…and it begins
I walk down the street with a smile on my face. It’s imperative that you always seem like you enjoy what’s going on, all the time. People will find you interesting, right? I don’t really let people get into my head too often. It’s bad press, and you’ve got to be a self-sufficient little unit. That’s the way nature intended it, you’ve got blood cells to transport necessities to cells. You need them, the necessities I mean. Water, food, shelter, it’s pretty obvious. Maybe the occasional cigarette, I mean, they aren’t going to kill me. Cancer might kill me, that’s not for at least 20 years though. I can’t really look all that far into the future.
The future is a scary place, it makes me uncomfortable, a ton of things do. Imagine birds are remote-controlled and their eyes are cameras. They’re watching my every move and they’re reporting back to government agencies. The average person doesn’t know this, but I do, the average person is a sheep, and the government can pretty much do whatever they want without telling us.
I was probably about four years old and I was in my backyard. There were birds at the feeder. There were always birds at the feeder, my mother loved birds. She used to have a couple feeders in our backyard. There was also a big tree. It was a mountain ash, it was covered with these little berries. My mother always told me not to eat the berries, so I never did. I wouldn’t dare push those limits. Being a child, I did what I was told, I never did eat one of those berries. On this particular day, the birds in the backyard were acting strange. They congregated at the feeder, but they didn’t eat. They sat there and twitched their heads, jerking them spastically back and forth, surveying their surroundings. Being the inquisitive small child that I was, or in that case, any child is, I wanted to study their habits. I had a water pistol on this day and wondered how the birds would react to being squirted, or maybe I was just a little bastard and had become uncomfortable with the birds and knew they’d fly away.
I pulled the trigger on that water pistol like a madman, and the strangest thing happened.
The slugs from the .45 hit their marks and dropped those bastards. They spiraled awkwardly into the ground, feathers flying clumsily, sparks shooting majestically. Upon hitting the ground, one of the robins seemed to shatter opening to reveal its innards. The metallic corpse was filled with sputtering and clikcing gears, wheels, tapes, and lenses for eyeballs. I stood awestruck before scooping up the mechanical skydweller and quickly erasing my mind by putting it in the metal trashcan in the detached garage. For a while, I was unsure if it was a dream or not, it may not have been.
They’re out there, they’re watching.
You’re crazy.
