Search - Cluster :: Cluster II

Embed in a spacecraft often?

Ryan Patrick Wade | 10/21/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"You've returned to consciousness in the engine room where you hid after stowing away on this event horizontal skimmercraft that seems to be deriving some additional power from the Earth's oceans and is perhaps even recharging itself this way. Good to know, especially if the thing starts to get moody when you try and land it. On a whim, you close your eyes and try and reach the cockpit on intuition and tactile sensation alone, perhaps more than a little influenced by a timbre of alien idealism. Just as you are feeling a wet thermodynamic null seep in through your exploring fingers and smile to yourself about a possible encounter with a security guard who finds you absolutely adorable and side steps you in perfect silence to watch you toddle on, the texture of light through your lids alters as if you had been under a serving platter's voila dome, a side dish for an all-business lunch. You fight the urge to clear your throat, not wanting to give the impression of being tainted meat almost as much as you'd rather not be eaten. Turns out you're just garnish for the Venusian Ostrich Fish marinading in mobius serenity and hovering above you, free of all restraints, a kind of zero-gravity contra-veal. It's taking an awful long time for this lid to lift and the roasting fumes, never noticed until now, begin to overwhelm. Suddenly, the two most disconcerting words in the language are "palate cleanser". You haven't lived this long to snuff it as prelude to alien face sucking, right after the "well, that meeting went well, shall we seal the deal?" blink code, so you run for it and for a moment you think no one's noticed. That is until the multi-source slash of laughter and lasers, often indistinguishable from one another and often each heralding the other. This is less an exercise in extermination than a game to see who can come closest to hitting you without actually hitting you. Oh, the gilling the poor sucker will get who bisects my animacordus ridiculus, so you decide to make it easier and just stand motionless. Turn the whole thing into a knife-throwing act and try and work your way out of the infinitely botchable finale. Your stillness seems to have an effect on the inhabitants of the engine/dining room to the tune of a slowly accelerating show down at the OK carousel. Keep your own lunch down and maybe you'll remain becoming even while being circled by psychedelic soup shooting nerve shredding shards [...]suddenly you see it. It has been blooming up through your spine since you nearly turned your drawers into a fecal docking bay upon lift off. You can't be in over your head because there you are, like you've never seen yourself before, over your head. This is going to be quite a story. Now where did you put those hands?"