tomorrowland lunatic i saw him for the last time in the second month. his tentacled hand waiving as i stepped aboard, the setting sun refracting rosy and crepuscular, and the natural luminescence of the landscape. tinsel streaming down in unending confusion, only to be collected and manicured by the old lady with the leech. 001020 ... Bespeckled We can take off on rockets into a new world, a new existance where the world is anything but what it is right now, where fantasy prevails (even more so than in Fantasy Land, because the FUTURE ... is uncharted), where dreams pulse in the half-region between a moment's consideration and the reality that we step in on the way to school every morning. The rocket rods can't go fast enough to take us there. The autopia cars always come back to start. The price of admission is the mud of reality on our shoes. The rockets settle back down to earth, and even as we walk past Walt and Mickey themselves, the black sky providing the perfect theater curtain to a beautiful, invisible world (did you see the swan in the water by the castle? There's a swan there ... beauty that our imaginations deserve to see for real), even as we walk toward Main Street, the lights of the castle, the song of the wishing well, the promise of a beautiful, indescribable world of adventure, discovery, untouched wonder pulling at the back of our minds, we know there lies something sinister beneath all this euphoria. Ah, Disneyland at night. Can existence be more perfect? Have you ever wandered around the place half an hour after closing? An hour? Everything is beautiful, everything serene, like your own little kingdom where all the visitors have gone to sleep ... and all that it needs now is your approval ... but the gates will close behind you. The tram ride to the parking lot begins to break the illusion down. The smoke dissipates, the mirrors crack. And then ... the cars. The cars. The SUVS, the trucks, the vans. They bring us back to reality. They bring us back to gray, and cold. And you lie in bed ... wondering if there could be a real society going on over at Disneyland, that maybe, the magic is real all day and all night, but only if you know where to find it, and only if you're a product of the fantasy. And you wonder what it would be like to live there. 031008 ... User24 the intricate patterns of wiring and arcane mechanics spiralling upwards and all around them as they stepped into the machine, it was itself a paradox, built in the future based on itself from the past, our present. They turned switches, typed co-ordinates on foreign keyboards; so much had changed that the technology was hard to identify with - no friendly mouse, no CRT, it was all custom built for it's purpose; the exploration of a timeline that would never exist. Officially, it had been built in 1987, officially, it was the fruit of a billion dollar reseach project stretching back to the 20's, and of course, officially, it didn't exist. In actual fact, (fact being a rare commodity in these times) it was never built, it just appeared, some decision in the far future had affected the distant past, skewed the time lines, and produced the machine, it didn't ever need to be built, because it never actually existed. Of course, it was useless, you couldn't go forwards or backwards in our time, you could only explore alternate realities, things that never happened, things that won't happen in the future.. sometimes it was hard enough just to keep going forwards at a rate on 1 second per second; it was hard to stabilise it at our current timespeed. When they first used it, they were cautious, skipped back one minute in time, and quickly returned. that was a mistake, really - they never should have used it at all, it should have been ignored. when they got back, they were shocked, everything had changed, the past was different, and the future they returned to was different, too - it's presence in the past had affected the future so wildly that it was unrecogniseable. Now, it was rarely used, sitting in an abandoned lab, under surviellance, never talked about; the enthusiastic scientific papers and news reports had stopped, in fact, most people were waited for it to dissappear, as rapidly as it appeared, hoping in vain that if it went away, it would return reality to normal; take away it's wild changes. has been reading Dr Who. 031009 what's it to you? who go blather from