Sunday, September 25, 2011

Muse Abuse


John turns away from his computer.  The characters in the story he is writing desperately want to be saved from the incoming meteor, but John doesn't like neat, happy endings.  When he comes back from the bathroom, he fully intends to finish wiping out the planet, which had been pock-marked by several smaller meteorites, the harbingers of this new, massive chunk of incoming rock.
Unbeknownst to him, the citizens of his fantasy world had a better idea.  John was writing about an advanced race, light-years from Earth.  He didn't know it, but the idea for his story was coming to him from them via their technology.  Whatever he wrote happened to them.
Dismayed that the one person from Earth they tried to get to help them let their planet become scarred and left in ruin, and was about to let their planet be destroyed, the moved to their "Plan B," which was to build a machine to teleport the meteor to a different location in space.  Before, they had no location in mind that would not possibly result in the loss of a valuable society.
As John returned to his computer to finish writing the story of how a planet he dreamed up one day was destroyed by a meteor, the citizens prepared their device.
They could still see what he was writing, and in all the gory details in which he described their people dying.
Fed up, they took over this process.  John gleefully typed on, by then blissfully unaware of what he was writing.
In his mind, he was writing about some far away planet, about to be totally annihilated by a massive meteor.
To the people of the advanced planet, what he was writing couldn't be any more true.

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