Not-Suits: Don’t F w/ dem

Jan. 25, 2008
Black Rockalypse

We learned something new at the meeting last night.

A crew has been experimenting with the properties of the Not-Suits we’ve got here under the Not-Dome now. I might tell more about how and why we got those, just as soon as we decide it’s been long enough to tell.

Anyway, someone found a new litter of feral kittens in one of the abandoned trailers on the Ranch, and the Not-Suits egghead science-nerd committee have been doing field tests and experiments with the kitties, since there are no other live animals anywhere save our own personal pets, egg-laying chickens, and my compost worms.

One member of the crew — I won’t say whom, because they’re still devastated, on a charming level, so I’ll respect their privacy — tried on the Not-Suit and walked it outside the Not-Dome’s perimeter to the Black Rock hyperworld. Unbeknownst, of course, to the now-dwindling military presence and still-strong gathering of curious onlookers camped at the shorelines.

(Catchup for the new reader: Nobody could see the crewmember because the Not-Suits allow their users to cross in between our boi-oi-oing protective border and the hyperworld, where we still don’t know what’s going on. At all. That’s why nobody else has volunteered to leave. Because when you volunteer to leave, you never ever get to come back. We don’t know if the whole planet is as-was before we were transported out to the Black Rock Desert under this Not-Dome, or if it’s all gone to shit in a way we’ve all only actively fantasized about since high school.)

It’s hard to get into the specifics of the kitty story without feeling like I’m giving future serial killers a chubby. Let’s just say that 1) this one kitten the Not-Suit-wearer was carrying kinda got dead and charred to blackness the minute it passed through the Not-Dome. And 2) the kitten who walked behind the Not-Suit wearer out beyond the border actually passed through it without a hitch … proving our already-proved theory that animals can traverse the border unharmed.

Then the Not-Suit wearer, out in the hyperworld and not even thinking, picked up the kitty and ZAP! Charred blackness.

Traumatized and weeping, the crewmember quickly retreated to the holding cell and disrobed. More kittens who were allowed to run around at the border WITHOUT anyone in a Not-Suit touching them came back into the Not-Dome without trouble. (A couple ran off into the hyperworld, where they will freeze to death if nobody camping around the Black Rock picks them up soon. Hint.)

cat-haters make your own jokes

And rocks and sticks and bottles and cans carried by the Not-Suit-wearer cross between worlds unharmed as well. Which we already knew, and everyone’s probably guessed, as it’s been quite apparent since the day we got our shipment of supplies and those people lost their lives … that anyone wearing a Not-Suit can drive a vehicle between worlds.

Question: Why can animals and inanimate objects cross the barrier, but humans can’t? Something about self-awareness, maybe? … Is it interlinked with the fact that the vehicle depends on the driver, not weight or speed or might or weaponry? Is the Not-Suit a science-defying, interdimensional version of a backstage pass?

So the crew was explaining all this at the meeting and wondering aloud about the properties of the Not-Dome. I raised my hand and stood up and said that maybe the Not-Dome was somehow made of … death. Or the next life, or whatever you want to call it. That on the outside, from where the Blackhawk goons and Not-Dome supporters sit, they see nothing, where in fact there’s all of us and a bunch of stuff. Like ghosts. And if you turn the Not-Dome inside out — if you put death into where life is — then it’s like a black hole for what Chinese people and hippies call “chi.”

The Not-Suit literally sucks the life force out of whatever living thing touches it. Like when two magnets are stuck together and you pull them apart and flip one over and all of a sudden they can’t stand each other. Except the opposite, to where death can slide by death and life by life, but when you turn death inside out … then … uh … you know. Right? … Maybe? …

And there was a protracted awkward silence, and the Not-Suits crew onstage kind of looked at each other like “yeeeeah, she’s been eating paint chips again.” So then I shut my trap, but the meeting came to a finish quite soon after that.

I am buzzkill; hear me blather.

I might be right-brain-retarded, to the point where I walk around with my head tilted to one side from the emptiness in the lefty science half of my head. And I may not be calling things by the specific names the Not-Suits crew know how to use … but I don’t think I’m wrong, necessarily.

Do you?