Chapter 1.4

This made little sense, and she had read about this kind of thing in the booklets her shrink had given her…

TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US …TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US… TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US … TALK TO US …

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‘GO AWAY!’ Kimberly screamed.

This was not easing her mind. Where was the dull edge of the medication, the malaise, or even the sense of knowing that the brainless state of existence known as ‘Medicated’ was knocking on the door? It was sadly absent. Always with the waiting…

Waiting…

Twenty something years of this disease and still she bore the scars of the lack of general knowledge about both it’s origin and the method in which to treat it. Kimberly glanced up at the calendar she had sticky-taped to the front of her fridge with the days she had episodes on it. It was the end of the year and this was the first week of December. Great. She had not had an episode for 27.5 days, not since she woke up in the hospital with her smug mother staring over still body smiling. 27.5 days was a record. Previous best was 22.5 days which was two years and four months ago. They came so regularly then about two years ago there frequency stopped, morphing into a semi-regular almost monthly affair. During her teens it was at least once a week.

Episode or not she was feeling the inner drive to make it to the job today. So friggin’ what if it was a lifeless job with no prospects. It was freedom portioned out one week at a time. She had two sources of income, one from the state pension and the other from this job. One thing the positive thinking stuff was brilliant at was structuring the dreams you had in your heart. In between the medication, episodes and frequent trips to doctors and/or hospitals, Kimberly wanted something better. Pinned on the top on her roof was a picture that she found in some travel magazine while she was waiting for her shrink about a year ago.

The picture had three objects in it that she desired. The first was a small brick cottage in the middle of God knows where. The second was a small lake running from a snow covered mountain in the background, surrounded by rocks, trees and miscellaneous (though non-threatening) elements of wildlife, set perhaps in a the cold north of Europe. Kimberly enjoyed the scenery of the house in it’s computer generated surroundings. It was the first and most interesting element of the picture that captured her imagination however. As a matter of fact she stared at that during the night hours when her terror was at it’s highest.

The character in the foreground of the photo was tall tanned European man wearing no shirt and tight (though Kimberly thought not tight enough) denim jeans. Given that the advertising in the lower right corner of the picture displayed the logo of a prominent designer, who was famous for semi-naked eye candy in his salacious controversial marketing devices. This of course is what attracted attention to the product in question and demanded those of us with hormones gaze upon the clothes horse, though we never really want to buy anything afterward… at least most people Kimberly knew didn’t.

The man was a creature of the machine to most people but to Kimberly he was the man who would come into her life and partner with her to live in a small Chateau somewhere in the northern European continent. Given that the supply of ‘talent’ in her locale was made up of people who considered pants to be optional or lived in a small iron constructions built with sheets discarded from long closed building sites, it was indeed a dream. In her imagination, Kimberly met this man at one of the many support groups she frequented, they touched and talked and shared dreams of escaping to a simpler less medicated existence. He was a loner like she was with no support except that of a crooked physician who had ‘allegedly’ taken advantage of her. In her fantasies Kimberly was counseled by the shirtless man, held in his muscular arms (he had time to work out in between psychotherapy she reasoned… when he wasn’t in the working on the building site of course)… he was an image carved from Barbara Cartland herself.

The crooked shrink got his just desserts as they banished him out the office window of his penthouse office and escaped to Europe. Kimberly thought this part of the dream was a bit pale… why not an exotic island in the West Indies? Or perhaps a remote northern Australian town with the local populace of less than 100. A country retreat? No, her mind was too linear for that, it had to be precisely as it was in the photo. If it wasn’t then it wasn’t going to come true. You only receive what you believe… that was the mantra.

Kimberly stood up from her position on the couch realising that the medication was slowly and surely doing it’s work. It was time for a shower.

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Chapter 1.3

The first thing she came across was the local volunteer station that was largely manned by wannabe Spielberg’s, or visionaries that were to Guerrilla for film school.  Given that it was Saturday and all that was on the other channels was sport, perhaps this station could be of some value.  Usually though, this station, if it wasn’t good for a laugh, filled some kind of gap with something quirky, or at the absolute minimum an off-the-wall program that was so poorly made it was unintentionally amusing.  Kimberly, who ranked sporting activities up there with working, hoped to God that all she would see was something of interest (off the wall/quirky) and not sport.  No such luck.  What Kim got was a sporting show all right, but it was third rate.   The show was called Sports Frenzy and the host was a mid-forties overweight man with a flat (repeatedly broken) nose.

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Man he is ugly

She wasn’t quite sure: was he a footballer? It was definitely some kind of contact sport, or a sport that relied heavily on person-to-person combat, like boxing.  Maybe this man was involved in ice hockey, because his nose was flatter than a surfboard and wider than a rhino’s backside.  In fact, his nose was so damaged that it was clearly affecting the way he spoke.  He sounded like he was trying to use his nose as the device for talking, instead of opening his mouth and allowing the voice box to operate.

STOP RESISTING US, LITTLE KIMMY-WE KNOW THAT YOU ARE TIRING OF US, BECAUSE WE ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU ARE, AND YOU CANNOT STOP US FROM GETTING WHAT WE WANT, YOU KNOW.  WE ARE ALL CONQUERING, ALL POWERFUL

It could be that even while chasing the ball he found himself heroically motioning toward it, but found another male instead, thus colliding head against hip bone-resulting in an instant break to his formerly straight and hopefully inflated nose.  It was probable that the former vainglorious athlete may have had a penchant for nightclubbing, and of course the ensuing alcohol consumption.  A ‘few’ drinks later the superstar of the whatever-sport-it-is that this person used to be good at, picks a fight with another drunken idiot-then cops it sweet, right on the nose, breaking the damned thing.

OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK; WE ARE ALL AROUND YOU READY TO POUNCE ON YOU AT ANY MOMENT.  WE ARE HERE TO TAKE YOU DOWN INTO THE SWAMP AND DESTROY YOU.  TODAY WE WILL TAKE YOU THERE, TO SHOW YOU WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO MESS WITH US …WANT TO SEE KIMMY

This person, though, had an air of failure about him; why else would he be hosting a show on a third-rate television station on a Saturday?  Like so many athletes, maybe this person had consumed a banned substance like a Moduretic, the drug used to cover up the other drugs, and received a ban for two to three years.  Perhaps it was some scandal at a nightclub involving an exotic dancer, which resulted in a brawl that eventuated in a window being smashed and someone being thrown threw it.  More than likely the man on her screen was involved in a tackle of some sort that busted a knee joint and threw his entire career into chaos thus rendering the well-built giant innocuous.  Perhaps though, the presenter was only ever a mediocre sports person who wound up hosting this show as a community service deal.  Who knows?
Kimberly wondered whatever possessed individuals to want to play ’sport’, and furthermore what would ever make anyone want to spend so much time working on something that was, in essence, the senseless self-destruction of the human body.  How often is the so-called news followed by the story of one of these sports stars injuring themselves?  Too often, Kimberly had thought.  Eight-hundred people could have died in an earthquake in Turkey, but if a sports star gets injured, or banned for using a substance, then it’s time to stop the press and call the leader of the free world.

‘What is it with sport?’

YIELD TO IT.

Kimberly wasn’t sure if she saw it totally, but the man on television appeared to have something floating around his head: a sign or symbol of some sort.  She wasn’t sure if this was a prop gag or some bizarre football joke, but it looked like a dagger was around his head.  What was worse than that was every time she closed her eyes she could see him with his hair ruffed up and covered in blood.

What does this mean?

Kimberly was still waiting for the meds to kick in… it was taking ages. Still this small distraction had provided minor relief… for now.

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Chapter 1.2

‘Voices, stupid voices,’ she said, waving her arms around her head as if she was trying to swat a fly, ‘Can’t you just leave me the hell alone…I knew I took I waited too long.’
Whispers of different things blew into Kimberly’s mind and filled with a variety of ever-changing emotions.  She had to distract herself so they would stop as her doctor told her-so it was time to think about work. Think, think, think is there anything else to do? To control it you need to focus on something else … the voices are all in your head Kim, all in your head … they aren’t really there … they aren’t real … you are real … a real person … a person that is fundamentally insane but a person nevertheless.
‘Why does time drag on when you have to work in the afternoons?’ she said trying to focus her unruly thoughts, ‘it’s worse than pulling rocking horse teeth.’
HIDDEN BUT UNSEEN NOW SEEN NOT HIDDEN
‘Depressing thoughts,’ she said turning on her ancient television.
kimberly-mirror

YOU’RE NOT GOING TO WIN THIS TIME KIMMY- YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE.

‘Shut up!’

THE TIME FOR YOU TO DIE HAS COME, AND TO KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO DIE.  WE HAVE PATIENTLY SAT HERE WAITING FOR YOU TO COME TO US, BUT YOU NEVER DID, DID YOU KIMMY.  ALL YOU EVER DID WAS SIT THERE …

Kimberly looked at the TV… it was the perfect say to distract herself while her medication to kick in.  She had to get through it … today was her allocated work-therapy day.  Her Doctor was trying some ot kind of diversional therapy, work in the local deep fried chicken store.  It was demeaning.  This was a girl who was striking to look at, intelligent and all they could find her to do was some ridiculous gig working with horny teenagers?  When they told her what was coming… she cringed.  It took about four trips to the shrink-in-residence to get her to agree to it.  Now, even though she hated it, there was an attraction to the sense of independence it had brought her.  Sure, the money was hardly Wall Street and she was no closer to her dream of maintaining a self-sustaining life without the ever present threat of her overbearing mother, who had designed her life from the day she was born, hanging over her head.  It was the first step towards freedom.  In the game she was in, one step forward two steps back was the norm.   If she maintained the course for a while … there would be the hope of more freedom to come and who knows… maybe a place that wasn’t funded by the state? All she had to do was hold it down for twenty-forty minutes and the meds would give her enough clarity to flip burgers.   If she did that, today she would take another step to freedom.

Kimberly turned on the television.

“Sport,” she sighed, “Dammit…”

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Working out how to post a blook … some early thoughts

Ok so I am into chapter 1.2 which I plan to release today.  The first thing that strikes me as being different on the internet so far… (actually which explained really well on this site) is the potential of the medium.  I had begun planning a site that would deliver straight content but since I started I am wondering if a “blook” has much future given that the internet is very media rich medium.  My experience with social media services (i.e. Stumbleupon) is that you experience a very high bounce rate from visitors and that genuine internet traffic that will turn into long term readers is hard to leverage.  My point was further strengthened when on my more surreal experimental sites (okay so it’s funny pictures) when I had a huge day of 8500 visitors … none of them really went on to become subscribers… most of them bounced on to the next thing.  I think the following day it went down to 25 again.  So from that aspect selling a book online as a “blook” or “blovel” or “blookvel” or whatever strikes me as difficult.  The thing is people are doing it and they are having some degree of success.

I am wondering if a more media rich experience could lead to a novel experience that’s more interactive.  I have heard some of the brave steps authors are taking such as Doris Lessings latest venture… but I still think we are missing a golden opportunity here… then again we are authors not magicians.  If I was a magician I would wave my (magic) wand and create interest in my backwater fiction so I could write more of it.  But I digress.

Here’s where the web formula breaks down into mush for me.  I have heard arguments for and against a filter for the reading community most of which I tend to agree with.  Yet, my experience with internet entertainment (limited) tells me that people come when they are led by other people.  So how to get people to find interest?  Or in simpler terms that I can understand: How do we know our stuff will be passed around so we can move from internet obscurity to relative internet obscurity?  After all, if a writer is not being read then why do they write?  I know for passion… but surely being read and passed around beats the hell out of not being or passed around.  I could be wrong about this but I can say from my own perspective that I would rather have readers than not.  I would rather have support for my work than none (as I do at present).  Again, I digress.

So this note has me wondering… should I be more innovative in how I deliver content.  As the great annoying strategist of our time so eloquently stated in his five forces model, to sustain a competitive advantage in real business terms you need differentiation.  What differentiates a blook from a novel and why should we read it?  Because we are good people?  What’s the payoff?  So my first snag in this experiment is this (and it’s a common old problem): how do I present my work and get people to read it IF it’s good enough to be read… which I am sure it probably isn’t.   Marshall Mcluhan was famous for saying the medium is the massage message so with this medium how should one present the message(s)?  If we are to be serious how do we do it?  This is where I am at… at the moment… I wonder I wonder.  Luke out!

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Chapter 1.1

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The shadow certainly looked like it was moving… but she knew better.  It was time for the meds.  She opened the flaking brown wooden door to grab her prescription medication off the shelf, hesitating as she did so.  Kimberly carefully studied the bottle and then conspicuously opened the container.  The familiar sinking feeling of the drug-induced malaise that followed the ingestion of the pills was looming as she took swallowed the first of six different tablets.

Numbness… she thought as the last pill slid down the back of her throat.

The end of apathy, emotion and clear thought… the greatest irony of all for medication that supposed to stop the onset of a major “episode”.  In medical science the theory is that if they can reduce the symptoms you have, by replacing them with others that are marginally more comfortable, then you are getting better.  If on the other hand the drugs designed to replace the illness bring you to new levels of insanity and possibly to the brink of self-inflicted death then you aren’t ‘getting better’. The upswing days as Kimberly called them, consisted of clarity, creativity and raw emotional energy.   The downswing days were blackness, unreality and a level of apathy that destroyed any hope of ambition.  Today was an upswing day.  At least for now.

‘Shadows don’t move by themselves.’

This positive affirmation technique they had her using at first made her feel good but when the delusions overwhelmed her they rarely made a difference.  One of those, speak-it-and-it-is-so deals, where the therapist tells you to breathe a lot then prescribes you drugs that could sedate a mammoth.   It was never like the movies.  In those fantasies a needle and bang you feel into some kind of sleep… all was well.   Not this white rabbit.

YOU will DIE

Perhaps.  The voice was telling her of impending death… so it was confirmed.  Today would be ‘episode’ day.  Then again, it could be that the shadow was actually moving, or did move via some kind of ingrained wall effect or special paint that she hadn’t heard of.  Surely after staring at it for the last two years she might have noticed that.  How about when they were taking the walls down or when the were removing the rubbish?  God, they still hadn’t finished it.  They got so far then for stopped for some reason, like they do with all ‘ghetto’ zoned projects.  Why don’t they ever finish anything they start?

Last week she went downstairs into her garage to see what was wrong with her hot-water system and she noticed someone had stolen the copper rings from it and had dismantled the entire thing.  It was definitely a bad area, but it was affordable—so she lived there … at least until she could find a way out of it.  Besides, it was close to the city where she worked with others like herself, it was almost a certainty that she would move on sooner or later.   The developers had already rendered one block of flats because they caught ‘city glimpses.’  What they failed to tell the tenants who were dumb enough to buy these apartments was that the people who lived across the road were drug addicts, prostitutes and just about homeless, like Kimberly.  This used to be the kind of area where all the worst of the worst head cases would wind up.  Now, it had become the centre for Latte sipping social climbers, who were ever too conscious of self and too busy driving the latest SUV to notice the decaying nature of the societal structure around them.  What a horrendous paradox.

One of the most interesting things about living in the ghetto-like Eastern suburbs was the constant danger that real crime was around the corner, and you just never knew if a predator was waiting in the bushes or a flasher was around the next street or maybe even a rapist.  It was a real roll of the dice.
Funnily enough, the place where Kimberly lived was filled with trees and a massive park was next door.  It was developing and property from around the corner was selling at prices that were eight times was the average Australian could afford.  A very strange place indeed: on the one hand the worse crime area in her fair city and on the other it had made many yuppies and rich wankers ever richer.  Moving around was like walking through a part of Heaven that Satan owned.   It was a good thing it was this way because previous to living here, Kimberly had been in a place with ‘white padded walls’.

Inside her mind, which was a place that scared most of her therapists, was a world of her own creation.  In this world, she created the day or what the day would be like if she wasn’t incapacitated by her medication.  She saw herself, stroking her long red hair without thinking that it was going to fall out, she saw a great smile on her face as she sat playfully in her boyfriends (or husbands or whatever) lap and flirted with him.  Often, she dreamed that she could go out in public for extended periods of time without worrying about what other people might be thinking.  As her mother always said to her, ‘they can take your freedom away but they can’t stop your imagination.  As long as you have that, you can achieve anything.’  Mum was full of crap though, because they can take your imagination, especially when you must take these drugs.

Kimberly looked at the wall with fierce concentration again to see if it had more moving parts that she could amuse herself with, and it appeared as if the shadow had stayed put.  Suddenly she began to feel very light headed, yet another effect of the drugs, as she stared at the wall.  What was worse, she was now feeling disoriented.  Kimberly looked back at the wall, and again that damned shadow appeared to move from one side of the picture to the other.  On the wall a homeboy was pictured with a big smile on his face carrying a couple of guns and a thick gold chain around his neck.

How typical…

The shadow began moving again but not like the last time.  It began to extend itself off the wall taking on a third dimension.  Kimberly didn’t like the feeling of losing control, she blinked and then it was gone. Not believing what she had just seen Kimberly looked again and the shadow had been where it was originally drawn – at least according to the way the sun was positioned in the sky.

‘What the hell was that,’ she said uneasily, ‘shadows can’t move like that … I have to stop drinking so much coffee.’

ISOLATION DOES FUNNY THINGS TO THE MIND YOU KNOW—FUNNY THINGS IT DOES, LIKE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HURT PEOPLE—YOU HURT THEM AND THEY DIE.

The experience she just had gave her a nauseous feeling, because she was not the type of person who could enjoy hallucinations as some kind of fun happy time.  She had been having them for years and no matter how many times she had them or how many drugs she took, nothing ever prepared her for the onslaught on visual and auditory hallucinations. That would mean losing control, which to her was one of the most important things in the entire world.

Control is everything.

‘This can’t happen to me; I can’t go schizo, not now … I have to go work dammit!’

WE’RE WATCHING YOU DEAR, AND WAITING FOR YOU TO COME …

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Chapter 1

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* Courtesy: Jam343

Kimberly daydreamed about a different existence as she stared blankly out her kitchen window across the to the vacant inner city block over the road.  The thought of not having to fight the voices, or the constant stream of medical trials that was her psychiatric care made for a pleasant thought.   She now lived in a state funded single bedroom unit run by the Department of Health in downtown Hamlyn.  A nameless city of less than a million people in the middle of nowhere.

Her dream had involved living inside an independent flat, as she presently was, but with a family… a dog and two-point-five children. Nothing too shabby considering that her life was less than dull, what with the constant flow of ups and downs followed by the streams of unnecessary consciousnesses floating around her drug-addled mind.  It was home but her mind was making for her a better place.  Her dreamworld was cut short by the abrupt return to reality and the realisation that she was washing the dishes in her favourite “hello kitty” pajamas.   It was sad to say that at the ripe old age of twenty-four she was still dressing in such childish clothes.

That however was a moot point because she had been told quite often that she was a child.  A child with the mental capacity of a late teen.  A terrible statement for a girl that was strangely attractive despite years of self-inflicted wounding, stays in the inadequately funded mental facilities of Hamlyn and the never ending ebb and flow of suicidal behaviour.  There was no real need for them to tell her that because ever since she could remember drugs, doctors and whatever else you can imagine had been the order of the day.   These obstacles aside, she still managed to dream.  Hallucinations had their upside so she had come to understand.

The view from the one-bedroom apartment where she lived was not necessarily fantastic, mesmerizing, or at all glorious; it was completely mundane, yet somehow transfixing.  In the vacant lot across the street was a loan brick wall… a remnant of a condemned building standing as reminder that things must progress.  For whatever isn’t moving or changing is standing still… so we are told.

What immediately caught her attention in the middle of the wall was a crudely spray painted picture of a homeboy character, with two large guns and a heartless sadistic smile on his face. Kimberly had seen that look before… although she had trouble remembering where.  The sunken eyes, the cold intent reflected in the eyes.  The picture was so cleverly painted that a shadow painted behind the face, to emulate the sun shining our the criminal in question, looked like it was moving.  Kimberly studied it at great length.  Was it moving?

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Welcome to the Omneckron project

* Image courtesy: Aline Salazar

Ok so to the four people that read my prologue I am changing it.  Don’t shoot me… it just sucks.  Oh and welcome to the project.  The aims are simple, I am putting a web-based novel to work in a more web 2.0ish way.  I plan to use a ton of available resources and ideas to make it work.  I should also mention that Web 2.0 is really another way of saying the read/write web.   As a co-teacher of Mobile Workforce Technologies I find it interesting that people love that phrase so much… it’s a label and I am not afraid to use it.  So, what can you expect on this site.

Well, it’s my brainchild thought baby thought bunneh humble terrible novel writing project that I began so many years ago.  For the past three years I have done nothing on this project except sit on my “evergrowing” ass and hope that someone would buy it.  When I started reading it again I began to notice how poorly it was written and thought, “man I wouldn’t buy this… it stinks”.   So I thought, hey… let’s forget about this and focus on my real job, but that bores me sometimes so I thought (baby) again why not rewrite the book as a blook, e-novel, sturdious work of fiction, blovel, blebsite or whatever.

Here is my elevator speech: This book is about a young girl who is mentally ill.  She begins to see things that aren’t there and we follow her into this world.  We find struggles, power games, evil dictators, landlords, cheese and a short rant about the holographic paradigm.  I am not going to pretend this is good fiction, it’s not.  It’s me having fun.  The characterisation is shallow, the writing is amatuer and the plot doesn’t exist.  Let’s hope by the time I inject some life into this piece of nonsense that you or me (Hi mum!) will enjoy this project.   Some serious stuff:

  1. This is a creative commons piece of work… note the license
  2. You can read my personal blog here… it’s my random thoughts
  3. I post three times a week… but I am a procrastinator by trade… so if I fall behind it’s because I am lazy.
  4. I don’t really know what I am doing so any flames or comments are welcome… this is an attempt to improve my writing… and reduce the amount of ellipses I use in sentences.
  5. I really believe in this post and I think I have a shot… once I get it right.
  6. I delete or spam random flames… read this if you flame randomly or this
  7. That said if the flaming is constructive like this example or this one… (but not this one) then I will take on board your comments.  I am used to highly strung insecure people… I work at a university!
  8. If I make money of this … I promise it was an accident!

So in closing my inaugural post let me write this: I am not really happy to be doing this but I know for my personal growth that I have to… be gentle with me… it’s my first second third fourth fifth six seventh tenth… oh to hell with it I forget which time.  Will I never learn?

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Prologue

‘Mum,’ Kimberly said with a soft voice, ‘I’m sorry for what happened.  I trust you if you, I … I …’

‘Yes, Kimmy …’

‘I want to stay here with you for a while if that’s OK.’

Kimberly opened the shower door and poked her head out to look at her mother and to give her a repentant smile, but was stopped by something she couldn’t really believe.  Her mother was holding an extremely sharp meat cleaver, with a line of fresh blood on it which dripped from the blade onto the floor.  Kim was utterly speechless.  What was worse, the symbol she had seen earlier was there again, lit very brightly.  The look on her mother’s face was not one she had ever seen before; it was one that conveyed a lost element, or a lost cause.  It was somewhat blank, as if in deep shock, yet formed well enough in intent that she seemed to know exactly what she was doing.

‘Kimmy, won’t you come out of the shower dear, I have something to give you,’ she said, ‘I think you will like it honey; it’s something that your father should have given you when you were a little girl.’

This was not the same woman she had known her entire life, not the recipient of the University of Hamlyn best ‘Academic of the Decade’ award.  Surely not.  There was no time to analyse the situation, as her mother appeared to be closing in on her.  In one hand she had a meat cleaver drenched in blood, presumably her boyfriends, and in the other she had what appeared to be brain and skull fragments stuck to the back of her hand.  Across Eunice’s face was a thin wispy spray of arterial blood that speckled her wrinkled cheeks, giving away the fact that she had just ended her boyfriend’s life.  Almost immediately Kimberly thought she was having another hallucination, but it couldn’t possibly be, this seemed so real.  The look in her mother’s eyes was one that sent a shiver up her spine.  Dark rings had formed around her eyes and the skin that was visible on her arms was bubbling slowly. It was as if some thing inside her was trying to break itself free of her mother’s body but couldn’t.

‘Oh dear Kimmy,’ Death said through Eunice, ‘Time for you to get the chop.’

Without warning Eunice walked briskly over to her daughter in the shower and made a quick grab for her through the door that Kimberly had shut, smashing it to pieces. Eunice was cut in the process, squirting blood around the white tiled bathroom.  Kimberly, in a state of panic, tried to push her mother out of the space she had so aggressively invaded, but she was far too strong for her.  Eunice somehow had her pinned to the shower wall with one arm and was now raising the meat cleaver above her head.

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Introduction

‘For centuries we have looked up to the human race as an enemy that has stopped us from living our lives in contentment, in the fullness of a body,’ the boss (or CEO, as he was known by all and sundry in the sub-terrain) shouted as he addressed the crowd.

‘I can tell you now that this world, the world of the human, is coming to an end - we are but a few days away from taking the Earth from the Peace Corps and that makes us one step closer to taking their throne!’ he exclaimed with all the fervor of a Churchill or a Kennedy and receiving the loudest of applauses from the loving crowd.

‘We own Omneckron, which was given to us; we almost own Earth, and not long after that we will storm the gates of the Peace Corps and strike them down where they lay,’ he shouted, pausing for emphasis so appropriate cheers could be heard, ‘then we shall rule the entire universe and all things in it!’

The CEO stepped away into the darkness where he spent most of his time, organizing, planning and dictating strategies to his subordinates so they could do his will.  Now though, he had to show his face because the time had finally come, after centuries of being defeated, to stand up and take the Earth away from the human race… forever.

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