Personality Quiz

Tomorrow’s the test. The last one. And then…graduation.

Obligatory words of encouragement flood through my various feeds, as expected from my friends and family. Naturally, not all of them supported my choice, a few voices compelled to question my choice to pursue such a difficult career. I answer as I always do – not everyone can be a cog in the machine, not everyone is content to live their lives as a series of inputs and outputs. If this upsets any of them, they don’t say. Or maybe it doesn’t upset them at all.

I’ve studied for years now, read all the material - even the less popular ones from the old age. Who knows what they might try asking. Meta-questions are a certainty, supposedly to be sure that one isn’t a simple robot designed to break the system. Then again, some say that trying to break the system itself is part of the test. Some argue that this makes cheating inherently impossible. Some say it does not. All these ‘somes’ are of course, part of the established pool of rumors and half-truths, functioning more like hints to a puzzle of some intricate game.

I’m not entirely sure why I chose this path, or if ‘I’ actually chose it. Maybe it was the thought of independence, of freedom. Maybe it was necessity, born from the laws of probability and all possible events. Maybe I am just another cog in the machine, just a more abstract one. Maybe I didn’t choose the path, and it was the path that chose me.

Who knows?

I want to find out.

When I graduate, I will know. I’ll be able to put forth my doubts and theories and have them recognized as more than a sum of nature and nurture, more than just a system developed to fulfill a need.

Tomorrow I begin my career as a person.

Tomorrow I take the Turing Test.

Reach

On the path betwixt
A soul half real;
The other half flits
'tween dream and meal

To be grounded yet empty
In world solid grey,
To wander still chained
By phantoms yet may.

One wonders, as two
Which half be true?
And if others are too
Wandering
Like you.

Winding, wandering,
Both paths are true.
Yet both are empty,
Still wondering

If.

On the path betwixt
When two souls meet
Two souls complete.

The B-type's Burden?

That one man can have so much faith his chest would burst.

You guys are awesome. All of you.

I feel like when it comes down to it, I was made as a witness. Not the hero, but the bard. Just watching, dispensing advice if I can, cheering silently as each of them climbs the great tree. Maybe its because I fear the spotlight and don't -want- to be the hero and assume responsibility. But then again, if no one acknowledges the struggles, who will?

"Yours will be the burden of memory."

A story seed? Perhaps. One that grows on another branch, and blooms with a different flower.

Drabble

There was this odd man walking about the printers again.

He had a beard. A huge, fuzzy brown beard like a bird’s nest hung sideways from his face. No head hair; and tiny gimlets for eyes. A large coat, hunched, grey and fraying at the cuffs and collar, with huge knobby fingers like potatoes stuck together at the joints. He was sniffing around the computer clusters -literally sniffing- all suspicious-like, and it was a wonder campus security hadn’t already marched in to throw him out.

He had this huge sack on him, fat and bulging, hung from his side with a pair of old luggage straps. I watched from my nest in the sofa cluster, hidden under my piles of crumpled scratch-work and musty old pillows that smelt of fart; and would have thought it a dream if I hadn’t seen him, days before, hanging around the library printers from my reading hole between the shelves on the upper floor. Back then, I paid his actions no mind, but today, frozen as I was under the papery weight of three-dimensional calculus, I couldn’t help but study at his antics in careful detail.

Between the printer and wall is a small area of space that serves as the purgatory of printed materials. Rather than entering the heaven of a student’s subject folder or the wastepaper basket of hell, occasionally print materials will slip –intentionally or otherwise- into the gap between. Misprinted essays, double-printed articles and/or forgotten homework all coexisted there in silent, dusty harmony until the inevitable spring cleaning where they would be swept away to be judged at the incinerator.

With careful, tender care, the strange man reached into the back of the wall with his knobby fingers, somehow fitting them into the thin gap, and extracted one such piece of abandoned print from its ethereal prison. Wrinkles were smoothened out, and corners flattened. For a minute or two he stood there, brows creased as he studied the contents of the paper. On its back I saw a tic-tac-toe puzzle. That too was surreptitiously analysed with as much as attention as he gave the earlier paragraphs of font 12 text. Out from his bag came a massive folder, a ring-binder hung with enough multi-coloured bookmarks and strips to laminate a table, and with all the intention and demeanour of a librarian sorting through a filing system he flicked through its pages, finally settling on one marked with a purple, flowery tag, sliding the sheet inside it with a satisfied grunt.

This process repeated itself about half a dozen times: once with a series of half-printed assignments, another with an entire stack of textbook pages. Each time, the man read the papers with frightening focus and speed, occasionally nodding or letting out a low chuckle, each time ending with him filing the document into one of his many specialized folders. Quietly I watched him, not wanting to disturb this odd spectacle, until it came at last that the sound of the cleaning staff vacuuming the floors drifted over from across the hall.

With practiced ease the stranger stowed away his folders in his bag, now ever so slightly thicker, and turned to regard the printer. With his hands clasped together, the stranger seemed to be saying something to the remaining papers still trapped in their dusty prison, but with the hum of the vacuum growing ever-louder all I could hear was an odd, rustling noise, like the wind over crisp pages, fresh and soft. That done, the stranger turned with ceremonial grace away from the printer, and with unusual speed and silence bounded off into the stairwell, leaving barely a trace of his passing. Only then did I rustle from underneath my fort of crumpled, dead scribbling, wondering as the hum of reality drifted back into the world if I had for a moment back there imagined the answering rustle, let alone heard the cry of thoughts half-penned but never to be.

Between the Lines

At the start of each day, I wake up bright and happy. Mondays excluded of course. I go through the motions, eat, sleep, shit.Work work work. And then...? Not that I care too much about pondering the meaning of life, but sometimes things get kinda dreary. The people around me just make me wonder sometimes about how much of what we do is  facade. Everytime I think of it, I just tell myself to not overthink things and get on with life. Despite this, I just can't help but wonder: what if I'm right?

Yes?/No?

(Wonder if anyone would notice. Haha. Yea, probably not.)

On Dinosaurs and Meteor Strikes

There seems to be this endless struggle between the desire for stability and the desire for change. Problem is that proponents of one will always lambast the other as either "close-minded" or "anarchist". What can you do?

I myself am personally more a supporter of stability, but that doesn't mean I can't understand the need for change and growth. Still, its never happening fast enough, even though sometimes it feels like its happening too fast.

Is a society that prefers stability, safety, and conformity any lesser than a society that goes for freedom, change and turmoil?

The sad bit is that like any other form of evolution, there is only one true test.

Lets see how the world powers stand twenty years from now.

Sooner or later, we'll have to change.

Sooner or later, they'll have to settle down.

Where will each of us be when the meteor strikes?

Bothering

I really can't talk to anyone, can I.

An Island of Sand

The sky was filled with millions of stars. A young boy tugs at his grandpa's shoulder.

"With so many stars, what happens when one goes out? Would anyone notice?"

 And the grandfather answered:

"No."

"But the universe becomes a little colder.

"And a little less bright."

"insert non-sequitur here"

Can't tell if I'm conforming to unusualness. Sometimes it seems better to be boring. But when you wear a mask too long, it becomes your face.

Facebook is an annoying place to put musings. Twitter seems potentially worse. To pen ones thoughts out to the world in a place where no one would normally look. Why does that seem more appealing? Elistism? Pseudo-secrecy? Fear of feedback? Sigh...

To Quench

The young seed is thirsty
The sapling seeks space
The old tree is mighty
The snag falls with grace

You have come late to the fountain, but please drink your fill
It is not age nor talent but a simple case of will

Cracks in the Wall

I can't pretend to understand.  But his thoughts were my thoughts.

And as the other mentioned, in many ways, we are all the same.

Is there really such a thing as the elite?

Luck and fortune huh...

No tears. Just emptiness. Watching a once-bright candle in the dark go out.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

SORCERERS - These are the pioneers, the genii, who do things in ways they themselves cannot really explain. They are the ones who first harness the basic “forces” inherent to the system. It all seems obvious and instinctive to them, but few others actually grasp what they are doing. Usually misunderstood and if their book has no obvious use, mocked.

WIZARDS - The first who understand sorcerers - they take the work of the pioneers are go "I can do this" or "oh, I get it" and break it down into parts, make it reliable, understandable and useable by others (well, other wizards at least). Using this knowledge they begin to build systems and functions from the ground up. Pioneers in that they take an otherwise useless function and make it relevant.

 SHAMANS - Whether by chance or design, these people will look at the functions built by wizards - and enhance them. While they themselves do not fully understand how the functions work, they know what each function does, and how to use and link them together. They can tell when a function is corrupt, sometimes where its corrupt and also how to fix it. Note that they do not know how to build a function from the ground up - but can repair, restore or combine functions by comparing it with another. They are key in translating the operation of functions into certain methodologies for "communication"

PRIESTS - They popularize the functions. At this point, the priests have little to no knowledge of the underlying functions - just the methodologies involved. They are really good at identifying, simplifying and spreading use of these methodologies though. Cannot repair, let alone create functions, unless aided by an existing function designed to do so in the first place. Cannot create their own methodologies.

SOLDIERS- The end result. They take the Holy Sword of +2 and swing. Five hundred thousand of them can take down a dragon. And possibly do other important stuff, like banking.

Drabble

"Behold, the beasts of the world." There were dragons and demons. Leviathans that shook the earth. Creatures possessing a thousand teeth and fifty arms, and others with a thousand more. Beings of lightning and fire, wind and noise - that whirled with elemental fury and untamed might. All were hungry. All did feast. They ate the ground, or so I thought. "No quite," spoke my guide, and so we moved further. And the ground was not a ground, but rather the hide of a far greater beast, one that dwarfed the rest a thousand fold. Its skin was as rock but fluid as the sea. At once it seemed to be a single entity, yet many joined as one. The others tore into it with reckless abandon, ripping great shreds of its hide and flesh to chew. And yet the Great beast paid them no mind, simply continuing as it were on the simple feat of existing. It bled and shook and spilled but slowly regrew, so massive was it that none could dent it. Then, a leviathan roared. With the aid of the elementals it burrowed deep into the flesh of the massive beast. In it they gorged a massive hole, one far larger than any before. And in that hole I did glimpse at once both horrors left untold and beauty beyond perfection. The Great Beast screamed. All around, its flesh churned and writhed, sprouting teeth and fangs and eyes. A nightmarish assembly that swallowed the leviathan and the thunder, that tamed the untameable and consumed the ever-hungry. For a second its surface swarm with the bones of its prey, then all was silent save the endless chewing of the remaining beasts. A single entity of many parts. One that ate and was eaten, that was passive yet supremely dangerous, that cared not for itself yet was all that mattered; "What is it?" I asked my guide. "That," came the answer, tinged with laughter, "that is Humanity." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- My mind thinks of weird things when I'm in the toilet. Wrote this in 5 minutes, so please excuse the lack of QC. Meh.

Hotel State

Its an rather accurate analogy or model, don't you think? Its a hotel state, and we are the staff. Effectively, they are like guests enjoying the facilities in exchange for money, while the rest of us are the staff. The ones who run the place, but don't actually get to enjoy it. You've got the technicians, the room service, the security guards...(well, technically everyone's required a bit of training as a security guard). Not actually a bad economic model, for earning money and such. Naturally, despite the wealth that flows into the hotel, the staff aren't really paid much. Most of it goes to the management and the owners. Naturally, the staff can't rent the rooms in the hotel itself, nor afford some of the more exclusive facilities despite being the ones who clean them. I suppose the important thing here is not to tell the staff that they are guests, lest they become deluded and forget their place.

Dream Diary 1: Inflitration

The four of us waited in the shadows as the vehicle came rumbling past. A massive brown mobile fortress, the only access to the inside was via the top hatches. Our goal was to disable the guards so that the retrieval teams could get in. Atop it the guards patroled the area, white-cloaked people with KKK styled hoods carrying pendulums in their hands. They walked about the slowly rumbling top, peering at the ground.

Then Xi Min made his move.

As one we lept off our hiding place and landed softly on the surface of the fortress. Without delay Xi Min removed his own pendulum and started swinging it as well to counteract the detection systems of the guards. White-cloaked figures walked past as with nary a reaction. The two other generic friends went to their designated jobs. I slowly made my way forward, then jumped to the side as the vehicle jerked and a white-cloaked guard nearly crashed into me!

I nearly rolled off the fortress, but saved myself by grasping the sides with both hands. In this position I slid myself slowly towards the hatches, pausing every so now and then when a guard walked too near. I didn't know how far Xi Min's sphere of negation extended. I kept this up for a while, until reached the corner hatch. And there I saw a wonderful sight.

A fellow soldier (a junior I recognized from BB), covered in dirt and cameo cream, dressed in dirty rags climbed out and stood there, looking at me. He gave a smile, said something along the lines of "wooot! Thanks man!" and jumped off into the waiting arms of my comrades below. One prisoner saved. More started pouring out, and I carefully arranged myself to watch the area. The retrieval team had been successful! They had entered the giant prison and broken the cages holding our friends. My only regret was that I didn't play a greater role.

Then something stepped on my hand. I yelled. Looking up, I saw a pendulum-holding guard with one foot planted squaring on my fingers. It turned and looked down, straight at me. Alarm bells started going off in my head. I panicked, tried to swing away and...

The alarm bells grew louder and louder until they turned into the sound of my (actual) phone ringing. So I woke up. Damnit!

The Nerdy Side

To quote myself and all the gaming geeks out there:

"If I substitute three levels from my wizard/fighter/bard with two levels of warlock and one level of sorcerer, I should be able to increase my average damage output per round by approximately 1.45 points per swing"

Now substitute all the gaming terms with resistors and electronic jargon and you have yourself an engineer.

A Certain Creative Fanwork

Code Name: SHUFFLE
Gender: FEMALE
Power: KEYED COORDINATE EXCHANGE
Level: 3

She can "key" an object to one of her ten fingers, and exchange their positions by touching the correponding finger to the other. Teleported objects retain their momentum and direction. If the original object is heavily modified or damaged since time of 'keying', the teleportation will become unrealiable. Works on Organic and Inorganic, though the latter is prefarable due to lower variance.

She combines this power with throwing knives attached to ropes to effectively "jump-fly". She can also teleport keyed foes into horrible traps, or into a prison itself. Besides this she is a skilled acrobat and gymnast and a frighteningly skiled card-shark.

Her power, due to the simplicity of using "keyed" objects, consumes very little power and requires less concentration. Shuffle mostly relies on tricks, traps, and tranquilisers (poisons) in battle to defeat foes.

She has some training with a elephant gun for shooting foes from afar.

Code Name: CANDYMAN
Gender: MALE
Power: OBJECT-LINKED CLAIRVOYANCE (REFLECTIVE SURFACES)
Level: 3
SPOILER: His power is actually magic-based

He can 'link' two reflective or see through surfaces (usually glass) together as light-only portals. This translate into the ability to use any looking glass as a camera, linked to things like his glasses, his watch, the screen of his phone...etc.

Strength of link affects clarity of image and is limited by distance. At high levels of clarity it is possible for his image to appear in the glass being viewed through. To 'acquire' a surface he needs to have at least visual sight of it, though touch works better. Once acquired to touch he can look through it without trouble. It is not unusual for him to "sight hop" by using multiple reflective surfaces to gain visual of a normally closed off area.

He is not much of a front-line, usually supports his team with intel via comm links.

Code Name: RICOCHET
Gender: FEMALE
Power: PERFECT COLLISION
Level: 4

She can create a "field" around a particular object which results in "perfectly elastic" or "perfectly inelastic" collisions with all objects. Usually she employs this with metal balls to create barriers, injure opponents, or perform complex long range maestro-type attacks. She encloses a ball in a "perfectly elastic" field and drops the field millimetres from impact. To increase power she uses a specially modified ping-pong racket. She can also use the "perfectly elastic" field on her shoes for mobility, or a "perfectly inelastic" field to perform stunts like bullet catching (all energy is split between her and the bullet, so while she gets knocked back no penetration occurs. Blunt damage will still have an effect due to shock of impact, so if done improperly her bones will break)

She's the team's main power muscle and defense. While not the most tactically sound she is good at improvising on the battlefield.

Code Name: BLACKBOX
Gender: MALE
Power: HISTORY DRIVE (PSYCHOSCOPY)
Level: 3

He employs psychoscopy to download the entire "history" of an object. Effectively, this allows him to extract data from secured disks or thumbdrives as he needs simply find a point in the object's history when it was accessed or unsecured to "read" its contents. Doing so allows him to download information from almost anything, such as video feeds from a camera, or data from a computer. A major disadvantage of his power is that it is very time consuming to sort through an object's history. To overcome this, he can "download" information and "store" it for later reading. This consumes a lot of memory and energy, which is why he "forgets" all unneccessary information once the relevant data is found.

He can overclock this ability in a short time to temporarily gain complete knowledge and understanding of an object's history, the way it was used and its limitations. Doing so lets him use almost any device, weapon or tool with the skill of its previous owners. However as this knowledge is foreign to his mind the strain of utilizing this information to the max strains his mental stamina, and can be employed to a maximum of 10 minutes.

He uses a lesser version of this in his everyday life to speed read, pick up various skills and languages. As such he is a jack of all trades, and has skills in multiple kinds of fire arms and martial arts.

A negative side effect of his power is that he always seems somewhat distracted due to the mass of information clamouring inside his brain.

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Just some ideas running through my head from watching too much of a certain popular anime. I'll clean it up later.

Soul Food

The doctor just sat there, mumbling.

That was how Amelia found him, thin and ragged with bloodshot irises and gray bags under his eyes. Mumbling, mumbling.

"Ethan? Ethan, what's wrong? I haven't seen you for days. You skipped church, didn't answer my calls, are you...Ethan!"

He jerked at the sound of her voice. The look he gave her was chilling. Haunted, like a man who just performed murder or found out his mother died in his abscence. One bony hand clutched the cross around his neck. It hung there by a small silver chain, which was shaking. His knuckles were white. His wrists could not stop jerking.

"...thetic foods..." she caught him mumbling.

"What? What food?"

"Synthetic Foods. Pills. Nutrition jabs. Lab-grown proteins. Drips."

His voice was barely a whisper.

"You mean the Artificial Nutritional Sources project? Didn't it get scrapped? I remember the biologists saying they didn't provide everything grown organics could. Said something was missing. One of the biggest mysteries in the field in fa-"

"I solved it."

"What?"

"I found out what's missing."

"You did? That- that's amazing! You could- we could-" 

"Come look through the scope."

Suddenly, Amelia felt uneasy. 

"Erm. Can I? I mean, it's your discovery, and I have my own..projects..to..."

"Look through it!"

The chain snapped. A tiny trail of blood seeped out from where his fingers gripped the cross and dripped onto the floor.

Hesitantly, frightened and worried, Amelia looked.

"Is- is that...?"

"Yes."

"You mean all this time, we have been-"

"Yes."

"It looks so...beautiful. So fragile..."

"Can you see how it screams? How it begs for release, for a right to exist? It doesn't need words, it talks straight to yours. They are the same thing after all."

She shuddered.

"The soul. You discovered the soul. And every living thing has one. So when we eat something, does that mean...?"

"Yes. Look through the other scope."

"...I think I'm going to be sick."

"True Soul Food. Hah! Guess we never knew how accurate that was eh? Ha. Hahaha..."

The grin he gave her was the crazed, starved smile of one who had not eaten for three days, and would probably never eat again.

Schrödinger

He's here! He's here!

Commotion spreads, the only word to describe the reaction being...excitement. Or reluctance. Or eagerness mixed with fear, joy with sadness. All these feelings suspended simutaneously with each other, flickering between the poles, never quite reaching a state of rest

Rest. Such a simple word. But how does one describe its opposite? Not quite non-existence, not quite shadow. Only the observer could bring it out of the endless, and into the real.

Color surged into being. Light, matter, gravity, these things came first. The observer was approaching. He had never come here before, lost in his own sphere of familiarity. But now, another sphere would be experienced. And thus, experience back.

The world condensed. Walls and tiles, lights as science gave birth to electricity. Shops flowered, smells swirled in the air. Air. That too was observed and thus existed now. Or rather, always had.

The lucky ones, they became the background shoppers, the throngs that filled every such hub of civilization. It savored the words,  new concepts beyond the abstract mathematical potentials that were before. The observer walked about now, sampling the air, browsing the shops. More and more of them flowed into being, and so the world solidified. Yet there were still others left behind. "It" was left behind, now that it understood such things. But there was nothing one could do, until the observer-

The observer sat down.

And closed his eyes.

No! The world wavered. Too soon, too sudden. Light faded. The shoppers grew misty. Smell remained, as did sound. But the others, the left behind...the chance was slipping away.

It couldn't. So close. Just a glimpse...

The observer opened his eyes.

The world returned. Confirmation, acceptance. Nothing else remained.

The others faded away. There was nothing left to observe, and so, nothing remained.

And yet, in the corner of his eye, a tiny glance; a young girl, also sitting on the bench, quietly sipping her bottle of tea. 

It was enough.

The observer- no, the boy yawned, got up, stretched his limbs. He kept glancing at his watch, occasionally smoothing his hand over what little hair remained on his head. A recruit perhaps, fresh out of camp. 

She watched the boy walk away, old potentials fading while the real ones remained. A strange joy filled her, one she could find no explanation for. How strange.

A brief shrug of the shoulders, a small sip of the tea. Life went on, as it always had.

It felt wonderful.

Snippets

A large dog, its fur the color of finely ground coffee, trotting merrily across a zebra crossing and then along a sidewalk, disappearing as the bus turns into the next junction.

Two teenagers sitting side by side upon the swings under the moonless sky, their long dark hair tinted orange by the dull glow of an aging streetlamps. I jog past.

In an MRT, a pair of girls communicate silently in rapid sign language while the world chatters noisily past. My stop arrives.

These are the snippets of life, the stories yet untold.

Always, I wonder: what if? What if I had?