Dreamweb

   As something that prowls the night, the empty streets between living alleyways, it is a great offense that the new city’s chemical lights are having a detrimental effect on the psyche of the general public. In the past, when the streetlights came on, the people would be consoled—if falsely—by the cheerful white and yellow streetlights provided them to prolong their daylight hours and keep my kind at bay. As evinced by the romantic art of the last several hundred years, suggested by many paintings and holograms metaphorically depicting lonely lampposts as islands in a sea of darkness, the sun-mimicking glow of gas, electricity, or even sulfur—cheap and vile as it might be—has been as steadfast in your culture as a sign of urban hope. Whether it be a solitary cone of light cast upon the snowy sidewalk or a a string of streetlights reflecting from a windshield, they have always possessed a warm glow that confounded night vision and provided pooled safe havens from night hunters.

    The ‘increase’ of attacks so loudly trumpeted by the text in this very newsfilter is nothing more than a removal of the natural urban barriers to ghast predation.

    With the introduction of this new ‘un-fueled’ system of lighting—which even the least educated know for a misdirection, Senator Kleary—the city streets are now bathed in an eye-soothing wash of reds and blues. Is it any wonder that such a fundamental change in the city’s infrastructure might have unforeseen repercussions? Who would have thought that a color change might send the city into a spiral of terror?

    Terror, as you well know, taints the meat of creatures who experience it, which is one of my primary concerns. Additionally, fear both keeps humans inside and, paradoxically, allows my kind more opportunities for a meal from those who do decide to brave the cool, dark streets.

    Since time and population controls - like the controversial Lista-Parvani ‘Thirdborn’ Act - have regulated human birthrates, the ghast population has increased and decreased in lockstep with their chosen prey. The humans, though wary, carried with them into urban centers an acceptable-loss threshold, as unfeeling as it sounds. I fear that with the city’s color-change decision, the threshold has been breached and my kind face a world where our survival is not only seen as at the expense of others, but as unnatural and detrimental.

    I argue for a return to the equally-expensive and less third-planet exploitative streetlight colors of last year. As further evidence to the duplicity and corruption of your human leaders, the budget numbers do not even show a dip in infrastructure spending as we were assured there would be by cool-light proponents.

    My kind’s society depends on hovering at a certain ratio to human. Yours and my goals for ghast population control align in that neither of us wish the population to increase, but the removal of the precaution of electric light has caused a baby boom among my community, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the urbanization of the the old United States and the second Great War when the ghast population was able to increase their former rural ratio and experience a cultural Renaissance. Our culture is about to, once more, go through the bloody growing pains once experience by our previous generations. The effects of this, with our increase in numbers, may spill into the human herds and reinforce prejudices and fears regarding what is normally a positive, symbiotic parallel civilization.
   
    To those listening, I exhort you to write your congresspersons in a rational manner to explain the need for yellow light on the streets at night. The humans more likely to survive their walks home at night will thank you, as will this particular ghast and his growing family.