Sick

Perhaps it's because I have a cold, but my sleep has been unsatisfying lately. I wake up a lot and have unpleasant dreams.


The problem with the dreams your brain casts while ill is that you get that frustrating combination of severe weirdness and fever-induced obsessive compulsion. Last night I was in the world of System Shock II, and Shodan was lecturing me on how I needed to use the bag of tools I'd just found to kill a certain monster. When the monster appeared I had to stab him in the neck five or six times with a specific screwdriver to properly kill him. But when push came to shove, I couldn't remember if she'd said five or six or fifty or sixty, so to be on the safe side I had to stab him sixty times.


Actually sixty-six, since one should always allow a ten percent margin for error.


He stayed obligingly still while being punctured, and for some reason didn't bleed, so it was more of an annoying chore than a gore-fest. A small, sane part of my mind kept whispering, "This is stupid. Just shoot him with the fusion canon already", but by that time I was in the mid-forties, stab-wise, and it seemed easier to just stay the course.