This is where I'm posting excerpts as I'm going along, so keep in mind that everything on this page is very Rough Draft. --G

Ramada Inn

45 miles North of San Diego

            Light.

            Dark.

            Light.

            Dark.

            Light-light-light.

            Dark.

            From the warm cocoon of the bed, Flutterby watched the light patterns dance across the far wall of her motel room. As cars passed by on the old decomissioned state highway outside, the light from their headlights shot in through the window and rocketed across the wall. Small at first, and then larger and larger, until they disappeared altogether, collapsing under their own lightness of being, to steal a phrase. Poof.

            Flutterby is smiling. On the bedside table there is a laptop computer, sitting open and whirring occasionally in quiet dissonance with the air conditioner. On its screen patterns of light and color swirl endlessly, a fractal program that started out as a screen saver, but Flutterby had found far more useful applications for. It was a Zen thing, really, the ability to lose oneself in the light, to allow all of the depth perception to be stripped away and just see the shades of light and dark in all its patterns, and then to perceive the tiny fractal repetitions everywhere around you. That was what the screen saver taught, Zen and the art of flying toasters. Flutterby practiced her fractal meditation every night before going to bed with her eyes open -- another useful trick she’d taught herself along the way. It scared the shit out of burglars when they broke into one’s room at night, giving one the extra thirty seconds to grab the stungun kept beneath your pillow.

            Conditioning, it’s all just conditioning.

            Light.

            Dark.

            Light.