The Mindstorm Chronicles

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

 

Having seen so many things it became a challenge how to memorize them all. Starting from the beginning I would work my way up to the present every day, a process which was slowly becoming longer and longer as the months slipped by, but the only way that I would be sure to remember everything I could, despite all of the hypnotic games bent on making me forget as much as possible. After a few years I felt as though I'd retained it all, and began to think about it less and less, it all took so long and was so greatly complex that it just wasn't the kind of thing that you could explain to someone. And at the level of things to which everything had risen there was nothing left that didn't at least seem important, which just left one endlessly pouring over details which would hardly seem significant unless you'd survived such things. Unless you knew what it was like to be "there". In fact it was all so heavy that even my memories of having memories became important moments in and of themselves.

 

I remembered sitting alone in my cold, dark, damp house looking at the burning candle and listening to the water dripping from the ceiling. Cold and hungry and never having felt so alone in my life, I thought about the previous year which had been entirely different, and wondered if I could ever sort out the precise meaning of it all.  Nature hates a vacuum, and that is especially true of a mind which has no distractions left, just time to think. It is the odd moment that leaves one without a thought. And that becomes especially true of persons who have spent any amount of time surviving by their wits. Once that line of traumatization is crossed there will never again seem to be anything as important as how one thinks. Differences among survivors could be categorized either by exclusiveness or inclusiveness of thought. That is, for some the important thing would be to avoid certain thoughts and memories at all costs. For others, survival meant knowing absolutely everything possible, and especially about oneself.

 

What happens is that mind control victims are traumatized so badly that they then have memories with which they are quite sure that they will be unable to live. The mind controllers know this, in fact they perfect it by simultaneously traumatizing the victim and reinforcing the myth that thoughts or memories can be deadly. To remember certain things, or to think in certain ways then becomes tantamount to suicide. And if you knew the sorts of ways in which they traumatize people, if you knew what sorts of personally devastating horrors could be placed into someone's memories you would know why. Essentially this establishes a hidden control room in the mind of the victim which escapes any sort of inquiry and allows the victim to be, in ways subtle or overt, to become controlled by their worst fears. This is well known to the controllers.

 

All of this, if one waxed poetic, was about an age old argument, about some archetypical struggle which has been occurring since the dawn of time. What motivates creatures the more -and in this case specifically as relates to humanity, of course...  Fear? Or love? This question, which often led to opposing philosophies and methodologies in ways large and small, would be answered quite dramatically within every savage wilderness, or upon every savage battlefield at some point or another. In the end the answers will have depended upon individuals and whether or not they had love and courage more than self interest and fear.

And the mind controllers, themselves a product of generations of the worst sorts of sociopathic manipulations, are aware of this, and they seek to make the most of people's fears so that people will not act courageously against them, not even in defense of love itself. And if they thought to do so, they would exploit as much as possible the worst of fears, to loose those whom we love the most. Savage, brutal, and ancient, one could find examples of the methodology throughout history. Perhaps the most famous being the stories of Pharaoh or of Herod. It is to terrify people with their worst fears, but it is a double edged sword. Once they have gone so far as to destroy everyone a person loves, or to destroy their love for life itself, they then have enemies with nothing left to loose. And those are the most dangerous of sorts. The deepest love to be replaced with some other phenomena- the deepest of hatreds. And perhaps, the only reason such an enemy one has left for living, to avenge their loved ones. And themselves.

 

Of course it is all  more complicated still, complicated by love's various manifestations as arise from greater and greater philosophies. Love of God, love of country, love of humanity, love for the earth. At some point, like all abusers, the bullies must get us alone. Because the majority of people by all reason and logic understand such threats to be systemic, that is, what threatens one threatens us all, if not today then perhaps tomorrow. Something else that the bullies know well, they can never get us alone when there is accurate and timely knowledge of what they are doing available to the majority of people. So in the end they're forced to operate in the darkness, their power coming from deceptions and illusions more than anything else. And apart from which no one in their right mind would have any part of them whatsoever, because everyone hates bullies.

 

Alter personalities take the mind places it would never have otherwise gone, whatever one thinks of alter personalities. Michael isn't so much fascinated with Michael as he is with everyone and everything else. Though as one might imagine, it is difficult for him to say just how Michael fits in with everyone and everything else. Not that he doesn't go to great extents in order to do so. Just for all of that, at the end of the day he will still be quite unique. And alone in his uniqueness. Much his fascination with his brother who also goes by more names than can be counted due to the fact that being immortal, even while at sometimes learning quite personal lessons about mortality, results in confusion for most mortals, none of it is easily explained in any event. If immortals were to tell us their lives stories no one would live long enough to hear it all. But unlike today when so many people wouldn't even know the meanings of their own names, Michael's favorites are always those which brought into remembrance some purpose, some function, some archetypical principle worth remembering. Michael is the eldest, hence first there was Love, then Righteousness and after that, Mercy. Righteousness does love Mercy, and Mercy does love Righteousness.

 

Their existence is so different from our own that we could scarcely imagine it. Since all things are possible for God and by extension, those who love God, time and space are, well, merely conventions which give continuity to the story of principles and their development. Though words themselves couldn't do justice to such an existence, I guess any number of understandings could suffice for the moment. They spend some part of their existence here, in this world, and in any variety of ways, but they also spend some part of their existence in what we might think of as a lucid dream. And at any given time they are free to experience as we do the limits of corporeality, or the nearly limitless existence of the dream time limited only by their own imaginations, or anything in between. In short, their only limits are their principles and their imaginations.

 

Imagine such things as transpire in worlds where time and space simply exist as bookmarkers.

 

Michael is a rather different sort of personality than Gabriel. Being the eldest there are some things about which Michael knows more, but Gabriel quite often acts as Michael's conscience. Righteousness is tempered by Mercy, after all. And they are always teaching one another.

 

In one such, well, dream like circumstance, Michael had been creating creatures with God and had wandered into some series of thoughts about survival and about fierceness. But upon looking back at his creations he thought that perhaps fierceness wasn't the only answer to survival, since it seemed also self defeating that fierceness simply begat the need for fierceness, there are simply limits to any one principle apart from the principle of love which had caused all other principles to come into existence. For Michael, everything always revolved around first cause, though it would be difficult after so many mathematical relationships to explain precisely how this was so, but it none the less remained true to Michael, and in principles, first cause was love. It was the only rational reason that a universe would exist at all, that love is nothing without someone else with which to share it.

 

Upon looking back at all of his fierce creatures, Michael then invited his brother into the creative process. "Here you see the sorts of creatures created by Righteousness which are fierce in defending their young, are fierce in assuring their own survival. But now I am given to wonder, what sorts of creatures would be produced by mercy?" Without saying so much as a word Gabriel went to some place and time in the world and began to motion his hands around this way and that, producing an image of a living creature, not large, and not small, brown in color and with a short tail. When Michael saw the length of the creatures neck he thought surely his brother had made a mistake, and though he thought the oversized ears to be quite amusing, he was very taken by the creatures eyes. And immediately upon completing the creature vision with his hand gestures, Gabriel ran away.

 

Of course Michael was left to wonder why his brother had chosen to run away and hide from him. He thought for a moment, and decided that it was a riddle, and the answer resided within the creature of his brother's creation. So he began to appraise the silly looking creature with the sweet eyes. Why did it have such a long neck? And then he saw the creature reach down and begin to nibble upon a dandelion. Ah, Michael thought, to Mercy, form follows function and not the other way around. Humbling. And the oversized ears? Oh. Being aware of realities is even more important than creating them, in this way one understands what sort of realities one is prone to creating. And whether or not they are healthy realities. "Every time..." Michael thought, "He gets me every time." It was always like this with his brother, who Michael also called his conscience.  And the eyes, of course... like the ears, but there is something else. Why are they so sweet, so endearing?" "...because ... so that...", the answer came slowly, "Hopefully Mercy will find you before Righteousness." Michael, tears now in his eyes, suddenly remembered from whence he had fallen. If Righteousness was not Mercy's friend, Righteousness was his enemy.

 

"But, um, how, how does this creature defend itself?"  Michael queried. "Whenever Righteousness comes, Mercy runs and hides." An alarmingly simple answer, and ostensibly why Gabriel ran an hid, the first part of that lessonbeing that it was never enough to be feared or respected, the most important thing was to be loved. But here Michael began to reflect upon the many ways in which this statement was true. The males of many species would turn and fight while the females ran and hid with their young, and the females would turn and fight while the young ran and hid if and when it came to it. And Michael learned that this creature could also turn and fight, it's front hooves were by no means lethal, but sharp enough to be a decent deterrent. At that point, Michael realized that he knew nothing yet of the males of the species, in fact he was so engrossed he hadn't yet realized the sex of the creature that Gabriel had shown him. As soon as Michael asked, Gabriel was standing next to him with his hand extended. "Give me your sword." The angel said. And so Michael did, the result becoming antlers of course, more formidable, fiercely wielded, but still non lethal all the same. Michael was so impressed by this creation, that he determined that whatever some people would call them, that somewhere in the world they would be remembered  by how Michael felt about them so that he would never forget this lesson. That is how some came to know them as "deer". Michael was always big on word games of one type or another, especially when it came to phonetics.

 

One thing was always becoming apparent. That neither righteousness nor mercy could live long without the other. This, because in one way or another they always sacrificed for one another. And even if this was not precisely the meaning nor the purpose of love, it remained the proof of love's existence.  

 

 

Quiet | By Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

 

The Post traumatic stress doesn't often allow you to not think. Especially with so much going on all of the time. Around and around the thoughts go until finally I drift off to sleep, or get up to find something to distract my weary mind. It was always difficult, not just because of the sorts of worries produced by stress, but because the thoughts could be so intriguing and compelling, even if they were bizarre to say the least.

 

Having alter personalities seemed to make it especially so. I say seemed because it had been so long that I couldn't remember what it was like to be one person. Sometimes just one person thinks too much, but MPD/DID may have a whole tribe of people thinking too much in what merely looks like one head. And then there is that I would expend no small amount of energy analyzing all of those thoughts, and trying to hold multiple possibilities about them all at the same time. Thinking itself could become like an exercise in heavy lifting. Especially when it came to the deeply personal and emotional thoughts one was often forced to wade through. In my world, anything could be too much to think about, my mind was always so busy. Maybe that's why Einstein kept forgetting where he lived. There were always more important things to think about. Just that not everybody bothers to think about them. Not seriously, anyway.

 

Sometimes it doesn't matter how real or unreal thoughts actually are in order to get you really thinking. For me it was always seeming as though anything were possible, at least until proven otherwise. That's the only way to face a vast unknown. Especially when you can't afford to allow yourself to be fooled by anything, least of all your own thoughts and emotions. Anything was possible, no matter how improbable. And only a very precious few things were ever certain. When you're uncertain about so many things it helps to remember who you are at all times, your truest self. Thus philosophy had become my greatest love. "What is the good life?" was always the most relevant question to anyone's existence. It's what defines you as a person, defines your character. I'd narrowed it down to three interacting principles through which I examined every effort to subvert my mind. Through which I examined all minds and everything that they produced. Love, righteousness, and mercy. They played upon each other in principle as if they were persons. God is love, which is why there is Righteousness and Mercy. And righteousness and mercy, like two brothers, love one another.  

 

Sometimes I think about my lion alter. It's a phenomena which apparently occurs naturally somehow in MPD/DID mind control victims, much like the angel Michael alter. There simply wouldn't be any reasons for the Nazis to program someone that way. All I can say about that is that it sure seems to be naturally occurring, and sure seems real enough. But explaining any of this stuff which became wildly metaphysical, even spiritual, was something that would be a challenge to anyone. Who would listen anyway? It all sounds too crazy. Even speaking to religionists about such ideas only ever led to arguments concerning their "yes, but" theologies. The word "but" in such instances began to strike me as merely a dishonest replacement for a punctuation mark, a period. So in my own mind I simply heard "Yes."

 

The lion alter was a sort of background feeling I had for the longest time that would sometimes produce insights into lions, or make me come up with wild tales about them in that Aesop's metaphorical lessons for slaves kind of way. Eventually though, as they tortured me every night and day I fragmented all the more, but sometimes in the most interesting ways. And at least the highly unusual thoughts helped to keep the torturers interested enough to let it go on without interrupting the stream of thought with more torture.  And that was reason enough to pursue even the strangest line of thinking, which normally one would have dismissed almost as soon as it began.

 

In some of these seeming flashbacks the angel Michael had decided to live as one of God's other creatures, something he hadn't done since they were created. He chose to be born as a lion. He gave himself a little extra advantage since he wasn't sure just how it would effect him. He was born a very large lion. And the other angels, as always, would learn from Michael's experience, and make sure that Michael didn't forget himself entirely, but would be sure to remember who and what he was, so that he would be sure to find his way home again.

 

Those kind of memories were never complete all at once, but began to come in flashbacks, and sometimes there were enough of them to eventually put together a more complete picture. I say memories because they are entirely first person experiences as though they were actual memories from the day before. But since it gets confusing I usually refer to my alters such as the lion as if they were someone else. Though you only experience the "otherness" of it after the fact.

 

There was a large tree that stood apart from the rest of the brush in a large clearing.  He was bothered that the monkeys would come over to the tree where the pride rested in the shade during the heat of the day, and so he would chase the monkeys back into their own trees whenever they became too brazen. "Stupid monkeys", he thought, "why would they continue to risk their lives this way?" There were always answers to such questions, "They like the fruit from the tree."  Well, he did see them eat the fruit. It didn't smell like it was worth eating and like it might make you sick, but perhaps that's just what monkeys ate. True enough, the monkeys didn't present any real danger, although they had sharp teeth and it wasn't worth risking an infection to actually catch one since there was so little meat to them anyway. Which is why he tolerated them sometimes rather than expend the energy in the heat of the day to chase them.

 

During these sessions, which usually occurred during times of psychological torture, you could feel what it was like to be a lion. Not only to have teeth and claws, and immense strength and agility, but also a sense of real authority that came from knowing one's place in things. While some few humans might want to trade places with lions, no lion would ever be anything other than a lion. If I only had one word to describe their consciousness, their being, the word would be "clarity".

 

Lions are hugely telepathic, at least they are with other lions. When the drought came, hunting had become so scarce there was nothing left to do but to hunt a remaining lone rogue elephant or to starve to death. The pride had never hunted an elephant before, in fact it may have been the first time ever that lions hunted elephants, but it would leave an impression on the telepathic, instinctual memory of the species. It was just Michael's nature. He had always been a strategist and a tactician. Absolutely necessary for facing an opponent as large as an elephant, even if you are about a third larger than any African lion the world had ever seen. Michael also loves a challenge, but he could never really seem to find one unless he first found some way to handicap himself. It's how he learned, how he evolved, how he loved, just like everyone else. There were two things that Michael was always proving to himself. He was no despot, and he was no panty waist.

 

Following their lead lion, the pride spread out into an on line formation behind the elephant and began to stalk their prey. The enormous lion began, from behind, to challenge the elephant causing him to turn and threaten to defend himself to the end. Meanwhile, some of the more experienced lionesses and young males

moved up on the flanks until the elephant was surrounded. Encouraged by the display of their leader personally challenging such a huge animal, the most experienced of the female hunters played her own leadership role on command and began to attack from behind, the real target being the elephant's hind legs. Soon the elephant was spinning in first one direction and then the next, only to be attacked from behind in every instance. First, by the experienced ones, and then as the enormous prey weakened the younger lions joined in the attack. The hunt had begun during the night, but had lasted well into the day. By the time the huge animal had lost it's legs and become fairly defenseless, and then finally laid it's massive head down for the last time, the entire pride was exhausted.  What lions had always known humanity would one day discover. That size and brute strength are no match for communication and teamwork.

 

He hated drinking from mud puddles worst of all. But a few weeks after the rains came life was good again. But Michael always had things to do, and so later the next spring he met his own demise when he was bitten by a hippopotamus while chasing it's young. It just seemed to come out of nowhere. As he lay dieing from a pierced lung he thought, "I should have known better". But neither Michael, nor lions, much question the mysterious rule of destiny. As his final strength was leaving him, he remembered all of the times the angels had spoken to him so as to remind him of who he really was. "No wonder," he thought, it was as he had always warned his pride. Take the older sick ones first, leave the young ones alone if you can. All creatures will fight harder for love than they will for anything else, even their own survival.

 

It had always been his fascination, even as a lion, why creatures behaved as they did.

 

 

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

 

 

Seven. How would I ever explain about alter personalities, that they're not like counting objects, but each one in many ways as much an altered state of consciousness as an alter personality. People just would never understand about such things. Seven. My "little" alter which existed long before I ever became a victim of mind control. But that was true in one way or another of all my alter personalities in the end. Though I didn't get reacquainted with them until long after I'd become a "runner", someone who ran away from the mind controller's attempts to enslave them. I ran, but sometimes you can just never run far enough. It became such a part of my thinking that I would never again hear the name Iran without thinking about running. "I ran".

 

Whether or not you even believed in time anomalies they were always very difficult to grasp. Here I was as a seven year old speaking to people in some long distant future, many of whom weren't even born yet at the time that I spoke to them. And knowing about my future self as well, if only in some rather child like way. In fact, I eventually began to think that all of my true alter personalities were from some other place and time. And no few of them were earlier versions of myself. Part of that was intentional, a way of reconnecting to who I had been before mind control. Part of it just started happening in ways that I couldn't have anticipated.

 

The mind control program apparently looks for potentials within a person upon which to create alter egos. Alter egos in the same sort of sense that people often "put on" a different persona for work than they do for play. That's normal enough until you're traumatized and placed under continual hypnosis. Then you simply begin to live those alter egos. But by definition they don't become alter personalities until they have unique histories of their very own. Even that is an over generalization. There are any number of combinations when two conscious beings interact, even when they're in the same person. There are all sorts of in between states, and describing any of that is sort of like counting clouds. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. And in the end it's meaningless anyway as they just keep changing. But it's possible to identify types of clouds, or to describe the cloud of the moment. Sure, alter personalities are a bit more permanent than that. But consciousness itself... is ever changing.

 

People who have been mind controlled begin with a few alter egos which have been intensified through a variety of methods. Made extreme by way of intensity and duration, but employing pretty standard psychological fare. Hypnosis, behavior modification, enhanced disassociation from spending time in metaphorical worlds where life becomes poetic, sometimes wonderful, sometimes tragic, but profoundly poetic.  But the phenomena doesn't stop. For whatever reason, mind control victims begin to generate many alter personalities all on their own, sometimes a thousand or more. As if the more or less programmed alter egos had just opened a doorway into some other type of consciousness where that just happens. As if the controllers themselves weren't so much attempting to create programmed alters, but were seeking to find alters hiding within an individual somewhere which could be controlled and manipulated, each one acquiring some new expertise according to some pre-existing proclivities or talents. The poetic side of it came from a simple mind control rule. No one was ever to speak about anything directly. Not ever. Under threat of punishment.

 

Every alter system is unique, as unique as the consciousness and the conscious experience that, is in all actuality, that alter system. But if you understandmore metaphysical approaches, Jungian collective unconsciousness and stuff like that, well, even that's highly arguable. Is consciousness like an aquarium, a closed system, or like and ocean, an open one? At any rate, as far as I know, my alter system is more than unique. It's in some category all of it's own because at least to some extent, I designed it before I entered into the mind control program.

 

The fact was that I had something that they wanted very badly. My mind. And they meant to have it. I could see that coming down the road. And so I did my best to prepare for it in advance. I knew they would splinter me into different personalities. And I knew that this had to happen if I was going to be able to get inside in order to do my investigations. But I had to make sure that I survived it with as much of my mind and my life intact as possible. And so I preplanned some of my alter system. The manner in which I conceptualized the plan was something like, that they were going to shatter me like a huge pane of glass. But if I deliberately created my own minor flaws I would shatter only along those creations, like safety glass. But just like shattering safety glass, not all of the results were predictable, just that there would be far fewer jagged edges. And as far as I knew nothing of the kind had ever been attempted before.

 

Oh, it seems brave now. But that's because it really happened. When I first conceived of it, it all seemed like a remote possibility, but one for which I had better be prepared just in case, and one that was interesting enough to hold my attention for hours on end. I had enough reason to believe that it could happen, even if I had far more rational reasons to believe that it wouldn't. My two biggest concerns were that no one was hurt, and that I wouldn't forget who I was, who I had always been. And so I fashioned alters out of my own personality. Earlier versions of myself with which I could reconnect. And that's why Seven is called Seven. That's the age at which he was made an alter, though it also includes the ages of eight and nine because it was an ongoing three year experience. That was one of the ways of naming these alters. The other was by the year in which a certain thought or event had occurred. Later there would be others, like Sixteen or 'Eighty Three. In fact it was 'Eighty Three that had put a lot of final design work into the preplanned part of alter system. That was the year that entering into the dark world of mind control began to look like an unavoidable certainty.  But if I played every card that I could just right, there was a chance that I could turn the tables on them. I could expose them for all that I was worth. And since the only way out of MKULTRA was to die, it seemed like my only hope. It was them or me, because I intended at the very least to die free.

 

Even back then 'Eighty Three thought that perhaps the alter system could include time anomalies from the future, at least in theory anyway. But it was ten years after when 'Ninety Three introduced past life alter personalities, seven years after having officially entered into the mind control program for research as a "volunteer", even though I had little actual choice in the matter. 'Ninety Three... Oh, my God. That was the year that I began to have complete recall of everything that had happened. And it nearly killed me. But it opened up the door to a world of metaphysical implications that as far as I know, nobody had ever even dreamed of. Even so, I had learned to organize my thoughts in so many other completely rational but rather sophisticated ways by sheer necessity. There were things which were consensual fact, things about which I was pretty darned sure but couldn't prove, a great many subjects about which I was any percent sure one way or another until there was more data for analysis, and fewer and fewer things all of the time that could be ruled out entirely. I endeavored to never assume, or never even to believe anything entirely one way or the other. That allowed for the greatest flexibility when I was a media analyst, and it came to be that my life might depend upon just that same flexibility in thinking. Besides, where modern science had held so many ideas to be mutually exclusive, post modern science simply didn't. At any rate, I no longer had the luxury of thinking of my thoughts or beliefs as being insignificant. Things were going critical. And that was always like like driving a car at 120 miles an hour. One mistake and it could all be over. And not just for me.

 

Since began to look very much to 'Ninety Three as though at some point things were going to become very intense again he began to summon every bit of logical reasoning that he could, and started to employ a types of simple computer commands in his thinking. If "a" then "b", if "c" then"d". Much of what he was learning seemed far to incredible to be true. And yet he couldn't deny the evidence that he had already seen. It's why he thought to sort of invoke past life alters who were going to be much needed specialists. Even that was so complicated, because sometimes the past life alters seemed real enough, but as if they were visiting from the past. But they also left behind such an impression that they never really left after that either.

 

Learning what he had about our past and about the future put Ninety Three through every emotional extreme possible. It's difficult to remember a very bad past. It's even worse to know about a very difficult future. A very...

 

Then there was the usual methods of distracting oneself from the stress of overbearing situations . Sorts of play periods. Music. Movies. Stuff. Just to stop and pick up an instrument and let all of those pent up feelings flow out into some creative notion or another was to do something rather than to simply feel overwhelmed and helpless at the feet of future "consequences" for what I was apparently going to be doing. And it wasn't as though I were all alone, either, though who could ever prove otherwise in matters of telepathy?

 

But, right now, I think I'll go lay down for awhile. And try not to think.

 

 

 

Anxious | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

Flashbacks. There were always flashbacks. About some world that I passed through where evil was everywhere, as if you'd just seen too much, and somehow your mind refused to let go of any of it. There was no real understanding it all, there was just going over it again and again in an effort to make sense of it. Every little detail, no matter how excruciating.

 

There would be no good way to describe it. Sort of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it didn't seem as though I were living in another world, it just seemed like all of a sudden everyone that I knew was living in some other world. Everyone was always hinting about something or another, but nobody would come out and say what was on their minds. But if I ever thought to ask them they had no idea what I was talking about. Later they wouldn't even remember the conversation, as if I'd been speaking to someone else entirely. Back then I didn't know very much about remote mind control weapons, I thought that they were probably all hypnotized by the media or something. Maybe it was both. No way would I ever have thought that these mind control people could just come into your home and dominate everyone. No way. But they did. As crazy as it sounds, as crazy as it seems, that's precisely what had happened. The government had synced my enviornment to my head. That's what I called it. Sometimes I called it mindsync.

 

Maybe it was that I really was insane ever since I was a kid. Maybe It was all really much crazier than I was admitting to myself. It was one thing to talk to the president in your head or the military men, or even with aliens for that matter. Back then it had gotten just as crazy as I allowed it to get.None of it was forced on me, but crazy was the only way to put it. Since aliens were such great telepaths, and since they could even connect you with anyone... well, being just a kid I wanted to talk to everyone. Why not?

 

Why not?

 

Why...

 

So, here I was after talking to the man from Tavistock, thinking about how there were Nazi spies and traitors in our government and such, and, well, I thought that maybe we could use all of the allies we could get... and so forth... So what did I do?

 

So I decided to talk to the Queen of England. It wasn't like I really took it all that seriously, until she was right there in my mind. And her presence felt just as real as if she were right in front of me as I sat on the ground behind our house in the mountains. Being only seven, I didn't really know too much about protocol or anything, but if she had actually been there I would have known to bow, that's about it. I wasn't sure what to call her, and she seemed at first to be absolutely stunned at this sort of shared vision we were having, and also very uncomfortable telling me what to call her. So I asked that somebody please tell me, and then a man entered into the conversation and informed me that the Queen was referred to as "Her Majesty". "Oh, yeah!" I thought. But then I didn't know what majesty really meant, except I thought it must mean really beautiful because of the American song we sang in school about "purple mountain's majesty". To this day whenever I think of Her Majesty I think of those purple mountains.

 

It was very difficult, you know. I had never talked to a Queen before and hadn't really ever thought about it. And she was just being very quiet, but I could tell that she was sort of shocked that this was happening. I didn't mean to make her uncomfortable or anything. Anyway, I think the man told me that I should ask permission to speak, which Her Majesty "granted", meaning that it was ok, I guessed. Well, I told her all about the Nazis in America. And said that we might need help here, and wanted to know if England would still be our ally. I tried to explain the best that I could. That I had talked to the man from Tavistock. And then I asked Her Majesty if she knew much about how the Nazis really were. She said that she was a young girl when all of that happened and didn't remember that much about it all. "Oh." I said. Maybe I should talk to someone older. Her Majesty said that she would do whatever she could, and she even granted me permission to work for her, in a kind of way, I guess. So that I would have friends there as well. After that I talked to the Queen's Mom.

 

The Queen's Mom, mmm, Queen Mum, the man said, seemed even more stunned by all of this than Her Majesty herself. You know, I hadn't really thought about that older people gave up thinking that leprechauns were possible a long time ago. And being only seven I didn't really know what adults thought about aliens. The more I tried to say anything to anyone the more I realized that my Mom was right, that I was never really as smart as I thought I was. There was just too much to know. Adults never seemed to think about it, but I was just amazed at how much they could remember.

 

The Queen Mum and I spoke about the situation for a little while. Her Majesty's Mum was very nice but didn't say much. In my mind I just saw a look of real surprise on her face, I was feeling a little bit guilty about that. Her Queen's Mum told me a little about what the war was like and how bad Nazis had been, and how dangerous they were. I asked her if she thought that I could trust the American government and she had a look on her face that just said "No way!" When this stuff happens, it was all new to me at the time, but when this stuff happens you can sort of feel what people are feeling. Anyway, some of the stuff that we talked about... it would be better if Her Majesty and Her Majesty's Mum told you, because it sounds even crazier than what I've told you so far. Really crazy. And I wouldn't want to get in trouble with Her Majesty and Her Majesty's Mum because they were so nice. I could tell by the man who was helping me say the right things that people in England take these things very seriously. I wish I could remember who he was. At first I thought he was a butler, but I think that he wasn't dressed like a butler. But he was a little upset by all of this. I didn't blame him. In a way, so was I. I decided to think about these things more before I jumped into them after that. It wasn't anything like playing pretend. Not even!

 

If all of that hadn't been enough, well, I mean, how often does a kid get to talk to anyone that he wants? That's when I became aware that the voice in my head who had been there right then wasn't an alien, but somebody named Michael. He said that people called him an angel, but really, seeing as how he was also like from another world, he was sort of like an alien, because, really? People didn't know much about angels. Well, I didn't either. But, you know, the President, the aliens, Her Majesty... why not? At the moment I was still wondering about kings and queens, and for some strange reason we began to talk about emperors too. Well, as long as I already sound this crazy, Michael let me talk to an Emperor that was from a long time ago. But it was really neat because he was about the same age as me. He was in China. He was so friendly, and he was really smart. He told me a lot of things, and he believed in reincarnation just like my Mom and me did. But he knew a lot more about that than I did. He even said that one day he would be me. That just made my head hurt. He was telling me all of these things that made my head hurt. A lot of it was very interesting but a lot of it was too much for me. Anyway, we had a great talk, he wanted to talk some more but I told him that I had to go lay down because my head hurt. But I couldn't stop thinking, even though I wanted to.

 

So I went in and laid down on the couch and Michael was sort of laughing and telling me not to worry so much, that I wouldn't be crazy or anything, and that he was going to show me more things and that everything was alright. I wasn't in trouble or anything. That's when I thought about angels, and how I really didn't know anything about them. He said that was ok, because, really, neither did anyone else. He was a sort of leader angel or something, so he got to do these things. Not all angels did these things. So, and I don't know why I thought this, but I asked if I could talk to God. He said that he'd be right back. A few minutes later he said that I could. But then I started thinking about that. I didn't know how to talk to Her Majesty, let alone God. Maybe I'd better wait, I thought. Michael thought that was a good idea. But I wanted to make sure that someday I could. He said that I could, and asked me when that would be. I said, well, whenever I was ready, and whenever I could make God proud of me. You know, God knows everything. And I fibbed sometimes. Michael just laughed. So does everybody else, he said. Sometimes it was ok. You know, like when you just didn't want to hurt sombody's feelings.

 

I guess I never really thoughtseriously about God before. Not like that anyway. It was a little scary. I wanted to think about something else for awhile. So we talked about something else for awhile. Cars, I think. And television. We didn't have a TV and I wanted one. But Michael told me that sometimes it was better to spend your time thinking, and I would be glad that I did. He finally convinced me. He said that a lot of things are how they should be if people only thought about it. He gave me some examples that I forget. But he was right. So I didn't ask for a TV, even though it was my favorite thing. My auntie said that I was watching TV before I was out of the... What do you call that thing? Baby seats. She put me in front of the TV in the baby seat when I was a new born baby and I couldn't stop watching. I even remember that. The man on the cooking show was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't understand what because I didn't know how to talk yet. I didn't know that the man was talking to everyone. But I don't think that he was really, because he stopped cooking and came right up to the camera and started talking away, and some woman came and took him by the arm and made him stop. Then they did a commercial. I think Michael does those things. It's not like he's being sneaky. It's just that, well, if he had to stop and explain everything to everybody all the time he'd never get anything done. That's what he told me. He just does a whole lot of things really fast, that's all...

 

That's... all?

 

Oh, man. Seven is so heavy. How did... Never mind. Yeah, Crazy. Sounds so freaking crazy. I don't like to think about it. If people ever found out that I used to think like that... How could I ever explain these things? Seven. My "little" alter. Mind control splits you up. So many different mes now. What's weird is that they weren't programmed mes. They happened spontaneously in a moment of crises. In a way. In a way some of them happened long before mind control. I remember it plainly. There I was, seven years old, sitting on the back steps of the house up the hill, telling this story to everyone from the future. I have too many alters to count anymore. And most of them are time anomalies. And Seven is the most powerful of all of them.

 

 

 

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

 

Older now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were all those hippie years when life was wonderful. It was all an adventure then. When did life turn sour? Oh yeah. 1987.  Always the same answer.

 

How did all of that start? Geeze, you know the memory isn't what it used to be after all that I've been through. Somehow all of this was meant to happen, I guess. Did it start with meeting JFK in my head? Did it start on that disturbing day when the military men were all upset? I don't know. Couldn't say. in a way, I always think that it started a few years before 1987.

 

Paintball is a stupid sport in a lot of ways. Oh, God. No, don't talk about paintball. Well, but that's where it began, in a way. There, where I began to meet new people. It was after that when things went sour at work, and for no real good reason. Nothing that I could ever put my finger on.

 

When we first started our team there was another team that was doing well at the field. No losses for six months straight, and I considered it our challenge to beat them. That was the only real measure of success, that was the only goal worth having at the time, was to rise through the ranking system at the field, You know, all of that stupid youthful macho exuberance. A young man with something to prove.

 

No easy challenge. These guys were a class act, unlike any other team there. They all owned their own guns, had their own T-shirts, and they hada newsletter. The captain of their team was brilliant. He did his own artwork and most of the writing for the newsletter, and was just freaking brilliant. I subscribed partly because I considered it like intelligence, I wanted to get to know our opponent. Partly I figured we could learn from their success. Partly, I was an enormous fan. I read the newsletter over, and over and over each month until the next one arrived. There was something about this guy. He was agenius of some sort. And his editorials were revealing in ways that I hadn't expected.

 

This guy knew how to be a team. Teamwork and communication were his specialties. And no wonder. He was former Green Beret, and had survived countless incursions behind enemy lines in Vietnam. Wouldn't have guessed it. He was the friendliest guy that you ever met. Great sense of humor. And had a certain humility to him that was completely disarming. He had become a cop when he got out of the service, and somehow ended up with paintball as a serious hobby.

 

There was something really familiar about him. But I could never place it. Even his name seemed familiar. And there was something magical about him. Probably why everyone called him the Wiz. Not to be outdone I started our own newsletter, which led to a whole lot of back and forth, all in good fun. Jabs, propaganda, and mutual back slapping. Great fun, but I found myself really admiring the man. He was somebody I began to see as a role model in my life. I doubt that he ever really new how much I had taken to him as a mentor.

 

And it really was very magical, as if we could read each other's minds. It's one thing to just feel that way, or to think such things. But every month when the newsletter arrived I saw proof of it. For some reason we knew each other. As far as I know, he saved my life. He must have. It must have been that he got wind of what was happening to me when my life began to implode in 1987. The cops weren't going to help me, but the sheriffs showed up, even though they were from the next town over. Did he put in a call to someone? I don't know to this day. But what was apparent was that, for reasons unknown to me, he knew more about my situation than anyone else. He told me all of these things in that metaphor sort of way that just had everything to do with what was happening in my life. I never even new how or why, but those little things that he said kept popping up in my mind over and over again as I wouldsit and recall every detail that I could trying to figure out how I ever got into the extreme mess that I was in, or how to get out of it. But by then it was as if a truck had run over my head. It was a wonder that I could still think at all.  

 

Somehow, I had just been struggling so hard with all of the deliberate illusions being forced upon me in some covert psychological war against me, that I seldom allowed my mind to wander to anything more extraordinary than was absolutely necessary to understand how or why they were pulling this war off. The last thing I needed to worry about, I thought, were the voices that I used to hear in my head when I was a kid. Especially alien voices, for Christ's sake. My number one goal at that point in my life was to remain sane. And alive.

 

Finally, after a year and a half, when my marriage was over, while I was losing the house that my father had built and that I had grown up in, sitting there without any utilities and no food, and being threatened by some CIA guy who I identified from previous encounters, George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just become president, I think, I started looking for a way out. And I was no longer in a position to be picky. I prayed to God, I even talked to aliens.

 

That's when they began to remind me of all that had happened before the mind control tank ran over my head. And that's when I remembered this Wiz guy. The first time that I met him. He was the soldier in Vietnam who I had told to expect help from the "Martians". That was part of the plan at some point. That I would meet this guy and get to know him. And he would be there in my life when I most needed someone to be there, at a time when it was already getting hard for me just to sign in at the paintball games because I couldn't remember the year and had trouble even remembering my name anymore.

 

I thought about all of those years ago when I was seven or eight laying down in the back seat of the family car on the long drive to Lil' Miss, about how he had told me that he had problems with the CIA, and how for some strange reason I said that the "Martians" would help him. And how the songs on the radio would talk to me, in a way. Tell me when things would be alright. "Near the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight." My problem had been all along that I couldn't believe how serious things were getting.And every time I thought about that, they were even more serious than I dared believe. Somehow though, eventually something would come along to fix by broken believer. But full well I knew that every time that happened I was being drawn into a world of other "nut jobs" who had no way at all of proving what they believed. Rather than become so marginalized, I justcontinued to compartmentalize mythoughts, and live a double life. As lonely as that was, it was still a life that would allow me to carry on.

 

There were other songs. One meant that things were getting heavy. "C, CC Rider, now see what you have done". Where would I be without the music?

 

 

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton

 

By the time I entered into Junior High School in our conservative little town I was already aware that the world was often an unjust place. It was just that, apart from the occasional bully, or the time I saw our sixth grade teacher grab a student and hold him against the wall with his feet dangling beneath him, the world had been pretty fair to me. All that was about to change in the seventh grade.

 

The first time I sat down to a picnic table in the quad for morning break, a teacher came up behind me, grabbed my hair and jerked my head back and said, "Get a haircut, Liberace!" Mind you, my hair was just a little longer than anyone else's by today's standards, but those were the days when the dress code said that your hair was never to touch your shirt collar or your ears, and had to be above your eyebrows. Him and his flat top haircut walked off and I thought, "At least I grow my hair on the outside of my head!" For the whole rest of my time at that school I was getting in trouble for my hair. My English teacher was especially fond of sending me to the office. But she was one mean woman anyway. One of those teachers who you know hates their job, should have been famous or something if the world had appreciated her true gift, which as far as I could tell was being mean.

 

Like so many schools, people banded together in one way or another because there was safety in numbers. The bullies over on the side of the quad next to the snack bar, and a sort of descending order to the opposite side where my friends and I hung out. Some of us knew each other from elementary, and we were slowly going from being mod to being rockers, even if we were the sorts who actually read books and had long philosophical discussions about what was wrong with the world. I guess it was because we were so accepting of people that wewere slowly surrounded by other nerds of every type. You know. People who were different because they were smart, or short, or fat, had some handicap or were just insecure about the world. It probably didn't look as though we would fight, but looked as if we could, and that was good enough for them. Anyway, besides safety in numbers there was laying low and being inconspicuous, which worked at least until one braved the watering hole known as the snack bar. God help you if the bullies gathered for a feeding frenzy. That's when a dozen or more would surround you, humiliate you, push you around and then walk off laughing.

 

There were two friends of ours who always hung out together. One was the biggest and most heavy set guy, and the other was the smallest guy in school. I learned good lessons from both of them. One day the bullies came up and picked the little guy up and dropped him in a trash can. But rather than getting mad he just folded his arms and stood there saying, "Cute. Cute." Which even made the bullies laugh in a more good humored sort of way. Once I saw him get up on a picnic table and dance for the whole school when he was being picked on. Everyone cheered and he was a success. The bullies never could match his wit. His best weapon was his sense of humor.

 

Our other friend came to my rescue one day in a lesson about courage that I never forgot. The bullies had me surrounded, a much larger crowd than usual, and for the first time I saw the big guy, who never even stood up for himself, go into action. All you could see was his bright red hair tossing bullies from behind this way and then that, and he stood in front of me and informed them that if they wanted me they were going to have to go through him. After that the bullies never bothered him, or me, whenever he was around.

 

By the ninth grade, the smaller guy and I conspired to put Shakespeare to the test and see if the pen really was mightier than the sword. His dad owned an old fashioned printing press, and we went to work on our own underground newspaper. We denounced bullies for their homophobia, a thought which was way, way ahead of the times. None of us were gay or anything. Well, not at least as we knew, anyway, but being different was sure to get you called all sorts of things. But why couldn't they keep their hands off of us unless they were gay, we asked. We also ran a slander column that poked fun of teachers.

 

Bullies would be reading the paper in class and nervously looking around as if guilty of something. Some of the teachers devoted the whole hour to denouncing it. But after that, the bullies stopped bothering everyone like it was magic. It worked so well that we never even came out with a second issue. And we had massive respect. Nobody wanted to be the subject of the second edition. Shakespeare had been right.

 

One day in drama class, the teacher, another fairly mean woman, passed out a poem and we were told that we were to recite it. If we memorized it we would get at least an A regardless of performance. If we performed it well, but didn't memorize it, the best we could hope for was a C.  Then a few of us in class happened to notice that the poem was blatantly bigoted towards blacks. The girl who sat next to me, with the really long straight black hair and John Lennon glasses, who always wore white, I don't know, panty hose or tights or something, the ones with little red apples all over them because she had to wear a dress but didn't shave her legs, became outraged and denounced the poem as racist propaganda. After a short discussion the teacher told the class to raise their hands if they objected to the assignment and that they would be given a different one. Right away, I smelled a rat.

 

Well, the girl with the John Lennon glasses raised her hands, along with another guy in class, and I just looked at them, "It's a trap!" I wanted to say. But then she looked at me and shouted, "Raise your hand!" And so I did. Not that I needed anymore suspensions right then. But as I suspected, instead of new assignments we were reported to the office. But the school counselor let us off and called in the teacher because the students stories were identical.

 

The next day we were issued new assignments, but quickly found them to be much like the first except that they picked on different minorities. Did I mention that our school was almost entirely white? We all thought it would be pressing our luck to ask for still another assignment. So when the day came that we had to perform our poems the girl with the glasses and the strange stockings, or whatever you call them, got up and read hers in a disinterested monotone and received a "D". When it came to our friend, he did the same thing, and for the same grade. But I wasn't satisfied with that. So when I read mine I was as dramatic as I could possibly be, screaming at the tops of my lungs as if I were the irrational bigot carrying on about "savages". I received a standing ovation from the class at the end, who were shouting at the teacher that I deserved better than a "C" even if I didn't memorize the poem. The only hard part was that the girl with the glasses was laughing hysterically all the way through my reading, and it made me want to laugh too.

 

Our little town was changing, no matter how slowly. I remembered when I was new to the first grade a black kid came to our school. A bunch of other little boys started beating him up, and when I told the teacher on playground duty she just looked away. I was nearly in tears going back to class after the bell rang. I thought about how he must feel, but what really did me in was thinking how his Mom would feel that this happened. Throughout most of my life when I was there, the only black people one ever saw were getting a ticket by the side of the road. For some reason, neither my Navajo or Hispanic friends ever had such problems.

 

Every once in awhile I would talk to the voices in my head. Now I remember that I talked to an alien when I first entered that school. He pretty much said that the whole world was this way, not just the school, and he didn't seem to know why either. But there was a chance that it would all change someday. Especially if we could think of ways to help it change. It was a possibility, at least. Pretty much I didn't feel qualified to say any such things, and told him if ever I came up with something he could try it out on people who knew more about such things than I did. Things like having a press that took up for the underdogs, like the value of humor, like using the right to say no to stupid stuff even if it meant being sent to the office. Somehow though, I just knew that I was headed into some kind of confrontation with the powers that be. But at that time I just had the strange feeling that I would keep getting suspended for the rest of my life.

 

 

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton

 

 

 

The world always seems like such a vast and confusing place to a child. You start out learning the basic differences between right and wrong, and end up wondering just how adults seem to have forgotten such lessons. At some point you wake up and realize that there is so much hypocrisy going on about everything that you increasingly begin to take on a sort of cynicism, the world is in the hands of so many fakers and snake oil salesmen that it makes you stop listening, you begin as a preteen to form a sort of existentialist view. The world is quite insane. Though you figured that at a much younger age, by the time that you have some knowledge of the world the proof is everywhere. Everything seems absurd. And it really is.

 

Somewhere along the line I had become socially conscious, slowly, too slowly to have recognized that this was happening to me. It was partly, I suppose, the sort of times that we lived in that made me so. I was always a curious kid, and I'd run across some of my sister's more liberal books about the civil rights movement, was forming my own opinion about Vietnam from various papers that I'd read, watched as charges of injustices such as police brutality dominated at least some headlines. Every once in awhile I'd stop and say something to the voices I always felt were still listening somewhere, and on rare occasions I would talk to someone, a politician of some sort or another. After which I would embrace my custom of talking to some entertainment types so that it made me feel better somehow. Like we were doing something, if not very much at all. Though quite often the results of those dialogs produced results which exceeded all expectations.

 

Not that I'm at all comfortable talking about those things. You know, when you're just sitting alone in your darkened living room talking to the voices in your head, and not really knowing how they feel about any of this, and not even being sure that you're not just crazy or something, it doesn't seem like much at all. But later it seems like too much if the thing we talked about really took on wings. Then it would look as though you were trying to gain something by being associated with something famous and all, even if the fact was that you were just a kid whiling away a few hours now and then. And had just hoped that you weren't dooming them by asking for something so different.

 

We talked about all kinds of things and would sort of think them through together. Those voices were still so helpful in answering my questions, you know, why the world was this way or that way, what did they see happening from where they sat and so on. One time I asked someone why, if rock and roll music was so powerful, didn't anyone try to use it to do something useful in the world? And the voice said "Like what?" And I had to think about that for awhile. And I thought, well, you know, find some things that we all know are true, things that all people should believe in, and sing about those things sometimes.

 

I remembered President John Kennedy saying something which I later learned was quoted from another president, that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. During the course of the evening I began to wonder just what he'd meant, and how many ways that was true. Someone had said that some people hated some other people because they were afraid of them, and really, they didn't even know those people. They were too afraid to even get to know those people in the first place. Some rich people liked it that way, but most normal people suffered because of it. So, I thought that, well, maybe someone should try out some songs about all of that and see if people would like them enough that they still bought the music.

 

I tried to just stay with what I thought I knew for sure, things that made us all better people, things like I'd been learning from those other voices in my head. We shouldn't be fearful and hateful. We shouldn't be ignorant. We shouldn't be silent. We could do anything if we just put our minds to it. Those sorts of things.

And right then the voice in my head, who I'd all but forgotten about said, "How should it go?" 

 

So I made up a little song about it, and I could see the man, who I had always thought to look much different than he did right then, writing down the words. He was from England and I thought about the man from Tavistock who I spoke to many years earlier, and I wanted an English approach to the song. Then, as happened sometimes, I began to get pictures coming into my mind's eye that there would be a whole lot of satellites connected for the very first time for TV, and I thought that if the song turned out to be good enough, well, that maybe it would inspire musicians everywhere to use the power of their music to once in awhile say something that made people think instead of just going along with whatever the rich people had to say, or just so many songs that were far less meaningful. Then we just started talking and talking, but I've probably said more than enough about all of that already.

 

With some other person I talked about alien contact quite a bit, because that had always been an area of interest to me. I seldom spoke to the aliens anymore, or if I did they didn't feel it necessary to tell me that they were aliens. After my president was shot I was never as accessible to voices. Not for a long time anyway, though sometimes we'd still talk about one thing or another. But I hated the feeling that maybe I might have gotten him into a lot of trouble, and that I could get someone else into trouble. All the same, you know, I had to leave it to God and to adults to figure these things out. Well, and the aliens, who were adult aliens even if they were only five years old. The world was just a very serious place. Could be, anyways. But it always made me feel good when something popped up in the media about which I'd been some small part.

And it seemed sometimes, well, as though the whole universe wanted me to be happy, and that I was just the luckiest kid in the world, even if these other things were so difficult to go through.

 

Lil' Miss was a wonderful place, our nursery and our landscaping made it seem like a tropical island somewhere, and we were always playing at such things. There was a public swimming pool just down the street and we'd spend a lot of time there in the summer, which always put me in mind of Tarzan movies and the like, going from the jungle to the water that way to swim, being an imaginative kid and all. In Lil' Miss, us kids, tadpoles the old folks called us, spent our summers in no more than a pair of cutoff jeans and underwear. We didn't wear shoes or shirts, we were just like Tarzans and Bomba the Jungle Boys and what not, climbing trees, throwing spears made from tree stakes, climbing trees and all. We hadn't had a monkey for a long, long time, but my dog was still my best sidekick, and after a long day of swimming I'd come home to that same old familiar scolding, "Ahrooo, rooo, rooo! Ahrooo, rooo, rooo!" And all that went with it. It was sort of like my Tarzan call.

 

I used to love that summer afternoon time of day in Lil' Miss. The way the light danced upon the water at the pool, the way it filtered down through all of the trees as the day began to cool off. I'd come down the path past Granny's shed, where we stored materials, share whatever was left of my treats which were purchased with whatever change was left with my dog Laddy and than go straight to my room to rest and to watch television with my bloodshot and blurry eyes. Laying there exhausted from the days swim, smelling of sunburned skin, I would usually hear some little remaining pool water drain out of my ear just before I went off to sleep for a little while. For all the world, at that age, I couldn't have imagined a better life for a kid.   

 

 

 

Quiet | by Paul J. Norton