2013: An Ace Odyssey

A child sat in his room, in front of his computer, at some ludicrously early hour, trying to think up something to write on matte plastic keys slightly sticky to the touch with an energy drink that had been spilled on them a month or two ago and not quite properly cleaned up. The specific time this occurred was not important. Suffice to say it was incredibly early, and the child was aware that it was incredibly early because his brain and his muscles, and indeed every sensible part of the boy's being, kept telling him that he should go to sleep. If he were pressed for a specific time the boy might have told you that it was 3am, maybe 4am. This too will suffice. The boy had not been to sleep since the previous night, so perhaps it might be better - which is to say, more accurate - to say the boy was up at a ludicrously late hour, rather than at the early hour to which we had previously alluded. His being awake that this hour was not accidental, but rather intentional: it was a solution the boy had created to solve a problem. His intent was to revert his biological clock. His mechanical one had broken and he, as a result, was having trouble waking up at the 7am that his numerous lectures and seminars required of him. Most people his age didn't have this problem, he told himself. He was wrong, he knew he was wrong, but he said it anyway because he'd made a habit of it. Telling himself that he was unique in feeling, experiencing, being or doing certain things made him feel better about himself. Presently the child found things to write. Whether or not the things he wrote had any value was for someone else to decide, by that someone an entirely different person, or simply the very same child at a point slightly, or vastly, further on in time. As he wrote he found himself glancing to his left, into a corner of his room occupied by darkness, and as he glanced he wondered to himsef why he was glancing. Was there something there? Something eldritch and terrible, something that his soul could sense but his senses were unable to comprehend? Yet he had never ascribed much value to the concept of a 'soul'. It seemed at odd with the scientific principles on which he had been raised. Perhaps there was something there that he saw subconsciously out of the corner of his eye and that dissapeared when it detected him turning to look at it. Perhaps when he turned to look at it it flitted into some other dimension, parallel yet seperate to this one, which was entirely inhabited by awful, ineffable creatures of chaos and madness. Or perhaps it simply drifted into a place in space equally out of the child's sight as the one it had occupied prior to the child's turning his head. The thought terrified him somewhat, and briefly he imagined the 'creature' - imaginery as it surely was - reading what he had written on his computer screen from over his shoulder. He began to feel real fear at this point. It raked and clawed at his gut, and he resolved to turn the lights on.