momebie

[Source.]

I've started working on re-writing the WWII AU so that it's real. No one tell Em, I don't want her to get her hopes up.

. . .

With all of the national delegates convening in one place to discuss the growing alien crisis, the district had anticipated some sort of terrorist attack. Attempts had been made to create safe lighting zones with gas lamps erected in the streets. They were meant to help people get out of the city more safely in case of a technological attack. They made the men uneasy. The men were used to diffused electric and halogen glows that set a person's features in stone, not the mercurial shadow play that cast a person's demons across their skin as the light flickered with the fuel.

Heeden stepped out the front door of the hotel like she was leaving a bar and tilted her hat back, giving the signal to the boys hiding in the dark room across the street. With any luck it would be at least fifteen minutes before someone discovered the dead men upstairs. She lit a cigarette and pushed off the porch, expecting to see her men armed and in the alley in less than five.

Behind her, a familiar voice shot out of the shadows. "Still inflicting your bad habits on young men, I see," Aed said.

"If you're here to save them, you're too late," she sad.

"I don't suppose it matters whether you're talking about my superiors or the lost boys you've collected over the last year."

"No boy was ever more lost than you. Did the army ever give you a working compass?"

"My compass works fine," he said. "But it's hard to read, when access to a True North has been obscured."

"Fuck with the planet, it fucks back." She could see the glint of the guns across from her, waiting for her order. She took three quick sips of the cigarette, giving a signal with the burning tip to hold on. She stood stone still as his boots slapped across the concrete behind her.

"Did you bring him?" Aed whispered into her ear and wrapped his fingers around her hip. "Did we come all this way just so he could save you from me again? Does he know that this time you really need it?"

TITLE: Still, Life After
AUTHOR: momebie
RATING: PG
WORD COUNT: 691
FEEDBACK: On || FEEDBACK TYPE: Tactful
WARNING: Character injury.
SUMMARY: Aed doesn't depend on others and he doesn't know why they depend on him.
PROMPTS: "write a still-life"
A/N: This was really hard to pull out once I settled on the scenario, which is unusual for me. I don't know if that works for or against it. Also, in case Snow In Florida is confusing: it's the future! Weather patterns be damned!

( Every time two men stand toe-to-toe there should be seconds at their sides. Rajin has brought one. From fifty paces their long black coats appear to hang on them like Spanish moss clinging heavy to dead trees. Aed has tried his damnedest to come alone. )

Original fiction.
1033 words.


Caleb's cup was empty again. He stood up on loose legs and swayed in front of his cot, looking around for the bottle of vodka. It was a small room that he and Rajin shared on the compound. Clean and bare with hardwood floors and white walls that reflected the light from their battery powered lanterns. Rajin was hunched over the small table between the beds, clutching the bottle close to him. It was almost empty. Caleb fell back onto his cot and kicked his legs out. "The first," he said softly, just to feel his lips move.

"What?" Rajin looked up at him, his eyelids and mouth both drooping. Some people looked interesting when they were drinking, Caleb thought. Rajin looked like a sleeping basset hound.

Caleb cleared his throat. "I said, the first messages we sent into space were so clumsy. It's a wonder they granted us audience with the counsel at all."

In Caleb's life before, when he was working to build robotic ambassadors to send to the newly found life in space, the main problem had been automated reasoning. The problem with automated reasoning was that they could never figure out how to make machines think in ways that were 100% predictable.

In Caleb's life now, the main problem was with human reasoning, because humans did tend to think in ways that were 100% predictable.

Rajin said, "oh right, Beethoven."

With machines there was always a theorem that couldn't be proven. There was always an algorithm that needed to be looked at again. Caleb really missed working with machines. "Not just, but yeah, Beethoven. How arrogant was that? Like our infantile attempts at what we call music could possibly mean anything to another form of life."

"Who's to say they wouldn't?" Rajin cocked his head. "If you were going to receive a transmission from another form of life, having no previous knowledge of that life's existence, what would you want?"

"What do you mean?"

"All I'm saying is," Rajin paused to tip the bottle back and lick at the final drops of alcohol as they trickled down the neck. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "There was nothing that was going to make sense, so we might as well have sent the music. It's important to us, anyway."

Caleb had spent a solid month and a half going over the primitive recursive functions used in the Alien Speech Mode Shift program before he found the cause of the redundant cycle. Now he was lucky if he got a radio that worked for an hour. It was funny the way things worked out. Funny. It was the word she had used. It's what his commander had said when Caleb joined the rebelling ranks. Yeah. Fucking hilarious.

"What good is it showing them the most important parts of us first? It's rash, leaving our hands in the open like that." And immature, which was one of the first words the robotic ambassador had brought back with it. In Caleb's former life, if a machine couldn't perform a task 100% of the time, then it really wasn't any more useful than a person. If that was the most damning statement you could apply to a machine, how did it reflect the worth of humans?

"Do you not consider that to be one of our most defining characteristics?"

"Should have just stayed out of the whole mess." Caleb could feel his eyelids getting heavy. He was thirsty. He swallowed and it stung.

"Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda." Rajin stood up and kicked his chair toward the wall. "Do you want any water? We've got early reveille, and you're an absolute bitch when you're hung over."

To Caleb, algorithms were beautiful because you could break them down into their components and each piece meant something, even when it was divorced from the whole. People were something else entirely, and even after six months on the compound it was still hard for him to share space with another person without resenting them. He'd lucked out with Rajin, who was actually quite intelligent, despite looking like he'd been born and raised in the state pen.

When Caleb broke Rajin down into parts he still made sense. As a military defect. As a college drop out. As a person who valued freedom of thought. As being slightly gullible enough to believe in a cause. Every part of Rajin carried the beauty of sense. This confused Caleb, who had always seen all people, even himself, as inferior to the possibility of pure automated reasoning.

"You're looking at me funny again," Rajin said.

Caleb shook his head and looked down at his feet. "Yeah, water please." He held his glass out for Rajin to collect and take away. Alone now, he let himself fall sideways. He curled up on top of the rough blanket that was draped over his bed.

He hated thinking of himself as lost and misunderstood. It was a phase he didn't go through in his teens because he'd been too busy with work, and it would be ridiculous for him to pick up the habit now when there was still so much work to do. But the truth was, Caleb was going to fail his mission. Even though Rajin was intelligent and thoughtful, there was no way Caleb could make him understand about the machines. Not short of figuring out how to implant his knowledge right into Rajin's brain anyway. This, as far as Caleb knew, was a technology that was still in the testing stages and didn’t always go well. He needed to, though, if either of them were going to make it to the end of the war alive. There was something he was still missing.

Caleb believed that human thought was predictable 100% of the time. You just had to know which parts of the algorithm were present. If he could break Rajin into components, maybe he could break down the others too. Maybe then his world view would make sense again. Maybe then he could figure out what he was missing in the machines and make that right as well. Maybe. Sometimes it was just funny how things turned out.


This entry was written for Topic 13: Inside Baseball at therealljidol. All comments and questions are welcome.

Original fiction.
~750 words.

“I should be dead,” Heeden said. To living people death was often no more than a theory. Everyone around them could die, but as long as they were alive there was still hope. They might still have some quality the others had lacked. They might be able to survive forever. Knowing that she had died and could probably die again made Heeden feel vulnerable and small. It was not a feeling she had time for. She focused on the rage instead. She focused on the fire that had once burned inside of her.

With her fingertip, she traced the scar that ran across the side of her neck. The knife blade had been cold against her skin. On that night the whole world had been cold. She remembered her murderer’s face, the sarcastic little smile and the way the alley shadows had darkened his eyes. When he told her he was going to kill her, his breath had come out in puffs of vapor that danced around his chin and then floated away. Her soul should have followed.

Would you rather be dead?

That was going to take some getting used to, the way the words just cut across her thoughts. “I don’t know.”

Before her death, Heeden hadn’t known about the experiments the government had been running on captured alien consciousnesses. She wished she had. It would have added so much fuel for her little rebel cause. That’s what Aed had always called it. Her little rebel cause. As if the people didn’t stand a chance against the military. The fucker. She was going to kill him.

But for now she needed to figure out how to work with the alien consciousness they’d planted inside her. From what she could tell she was the only human to survive the transplant with her mind intact. Of course, the bodies they’d been working with had generally been longer dead than hers. Perhaps it was just that her soul had still been in the area, had been called back when it sensed life. Two weeks ago she hadn’t believed in souls.

“And what about you?” All she knew about it was that it was called Bravd and that it had been a prisoner on its home planet. That was before they’d shipped it all the way out here in case the humans became a problem. Why dirty the hands of innocents when you could take advantage of those that had already taken advantage of others? Life was the same everywhere. It was knowledge that disappointed Heeden. “I got my life back, but trapped in here with me you’ve just gone from one prison to another. You’ve gotten the raw end of the deal.”

At least here I am afforded some sense of freedom. It is your freedom, but it is freedom nonetheless. I will not be contained in blackness for long stretches of time.

“Maybe,” she said. “We don’t know what happens to you when I die. Again.”

I will simply have to learn to manipulate your limbs.

“That’s probably not a bad idea anyway. Two in a fight is better than one, even if they are sharing the weapon. We’ll work on it.” And then, lightly, as if she’d just thought of it she asked, “How did you keep from going insane?”

I did not. I lost track of everything while I was in the prison. My time there was an uphill battle.

“What did you do? To get you landed there, I mean.”

Does it matter?

“Not really.” She shook her head out of habit. She was going to have to learn to communicate with it more subtly if she was going to use it to her advantage. “How do I keep from going insane? No offense, but I’m still not quite comfortable with the extra conscience. I’ve made it this far without a cricket on my shoulder.”

Maybe insanity is the only option.

That wasn’t good enough. “They need me. All of me.”

Everyone has someone who needs them. But you have to allow yourself to break if you are ever to be strong enough to do what they need you to do. If you do not, you will stay brittle. In your current state you are of use to no one.

She sighed. “An interlude then.”

An interlude.

“Lord, give me strength.” They were empty words. Another habit she’d picked up from the people around her. She never expected an answer. Not knowing this, Bravd gave her one anyway.

Only you can do that, little one.


This entry was written for Topic 6: Not of Your World at therealljidol. For those with no context, it's part of a larger work I often call the Big Damn Existential Scifi Novel. All comments are welcome.