The providence of dreams

To some people, dreams are a gateway to the soul. To others, they are glimpses of possible futures, or echoes from the past. Dreams are the realm of mystery, possibility, higher consciousness. For others, dreams represent some very basic and necessary processes of an organic mind. Assimilating experience into memory and resorting neural pathways to make the brain ready for another day.

In spite of my Buddhist upbringing and the significance of dreams in those traditions, I'm a rationalist. I understand the purely organic nature of brain function and the random synaptic interconnections that become our dreams. I don't believe dreams are a window into some higher reality, but I do believe that sometimes our dreams have meaning. Sometimes, dreams are the only way we can talk to ourselves. And I know when I'm dreaming.

It's always difficult to tell when a dream's started. There's a rolling window that can only see so far into the memory of dreams. You can see where you are and may remember where you just where, but the images are fleeting. It's hard to remember how you got there.

The images change. Reality is fluid, sometimes disconcertingly so. But it's a dream. It's not supposed to be solid. Even when the colors are vivid and the imagery solid and real, it's just a dream. People. Places. Things. All usually identifiable in the context of a dream, even when they bare no resemblance to the reality they represent.

This dream is no different. I am me. Of that I have no doubt. I'm at the beach house, the one we would sometimes visit in the summers, though it looks nothing like it and the rooms seem to change as I move through them. That's the nature of a dream though. Real is what it is, regardless of what it isn't.

The rooms shifting and changing don't bother me.

That the world outside the beach house lacked a beach didn't bother me either.

I would have expected beach clothes to go with the house, a swimsuit or sundress. But it's not. I'm in my Dress Black's, the dress uniform of Intel section. Black. Silver trim. It can't be mine though. It doesn't fell right. Too tight in some places, too loose in others. In a mirror it looks right, but the uniform doesn't fit.

"They used to call you Ice Queen." A voice says to me softly. A child's voice. A little girl, no more than seven or eight years old.

"Once. A long time ago." I answer. We're standing outside the house. I don't remember moving from inside to here, but it doesn't matter. She's sitting on a large rock wearing a slightly scruffy sun dress. Her features are indistinct. I don't know this child, but she knows me.

"Why did you end my pa?" She asks me. An innocent question, but full of hurt.

"I'm a soldier," I reply. "Sometimes soldiers have to kill people." It's the only answer I have. I don't know this child's father. Or maybe I do. Did it matter? I'd ended my fair share of people. It was inevitable I'd left someone without a mother or father. "I bore him no malice, child. That's not why I became a soldier."

"It's ok," she says. "I'll have enough malice for both of us."

I look, and she's holding a gun. It looks almost comically big in her tiny hands, the muzzle looking a full twenty millimeters across. So big I can see the blunt nose of the round in the chamber and a slow motion eruption of flame around it. Everything slows. The round crawling up the barrel, then bursting out with a wash of fire behind it. I have an eternity to move, but I don't. I just watch as the round crawls towards me.

A hand reaches in from beside me and plucks the round from it's course, holding it up to examine it curiously. I know this person, but I can't find a name. The male side of androgynous, average, nondescript. He is everyone, and no one. His voice, like his form, faintly masculine with the undertones of dozens of voices all speaking as one.

"This does not have your name on it. Do you see?" He says, holding the bullet out in his palm for me to see. Scrawled down the side in Cyrillic letters, the name Shan Yu, the long dead dictator known for his cunning and cruelty.

"But why? Why are you here? Why do you save me?" I ask the figure I can not name.

"Because the future will need its Dragons," he answers simply, and is gone.

I hear the little girl scream in frustration and anger and she's lunging towards me though a haze of bright light and I am . . . .

Awake.

I can hear Haley snoring peacefully on the couch in the other compartment, and Sabrina's soft murmur of complaint as my motion disturbs her sleep. In an instant I know where I am again and snuggle up against my wife's warm back, burying my face in her hair.

I find comfort in the close contact, but tonight, I will find no more sleep.

Defining quiet.

Quiet is a relative thing with a definition that depends on circumstance. As the town's Mayor and, effectively, Colonial Governor, for whatever that's worth on a world with about six hundred people at any given time, "Quiet" translates to "No one is shooting at us." There's other connotations, like "no one is in my office screaming at me," or "we're not trying to negotiate with the Alliance," or "no one's set anything useful on fire - again."

As an individual, quiet is just that. The absence of sound. I can achieve that relatively easily. Seal Wave Equation's main hatch and turn everything to 'silent' mode, and my own heartbeat sounds quite loud. While such silence can be conducive to meditation, it's not really my preference. I actually miss some sound in an otherwise quiet setting. The sounds of a forest, or beach. Birds. Insects. Wind through the trees. Waves against a beach. I can simulate any of them, of course. But it's just a simulation. An illusion. They are not the sounds of Hale's Moon.

From the perspective of a parent, the definition changes once again. In this case, quiet means your younguns aren't getting into trouble. For me, that's been a special challenge. Lily and AuroraBlue aren't exactly your run of the mill younguns. If they were normal younguns, Lily'd still be a toddler and AuroraBlue'd still be working on rolling over under her own power. But they weren't. Artificial life didn't play by the same development rules the rest of us did.

Lily was still Lily. Mostly. There were some subtle changes in her behavior since she reintegrated with AuroraBlue, but they were hard to define. More at a gut level than something I could describe specifically. Her relationship with Cody was evolving, though I still had a deep seated feeling that those two would never have a normal life together. How could they? I wanted what was best for Lily. If that coincided with what was best for Cody, so much the better.

Defining the changes in AuroraBlue was far harder. My relationship with my magomusume had never been, well, normal. There was a phase, while she was "broken," where it seemed the only person she was actively avoiding crossing was me. Respect? Fear? Saving the best for last? I'd never know. I don't think I really wanted to know. But things were different now. Kind of.

She was developing rapidly, but was still a toddler. Unfortunately, she was a highly mobile toddler and had already regained much of her intellect. Even with eyes on her, it was impossible to keep her safe and treat her like a normal child. In fact, I'd go so far as to postulate that her cooperation with us as 'parents' in the days leading up to her reintegrating with Lily was conscious and intentional.

Which implied that her returning to the idle sections of the mines to 'play' was also entirely conscious and intentional. Only a handful of people remembered what had buried itself beneath the surface of Hale's Moon, and it appeared our Tiny Dragon was one of them.

She was, legally at least, Lily's daughter. Her cub. It wasn't my place to force Lily to treat her like a normal child and keep her at the surface. Younguns here played in the mines all the time. Got hurt doing it from time to time, to be sure, but it was a fact of life. Parents got used to it. Gave them a whupping when they needed it, let them be children the rest of the time. But none of that made it any easier to step back and let AuroraBlue have her rein.

It made things a little less quiet.

It had me listening for sounds I didn't want to hear.

And then there were none

It had been weeks since we'd heard anything at all about the remains of the Loyalist platoon who'd been abandoned. For months they'd been living in the outback, moving between remote bases set up in abandoned mining installations or ore storage bunkers. Without resupply and given Hale's acute lack of surface resources, they'd taken to raiding town or outlaying settlements for food and water.

And now it's stopped. General'd put some effort into tracking them down and eliminating the remaining threat but had come up mostly empty. Like previous efforts, he'd found the remains of several of their camps and indications that only a few of them remained alive. Unfortunately, he didn't manage to find them. Since, even then, the raids had become little more than a nuisance we didn't pursue further.

It seems that Entropy finally won the battle with the Loyalists for us.

One of the mining teams checking out a remote facility found the bodies of three recently deceased Loyalist soldiers. While we could never be entirely sure, it seemed entirely likely they were the last of their unit. The long running annoyance with a rogue Black Ops team was finally done.

Being civilized folk, we gave them appropriate last rights and buried the bodies. Annoyances or not, they'd been soldiers and deserved that much. Their idents would be going home on the next Alliance transport heading coreward. Small consolation their families though. Small consolation to the people they'd hurt.

I'd been in Black Ops myself. I knew the mindset and the level of loyalty to the 'cause' instilled in the men and women who fell into that life. When you started to question the ethics of what you were doing you either got out, or got dead. I'd gotten out. But you never really left that world. You could change though. You could learn to shed some light into a very dark world, but the memories stayed with you forever.

Were we finally done with the Loyalists? Who knew. It was possible one or two of them were still alive out there in the Back Forty. It was even possible that some of the original unit had made it off world. It's not like our Customs folk were overly thorough in checking what came in and out. But, for now at least, it seemed that particular threat was past. At least locally.

The Loyalists were still a factor in Alliance politics. There were still MP's who aligned themselves with the Hardliners, and there were still noises about 'suppressing' the more vocal supporters of Independence on the Rim. While our Loyalists were no longer a threat, the overall issue was still there.

We'd still have to be vigilant.

Dynamic interactions of temporaly related systems

Ghost in the Machine
Do you see the same future?
Peace between our kinds

Bringing my girls home
Significance understood
Merry Christmas, Blue.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel. Mixed seems so . . . inadequate. I knew this was coming, of course. I've been watching. I believe it would fall under "misappropriating Alliance assets for personal use", though I could make a case that my interests support my official duties.

Whether it went exactly to plan didn't really matter. There were so many factors in play behind the scenes the outcome was assured. Lily and AuroraBlue would be where they needed to be, together, under favorable circumstances.

Now they are together. Lily and her cub. My little girls. Not as it was. But as it should be.

Thank you, Blue.

Merry Christmas.

I've said many times that no mother in history has gone through the trials I have with these two. An artificial life form and a genetic construct. My little girls. One by emotional attachment and legal adoption. The other, by even greater bonds. I loved them both and now they would have a chance to be, well, something more closely resembling a normal family. If anything really passed for normal out here.

Cody's asking for Lily's hand changes the equation as well. Whether he really knows what he's getting into or not I can't say, but he's sincere and he's already shown a willingness to put himself in harm's way for them. Don't know whether Lily will accept. After being reset, again, it's hard to say what'll be running through her mind. But he'll be in for a complicated ride. Lily's no ordinary girl and AuroraBlue's special in ways I'm not sure anyone understands.

Blue, maybe. If anyone. He's been at the core of this for longer than anyone realized. Might have even set it all in motion as part of his original agenda. But that agenda changed. Or maybe evolved. When Krenshar and Gallagher changed the equations, Blue had to adapt to a new situation, possibly setting new goals to suit.

Whether he had a new agenda or not didn't matter. He'd done his part to bring Lily and AuroraBlue back together. To make them both whole again. Lily would become AuroraBlue's mother, relieving Sabrina and Genni and I of our foster mother roles. I knew 'Brina wasn't really comfortable as a mom. She was better with machines than with younguns, and I was just fine with that. Neither of us had planned to be parents. Genni adored AuroraBlue. Treated her as her own. And me? I'm not really sure how I've done as a mother, but no matter how the details of the situation changed they'd still be my little girls.

I could live with that.

Family formed by chance
Future evolves as it should
A truth well hidden

All the world's a stage

I remember hearing my uncle once say "Life ain't a cabaret. It's a Gorram circus." At twelve, I didn't know what he meant. By twenty, I understood. And by thirty two, I'd come to the conclusion that he'd far understated the truth of it. Now? Now I was resigned to being part of the floor show.

In some ways, literally, since the town council had gotten a burr under their collective saddles to put on a faire and invite everyone within shuttle range to come join the party. I'd managed to dodge taking a turn in the kissing booth or dancing for anyone I wasn't interested in sleeping with, but I hadn't managed to escape dancing with a couple of folk at one of the several dances, or managed to avoid giving one of my "famous" Mayorial speeches.

"How are you fine folk doing? Having fun? Shiny! Go spend some coin."

It was all in good fun though, and the townsfolk had a good time. It was nice watching the town's younguns enjoying the kind of carnival most of them had never seen, and their parents getting in on the fun. It was the kind of portable carnival that used to frequent the smaller, rural, towns on Ariel. A few rides. Some games. Various performers plying their trade. It was the kind of show "sophisticated" core folk would scoff at, but for folks on a remote mining colony it was pure magic.

We needed some magic.

The Faire gave me some additional perspective too. While I'd been spending a lot of time in the office, and a somewhat smaller measure on the Orbital helping 'Brina supervise the crew installing the new expansion, I hadn't been spending as much time feeling the town I called home.

When I'd arrived we'd been a barely viable mining colony that Weyland Yutani had effectively abandoned to its fate. The Alliance issues hadn't helped the population much. By the time Colonel Silvermane had reestablished control of the 1st Marine Raiders, there were barely four hundred people living on Hale's Moon.

But then things started to get better. The mines started pulling down a small but steady profit. We started to get some coin from a growing trans-shipment operation, and with it people. The smugglers were still around, but most of the pirates and raiders who'd used us as a waypoint had gone for seedier digs elsewhere. Probably on account of our acting civil with the Alliance authorities.

Independent minded folk may not have liked that, but I do what I think is best. They elected me Mayor and that means doing what's right even if it's not always expedient. Fighting the 1st would have been a lost cause, being as the Sun Tzu's got more people cleaning their decks than we've got colonists.

When they evacuated Blackburne, we offered them up what little we had. Hospitality, land to build new homes, and folk willing to help them build. New families. New folk. Wasn't always smooth. People getting used to having new neighbors, or adapting to a new culture on a new colony. But we got by. Our numbers swelled. Had to have been over five hundred by the time it was all said and done, and the increased growth brought more people to our little slice of Heaven.

After the Alliance cracked the dome on Caliban, and x0x0 agreed to give Krenshar and his a slice of the land Blue Sun had leased from the colony to call their own, the numbers swelled even more. The Destiny Reservation was a bit isolated socially, by choice, but they were part of what made Hale's Moon what it was. Just as much citizens of our little world as anyone else who called it home.

But it took a traveling Carnival for me to step back and see the actual changes that've come to our little world. New buildings. New businesses. New people. Don't know that "thriving" is the word I'd use to describe a colony of maybe six hundred people, give or take, but we were certainly holding our own.

That was what mattered.

I'd been too focused on other issues to see it. Helping 'Brina with the platform. Taking care of "Anna," who was already showing signs of taking after her mother. My Intel role for Tag. All very important. All part of who I was. But I still needed to see the people who made this little slice of Heaven what it was. They were part of who I was too. Something I couldn't lose sight of.

I might have moved Wave Equation to a hangar on the Orbital, but that didn't make the colony any less my home.

It just gave me a different perspective.