Path-Choosing Stories

[Copperfox]

Way way long ago, before Dancing Lawn existed, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons at a bookstore in Illinois. My alias of "Copperfox" _originated_ in those gaming sessions. Also popular around that time were books in which each reader could choose among branching-out choice-and-result sequences. These publications typically had a dozen or more possible finales: perhaps two outcomes in which the main character dies outright, three in which he or she survives but suffers non-fatal harm, one simply bringing an embarrassing failure, and the remainder turning out happily.

I figured, why not compose a multi-path story of my own? So I conceived a kung-fu saga, in which an aging master desires to find a successor to whom he can teach all of his techniques. This, again, was before Qui-Gon Jin sought a padawan on Tattooine, but that was the general idea.

Confounded real life didn't afford me the means to _publish_ any such work; but now I can use Dancing Lawn instead. Though it still is not so handy as printing books, I can at least share a sort of condensed version. Like, six or seven endings, with only one fatal and none of the others calamitous. It will give the idea. Maybe someone here who _isn't_ seventy-four years old will take the baton and run with is. Thus, I present:

}}}}}}}}}}}}}} THE MISSION OF SANG KI-JUNG !!

 

[EveningStar]

Copperfox has consented to postpone actually starting "Sang Ki-jung," so I can try my hand at a path-choosing story which came to my mind. Copperfox can resume his kung fu story sometime later. Therefore I now proceed with Channel 8.

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CHANNEL 8
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Once upon a time there was a thing people used to watch for entertainment. It was called Analog Television, or as they commonly referred to it, "TV". And when people wanted to select a mainstream program on the TV, they would turn a knob that had distinct clicks to let you know when you arrived on each station. Thing is, there was also a knob for the upper band, and it tuned like a radio. You would move from one channel very slowly, and the signal for channel 25 would slowly degrade, then fail. Then you continued tuning to see if there was something on 26. That was called a veriner dial, and it hinted at interesting possibilities if someone were to use frequencies between the officially sanctioned ones. Like 25.5.

If you were lucky...or unlucky...you might linger on the wrong decimal at the wrong time and hear something emerge from the static. Lists of numbers being read in a British dialect. Morse code. Abstruce orders in military parlance asking Baby Bear to contact Mama Bear at seventeen hundred hours.

Then televisions became more conservative. In the name of easiness...so they say...the UHF Veriner dial also had click positions that prevented you from lingering in the interstitial regions of mystery that make up the electromagnetic spectrum.

Where it gets to be scary is that life on earth...and any life that may be outside our big blue marble...is all tuned to Channel 7. Not TV Channel 7, but the real Channel 7 which went on the air the day God said "Let there be light."

One click away are other programs, other realms, other hopes and dreams. In short, you have spent your nacient existance as a human being, along with your dog or cat or hamster, viewing the program designed for someone of your young age. Young, in the cosmic sense.

That's where the strange case of Jake Beaman becomes interesting. For Jake was a lineman who endured a jolt of electricity no man should have survived. And he didn't...for 15 minutes...until he did. And while he had his near death experience, which profoundly changed his sense of values and inner peace, he also opened an area in his soul that was not meant to be used by Mortal Man 1.0.

Jake was sitting in the outer office of Sparky Sam's waiting to see HR about his health insurance claims, putting a stale cup of mediocre coffee--waiting room coffee--to his lips. His train of thought went to the new knob, the clicker, the veriner dial that made up part of his memory of seeing the Being of Light and his late parents. He wondered what the symbols on the knob meant, and the knob turned.

The cup of coffee fell to the floor and splashed across the high traffic carpet squares, and the vinyl seat cushion sprang back to his normal shape.

Jake was gone.

 

[EveningStar]

Jake arrived at the creation we call Channel 8, for lack of a better name, quite nauseous. That was his first channel change, and his body rebelled. What passed for meadow grass was blue. The trees--taller than any trees he had ever seen on earth, had leaves of aqua and cerulean. The cloudless sky was a light violet, dappled with silver stars; not ugly but not familiar.

He lurched forward, suffering from vertigo. Even in his wretched state, he felt like he could jump over a truck in the low gravity, if there were trucks. There were not only no trucks, there were no buildings and as far as he could see no forms of animal life.

"Poor man," he heard in his head, almost as if he had imagined it. "Stand still and we will help you."

Jake was so desperately sick that he threw up the stale doughnut and coffee he had in the waiting room. He was willing to try anything.

"Please hurry!"

He stood still, struggling to avoid falling over. Then a remarkable thing happened. His feet rooted to the ground.

That's not to say he was merely unable to walk. He felt a connection with the soil, and strength flowed into him. He began to get taller, firmer, and leafier. Which is to say he became a tree.

Ordinarily he would have panicked, but to begin with he was still conscious, and the nausea and vertigo had gone away. He was also aware of his environment, and not having eyes or ears he nonetheless saw and heard.

"What's happening to me??"

He could hear the voices more plainly now. He also felt emotions and memories and identities. In short, he realized that the huge forest around him was made up of people, and he was now one of those people.

"Welcome, friend. Welcome to the family."

"The family??"

One voice that sounded older said, "He's mobile. He does not understand. We must show him."

Just then something odd happened. Jake felt that odd feeling we usually described as "being watched." Only it grew stronger--much stronger. Suddenly he became dissociated from the tree. It was his home, but his mind and his senses travelled freely throughout the length and breadth of the forest. He was everywhere and nowhere.

Just as he began to experience this new kind of mobility, he felt himself launched upward. His spirit flew like a cosmic phoenix, travelling upward and onward until he could see the curviture of the horizon and the blackness of space above the atmosphere. "Whoa! I'm an eagle!"

"Best come back down for now," the voices called out to him. Suddenly and inexplicably he found himself back in his tree body, with no inbetween.

His thoughts darted to that knob, the one that put him there in the first place. Would it be possible to see other worlds? Was he stuck there in Channel 8? And no sooner did this thought occur to him that he found himself standing in the middle of the lobby next to the spilled coffee and the empty seat. He was back at Sparky Sam's.

The lady at the reception desk screamed. But quite honestly she had not seen anything nearly as shocking as what Jake saw.