Phantasm 1: For the Light of the Stars (one)

She pulled herself up with a muffled groan, sitting with legs hanging over the edge of her bed while she contemplated what awaited her this day. Laura itched at the implant atop her left forearm, her fingernails tracing the respective outlines of its three dark ports as she walked across the room to a chair covered with her clothing. The chair was tucked under a wooden desk placed against the window. The rich mahogany top (itself with a terminal inside) was obscured by a mixture of writing implements and notepads. Her clothes hung off the back of the chair where she had left them last night. She grabbed the denim jeans and white blouse and dressed hurriedly. The material was cold against her flesh, sending a chill through her, but she warmed quickly.

Laura cleared her desk, leaving only a few pens and a notepad for her use. The touchscreen terminal was visible, glass frame set deep into the dark wooden bulk.

She was a poet. Laura enjoyed the experience, enjoyed expressing herself. To her the content wasn’t as important as the process. Put another way, she wrote simply because she enjoyed it. Poetry was one of the few arts that required genuine skill anymore. Creativity had disappeared over the last few centuries, replaced by the ineffective renditions of analytical programs — programs that did not know how to compose, only to reconstruct, recreate the classics and nothing original, nothing new, nothing of life. Poetry and music and anything of the like required passion, feeling, they needed emotion to really come alive. Such things could not be duplicated by computers no matter how advanced they were. A poet had to feel to write, had to be moved by a subject, and that was what attracted Laura, the written articulation and eloquence of belief, faith, and personality. She could disguise her own feelings within a poem, use them to create something beautiful and powerful. There was un derstated majesty in the creation of something, whether it be a child or a work of art. When intelligence was discovered at birth and knowledge regulated for the duration of a natural life to accommodate for such a "prescribed" intellect, expression of creativity was one of the only true joys left. And even that was slowly evaporating, dying out like so many other wonders of the past. People were becoming lazy, or maybe they were getting more complacent, which wasn’t really all that different. Laura was content to write and keep on writing. While she used her mind there was still hope, and while there was hope, there too was beauty.

Laura sat at her desk, feeling the breeze more powerfully now, and she opened the pad slowly, reaching for a pen. Her thoughts became a steady stream flowing from her imagination; she had no control except the output that emanated forth from them. She felt this way often, a tingling at the back of her mind that became words written by the hand in translation. Creativity was the language of the mind and no matter how satisfying it was to capture it, it always lost something in that translation.

She only wrote for about ten or fifteen minutes, fiddling with what she had produced. When she’d finished, she walked to the door and there she paused. A nearby flickering had caught her attention, so quick it might not have been there, but she trusted her instincts. Her gaze settled on the mirror opposite. For just a moment she thought something had moved behind her, the reflection caught in the mirror, but that was stupid.

Wasn’t it?

Laura shook her head, dismissing the thought, then she left, closing the door behind her.