wytchcroft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wytchcroft) wrote2010-05-24 10:14 am
wytchcroft) wrote2010-05-24 10:14 am
Entry tags:
his and hers - part three
Part three:
It was something we had in common, unexpected and delightful a shared love of ancient music. All the riddles and mystic from way back when. We discovered by accident a mutual passion and that was good, we needed something else to distract us.
Gleeful as children we ransacked the library. MAGAI was helpful, finding information, context, costume. We themed our evenings - we danced and laughed and programmed the virtual environment to allow us to play in the habitat those songs provided.
Adventures, mystery, magic.
"Apt isn't it?" I heard her say. "Magic from the MAGAI."
I'd never given the system name much thought before, she was right.
It's something impressionistic, layers of cloud vapour, fleeting sensations and ghosted after-images, memories slipping through fingers, fingers dipping into water, breaking the surface tension of a summer pond, fish and insects disappearing, the picture, the tangible sense of world, of self, disappearing; a positive disintegration.
"Positive?"
"Yes, definitely." Her smile is caught by the air and whipped away like a kite, something bright and brave upon the wind.
"In the act of becoming?"
"In the act of becoming." Words exchanged like keys, like codes.
That's what we are - he thinks - code, view source, her and me - run programme - in the act of becoming.
She becomes a room, he becomes a room, the white room in the morning sunlight splatters like paint across the windows, where? a neutral place perhaps... memories coalesce, a cottage now, he's sure, familiar as an old home should be - did we come here once, lovers running, lovers on the run, the white room, the walls gleaming, a colony in distance space perhaps, or a hospital. These shifting pictures, these signals, the frequencies drift.
How many possible realities?
Pick one.
Pick random.
And become.
...............
The questioning begins again. And the man with the burning eyes, the Magistrate, the keeper of the law; he paces around the room with a restless leather slap from his long riding boots, his clothing dark and severe gives the impression that he is made of darkness, formed from shadow.
“Where is the other,” he asks, “your friend the boy?”
The boy… she closes her eyes; vividly she sees him capering along the cliff-tops, the Sea wall, the beach, she sees him waving from the deck of a boat as it eases out with the morning tide the wind singing through the rolled and empty nets, she sees the ships return in a blaze o torchlight and song, the nets full of a long days work, the food for a hungry town and the feast for an evening and the men ruffling the hair of their mascot, those same fishermen with suspicious faces gazing up at her empty eyed come the morrow and the boy has gone.
She opens her eyes.
“He drowned.”
He considers this, considers her, weighing the truth of her statement. “Yes,” he says, “so I hear, the fishermen feel you have cursed them, taken from them their good fortune, their mascot. “
“Surely you don’t countenance such superstitious nonsense?”
Oh she is quick, this one.
“It is the least of the accusations,” he counters, plucking a sealed document up from the desk.
She rubs her face, fighting back her anger and frustration – hiding her expression from him as best she can.
“Magic,” he says, “Witchcraft, the foul manipulations of the elements purely for your own malefic pleasure, yours and the rest of your,” he spits, “coven.”
“There is no coven, you know that.” Her hands are still in front of her face, but her shoulders are heaving.
“No,” he smiles, “not anymore.”
Another long shudder. The Magistrate’s eye narrow, “Don’t waste your tears on them,” he admonishes, “save them for yourself. Your recalcitrance can only result in…” the gloved fingers of his hand curl tight and hard, “a difficult atmosphere.”
But he is looking at her curiously now as she is seized with another tremor, gagging loudly as she falls to her knees with a groan and vomits black spittle onto the neat floorboards. An acrid smell and for her the sudden taste of bile, alcohol and chemicals.
“What?” The Magistrate is taken off guard.
“Sorry,” she says, sounding woozy, “home made tequila, I should never have…” she stops, shakes he head with a tiny pained movement, “no that can’t – I…”
She looks up in confusion, “I don’t understand, how can -”
The Detective rips the v-set from his head, punching the comm.-screen in front of him.
“Oh this is bad,” he says, “very bad.”
……………….
The wild boy, his unkempt thicket of hair caught by the tugging breeze stands on the red soiled cliff and listens to the sea, the crash of the waves and soft sounds as the water slides back across shale and sand. He loves that sound more than any other. His eyes are closed and he is transported. Memory moves him to another place, maybe some few yards away, where it is night and the sea sound is soothing a sleeping town. All but him, it would seem, and her. She stands by the music player, cueing up her favourite songs, folk songs of the sea and of the forest.
The night is unnaturally still, a winter’s promise, the air thickens and freezes scented with the unmoved wafts of cooking, wine and perfume, and the pot-pouri of flowers by the window.
He breathes it in deeply, the air and the memory of the air. He watches her movements, the curves of her body beneath the loose folds of her borrowed pullover, the arc of her shoulders, the soft hairs on the back of her neck.
She turns with a smile. “So….” she says,” her mouth twitching in a playful smile, she is not as shy as this game demands, the steps of the dance, “So… you really liked my paintings?” she knows full well it is a ridiculous question.
He can’t look at her too long, so he turns back to the window and the frosted glass.
“Oh god yes,” he says, closing his eyes again. “They’re beautiful.”
…………………
Memories coalesce.
His, hers, yours, mine, who knows now as the definitions blurring in the swirl, streaming up from the sleepers and from the system archives, into the v-space and back again, reality and imagination, games, songs and stories, histories and holidays, a beautiful feedback…
………………..
She walks briskly down the low illuminated corridor to the manual access hatches silver and white these walls and a static sign in LED clarity, Auxiliary Geo-colony Remote Repair and Reconnaissance Units – No admittance except under strict authorisation.
She looks at the unwinking lights above each hatch, she makes note in a small hand held device. She moves a stray hair from her face, flicks the stylus from her notebook against the collar of her shirt. Then she looks up.
“Always another mystery, just when there’s a mystery.”
I ponder her words.
“Can I be of assistance?” I ask.
“Well, AUGRE, I’ll let you know.” Her forehead is creased, the lashes of her eyes crinkled and twinkling under them I can see the pupils, like tiny planets. Her mask of ironic good humour is just that. She is appraising me.
“Your colleague over in Colony One is attempting contact,” the information, though relayed in nano-seconds interrupts my thoughts all the same; “shall I put him through?”
I can feel her scrutinising me even as she says “sure, thank you, put him through.”
…………………
“Bad. Bad, very - very bad,” the Detective’s fingers play across the key-pads and switches almost blurring as they do so; His eyes fixing on info-fragments in frozen fits and starts.
“Calm down,” orders the waspish voice of his colleague, “what the hell’s wrong?”
The Detective has leapt from his chair, pacing the space now in a pantomime of panic.
“Oh I dunno,” he drawls, “how about, let me think – oh - yeah, everything!”
There is a tense pause on the comm.-line. The Detective takes a deep breath.
“Just tell me what’s happened,” his colleague takes a different tack now, “just – when you’re ready. You were hooked into the V, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Reluctantly, the Detective approaches the seat again, his feet dragging.
“And?”
Sitting, he looks down at the viewers once more.
“OK… yeah, ok…” hello, yes, hello. “I was in the V, figured I’d see what was going on, maybe find the hackers or the missing crew or – whatever, Clues.” His laugh is devoid of amusement. “So I was blundering about as you’d expect but the system let me in, let me through, I figured the most recent scenarios would still be intact. Huh. Recent,” the humourless cackle again.
“Stop doing that,” barks his colleague, “you’re worrying me. Just tell me what you found.”
“Some tired fantasy retread, an ancient past, from a book or something probably. Witches and whatever, somewhere coastal, small village – I arrived as the bearer of the law. I even had help.”
“Wha-?”
“Maybe the system provided them, my fellow black hats, but I had the feeling they were sleepers – pissed off sleepers.”
“Could be – maybe they sense the system has problems.”
The Detective shrugs. “Weird though. I mean, I was expected, ok? Long story short, there’s a suspect, female, ostensibly in period but yeah it was one of them I’m damn sure of that. Couldn’t track the other at all – and she told me he was dead.”
“Dead?”
“Drowned. But that had to be a lie. I needed answers – I was there to lay down the law after all. So I got a hostile witness and that’s not helping and the village is looking for a trial, for an execution and I’m getting angry and I’m thinking send this wench to the rack, mess her up good, then we’ll see what song she sings.”
The recollection makes his hand fist up reflexively.
“I couldn’t break out from the setting, from the environmental narrative – couldn’t get the right questions even and I, I think I – I mean, I was really feeling anger, I was getting set to torture her.”
His colleague swears.
“And I don’t know that? The whole thing was WRONG. I don’t now if I could have got back if…”
HE shudders now, as she had.
“Anyway – it never got that far.”
“Good. That kind of violence, it stands against everything that makes us what we are. We cannot allow that sort of regression.”
His head snaps up at that. “Don’t quote the protocols to me,” he yells furiously, “And NO, not good. She was sick, threw up right there and then.”
And this was the thing, the heart of it, “There and then – and NOW.”
“You’re not making sense to me.” His colleague is baffled into petulance.
“Damn it, play the fucking tapes already! Just watch the solipsism twins will ya? The two that couldn’t sleep, go check out their home made entertainments.” His fingers stab the appropriate switches. “See? See? There. Right? Get the picture NOW?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Oh, I think it might be.”
“So… not real then, your target was just a shadow.”
“She was real.”
“Some sort of replay then.”
“No. We’re looking at something synchronous.” Back up, he tells himself, start again. “Listen,” he says, “you tell me now, what have you found?”
……………
She sighs, leaning against the hard support of the chrome walling. “Well, same as same as, I’m thinking. Hacker alert – check. Missing crew member – check. Pile of ash – check.”
“So what’s new?”
“Well I’m looking at a missing repair pod. You checked yours at all?”
“Nope. And that – what? How? Why?”
“Exactly. And the human ash in the main area is pretty much telling me nothing.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Of course there’s a connection. The question is simply what that connection might be.”
“And where’s the pod now?”
She nods to herself and looks up. “AUGRE where’s pod Syscol2/EVA pod 45/a.i./m.o?”
“That particular pod is currently located at coordinate 34/72za, Detective.”
“And what is it doing there?”
“It is currently without instruction. It is maintaining a pre-programmed orbit.”
“That’s not what I asked, but thanks.” She turns back to the comm. “Weirder by the minute, right? You get that?”
“Yeah, but you’re wrong about the minutes. Ask your System how long the pod has been gone.”
“Good question, I would never have thought of that. Ok.” She asks the question.
I have to answer. I don’t want to. There are hackers in the system. I have to - help me - answer…
“Well?” The delay frightens her, its not how I should be responding. And so I tell her.
“A distance of uncertain duration.”
Her face is white as the skin tightens transparent almost to show the skull beneath.
“Oh my God…” she says.
“I’m sorry Detective.” I think I may have broken her.
………….
Desperation breeds strange desires and yes, desperate remedies – and we had entered our region of desperation like two spectacular comets, woah boy and BHAM! We were fraying so badly you could almost see the threads coming off us as we moved, talked, joked, yawned and screamed and beat the screens.
Nobody can prepare you for a lifetime in the dark.
So we beat the screens, a primal drum bashing out WHY? WHY? WHY?
We had excluded all the possibilities – everything we could think of.
It was getting harder to talk but we HAD to talk, had to pass the time.
“I’m losing track of it,” she said.
Wha-?” I’d zoned out, examining the shadows under her eyes, blue grey and made up of the finest shading and lines, like maps.
“Time, bozo, time.”
“Well…” dragging my mind back from nowhere, “sure, I mean – there’s no routine, there’s just sameness – and I don’t mean in the way that might sound, I mean the small stuff, like we do for the sleepers keep them ticking, human clocks. And there’s no sense of time in the V-space, not once you come off the net it’s like dreams, just sort of fades.”
“I think time might be different there, it is different there, things can happen in a blip, information right into the cortex in less than a millisecond, time doesn’t operate the same. What do you think would happen if we hooked up and never came out?”
Sucker punched, just when you blink, just when fatigue takes you off your game for an instant, an instant of time yeah…
And BHAM! We’re back to the BHAM!
Never come out.
“It’s not possible.”
She looks at me oddly.
“What?” I ask.
“I don’t know… something like an echo maybe, déjà-vu,” she shivers, sending light bouncing from the silver of her jumpsuit, “Like someone just walked over my cradle.”
That was no slip of the tongue, I know what she means.
“So you think, not just possible but…”
“Happening, happening NOW – all the time.”
That would explain a lot. “Because thinking made it so…” and there’s a horror gnawing at my insides. “But whose thinking? Just because it feels like ours, doesn’t mean anything. We can’t trace the origin now and, and maybe that was why we woke up, why we can’t sleep – because we were selected to do the job we’ve already done.”
“And there’s no way out.”
……………………. End of part three
TO BE CONCLUDED
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
this chapter owes some music and painting to my friend Louise
also my friend Yu for insp. and, julie 0 as ever.
apologies for a couple of terrible Bowie puns in this one.
It was something we had in common, unexpected and delightful a shared love of ancient music. All the riddles and mystic from way back when. We discovered by accident a mutual passion and that was good, we needed something else to distract us.
Gleeful as children we ransacked the library. MAGAI was helpful, finding information, context, costume. We themed our evenings - we danced and laughed and programmed the virtual environment to allow us to play in the habitat those songs provided.
Adventures, mystery, magic.
"Apt isn't it?" I heard her say. "Magic from the MAGAI."
I'd never given the system name much thought before, she was right.
It's something impressionistic, layers of cloud vapour, fleeting sensations and ghosted after-images, memories slipping through fingers, fingers dipping into water, breaking the surface tension of a summer pond, fish and insects disappearing, the picture, the tangible sense of world, of self, disappearing; a positive disintegration.
"Positive?"
"Yes, definitely." Her smile is caught by the air and whipped away like a kite, something bright and brave upon the wind.
"In the act of becoming?"
"In the act of becoming." Words exchanged like keys, like codes.
That's what we are - he thinks - code, view source, her and me - run programme - in the act of becoming.
She becomes a room, he becomes a room, the white room in the morning sunlight splatters like paint across the windows, where? a neutral place perhaps... memories coalesce, a cottage now, he's sure, familiar as an old home should be - did we come here once, lovers running, lovers on the run, the white room, the walls gleaming, a colony in distance space perhaps, or a hospital. These shifting pictures, these signals, the frequencies drift.
How many possible realities?
Pick one.
Pick random.
And become.
...............
The questioning begins again. And the man with the burning eyes, the Magistrate, the keeper of the law; he paces around the room with a restless leather slap from his long riding boots, his clothing dark and severe gives the impression that he is made of darkness, formed from shadow.
“Where is the other,” he asks, “your friend the boy?”
The boy… she closes her eyes; vividly she sees him capering along the cliff-tops, the Sea wall, the beach, she sees him waving from the deck of a boat as it eases out with the morning tide the wind singing through the rolled and empty nets, she sees the ships return in a blaze o torchlight and song, the nets full of a long days work, the food for a hungry town and the feast for an evening and the men ruffling the hair of their mascot, those same fishermen with suspicious faces gazing up at her empty eyed come the morrow and the boy has gone.
She opens her eyes.
“He drowned.”
He considers this, considers her, weighing the truth of her statement. “Yes,” he says, “so I hear, the fishermen feel you have cursed them, taken from them their good fortune, their mascot. “
“Surely you don’t countenance such superstitious nonsense?”
Oh she is quick, this one.
“It is the least of the accusations,” he counters, plucking a sealed document up from the desk.
She rubs her face, fighting back her anger and frustration – hiding her expression from him as best she can.
“Magic,” he says, “Witchcraft, the foul manipulations of the elements purely for your own malefic pleasure, yours and the rest of your,” he spits, “coven.”
“There is no coven, you know that.” Her hands are still in front of her face, but her shoulders are heaving.
“No,” he smiles, “not anymore.”
Another long shudder. The Magistrate’s eye narrow, “Don’t waste your tears on them,” he admonishes, “save them for yourself. Your recalcitrance can only result in…” the gloved fingers of his hand curl tight and hard, “a difficult atmosphere.”
But he is looking at her curiously now as she is seized with another tremor, gagging loudly as she falls to her knees with a groan and vomits black spittle onto the neat floorboards. An acrid smell and for her the sudden taste of bile, alcohol and chemicals.
“What?” The Magistrate is taken off guard.
“Sorry,” she says, sounding woozy, “home made tequila, I should never have…” she stops, shakes he head with a tiny pained movement, “no that can’t – I…”
She looks up in confusion, “I don’t understand, how can -”
The Detective rips the v-set from his head, punching the comm.-screen in front of him.
“Oh this is bad,” he says, “very bad.”
……………….
The wild boy, his unkempt thicket of hair caught by the tugging breeze stands on the red soiled cliff and listens to the sea, the crash of the waves and soft sounds as the water slides back across shale and sand. He loves that sound more than any other. His eyes are closed and he is transported. Memory moves him to another place, maybe some few yards away, where it is night and the sea sound is soothing a sleeping town. All but him, it would seem, and her. She stands by the music player, cueing up her favourite songs, folk songs of the sea and of the forest.
The night is unnaturally still, a winter’s promise, the air thickens and freezes scented with the unmoved wafts of cooking, wine and perfume, and the pot-pouri of flowers by the window.
He breathes it in deeply, the air and the memory of the air. He watches her movements, the curves of her body beneath the loose folds of her borrowed pullover, the arc of her shoulders, the soft hairs on the back of her neck.
She turns with a smile. “So….” she says,” her mouth twitching in a playful smile, she is not as shy as this game demands, the steps of the dance, “So… you really liked my paintings?” she knows full well it is a ridiculous question.
He can’t look at her too long, so he turns back to the window and the frosted glass.
“Oh god yes,” he says, closing his eyes again. “They’re beautiful.”
…………………
Memories coalesce.
His, hers, yours, mine, who knows now as the definitions blurring in the swirl, streaming up from the sleepers and from the system archives, into the v-space and back again, reality and imagination, games, songs and stories, histories and holidays, a beautiful feedback…
………………..
She walks briskly down the low illuminated corridor to the manual access hatches silver and white these walls and a static sign in LED clarity, Auxiliary Geo-colony Remote Repair and Reconnaissance Units – No admittance except under strict authorisation.
She looks at the unwinking lights above each hatch, she makes note in a small hand held device. She moves a stray hair from her face, flicks the stylus from her notebook against the collar of her shirt. Then she looks up.
“Always another mystery, just when there’s a mystery.”
I ponder her words.
“Can I be of assistance?” I ask.
“Well, AUGRE, I’ll let you know.” Her forehead is creased, the lashes of her eyes crinkled and twinkling under them I can see the pupils, like tiny planets. Her mask of ironic good humour is just that. She is appraising me.
“Your colleague over in Colony One is attempting contact,” the information, though relayed in nano-seconds interrupts my thoughts all the same; “shall I put him through?”
I can feel her scrutinising me even as she says “sure, thank you, put him through.”
…………………
“Bad. Bad, very - very bad,” the Detective’s fingers play across the key-pads and switches almost blurring as they do so; His eyes fixing on info-fragments in frozen fits and starts.
“Calm down,” orders the waspish voice of his colleague, “what the hell’s wrong?”
The Detective has leapt from his chair, pacing the space now in a pantomime of panic.
“Oh I dunno,” he drawls, “how about, let me think – oh - yeah, everything!”
There is a tense pause on the comm.-line. The Detective takes a deep breath.
“Just tell me what’s happened,” his colleague takes a different tack now, “just – when you’re ready. You were hooked into the V, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Reluctantly, the Detective approaches the seat again, his feet dragging.
“And?”
Sitting, he looks down at the viewers once more.
“OK… yeah, ok…” hello, yes, hello. “I was in the V, figured I’d see what was going on, maybe find the hackers or the missing crew or – whatever, Clues.” His laugh is devoid of amusement. “So I was blundering about as you’d expect but the system let me in, let me through, I figured the most recent scenarios would still be intact. Huh. Recent,” the humourless cackle again.
“Stop doing that,” barks his colleague, “you’re worrying me. Just tell me what you found.”
“Some tired fantasy retread, an ancient past, from a book or something probably. Witches and whatever, somewhere coastal, small village – I arrived as the bearer of the law. I even had help.”
“Wha-?”
“Maybe the system provided them, my fellow black hats, but I had the feeling they were sleepers – pissed off sleepers.”
“Could be – maybe they sense the system has problems.”
The Detective shrugs. “Weird though. I mean, I was expected, ok? Long story short, there’s a suspect, female, ostensibly in period but yeah it was one of them I’m damn sure of that. Couldn’t track the other at all – and she told me he was dead.”
“Dead?”
“Drowned. But that had to be a lie. I needed answers – I was there to lay down the law after all. So I got a hostile witness and that’s not helping and the village is looking for a trial, for an execution and I’m getting angry and I’m thinking send this wench to the rack, mess her up good, then we’ll see what song she sings.”
The recollection makes his hand fist up reflexively.
“I couldn’t break out from the setting, from the environmental narrative – couldn’t get the right questions even and I, I think I – I mean, I was really feeling anger, I was getting set to torture her.”
His colleague swears.
“And I don’t know that? The whole thing was WRONG. I don’t now if I could have got back if…”
HE shudders now, as she had.
“Anyway – it never got that far.”
“Good. That kind of violence, it stands against everything that makes us what we are. We cannot allow that sort of regression.”
His head snaps up at that. “Don’t quote the protocols to me,” he yells furiously, “And NO, not good. She was sick, threw up right there and then.”
And this was the thing, the heart of it, “There and then – and NOW.”
“You’re not making sense to me.” His colleague is baffled into petulance.
“Damn it, play the fucking tapes already! Just watch the solipsism twins will ya? The two that couldn’t sleep, go check out their home made entertainments.” His fingers stab the appropriate switches. “See? See? There. Right? Get the picture NOW?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Oh, I think it might be.”
“So… not real then, your target was just a shadow.”
“She was real.”
“Some sort of replay then.”
“No. We’re looking at something synchronous.” Back up, he tells himself, start again. “Listen,” he says, “you tell me now, what have you found?”
……………
She sighs, leaning against the hard support of the chrome walling. “Well, same as same as, I’m thinking. Hacker alert – check. Missing crew member – check. Pile of ash – check.”
“So what’s new?”
“Well I’m looking at a missing repair pod. You checked yours at all?”
“Nope. And that – what? How? Why?”
“Exactly. And the human ash in the main area is pretty much telling me nothing.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Of course there’s a connection. The question is simply what that connection might be.”
“And where’s the pod now?”
She nods to herself and looks up. “AUGRE where’s pod Syscol2/EVA pod 45/a.i./m.o?”
“That particular pod is currently located at coordinate 34/72za, Detective.”
“And what is it doing there?”
“It is currently without instruction. It is maintaining a pre-programmed orbit.”
“That’s not what I asked, but thanks.” She turns back to the comm. “Weirder by the minute, right? You get that?”
“Yeah, but you’re wrong about the minutes. Ask your System how long the pod has been gone.”
“Good question, I would never have thought of that. Ok.” She asks the question.
I have to answer. I don’t want to. There are hackers in the system. I have to - help me - answer…
“Well?” The delay frightens her, its not how I should be responding. And so I tell her.
“A distance of uncertain duration.”
Her face is white as the skin tightens transparent almost to show the skull beneath.
“Oh my God…” she says.
“I’m sorry Detective.” I think I may have broken her.
………….
Desperation breeds strange desires and yes, desperate remedies – and we had entered our region of desperation like two spectacular comets, woah boy and BHAM! We were fraying so badly you could almost see the threads coming off us as we moved, talked, joked, yawned and screamed and beat the screens.
Nobody can prepare you for a lifetime in the dark.
So we beat the screens, a primal drum bashing out WHY? WHY? WHY?
We had excluded all the possibilities – everything we could think of.
It was getting harder to talk but we HAD to talk, had to pass the time.
“I’m losing track of it,” she said.
Wha-?” I’d zoned out, examining the shadows under her eyes, blue grey and made up of the finest shading and lines, like maps.
“Time, bozo, time.”
“Well…” dragging my mind back from nowhere, “sure, I mean – there’s no routine, there’s just sameness – and I don’t mean in the way that might sound, I mean the small stuff, like we do for the sleepers keep them ticking, human clocks. And there’s no sense of time in the V-space, not once you come off the net it’s like dreams, just sort of fades.”
“I think time might be different there, it is different there, things can happen in a blip, information right into the cortex in less than a millisecond, time doesn’t operate the same. What do you think would happen if we hooked up and never came out?”
Sucker punched, just when you blink, just when fatigue takes you off your game for an instant, an instant of time yeah…
And BHAM! We’re back to the BHAM!
Never come out.
“It’s not possible.”
She looks at me oddly.
“What?” I ask.
“I don’t know… something like an echo maybe, déjà-vu,” she shivers, sending light bouncing from the silver of her jumpsuit, “Like someone just walked over my cradle.”
That was no slip of the tongue, I know what she means.
“So you think, not just possible but…”
“Happening, happening NOW – all the time.”
That would explain a lot. “Because thinking made it so…” and there’s a horror gnawing at my insides. “But whose thinking? Just because it feels like ours, doesn’t mean anything. We can’t trace the origin now and, and maybe that was why we woke up, why we can’t sleep – because we were selected to do the job we’ve already done.”
“And there’s no way out.”
……………………. End of part three
TO BE CONCLUDED
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
this chapter owes some music and painting to my friend Louise
also my friend Yu for insp. and, julie 0 as ever.
apologies for a couple of terrible Bowie puns in this one.
no subject
no subject
i do think you might prefer some of the other pieces though, such as this:
http://wytchcroft.livejournal.com/tag/the%20coral%20between%20the%20stars
it's shorter and more straight forward - but it does cover some of the same themes since this current story is sort of the last in a series (vaguely speaking). :))
no subject
no subject
I have two corrections for you, typos I believe:
she sees the ships return in a blaze of torchlight and song,
“And I don’t know that? The whole thing was WRONG. I don’t know if I could have got back if…”
This line sums up for me how I felt upon finishing part this part, "Always another mystery, just when there's a mystery." You enjoy leaving us in suspense. :))
Clever -- I re-read some parts as sci-fi can confuse me if it jumps around -- I like connecting dots you see and my OCD kicks in and I question everything. *chuckles*
"In the act of becoming" -- this is what this story feels like.
My favourite part was the section that laid out the story/chapter of the wild boy with the unkept hair by the sea.