Dead Dog's Tale

In the quiet, inky blackness of early morning, I awoke with a start. The room was shrouded in darkness, the kind that seemed to swallow up even the faintest hope of light. My young mind, perhaps no older than five or six, instinctively knew the hour. Just past 3 a.m., that liminal time when the world teeters on the edge of something otherworldly. Anxiety bubbled up within me, a nameless fear that I couldn't yet articulate, but it was there, as real as the walls of the ranch-style house in Chino, California, where I lived. I can still trace the layout of that house in my mind, every corner, every shadowed hallway. Even then, I had an intimate knowledge of its contours, perhaps because there were times, just before dawn, when I would find myself in different parts of the house, far from the safety of my bed. The clock ticked toward 5 a.m., the hour when my father would rise, a man of little patience. His wrath was a thing to be avoided at all costs. The thought of flipping on a hall ...

Surprised, I opened my eyes to find myself standing. My gaze was fixed on a vast crystal blue sky. A soft, icy breeze coiling around the hilltop conveyed the morning cold. I began shivering and asking myself how I got here when a glint of silver caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see a bright metal disc with a mirror polish, gigantic in proportion, hanging silently above me. Upon my realization, I was suddenly seized with a terrific force. Some invisible vice locked itself around my whole body; the air crushed from my lungs as it gripped me ever tighter against my consent. A loud metallic click resounded as I strained against what bound me and reverberated inside my brain. The disk and I began to interface. A deluge of images flooded my mental processes. I was a human particulate futtering between states of consciousness and dissolving in equal parts terror and astonishment.  Amidst the churning ocean of digital chatter I was drowning in, a single directive emerged, ...