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Godspeed, Star-Chaser: Awakening of the Calling-Star.

A boy apart. Funny. He never would have believed, before this final profound moment of understanding, that it would all culminate in a literal, physical manifestation of the mental projection he’d constructed of himself way back, as a child.

He would certainly live up to it, now: A boy in several parts. Billions. Trillions. The proximity klaxons attested to this revelation as they screamed in protest of the ship’s current heading. “Proximity Alert: Gravity well detected within critical ranges of current course heading. Collision imminent. Manual coordinate override required. Threat-level: Urgent.”

Privacy

“If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

I heard someone say this on the news in support of new remote body scanners being developed for use by police in New York.

Basically, it is infrared scanning technology being used currently at airports and the like to be a “virtual pat-down” to find items hidden on the body like weapons or drugs. Law enforcement is currently funding development of scanners much smaller and more discrete than the frontdoor-sized full body scanners at airports, something that can be used to scan pedestrians in cities without their knowledge.

This in itself isn’t the most appalling violation of privacy I’ve ever heard of before, but when coupled with society’s recent trend toward the abolition of small “insignificant” privacies such as cellphone wire-taps, the obscenely “thorough” pat-downs at airports, or even simply the ubiquitous seeming intrusion of advertising into our homes through facebook, television, or text messaging, it starts to become somewhat of an urgent matter to draw the line somewhere.

Somewhere citizens must take a look down the road and see where it takes us. This road only becomes more and more treacherous as we proceed. As these infractions by law enforcement become more and more commonplace we tend to lose sight of what we had originally considered would be “too much”.

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” This is not the answer. Whether or not “Good People” have nothing to worry about is not in question here. I ask that we think about this conceptually. If we consider any breech of privacy to be an infraction the question arises, “When is enough enough?”

Americans, as a pillar of their culture, have a ‘reasonable’ right to privacy, and as a DEMOCRACY, WE have the right to decide how to define the word ‘reasonable’ in this context. Not law enforcement.

Privacy is not only a right to Americans. It is a basic human necessity, as are shelter, and emotional stimulation. It is as important to our existence as Americans as is Security.

In response to the statement, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” I say, “To sacrifice any amount of privacy for this sake of security is to sacrifice our humanity for the sake of Judicial and Executive efficiency.”

Installment 4: The Silent Observer

The dried fish Ebb had saved for lunch would be anything but satisfying. As uncooked meals tend to do, it would simply fill the void in Samuel’s stomach, providing little in the way of mental sustenance. Only solid, steady, maintained meditation would make itself available this day. It would have to suffice.

Installment 3: The Kinetic Equilibrium

Channeling, no denying, was certainly a miracle, but, Ebb knew, not even a miracle could heal all wounds. Certain wounds, the ones that cut beyond just the flesh, the ones that, at surface level, crust and scab-over and eventually flake away leaving a deceptively smooth covering of healthy tissue, yet below the sore festers and runs, spreading fever and infection throughout the body, the ones that have ached and throbbed for so impossibly long that life before, life with this familiar pain, seems just forgotten and unknowable, the wounds that slowly, imperceptibly have begun to define existence, the wounds that have become you, from these wounds not even the Current can offer relief.

Installment 2: The Current

Mutually understood, that blindfolded face was a persistent horror plaguing Samuel, the gray, cracked skin, the glistening sores boring into the gaunt cheeks, the black, gelatinous streaks of congealing blood slowly, but continuously leaking out from beneath the tattered, blood-crusted blindfold like an ancient river-bed cutting through a desert. Fever raged in that hot, shrieking voice, a lunatic’s unintelligible mutterings followed by a brief moment of silent understanding. Then, the awful laughter, that grotesque, living-corpse of a face would erupt into sickening, wheezing, hacking laughter, each hack ejecting tiny flecks of stinking, bloody mucus dribbling off the stubbly chin.

Installment 1: The World shall not wait for those who hesitate.

“The World shall not wait for those who hesitate. Goodbye, my friend.”

White light burst through the flap of their make-shift tent like a frantic crowd escaping a burning building. Even the momentary exposure to this unforgiving light was enough to send streaks of searing pain down his optic nerves, deep into his brain. His eyeballs recoiled in submission. His brow furrowed tightly. He threw his arms up in a familiar X-shape, face burried deeply in the pits of his elbows.

“Man, if you don’t get up NOW I am leaving you behind.”

Are you Sarah Conner?