3AM

By Draconias Galactica

2003 Draconias Galactica

I was at the edge of the world once. It was...nice. The edge of the world was actually a ways back, because by the time you got to the physical edge, the world had just given up. There was nothing there...but ambience. Something was humming. I don't know what it was. But it was nice. It was sort of like a cross between a computer fan and an ocean wave...just this nice, almost-warm hum.

Well, it wasn't really warm. But it wasn't cold. And if you got used to it, you could believe it was warm. Just this soothing constant. Not like the world. Noise is chaos there, except at night. You'd have to be a million miles away from everybody, from everything to get some calm. Even the nights were tainted. I don't suppose it's nature's fault, but grasshoppers just don't work well.

We can't have silence, we need something. But that doesn't have to be our voices. It doesn't have to be our cars. It doesn't have to be our machines. I wanted to find a place like that. I knew the world was round. I knew that every square inch of the place was tainted already. I knew I'd have to go someplace I couldn't - cold Antarctica, deep Mariana's, tall Everest, desolate Sahara. Dead space. Nil beyond-existence.

The world doesn't want us around. It's trying to drive us insane. Or maybe we're all such a bunch of fucking stupid masochist-sadists that we taint every place we can stay with noise. Then there's this terraforming crap - making the last strongholds fit for corruption.

God doesn't care. You go up to God, tell him, "What's going on here?! Why won't you fix the world?" "Is there something wrong with it?" "It's fucked over! Everybody's sick of it!" "Then why are you still doing it?" Cold bastard, but time takes it's toll I guess. I met him out here, too. At least, I think I did.

It wears down on you, ya know? Just sitting around, waiting to die because you think that death has to be, _has to be_, better than this. Well, what if this is all we have? What if we all died a long time ago and forgot it. What if this was heaven? I doubt God would take too kindly to us messing up his aetheral plane.

At 3am, a telephone rings. It's the devil - or at least he claims it is. He wants to know if we need him to come in to work today, because he's going out job hunting. The devil's bailing out of this shit hole. Doesn't that say anything about this place?

There is always light outside. There's no ambience sound, but, a long time ago, we used to be able to look up at the stars. We still can, I guess, but we don't see a damn thing. Nobody looks at the sky again. Everyday, the sky falls a bit more. Or we build something taller. Either way, the world is shrinking while it seems to get bigger.

I wonder what the moon thinks of us. We took him hostage a few millennia ago, just so we could validate our existence. "Look, somebody can see us! We must exist!". Insecure fucking race. The moon's been trying to drown us with tides for a while now. That's his bit of payback for being forced to act as a night light for a species that's still afraid of the dark - keeping us away from the ocean.

A long time ago, the world had an edge. It was the ocean. Boats actually made the world grow. That's what our technology used to do, expand things. Now it just shrinks it back down, because we're starting to get scared of wandering around in this big mansion. The echo is starting to get annoying, so we hung up some paintings of cities. Of skyscrapers.

I used to sit up at night. Out on the porch, my shotgun decidedly _not_ with me. I wanted something to happen to me. We're all afraid, and I was probably the biggest coward of all. I hid from people. I hid from jobs. I hid from nature. I didn't want the universe to know I existed, because if it can't see me, it can't eat me.

4am usually comes 1 hour after 3am, and that's when the moon called. He was hijacking a satellite just to talk to me. He wanted to know why. Just why. So I told him, there is no why. You can't ask why this happened, because it didn't really happen. Nobody's watching him, so he doesn't exist. He said, "that's what I thought", and put me on hold. Pink Floyd - the moon's got a pretty good sense of humor. At least it wasn't Sinatra.

Echoes = a choice, if the english language worked like it should. You can choose to keep listening to the echoes, or you can say fuck them. Destroy the echoes. How you destroy them is up to you. Filling up this ball of dirt with shit works for most. We're not really filling it up, though, because it's already full. We're on the surface of the rock. And we're just making it bigger.

If we can make the world bigger with our shit piles, and make it smaller with our metal piles, can we control the world? Size is relative. Look at a meter stick from 2 yards away. It's not that big. Look at it from 1 foot away (metric vs english, the battle never ends). Now it's a lot bigger. You just made a meter get bigger. Size is relative. Time is relative. Everything is relative.

Quarter after, and the moon finally gets back on the line. There's a black hole that's going to consume us in a few million years, and this is his 2 weeks notice. Time is relative. He asks me for permission to leave early. I say, "Yeah, sure. Don't use me as a reference, though." And he took off. It'll take him some time, but he's leaving us.

Are you afraid of the dark? Well, don't be. It's egotistical. The second most egotistical thing you can do. The dark's out to get _me_. The first most is saying you exist. _I_ am me. _I_ am horny. _I_ am in need of a good line of credit. So I just stopped being afraid of the dark, because I (_I_) don't want to be _that_ egotistical. It was the only way I could stop being afraid.

Grasshoppers are all singing a song, but none of them know the words. You'd think they'd have learned by now, since it's been the same song for about a million years now. Imagine going to a packed kerioki bar, and 5000 drunks are all singing "Wish You Were Here". But they only know the title-track line, so they try "It's the End of the World as We Know It". And they can't sing that, even if sober. Notice that the exit has conveniently taken itself and left through the blind spot in the universe's 4th wall.

So why can't _I_ push-'n-pull the world? I traded in 1 egotism, shouldn't I be able to pick up another to balance myself out? The things one thinks at 4:30am, waiting for something, anything, to jump out and eat you. To prove to yourself that you exist, because it it can eat you, it can see you. And then it, whatever "it" is, is in your shoes, because there's nobody around to see "it". Eventually, everything's going to be sucked into a black hole, and that hole won't be able to prove he exists. Is that how we got started with making all this noise and such?

At 4:23am, Dave Thomas calls, just to tell me my watch is wrong. He and William Rogers are having a party with Ghandi and James Dean, just because they can. Douglas Adams is around, but he's disguising himself as the punch. Those crazy dead guys and their obsessions about time. Hell, if you're gonna be around forever now, you might as well get it right.

Wait - wasn't this place heaven a few minutes ago? I can make it into a palace, with a simple typo. That, and the belief that all life was typed out, will be typed out, is typed out somewhere, sometime. Imagine the funny mistakes a spell checker could generate if it misses a word. Kennedy was now shot by Lee Harvey Onion. All those porn stars are now porn stats, and I only know a few people who would jack off to numbers.

I was scared once, and now I'm just tired. It's too late to start living, so I might as well go back to being scared. But that just doesn't do it for me anymore. And it's too early for me to start dying, or re-dying, or dye-ing, or whatever. So, I'm just stuck somewhere birth and death. Bireth. Bearth. Now this place is a ship, and we're sailing off the edge of the world, only to make the world larger. Fucking progress.

The car noises, the damn flickering street light that I should go get my shotgun and shoot out, the drunk sing-along crickets, the stray dogs, it just gets to you after a while. Most people sleep, but that just seems like ignoring the problem. Besides, sleep is addictive. Once you pop, you can't stop.

So where do you go to go away? Someplace away from that slacker moon, these goose bumps on my skin, the world that we just won't let make up its mind (if it even can anymore), everything? You can only hide in the refrigerator at the grocery store and linger after closing so many times. Stalking people just isn't as legal as it used to be. Taking down stop signs and moving them to the place of your choosing takes to much work. There's just nothing left to do that's worth doing. Just killing time until it gets around to killing me.

At 5am, Dave Thomas tested, Mother Teresa approved (if she's dead, there's too many people for me to keep track of anymore), I call myself, to see if I'm home. I pick up, through some sort of weird existencial-yoga stuff, and have a brief conversation with myself. "So...like tacos? No, not really. I knew you were going to say that. And I knew that. How about them dodgers? They suck. Yeah." What can I say, he's (I'm?) not at my best at 5am.

A chimera, a griffin, a minotaur, a centaur, a unicorn, and a dragon all walked down the street, carrying "Will work for food" signs. I gave them a few quarters, and they left again. Poor guys. It not easy getting employment without existence. Guess they should have been more stuck-up and arrogant.

A squirrel sat down on my head. I don't know where he came from, and he insists that _I_ wasn't there a second ago. Well, we're here now...at least, we might as well be. "We're all bored too," he says. "The closer you get to the tire, the closer you come to dying, but at least it's not boring. Living is dull. We need to die more often." Well, can't argue with that. I was about to, just for the sheer hell of it, when he conveniently leapt back into the thin air he came from. I told him _I_ was here first.

The closer you get to the tire, the closer you are to dying. The closer you get to the edge, the closer you are to falling. I'm not asking for warmth - the world's too cold for that, and the sun's heartless. I'm not asking for love - I've tried, it's just too much effort to love someone. I'm not asking for much - I just want to get away. It doesn't matter from what, because...it's everything. We're surrounded by existence on all sides, and it just wears you down.

Reality is relative. My reality is another man's insanity, or fantasy, or fan easy, or whatever. Everything is relative. We made the world grow, and shrink, and the universe change just because we could, just to prove that we could, just to do something. So, why not walk until you get to the edge? It made as much sense as anything (or rather, didn't make as much sense as everything already didn't), so I aimed myself at the thin air and started moving the ground.

About halfway from one side of here to the other side of there, a lion and a scarecrow started following me. The more the merrier, I guess. The tin man rusted down, and they made a car out of him. They didn't stay long, because driving at walking speed got shit mileage. Optimus Prime showed up out of somewhere, and offered me a ride. I said no, and he rushed off towards the nearest red light.

The sun started to rise, but I just gave him a nasty look, and he decided not to risk it. He's just a 30 millennia demo edition - the registered sun has new skins, and can play mp3's. In space, nobody can hear you scream, but they can hear you rock. Nobody's willing to pony up $29.95us, though. It's not what we need - it's what we _want_. Needs are relative - we don't need what we need, we only want it. We _need_ what we want, though.

It's 0am, and my telephone called. He complained that I never talked to him, just to the voices in his head. My mirror showed up, and complained that I never looked at it. My headphones bitched about never listening to them. My gloves wanted to be felt. Ketchup was happy, but the real food wasn't, because I was just using them as a topping for my ketchup. Ketchup, with a side of fries, or rice, or, well, anything. I promised to come up with a 23rd sense that would let me do all that, and more, just to get them to shut up. I was on a divine quest, I didn't have time for this.

It was divine, because God hitchhiked a ride from me. I think he just used his friggin' god-mod codes to make me magically start driving a car, just to show off. Somebody should boot God, until he learns to play fair. But he's cool, and all - terrible taste in music, he actually _likes_ that stuff they shriek in churches. But, I was the driver, so I got to choose the station - that shut the little whiner up.

The only real reason he hung out with me (I'm not letting him violate the perfectly good rules of english, just because he has delusions of grandeur - Santa Clause is the one true savior) was so we could do some egg raids on those old norse gods. Thor's been going through some anger management, so he was cool. But that Loki - it's like he's allergic to eggs or something.

Somebody was crying. I was going to ask God who it was, but he decided to jump ship...after turning my car into a ship. I can see why none of the other gods wanted to hang out with him, he takes the job a bit too seriously. So I found a little version of me crying - not midget little, 6-year-old little.

"What's wrong?" "I don't exist" "But I'm you" "I know - you don't exist either". Poor kid. No wonder he messed me up so bad. Relax, I told him, all's not well, but it'll all be quite nice. He caught me - "stole that fucking line". I thought about countering with "keep on keepin' on, not that you won't die alone", but he just started crying again. So I kept sailing...driving...whatever.

"Why'd you leave that poor boy alone?" my mom asked, banging some sort of viking drum while a bunch of slaves rowed. "He'll be fine...or he won't. Either way, he'll be, and that should solve most of his problems." She still thought it was heartless and all, and who am I to argue? Loving anybody, even myself, is just too much effort.

A bittorrent download screen came up from...somewhere. Apparently I was downloading the source code for reality. I downloaded about 17mb, but I uploaded 52mb, so I felt good about that. Just wish I knew who was on the other side. Eh, what the hell? I peeled the bittorrent window out of the way, and there...

...it was the edge of the world. The car/boat was gone. Mom was gone. Me was gone. God was gone. Hell, everybody was gone. Everything was gone. And...it felt nice. I don't know how I knew, but that humming/wave noise thing, it was my soul. It was everything. I don't know why it was out here, but I knew I could actually hear it, feel it now. Away from everything else, away from myself, and I, there was _me_. And I don't exactly have the words for it, but...it was enough now. It was finally enough.