The real, secret ruler of this world is The Mimic, a spirit who can copy a human body and impersonate him flawlessly.

What, did you think mere human leaders could be so rotten?

Still, there are refuges; I live in a hippie county on the Redwood Coast, in a house of cats and babies. It's a place even the Mimic's ignored as unimportant so far. We're raising kids to keep their eyes open and not go along with the evil out there.

All the other adults are out one day, when suddenly I feel an overwhelming urge to mistreat the cats! I kick one.

Fight the urge, but it comes again, stronger... and... EXTERNAL. A demon's riding me!

It jerks me across the room like a puppet, to kick at a baby. Can only hope it's not seriously hurt; though I don't think that's the demon's purpose. Seems to be waiting for the others to come home, to frame me perhaps as a child-abuser. Or just crazy.

I fight the compulsion, but the best I can manage is paralysis--I keep from hurting the kids, but I'm unable to care for them either.

For half an hour I stand like a twitching statue among hungry, scared, crying babies...

At last the demon gives up and leaves.

My housemate Leona comes home. I warn her "We've been discovered at last. We're in danger here." She completely ignores this, doesn't want to hear it.

Leona says "Follow me! We have to go to a meeting over the ridge."

Huh? "Just leave the kids?" Makes no sense.

"It's necessary."

Necessary? That isn't how Leona talks.

I follow her, but as we slog up through the woods, "Leona" keeps talking strangely. I slowly start to wonder if she could be the Mimic itself, here to decoy me away from the kids.

I chatter 'innocently' back to pseudo-Leona, saying "I can tell intuitively if a person's fake or real, those monsters can't fool me!" The bigger an idiot the Mimic thinks I am, the better. Clearly it's war now. No refuge left.

I collect what powers I have, and with a wrenching leap, fly back across the meadows to the house.

Behind me, Leona dissolves to glass, to air. The Mimic itself! The real Leona must have been lured off too.

Back in the house, the kids are still alive, though alone. But I hear a crackling in the basement. Go under the stairs and peer through the door down....

Smoke and red light. Caught them early--they're just setting the fires to burn our house. It's the Mimic all right, in Leona-form again, with two servants, spirits of fire with no form at all.

They flame at me. I run downstairs in fury, blasting them with my rage. They re-form and come back. I sweep the room with wind and snuff the fires. They relight them. I smother them. Our souls wrestle like angry bears. I'm barely holding my own--harassing them is all I can do.

Monty, my apprentice, calls from the basement door "Can I help?"

"Keep out!" I yell. "It's the Mimic!"

But he keeps insisting. He's a kid with one power, and one only--the power of ice. I don't think that'll mix well with all this fire and wind, but he's a stubborn kid, and finally I have to let him risk it. I'm not making any progress on my own.

Monty blows on the fire-spirits, and to my surprise, they slow a bit, shrink and thicken to bell-shaped things like Saint Elmo's fire. Even the Mimic itself slows a bit.

But it too has disciples. The Voice of Truth starts whispering in my ear "This isn't working. This is useless. You can't win." And since it's the Voice of Truth, I have to agree. Still, I can't think of anything else to do, so I keep fighting--putting out fires, knocking the spirits around.

"The Mimic rules the world. You can't defeat it." True, true. But I keep delaying our inevitable defeat. So does Monty. And it works--the monsters chill into floating hats of slow fire, with sullen eyes. But sleepy. Sleepy and slow.

And still the Voice of Truth says "You can't live with them always ready to explode into fire." No. But it's a lot better than having them burn down the house and rule the world!

"They're invulnerable. You can never kill them." Okay, they're still invulnerable. But at least, for the first time, they're STILL.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• The Mimic: the temptation to conform to the idiocy around you. Oops, I just assumed you're surrounded by idiots. You might be lucky. You might not live in Reagan Land. I grew up there and learned to keep my mouth shut, even when that's a bad idea. A struggle to speak up.
• The demons: my own conformity and anger, but also the hawks and clearcutters and politicians and takeover capitalists who aren't satisfied any more with burning half the world--no, they have to burn it all, all, all.
  
  Time Bandits: parents about to stupidly blow up their own home.

• Monty: the boy starring in the Monty Python film Time Bandits. He time-travels with six dwarves, defeats the devil himself, and returns home having grown up a lot. But his parents haven't; he tries to protect them but they ignore his warning, touch a burning chunk of evil, burn down their home, and die. The dream echoes this, as we try to protect our kids and home against fire-spirits.
• The Voice of Truth: I'm sure you've run into this one in yourself some time. If not, try TV. Those ads, telling you all you lack, all you're not...
• Slowing what can't be stopped: my dream's borrowing a mathematical concept, the asymptotic approach. When a point or line steadily approaches another, slowing but never quite reaching it, it's said to be asymptotic. Real-world examples: the speed of light, zero degrees Kelvin, and a perfect vacuum. All are unreachable, yet you can get as near as you want--if you work at it.
• Hat shaped-spirits: more math! Their shape is a bell curve--massive in the statistical middle, but with wide fringes of rare outliers. Law, mass production and Eternal Truths all target the bulge. What if you're a native of the fringe?
• The dream proposes a defense against toxic... memes? Abuse memories, paranoid thoughts, addictions to rage or obsessive love, majority "truths" that aren't true for you, or just plain propaganda... fighting them just feeds them. But disciplined refusal to indulge them, rigorous neglect, starves them--like atoms grown quiet near absolute zero!

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