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First there was the duck doll, with its white fuzz and yellow bill, followed by the monkey, with its shiny vinyl foot pads and ears, lipstick still smeared from yesterday when Elena stole it from her mother's purse and reddened its face, and then the fluorescent green snake, spotted and patterned like an anaconda, and the corn-husk doll, wearing an apron and a bonnet, smiling, and a panda, black and white, rolling head over heels, tumbling against the side window on its way forward, face curled into its belly, and some sort of bird, fat, legless, wings stubby and vestigial, a bland look of composure forming on its diminutively beaked mug as it hurtled past Maurício's head, until they all converged against the dashboard and front windshield and fell in a random pile of doll carnage over the backs and feet of Elena, Dorotéia, and Maurício, only the monkey lodging between the two huddled bodies of mother and child and nestling there as the impact hurled them hard to the right and forward at a diagonal into the corner window and the glove compartment, but with Elena cushioned for the most part against her mother's ribs. All of this happened shortly after Elena looked up from her musings and cried out, "Big and red, Papí!" and then the grill of the big red hummer appeared from nowhere and plowed into their small maroon Fiat, gunning through a red light with their horn blaring and Chinese AK's and Kalashnikovs poking from the passenger window and jutting from the small back portion of the vehicle in which five men were squeezed.
 

They leapt from the vehicle and dragged Maurício from his seat and threw him against the closest wall, beating him inside the legs and thighs with the butt of their rifles, yelling, ripping his shirt at the shoulder as they swung him around to plunge his face, cheek first, into a phone shelter, and then beckoning Elena and her mother out of the vehicles with a wave of their rifle muzzles, just before two men jumped into their beat-up old Fiat and drove away, tagging along behind the hummer with their muzzles poking awkwardly out of the side door of their little car.
 

The small family huddled together and walked, Maurício limping and dazed, Dorotéia shocked and pale, through the burning hot streets of the city the eight remaining blocks to the laboratory, where they planned to hide. They navigated their way through the wreckage and rioting, following cues from Elena when she squirmed in their arms, or yelled out a color or an object, or gestured in a certain direction, urging speed, her small face becoming pained and frantic until they distanced themselves from the danger. After a few blocks they felt a protective sheet of circumstance fall around them, and they occupied what seemed like a strange shell of quiet amid the noise and violence, and in their shocked and drained states they could begin to see the patterns that guided their young daughter to shy away from certain areas, or urge them to go fast or slow, or to cross a street at a certain time or to look a certain way, to avoid eye contact, or to anticipate an event that would complicate their path. She knew before she saw them the approach of looters, she sensed the thoughts of hoodlums as they neared her vicinity, she knew where kind souls hid, beckoning them to hide with them until the danger had passed, she knew when vehicles would soon pass, she knew when stopping would avoid a convergence of harmful events, she knew when speeding up would do the same, and her parents, drained beyond their capacities, trusted her to guide them, and soon they began to see the vague outlines of what Elena could guide herself by, and their thoughts and reactions and actions became one and the same, guiding them safely to their laboratory hide-out through more dangers than that eight blocks had ever before contained.
 

"Why are you crying Dorotéia?"
 

"I am crying for Elena. How will she be happy when the world is falling apart?"
 

"It is not that the world is falling apart-- it is just that the people have gone mad."
 

"How will she be happy when the people have gone mad?"
 

"She will come to the forest with us. She will survive. You and I and the monkeys will survive and she will survive with us. When we live there the cliffs above the waterfalls that fall into the jungle forest will ring with her laughter, and the macaws that fly across the rivers will follow her and she will learn to speak with them. The natives will shelter us and teach us to live as they live and to eat their food. They have not gone mad. Society will forget them. She will be happy among her new forest friends and our work will go on."
 

"How do we get to this place, Maurício? It sounds so far away...."
 

"I have seen the path in my mind. Before Eiroed died he gave it to me."
 

"You scare me, Maurício. You scare me more than their madness. How will we care for her in such a place? The forest has always scared me."
 

"She will be free there. Her heart is too big for this place anyway, and now it will all be destroyed. We will die here of our own fear-- out there we can die only of our own courage."
 

"And of so many other things."
 

"So be it."
 

"Where is she? We must leave. I can't stay any longer or I will go mad as well."
 

"Dorotéia, don't say such things."
 

"You will not tell me what to say! You who speak in riddles and pour out all your affections on these worthless machines! Why did I ever marry you? Why did I bring you my darling monkeys to use in your crazy experiments when I knew you had your eyes fixed on impossible dreams? Why do I still endanger myself and my daughter by coming with you when I can't be sure that anyplace is safer than any other? Who knows what awaits us? Don't try to tell me that you know! Nobody knows! Nobody can save anything! And I am tired of your dreams!"
 

Elena popped a pacay bean out of its long, bulbous pod and sucked on its sugary white slip-cover until the smooth dark bean popped out into her mouth and she spit it on the floor. It spun to a rest amid the dust in a corner and then danced as the floor tremored from a nearby explosion followed by the rattle of gunfire. The female mariki spider monkey named Ynaie slipped her furred digits out of the cage bars and fondled at the hair behind Elena's ear, darting her fingers back at every loud sound, but diligent in her grooming impulses. Elena had heard her parents and knew her father to be right. He was right on this one, and the monkeys were not scared to go. They agreed with her that it was time. But her mother had never left Brasilia.
 

She had started her work with monkeys at the Brasilia Zoo on Avenida das Nações. When she caught wind of rare monkeys and even new monkeys species being sold on the black market or killed for food, she resolved to be their savior. She applied for permits from the government and employed black market representatives to find and secure monkeys for her so that she could house them in her apartment in Residential South, Superquadrant 108, Block B. One of these desperate young men had been Eiroed-- a sunburnt, tow-headed Argentinean of Welsh descent who, for some obscure reason, spent his days courting dangers in the deep Amazon jungles, contracting every disease known to man and fleeing one bad situation after another. He introduced Dorotéia to Maurício, for whom he did a little guinea pig work on the side when he wanted to hide out for a while or needed a break from the jungle. Maurício would hook him up to his machines and study his brain waves as he subjected him to all manner of energy field generated by the kind of apparatus normally used by physicists. This would continue for months on end, until Eiroed was pale and spent from his life in isolation, but the money was good. It was Eiroed who came and tried to hit Maurício up for a job when Maurício had no funding who then suggested the idea of using monkeys, which of course, Eiroed could provide for a fee. That was when the research really took off, and in his elation Maurício couldn't help but fall in love. Dorotéia was lonely in her life with only the affection of monkeys, and so she gave in immediately. That was how Elena came to be.
 

Elena was a girl who had later forgotten any of her childhood except the Brazilian rain forest. She was born in burnt-out, carpet bombed Brasilia after the revolutions-- precocious, clear-eyed, and dark in complexion. They called them the revolutions back then, but you may call them the invasions, or the tertiary derivative of outbreaks of international strife in other locales, or the civil unrest, or whatever you want to call it. You may prefer to call them the wars, the battles, the rapes, the killings, and they were all of these. Yet at times they were none of these. At some point it was just mob madness, heedless of its motivations, and mindless violence, gunshot cast broadside like seeds on farmland, and the need to assert oneself and feel like you could survive in a world where no one could hide. ^[1] And that was why they had to leave. Not because they were afraid but because their work could not go on when the world was changing around them. They were searching for something that did not change. Or perhaps that was only the dream of Maurício. Dorotéia longed for something that had changed forever.
 

[NOTE: I will insert more on the violence here. build it up a little. mention the "monkey laws" and their effective suspension during a time of conflict. set the scene.]
 

She was three years old, and her parents were carrying her in the back of their stolen delivery van with Empresas Olympikus emblazoned on its doors and she was in a cage, padded inside and outside with delivery blankets and covered with pallets, just like all the other lab monkeys that her parents were saving, escaping with, leaving the city with, along with the lab equipment that linked up with a huge array of orbital satellites that included scientific data gathering in their repertoire of duties, not least of which was transmitting television and simulvideo broadcast signals, and she was in there because she was valuable to them, just like the monkeys, just like the equipment, just like their work, their passionate delving into a new dimension of reality that spanned the boundaries between biology and physics, and just like anything that they loved they wanted to keep it safe and protect it from possible gunfire, and get it out of the city and take it to the last remaining stand of jungle that they knew of, far north near Venezuela, where the Yanomamo still lived, where the monkeys could thrive, where they would be left alone, where the ridges rising up from the Amazon basin would provide them with clear readings from the satellites, where they could read the movements of humanity from afar, and maybe, in their scientific way, "understand", and also maybe they could learn to predict or affect human behavior, or they could tap into the energetic links between humans and notice patterns in how the energy fluctuates and human behavior changes that could yield insights to later researchers, but they could not stop their work, and she was three years old, and she loved the monkeys, and they comforted each other in the dark on the long journey, with their thoughts, and their sounds, and the smells of their nearness. When they were unpacked they moved silently in the dark and quickly set up camp and slept beneath bushes deep within the trees. They did this many times before they arrived at their new home. Later she thought it strange that she remembered these events so clearly from a time when she was so young, but even then she was very aware of what was going on, if not in their import, still she could feel what others were feeling as they did the things they did, as they carried her about, as they slept near her or startled up with dreams of fearful anticipation which she knew to be untrue. As a young girl she lived a life not separate from dream but as if it were a dream and with the emotional intensity and clarity of a dream, and she remembered her dreams. This was the beginning of her childhood with the monkeys, far off in the forest. This was the adventure that prepared her for what she must do in her adulthood, that prepared her to escape, that removed from her the surprise. This was also where her eternal self took shape, but more than that I cannot say. More is yet to come.
 

Suffice it to say that many generations hence she shall still be present to observe the ways of humanity, and all of this took shape through those machines that her parents so carefully transported deep into the jungles, and all of this is inextricably linked to her natural rapport with the monkeys and her early insulation from humanity, and her natural abilities as an empath, and that she shall follow humanity until they are ready to know her directly, until they are ready to change, whether that be on earth or on planets far distant from here, and that her attentions shall eventually cause a mother to give birth to a soul that is suitable to her, and the body that houses that soul may not seem human to our eyes, but it will bear the necessary ancestry to shape a soul that is fully aware of a dimension of existence that we are blind to, even if we used all of our senses to the utmost of our abilities.
 

It will be a very, very long story, but it all begins with this girl who grows up in the Brazilian rain forest.
 

david_a: This is promising. I like the ominous yet tender tone at the beginning, and if I came across this as a prologue/outline, I'd want to read more. I would retain a lot of the language and tone of this for any kind of intro. j_moody: I'm glad the tone works. It's an easy tone for me to fall into. I think I'm torn between my fascination for strange technical possibilities and my tenderness for the characters, and so that vacillation is a reflection of my thought process. If that tendency makes for effective writing (with more editing, of course) then so much the better. If its of interest, this little snippet is for the background of the "transcorporeal entity" of Mackerel Sky. It/she starts out as this little girl (in a sense), so fleshing out this girl/woman's character will illuminate the nature of the entity. Because I'm moving towards linearity, I will probably tack this on (chronologically) before all the stuff I've posted on Skein previously... when I write it. Add comment