier? Now the cargo, both human and otherwise, was
carried along the highway by fully efficient and safely controlled robots. But who was that control that controlled them?
That’s what Monty wanted to know, but there never seemed to be anyone to ask
when he tried to find out.
So here he sat, sunk deep into the chaise, his
eyes closed, as he slowed his breathing to just a few breaths a minute, focusing
on the sound his heart made as it moved his blood. He fought to find just the right rhythm so he
could follow a single blood cell through his veins. This ability seemed natural to him, but he
knew that few others shared it, and when he tried to explain how it worked they
looked at him with the same look he imagined they gave the snake oil salesmen
of the American west some two hundred years earlier.
Once he found just the right cell to latch onto,
his concentration rose to a new level.
The world opened before him and he could see the new day unfold with all
its complexities, anxieties, hostilities, in fact, all the “ities” he could
think of. Mrs. Beaverton, in the next town
over was going to drop the skillet on her big toe. Josh, her son, would come running in when she
cried out, slip on the spilled grease from the skillet and end up splitting his
head on the counter as he fell heavy at her feet.
The couple on Weaver Place would arise at the
sound of the six thirty alarm and with their usual efficiency head towards the
kitchen and the shower, one in each direction.
Passing back and forth, as each went through their individual morning routines,
unaware that in just a few short hours they would discover they were expecting
a child.
These were interesting footnotes in the day, but
it was not the information Monty was interested in. It was not what the investment companies were
paying him for, and it was not what the government asked of him as they sought
ways to know what was going on with the population they controlled. So after just a few moments of looking into
the personal lives he found fascinating, Monty turned his attention to the
issues that paid the bills.
His first stop in this grand journey was to look
into what the CEO of Humanity Services had in store for her. A competitor had heard that she was nervous
about a new product HS was going to unveil, and was looking for an edge they
could use to get a leg up on them. They
had provided Monty with all the personal information he needed to focus into
her, and he now went through that information as his mind crossed the
boundaries of one reality to another.
All the sudden, she and her thoughts came into view, almost as if he was
tuning the remote performance box to see the latest Broadway show. Her features were clear, but the reality
before her was troubling. He did not see
her standing on the stage as he expected, but she was trapped in some kind of
box, screaming for help and fighting against the flames that lapped at her
feet. Monty cried out in pain and fled
from the scene. This was something
totally unexpected and he was not sure what to do.
His pulse raced as adrenaline hit his system and
he lost hold of his focus, causing him to leave one dimension and return to his
own reality. He sat there with a rapidly
beating pulse, elevated temperature but yet was in a cold sweat. What should he do?
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