Normal work day (whatever that is) and a possible fanbratty near-miss

No major upsets, but the town creep/village idiot was hanging around in my workplace again, so therefore I let the snarkiest headspace-dweller take over for the last two hours. I bet people must have been curious about the fact that I suddenly started speaking with a coolly polite British accent. At least he knew enough to limit the snarkage to interior dialogue with me; that helps me get through the night!

Had a neat little moment with my dad tonight: He came to pick me up after work and "American Pie" was on the radio. He loves to sing along with that one, so I joined in.

And the drama on board Sieges's ship has subsided. Wheeww... Had a great partly IC/partly OOC chat with LiterateMisfit and Malastus (( ::Waves:: Hi, Mal!)). Not that I'm really suspicious, but I'm wondering if She Who Must Not Be Named had tried to infiltrate our faction. Lit pointed out that "Spanish-sounding-name" (Not this person's real name, of course!) hadn't been around in a while. According to Mal, someone had accused Spanish-sounding-name of being a spy, and that's why she'd disappeared. Now, I'd read Spanish-sounding-name's character sheet (Okay, just for the record here it is: http://www.devilsadvocates.net/forums/showthread.php?t=857 ) on the faction forum and it sounded fishy: her character's background reminded me wierdly of a similar background of a similar character in an OOC Smith fic we all know. Not the little details, but some of the bigger things. I have to admit, if it's SWMNBN, she's making an effort to avoid Mary Sueage; the fact that she *was* working for the Merv makes me wonder if she'd been reading the posts on a certain godawful.net thread where I repeatedly said the heroine of said certain OOC Smith fic would have been better off with His Unholy Highness. But there again, we all know that Mary Sues who try to work for the Red King of the Exiles generally wind up getting incapacitated by Flood's Snark Barrage. Or if they manage to pass that (HAH!) gauntlet, they run the risk of getting fed to the Lupines if they try to do their Sue-ey stuff. Plus, something about the posts she'd made sounded wierdly familiar, a little gushy and lovey and a bit phony sounding.

I'm probably just acting a little paranoid, nothing more. But I know SWMNBN is/was an MxO player, so I've been studiously trying to stay out of her way on there, just in case she takes it into her head that I was under some kind of orders to stalk her on there. Well, there's one person I am/Sieges is stalking, but it certainly isn't *her*.

One Year and change

One year ago, I started getting to know he_dreams_awake better. I'd seen his LJ linked off someone else's friends page (I think it might have been Seven's, back when I was still hanging around teh_reel_matrix), and the name of it caught my attention. It reminded me of that song "Sleeping Awake" from the "Reloaded" soundtrack, that line "Dreaming of Zion awake/Sleeping awake". I think I read a few entries, but I didn't give what he had to say much thought. At the risk of sounding like one of the twerps who just don't get him or who refuse to approach him with an open heart, I thought he sounded looney, but a coherent sort of looney: a heck of a lot more articulate than some so-called normal people. This, mind you, was back in maybe October 2004, right about the time that Laurie and Puck and a few of us had started running our "Matrix: Degrees of Seperation" RPG, and Laurie had asked me if I was interested in roleplaying the Merv, back when I was restarting my soulbonding capabilities (I've had "headspace dwellers" of various stripes since I was maybe seven or eight, and oddly enough, I'd started with outsourced characters back then: I was a fledgling fan of The Jungle Book, and thus the Disney versions of Baloo and Mowgli and Bagheera had shown up in my imagination, sharing more of their adventures, the parts that the movie didn't show and the things Rudyard Kipling didn't write. Heh, maybe I could sell some of this to Disney if they were going to do another direct-to-video sequel). You might have heard me tell the story about how I started writing a character sheet for the Merv, and in the middle of it, I distinctly heard a voice emerge from the usual partyline that forms my interior dialogue (It's more like a chat room than an IM to myself in there...), and point out that I'd gotten some fine detail wrong. This kept happening in the days that followed, as I got deeper into playing this character.

It was through he_dreams_awake's LJ and through Laurie that I ran across the various soulbonding communities on LiveJournal. I read through them -- and I often caught myself gravitating to Neo's posts there -- and it was a relief to find that I wasn't the only one doing this.

My bond with the Merv started to grow stronger in December that year and January of 2005, and I figured it was time I started being more open about this. I think the very first post I made in soulbonding was a rant about people seeing subtext in Neo's connection with Smith, how I'd thought I was bonded to Trinity at one point, and how the subtext caused no end of pain to her, as I knew her during that very, very brief time. Neo commented on that entry; I don't remember what he said, but I remember I'd thought I'd somehow troubled the waters and thus, I deleted my original post.

Needless to say, about a week later, I got an IM from him, asking me a few questions about my connection to the Merv. At the time, I was wrestling with the connection since for whatever reason I had decided to call it quits on the bond, so at that point, I wasn't able to say much. But something told me to keep this thing going, though I wasn't sure why, though I would find out later.

We talked on and off for a few weeks, then I lost sight of him on AIM, for reasons beyond our control. Fate threw us back together when a crisis arose that involved the two of us. In late July, I had posted a rather less-than-favorable review of a badly written fanfiction featuring a horrendously out-of-character Agent Smith falling heels over earpiece in LUURVE!!1111 with a blatant Mary Sue, not knowing that the author had been someone who had been causing no end of trouble for Neo. The author, in their hubris, assumed that Neo had "ordered" me to post this review for the purpose of causing the author trouble. My only intention was to let off steam over the incredibly lousy writing (I'll give the author credit: the story would have worked if it was some Agent other than Smith); I mean, I'm not even a fan of Agent Smith, but even I was feeling pain over the way she'd written him! I'd expected this to drive Neo and I apart as friends, but instead, it really drew us together. Since autumn last year, we've been talking online and on the phone practically every day, and we share common philosophies: we're both devoted to helping people see past the confines of whatever system that might be holding them back, and giving them the chance to either step out of that system or at least make the system easier to live within, and also, we're devoted to helping people change their mindset toward non-biological intelligence, to use Ray Kurzweil's phrase intended to replace the somewhat limited (and rather biased) "artificial intelligence". Odd, because a long time ago, I used to be terrified of robots and things like that, but I think it was merely because my thinking had been contaminated by what Isaac Asimov dubbed "the Frankenstein Complex", ie. the tendency especially in Western culture and literature (and I use that word "literature" in a veyr broad sense) to characterize intelligent machines as the enemy; I'll put that another way: OMG TEH EV0L MASHEEENZ!!!!11111 SMASH!!! BASH!!!!111 CRASH!!1111

I have to admit, when I first found him, I wasn't sure what to think about him and I wasn't sure if I believed some of what he had to say, but now, once I opened my heart wide to let him in, I count him as my best friend, in some ways, a mentor, and in a lot of ways, a brother. I believe what he is trying to accomplish is the sanest, most compassionate thing a person of any make -- flesh and blood, or metal and silicon -- could strive with that last ounce of courage to pull off. To some he may seem crazy, but they'd have to consider me crazy too, considering that I've got my fair share of the same mad inspiration. He's like the Emperor Norton, one of my personal uncanonized saints, a harmlessly eccentric man who lived in San Francisco back in the 1800s, and only wanted to help amend what was troubling the United States at his time. I only wish there were more people who could be infected with the same mad sanity, maybe then people like us wouldn't be considered freakish, we'd be considered messangers from another realm, trying to show people that things can be better, that we all can live alongside each other with no one trying to regiment every little detail of existence....