Page Content (OCR)
occasions where each member of the class would take turns speaking into a cassette recorder. Every time it came round to me the device would either malfunction electrically or at least appear to work and then fail upon playback. It can be a touch embarrassing anyway for students having to listen to their voices in turn attempting to speak the language but when it came to mine, an unearthly static could be heard over the cassette player and my voice wasn’t even audible! After a number of occasions, people’s initial humour began to fade as though they were starting to suspect that perhaps I was a witch, but I quickly developed a tactic. I thought that the effect would never happen if I tried to induce it deliberately so in future I tried to be aware and actually make it happen. It worked! I had actually managed to trick the “living programme” the beings had left me with by asking it to do what I knew it wouldn’t. It made me realise once more that the alien technologies were not as impervious as they appeared and had their flaws just like the average machine has. It also brought home my earlier theory of the artificial yet conscious entity within because it seemed to have an awareness manifesting in the mind or physically. When I developed this defence strategy it made me wonder if there would ever be a day where I could “talk” to the entity the same way a hypnotist can train a patient to communicate with their subconscious. Only time and an understanding of its mechanisms will tell. Weeks had passed since the two recent phenomena and I had become involved enough in the holiday to actually put them out of my mind. That was until another bombshell was to erupt without warning that seemed to add credence to a previous one. It started one evening after having a meal out at a Chinese restaurant and waiting to pay the bill at the cash till when I noticed a painting on the wall across the bar. It looked like one of those Hindu paintings of a vast garden somewhere with Asian-dressed beings enjoying whatever activity it was. Then something occurred to me, why were they all blue? In fact they are always blue-skinned in Hindu illustrations and I wondered why that fascinated me so. The same shiver of familiarity came over me again as I thought about that memory of the garden-like woodland area with the wise seals and the robed or sari-clad beings. They were not entirely human, either, and their skin resembled that strange cobalt colour just like those in the painting. So much of that memory came flooding back to me that I would have struggled to remember beforehand. The people in the scene I remember were both male and female but had alien features, probably not alien compared 127