Bedrest

Warren Paulsen was a preacher, a father of 4 and a prolific unpublished writer. Beyond the list of things he would call himself, he was also what most would consider a microcosm megalomaniac, an egotistical political zealot, and emotionally confused. Rather than using his gifts, and talents to attend to his personal, and family responsibilities, Warren used his gifts, talents and responsibilities for forums of political announcement and dictation. Powered by his insatiable need to maintain his own purity, Warren had developed a sizable laundry list of platitudes and sermons that explained his otherwise inexplicable existence. The beauty of his defining words that made up his various speeches was that they absolved him from all need for adjustment. He had found after years of practice, that he could explain himself faster than he could improve himself, and thought it perfectly logical to progress this way.

The problem with explaining oneself as an alternative to personal change or self improvement, lies in the universal law of entropy. The inevitable and steady deterioration of all things has a profound effect on even the most excusable in society. To maintain protection against the scrutiny of others, the explaining of one's condition is must be ongoing, and the lack of personal upkeep only increases the need find or develop ever more complex and often convoluted explanations.

Weight gain is due to working harder on Sunday sermons, and the off-color speech is due to the same workload increase, and subsequent lack of exercise. The four to six hours of nightly television is an "unwinding requirement" due to the laborious work of sermon preparation. If one of the Paulsen Home residents is awakened at 3:00am for speech practice it is a necessary sacrifice. The man had a reason for everything but the one that went without saying was that the family needed to pitch in more lately because Warren was far too busy preparing sermons, watching television, sleeping late, and over eating.

Warren's duties as a minister were as he said "Appointed of God," and any miscalculation as to the order or quality of effort by any member of his family to aid him in this mission was a mockery of the Lord's work, and would not go without sharp [and lengthy] rebuke. These all-too-common lengthy rebukes were also reason for additional "unwinding" in front of the television and often additional rebuke, for they sapped him of his valuable preparation time for Warren's clerical duties.

Even when the house was running smoothly, and all the needs associated with the Gospel according to Warren were met, there was the occasional extra sermon of explanation, a freebee whenever he felt such a thing was called for. Such events occurred either with the Trinitron on mute mode, or when he would emerge from mid-day study for his lunch to be served by his wife or one of his children. One of these sermons was a reason to stop anything and everything you were doing aside from breathing for at least 45 minutes, and possibly the most significant one of these discourses looking back on it now, was the one on "Mercy killing," and why he would never in good conscience grace the box office with his patronage to see such a film as "That new Clint Eastwood Film! Just because your life took a turn you hadn't expected, you want to kill yourself rather than find your new place in the Lord?"

About Seven and a half months ago, on a Sunday afternoon, Warren's trip home from his chapel was cut short at Baker and Main. The simple act of swapping Yanni for Ted Nugent would forever change his life, the lives of his family, his devout congregation, and the life of the now physically recovered but emotionally yet unstable Janet Rice who had the green light that fateful afternoon.

For a heroic eight weeks Warren was a shining beacon of hope for all quadriplegics, and a man of his principles to the end. The end of regular visitation that is. Once Warren was finally moved to convalescent home and the family began to recollect, his visitors began to diminish, and his need to explain himself or the work of the Lord began to diminish proportionally. It was then that his principals began to lose their meaning precipitously. Sadly he found that with few to zero people to teach, he was left with only his mind, a few professionally kind health aids, and his own devastated body.

He had never been much of an athlete, and he certainly was no boxer but to completely lose his mobility was unthinkable even now. He hadn't gone more than a day without questioning his loss since the accident to the point of tears. His world was a bizarre hollow now; quiet, and without much purpose as he could find. The first few weeks of champion speeches of finding God's new purpose for him, and learning all he could about this terrible condition, had given way to beleaguered questions about the family if someone was by for a visit, but eventually most visits were missed entirely by sleep.

Warren could no longer much face where or who he was, so he spent most of the hours in the breathable slack the dream world provided. Whenever he found himself awake, he was stuck between wanting to die, and needing to be right. It was a battle for principle that cost his family a small fortune every month. He was bound by his body, and determined by pride to prove to the world the principle of living with what you're given, from a motionless bed, in a quiet convalescent home, in a small town called Hartley, in the all but forgotten state of Delaware.

Adrift

Up until recently Bradley Watson X4 Jones, was a highly qualified, large craft, EVO signals hardware technician with a spotless 15.5 year record. 12 hours ago however, Bradley was knocked violently from the port side of the GMC Galactic into deep space despite the routine nature of his being there, and the redundant safety systems designed to prevent such an accident. Who had wanted to get rid of him was the first questions to go through his mind after the initial rhetorical questions of disbelief had faded.

No, Brad no longer wanted to know who had done this, after rapidly going through the 5 stages of grieving Brad was moving on to new stages he had never even heard of. He started calling this one the philosophy stage. Having stopped his spinning at least by small propellent bursts Brad had lost all sense of relative movement, and in the eternity of inky black, stillness, the standard questions of philosophy began to flood his mind with such urgency that it was difficult to even comprehend his own thoughts at first. But soon, Brad could pick out his own questions, "Who am I? Why am I here, and what is all this, anyway?" It was all in this radical stillness, a calming fear ran through his suited body. Just what sort of situation had brad gotten himself in anyway, and not just being jettisoned into space, but this whole life of his? What had the whole mess been, and why would such a past lead to such a present? What is time anyway? Who was Brad now that he had nothing to compare himself to? Or what was brad? "Brad, Brad, Bradley, Brad, Bradley Watson X4, Bradley Watson Jones!"

With no other compulsion beyond complete, utter, and indefinite solitude, Brad began to call his own name. This can be a fun experiment for society bound souls that find only brief periods of solitude, but the duality of mind and purpose that ensues following the initial sense of foolishness, can become extreme when not checked by one's usual need to reenter society. Bradley had long since come to terms with the notion that he was very likely lost, and would be alone until death came to take him, by either starvation, or suit failure, and he knew it would have to be starvation, these suits were designed with tolerances to include such a situation. For the foreseeable future, it would be quite literally, "Me, Myself, and I."

It didn't take long for the duality to set in. It began with feeling that he was being called by someone, while feeling like he was at the same time calling someone. Amusing at first but it rapidly turned frightening when he began to call out more sharply, the feelings grew more intense until he began to hear a reply without feeling like he was providing it. Like a distant voice he began to hear a voice of assurance. "I'm coming, just a moment," the voice said, as it became more audible. "What is it you want?"

"Um, excuse me?" Brad asked with some reservation.

"What is it you want?" the voice replied.

"Who are you?" Said Brad.

"I'm Bradley Watson X4 Jones. You were calling me. What can I do for you?"

"But I'm Bradley Jones."

"Exactly, so am I."

"Where are you?"

"Where are you do you mean?"

"Sure."

"Right here of course."

"Where is that?"

"Take a look."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on man!"

Suddenly feeling disoriented again, like a fever derived somewhere between dream and awake, Bradley slowly came to. Starting at his fingers his fingertips, he could feel the blades of grass between them, he could smell the fresh air, and the warm, breeze-blown movement of fresh loosely fitted clothing. In disbelief Bradley opened his eyes. How could he though? They had already been open, Moments ago, he was staring into the salted blackness of space, with his eyes open. Impossible for his eyes to open from open he thought, but here he was, opening them as if from a lengthy sleep. His eyes even had to adjust to the light of the sea-side scape he now found himself.

Brad sat up to a familiar gentleman standing at his feet. A well-dressed and slightly older version himself, leaned over slightly offered to help Brad to his feet, did so, and was gone. In a state of quickly almost imperceptibly fading disbelief, Bradley began to recognize his surroundings, while the disbelief faded it shouted one last protest, "you've never been here!"

"But of course I have, Bradley thought as he looked around, these are the campus grounds of the lab," He thought to himself, "That's the Pacific ocean, and that's the building I work in," he thought as he turned and faced it.

But to the bradley still floating in space he had never been here before. At least not in any way he would have ever considered real. Bradley Watson X4 Jones, was a ship engineer for a ship that was set on course for the Alpha Century Star System 36 years before he was even born. The Pacific Ocean was a distant memory not only to the inhabitants of the enormous GMC Galactic, but to the few million people that remained on earth. The manicured lawn on which this Bradley now found himself, was a fundamental impossibility to the Bradley set adrift. He knew of such lush green, and seas and skies of blue only in pictures, and video archives. But this Bradley's protests could no longer be heard. The earth-bound Bradley had shaken his dream world only to realize that he must have fallen asleep on his lunch break. "Huh, I must have dozed off there. Hm, wow, I really conked out there," Looking around to where he had been lying down, he leaned down, and picked up his glasses, gathered the papers and plastic from his sandwich, crumpled them, threw them in a nearby trash barrel, brushed himself off, and made his way back toward the main building.

This Bradley was back at work, one of thousands government sponsored scientists putting together hypothetical solutions to cataclysmic earth events. But today Bradley was distracted. He had been up late nights for several weeks with his colleague, and occasional lover Samantha, crunching numbers for increasing the changes of survival in the event of an asteroid, or comet collision to earth. They weren't good, but Brad's job at this point was just to find out the annihilation threshold. How large and how fast would an object have to be to eliminate all possibilities for any chance of human survival or recovery. Once this job was done the Lab would then move on to determine how many known objects in our solar system would fit that description, and the probabilities and timelines of possible events.

This was all highly top secret work. Stories of such events had only been the work of fiction, and occasional hypotheticals of educational television programming. For the general population of the planet to know just how much the US government was spending on such data gathering, would likely cause a counter productive panic. The truth was, that something was going to happen, and soon, life-time soon for some, and work needed to begin, and as soon as possible.

Dr. Bradley Jones wasn't losing focus due to the pending threat. The hypothetical threat had been a part of his career since he received his masters back in 03, and it was around his doctorate in 06 that the term hypothetical was dropped. Bradley's lack of focus had set in after lunch. There were nagging thoughts in his mind, that he couldn't place. He kept finding himself drifting. Did he leave something outside? His wallet maybe? "No." He checked his pockets.

It was dusk now, and the thought of soon losing all daylight gave Dr Jones that last little shove he needed throw on his sport coat, and give the grounds where he had eaten his lunch another look.

As he made his way down the steps toward the grounds, he noticed a large metallic white shape where he had been earlier. A double take revieled that he was staring at something very familiar, yet very out of place. He moved closer until he was standing over a young man shouting from behind the glass of a large space suit. "Help! Bradley Watson X4 Jones, help! Brad, help me!" the man cried, "I'm stuck here! It looks like I'm going to be hear a while. I'm getting cold, very cold! It's going to shut me down!"

Dr Jones leaned in closely to see if he could find some sort of latch or, device to help the young man, when it suddenly became very familiar again. He was staring at himself, and was himself somehow, He could see himself looking out of the mask while he was staring into it. "I think the suit is going to suspend you until you're found Bradley, You'll be fine Bradley, calm down. They'll find you. Someone will find you!"

He was again looking into black infinite space for one final moment before the final smooth chill gripped him into a eye closing peace.

"Doctor Jones?" a voice called from behind him. "Are you okay?"

Dr. Jones got to his feet, and turned, to see Brian Katz, one of his colleagues standing under one of the lamp posts lining the walk way back to the building, "I'm fine, is there a problem?"

"No, Samantha was about to order Chinese for the 'night-shift' since we have another one of those nights ahead of us. She wanted me to find you and ask what you wanted. Do you want anything?"

"I'll have a number 4 again. Thanks Brian, you can call it in, and I'll run down, and pick it up."