Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Steps Outside Herself

There was nothing overly dramatic about the way I fell asleep or how I transitioned into dreaming that night. I was already tired when I went to bed, though I had enough on my mind that I couldn’t fall asleep immediately.

Remembering how abruptly the owl-turtle thing had pulled me into a full dream state the night before, I wondered if that had anything to do with the man’s never-before-seen ability to keep me asleep. Maybe the fact that it hadn’t been a fully natural sleep to begin with had something to do with it… the owl-turtle thing got its mental mojo techniques from Dee’s mind, after all, and she had done something similar to herself in an attempt to get to sleep.

Once this thought was swirling around in my brain, it was hard to ignore. Had my father been telling the truth when he’d said he’d had nothing to do with my inability to wake up?

The hole in that was that… all his protests to the contrary… he’d had no problem sending me back to the waking world the instant it suited him to, right after I’d surprised him with that inexplicable show of force. Even if Dee was no longer sure I could trust the owl-turtle thing completely, it was still the more trustworthy of the two.

Whatever its plans were, it hadn’t killed anyone.

Thoughts of this nature swirled back and forth in my head while sleep overtook me by degrees. I had a sense later that I passed some time in the foggy, poorly remembered fields of regular dreaming before I found myself in a very solid-looking cavern with a high vaulted ceiling. The space was about the same size and shape as the dream fortress the owl-turtle thing had constructed, and as soon as I thought that I realized it was perched on a stalagmite in the middle of it.

“I had a bit of an easier time integrating the defensive pattern with the structure of your mind, the second time around,” the owl-turtle thing said. “If it looks a little different to you, that would be why.”

“Does it not look different to you?” I asked.

“It looks more subtle,” it said. “Less obviously foreign. I see the pattern, I don’t see what you’re dreaming it looks like. Something… subterranean, perhaps?”

“Yeah, it looks like a cavern,” I said, nodding.

“Not quite what I was hoping to hear. But your mind’s accepting it as natural,” the owl-turtle thing said. “That’s progress. I want you to try to do something, and it’s going to be tricky because it’ll be easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re doing it… to dream you’re doing it… but that’s not going to accomplish anything.”

“What?” I asked.

“I want you to reach out and feel the wall, the way you would if it was a spell,” it said.

“But it’s not a spell,” I said. “The subtle arts aren’t magic, not the kind of magic I can feel and manipulate.”

“Outside your head, you’d be right,” it said. “Inside? Let’s just say that I have my suspicions.”

“How will I know if I’m really doing it?”

“You won’t,” it said. “The difference between you thinking that you feel something and you feeling something are zero, from your point of view. But I’m a self-contained point of view within your mind, so I’ll know.”

“Okay,” I said.

I closed my eyes and held up my hands, extending them slightly towards the wall. When I’d first started reading magical energy, I’d had to reach out with my hand in order to reach out with my mind… learning how to do it without touching was a bit like like learning how to move one finger without moving the others, as small children did. It still helped to gesture.

If the walls had been the result of a spell, there would be traces of magical energy. Depending on the nature of the spell, they could be made out of it entirely, or they could be awash in it as an active spell constantly reinforced them, or they might just have residue from the spells that moved otherwise mundane earth and rock into a stable shape and left it there. Since the mental walls had no reality beyond the pattern they represented, I imagined it would be more like the first or second case than the last one… and yes, there it was.

Like a glowing thread woven through space, I could almost see the signature… it really was just like magic.

Or was it?

It seemed a bit too much like magic, and too easy.

“No, stop,” the owl-turtle thing said, and I opened my eyes. It fluttered its flippers a bit. “You’re thinking about it too much, leading yourself to the wrong conclusion. It’s like how you feel magic, but different.”

“Sorry, but magic’s my only real frame of reference here,” I said. “I’ve never actually done anything like… wait, does this have anything to do with what I did to my father last night?”

“Maybe,” the owl-turtle thing said. “I mean, yes, it does, but I don’t know if it will go anywhere. I got a third-hand description of that, from Ian telling Dee what he remembered and understood of you telling him. It sounded a bit familiar to Dee, but this kind of thing is subjective to begin with, before you get into the language gap.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You have to know what it feels like when Dee pushes thoughts around or whatever, and by now you should know what it felt like when I did…”

“Oh, I should?” it said. “You barely understood what was happening, and then you woke up right after that. Do you have any idea what kind of damage forceful waking does to the nuances of memory? And then you have a day of ordinary mental activity on top of that… right now your predominant impression of what you did is that it would be hard to describe, and let me tell you, that doesn’t give me much to work with.”

“Okay, but hang on,” I said. “The upshot of this is that I might be telepathic?”

“In practical terms? No,” it said. “Not a chance.”

“Then what are we talking about?”

“Something like telepathy, but inside your own head.”

“Isn’t that like saying I’m telekinetic, but I can only move things I’m touching?”

“Imagine that everybody lives inside bubbles. Telepaths can pick up rocks inside their bubbles and throw them into other bubbles.”

“And what can I do?”

“Well, there’s a chance you might be able to pick up a rock.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” it said. “You could drop it, but good luck throwing it against the inside of your own bubble, much less through it and across the gap to another bubble. But compared to the vast majority of the population, that’s impressive.”

“Is it useful, though?”

“Who knows? We don’t know what we’re working with,” it said. “But I did tell you that the reason you couldn’t keep a defensive pattern up yourself is that you wouldn’t be able to feel what you were doing, and maybe I was wrong about that. You see where I’m going?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Then I think I’m going about this the wrong way… I couldn’t bring the walls down by willing, could I? I mean, in the ordinary course of things.”

“It’s not your will that’s keeping them up,” it said.

“Right,” I said. “So instead of trying to feel and manipulate them like I would a spell… something I can fool myself into simulating… maybe I should be trying to tear them down.”

“There’s not a chance that would work,” the owl-turtle thing said.

“But that’s good, because we don’t want them down,” I said. “But it’d be closer to the thing we know I can do, and you’d know if I ‘hit’, right?”

“Ah, now you’re thinking,” it said. “Okay. But instead of the walls, hit me.”

“You?”

“Well, listen, just because there’s absolutely no chance you’d succeed in taking the walls down doesn’t mean we should risk it,” it said. “Maybe you make a crack. Maybe you make a gap that lasts just long enough for something to sneak its way in using a less-than-obvious fashion while we think we’re alone and secure. Anyway, if you attacked the walls I think they’d become less integrated with your mind, which is the opposite of the goal here.”

“Okay, but by the same token of ‘what if I do really well?’… what if I hit you harder than you expect?” I asked. “You’re a pattern of thoughts, basically. What happens to you if I destroy you?”

“Listen, there’s nothing that you can do in your amateurish flailing-around that Dee hasn’t tried,” it said. “I can’t be too confident in the walls because they’re cobbled together using your mind’s processes, no offense intended… the mind I was originally made from is much stronger, for certain values of ‘strong’, than yours or Dee’s.”

“So you’re saying that in my amateurish flailing around, there’s no chance that I will try something that Dee didn’t bother to?” I asked. “I mean, maybe there are possibilities she’s been trained out of seeing because nobody ever found any situation they would work in… or maybe the demon side of my mind will see I’m trying to tear something down and get its claws into you? You’re fond of reminding me that you’re so new that even you don’t know how you work… who’s to say that there isn’t a loose thread somewhere that could cause you to unravel just by being yanked?”

It gulped.

“Okay, point taken,” it said. “Let me give you a target. Actually, let’s make this interesting.”

It waved a flipper, and another stalagmite rose up out of the floor. There was a wooden board with a bullseye painted on it, secured to the stalagmite with metal bands.

“What I’ve done is layered three different types of constructs here,” it said. “The bullseye is a figment, like me or your dream lover from last time… less interesting than me, but it still has a mind, even if that mind is just thinking ‘I’m a board.’ The pillar is the same kind of defensive fortification as the walls right now, though it’s not fundamentally connected to them so you can rock it without upsetting the whole boat. The metal bands are just a really solid dream of metal bands. Try to do to it what you did last night, just before you woke up and we’ll see what happens.”

What had I done? I’d reached out and pushed somehow… I’d been angry and frustrated, and it seemed like that was key to what I’d done, but I didn’t think it was the anger itself that mattered. Anger had just stopped me from stopping to think about what I was doing. It had been instinct.

Instinct… a natural reaction.

But even if I’d done it without trying the first time, it didn’t stand to reason that it would be impossible to do it when I was trying. Still, it would help if I could summon up something like the same circumstances, the same state of mind… I thought about my father invading my dreams, violating my mind and my life despite my repeated protests. I thought about the owl-turtle thing, and the way that even at its most helpful there was something fundamentally unwanted about its presence in my mind.

I thought about all the baggage my grandmother had installed in me, all the beliefs about sex and religion and myself that I’d come to internalize even if I hadn’t precisely agreed with it. I’d worked hard to excise those influences from my mind, but it was an uphill battle and an ongoing process. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to shove an unwanted influence out of my mind as easily as throwing a dead weight overboard?

I thought about what the owl-turtle thing had said about picking up rocks. Maybe it would be a mistake to treat the analogy too literally, but I had to start somewhere. The metal bands were just a dream, it had said. That meant the stalagmite and the target should have some kind of presence, some kind of reality and substance in my mind that it lacked… right?

It didn’t come to me all at once. I slowly became aware of the solidity of the walls around me, and by extension the solidity of the rock spire in front of me. The wooden bullseye had a similar weight, but it also had a sort of pulsing presence that I was now aware of from the owl-turtle thing. The owl-turtle’s pulse was stronger, and also more irritating… its fundamental unlikeability was shining through loud and clear.

Strangely, I didn’t seem to pulse like that… and for a panicked moment, I wondered if it was possible that I was somehow just a dream. Then I realized that this was in fact the case… or rather, the body I was seeing out of was a dream.

My pulse was all around us. My presence was everywhere. My mind wasn’t actually localized inside the arms I could see, or the holes I saw them through.

I held on to the awareness of that omnipresence, as I had a feeling it would be both important and useful in my quest for lucid dreaming… but it wasn’t what I was working on now.

I could feel the pseudo-mind the owl-turtle thing had constructed for the target. I could feel the structure of the tiny fortress it hung upon.

Strong as they looked, the metal bands were an illusion compared to either of them. They had less reality than a phantasmal weapon… they were like the memory of metal, or someone saying, “Hey, think about metal.”

With my mind firmly fixed on the “weight” of the target, I really did feel like I could reach out and shove it or twist it or break it, like I could scream at it with my mind in a way that it couldn’t ignore… but I found myself distracted by the sense of another weight, something that was deforming the landscape of the dream in such a way as to be almost invisible.

As soon as I thought that, I realized that this was basically what had happened: somebody had taken two bits of empty air and folded them over each other to create a blind spot. There had to be more to it than that, because that would just hide a visual presence in the dream and I didn’t think that would fool the owl-turtle thing… the presence being concealed was definitely muted. There was a pulse like the one I felt from my mind and the pseudo-minds, but it was slower and felt… farther off… than it actually was.

I shifted my point of view from where I imagined I was standing to the pulse of my mind, and from that perspective… the god’s-eye-view… there was no mistaking his presence. He was here. Probably he’d snuck in ahead of the owl-turtle thing, while Dee was consulting with it and quizzing it about its intentions.

He was here, and he knew… well, he knew what the owl-turtle thing looked like, and whatever he could glean about its existence from however he was able to peer into its structure. Even if he’d learned nothing else except the obvious, I felt slightly deflated. As disconcerting as its presence could be, there was no way the reality of the owl-turtle thing would be nearly as unnerving as the great creeping unknown he’d been dealing with before.

Still, I’d succeeded in shaking him up quite a bit in the past week, and I knew how to shake him up some more. From my external vantage point, I watched as my dream-self squared off in front of the target. I concentrated, and concentrated on looking like I was concentrating… felt the determination rising, building, and then I shoved with all my might… but not against the flimsy figment that made up the bullseye.

This time I did more than set him back on his heels. This time I heard him scream… maybe more in shock and outrage than pain, but it was a beautiful sound. The flimsy dream-fabric of his hidey hole tore apart as he stopped concentrating on it, but it hardly mattered because he’d fallen backwards out of the blind spot.

His face was twisted and ugly in a way I wasn’t used to seeing, but what stood out more than that his suit looked cheap… patched and threadbare, but cheap to begin with. Off the rack and out of date. I wasn’t any kind of expert when it came to that sort of thing, but I could tell it didn’t suit him. It… he… was kind of almost smoldering.

His edges were kind of going hazy in places and giving off traces of what looked like smoke, but which I could feel were more like bits of him that had lost integrity.

It sounded impressive, but I could also tell that this wasn’t really him… not all of him. He’d projected his own figment rather than coming in himself. The unknown did scare him, enough that he wouldn’t risk getting caught in a locked room with it.

I looked at the owl-turtle thing.

“If I can destroy that thing, he won’t know what it learned?”

“Nope,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Just that he sent out a part of himself that never made it back. Hoo boy, will that ever get to him.”

“Good,” I said.

It was exactly what I’d expected to hear, and in fact it was so obvious an answer that I regretted having asked, because now I’d just advertised my intentions and the figment could make a mad scramble for the walls and I didn’t know who would win that fight.

But the shade couldn’t change its essential nature, and couldn’t resist answering injury with insult.

“Wouldn’t your mother be proud?” it said.

It was exactly the thing I needed to hear to end it.

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Characters: Mackenzie, Some Sort Of Ridiculous Owl Turtle Thing, The Man