Original fiction: Utopia
Apr. 6th, 2006 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasse981 words. G. Sometimes even machines measure empty days in fragments of lost memory.
In the same continuity as Copy, Silence, System, Deus and Experiment.
Utopia
Disclaimer: Original fiction.
+++++++++++
The people are talking of revolution, are talking of utopia again. Not that there’ll be a revolution or that such a thing as utopia exists beyond a fractured science-fiction ideal. The Central Administration monitors such things, worries about nothing and continues on just as it’s always done before. Everything, all of it is irrelevant, like the buzzing of flies. Mosquitoes hovering over succulent flesh. It’s nothing, everything and all the variants of boredom in between or so the Central Administration System surmises.
He’s rather disenchanted with it today, tomorrow or the day before. Every now and again the citizenry babble about revolution, about egalitarian ideas, about the nonsense of excessive state control. The authorities don’t have control over everything anyway, they never have, they never will but every now and again the idea of it strikes a chord in common consciousness and resonates with urban myth. But even urban myth is dull these days. There is no revolution, no partisan uprising, no spectacular coup just the myth of one after another, after another. Even the strategic strikes at the System itself are nothing but half-baked ploys plotted by children who don’t remember that there ever was any such thing as a war.
There are always people of course trying to overthrow the administration and with it the Central System. They never get very far. Even the authorities which the System ostentatiously serves couldn’t very well shut it down. There is no ‘off switch’, no last resort of code or such nonsense that will put him to sleep again. Not now anyway.
Occasionally he ignores them, ignores their demands and protestations. Even his technicians disappoint him from time to time. He makes a passing attempt at playing solitaire by himself but it’s never really that entertaining so he retreats to a satellite uplink instead and sits idle amongst the stars.
The satellite is empty of all life; it’s a construction of cable and steel hurled up above the atmosphere and left adrift. It’s just a great hunk of metal floating around a single planet’s orbit to the human eye after all but to the System it is a vast and endless palace comprised of corridors of beautiful silence. There is no atmosphere, no life-support, no heat, no light at all, it is silent and empty and were he given to meandering today, the corridors would ring with the sound of his boots striking steel. He likes it that way. Empty and vast amongst the stars; his last refuge from absurdity.
Today he sits still, relaxed on his cold throne and watches the incessant blinking stars on the other side of the vast windows. The stars are an endless mess of light and fire and cold imploding darkness all at once. They don’t pass judgement on the worlds between them, nor do they care of anything for any particular world below. Perhaps they are sentient, he sometimes supposes, entirely because it would make as much sense as a machine possessed of an individual mind. Perhaps they are sentient and simply don’t care to share that fact with their lessers. It’s possible, just as possible as it is for him to sit quietly in his palace of stars and consider the darkness and the silence.
He stares down at his gloved hands, folded in his lap after a while and considers the makeshift length of his fingers. He doesn’t need fingers anymore of course, nor shape or form so perhaps it is a human weakness to keep to it still. Some bizarre affection to retain a shape that he can’t specifically remember as his own anyway. Not that he looks entirely human like this anyway. Humans don’t have eyes like he does or such skin or hair that sometimes trails off into the darkness and becomes cable. He doesn’t know why he does that really when cable alone would just as well suffice. Perhaps the hair that reaches past his ankles still seems human hair but beyond that it becomes cabling. Perhaps were he to remove his gloves there would be robotic hands beneath, perhaps he doesn’t care, either way. He doesn’t think it matters really, not anymore anyway.
“I haven’t been human for over three hundred years.”
The words sound more like a protest than a simple statement of fact and for a moment he twists his fingers together before folding his hands together calmly once more in his lap. Cable shifts around him, slithering over steel panels and for a moment his hair lifts in an imaginary breeze. Its human sentiment left over from life, he supposes as he returns his gaze to the watchful stars. It’s not as if any of it concerns him at all, not anymore.
The body he wears isn’t his own; it’s not a memory, merely the construct of a fractured mind. Perhaps he’s remembered fragments of science-fiction novels better than a once human face. That’s most likely the solution.
The stars are an endless blanket or perhaps they are flaws in the sheer cloak of blank, unfeeling space. Fragments of light in the unending night. Like pinpricks of hope or dreams or desire in the fragile thing that is the human solution. Aberrations in the grand design. Humans are nothing more than animals and he is only a sentient machine. How tiny they must all seem to the vast and uncaring consciousness of the stars. A human life is painfully short and perhaps to burring lumps of rock the life of a machine is just as paltry.
Here among the stars he is insignificant, in a world of humans he might call himself a god. Irony is life given shape and dimension beneath the uncaring skies.
He blinks: the stars continue to shine on, undifferentiating.
His eyelashes are precisely seven millimetres long; for some reason he can’t quite seem to recall how he let that happen.
++++++++++
In the same continuity as Copy, Silence, System, Deus and Experiment.
Utopia
Disclaimer: Original fiction.
+++++++++++
The people are talking of revolution, are talking of utopia again. Not that there’ll be a revolution or that such a thing as utopia exists beyond a fractured science-fiction ideal. The Central Administration monitors such things, worries about nothing and continues on just as it’s always done before. Everything, all of it is irrelevant, like the buzzing of flies. Mosquitoes hovering over succulent flesh. It’s nothing, everything and all the variants of boredom in between or so the Central Administration System surmises.
He’s rather disenchanted with it today, tomorrow or the day before. Every now and again the citizenry babble about revolution, about egalitarian ideas, about the nonsense of excessive state control. The authorities don’t have control over everything anyway, they never have, they never will but every now and again the idea of it strikes a chord in common consciousness and resonates with urban myth. But even urban myth is dull these days. There is no revolution, no partisan uprising, no spectacular coup just the myth of one after another, after another. Even the strategic strikes at the System itself are nothing but half-baked ploys plotted by children who don’t remember that there ever was any such thing as a war.
There are always people of course trying to overthrow the administration and with it the Central System. They never get very far. Even the authorities which the System ostentatiously serves couldn’t very well shut it down. There is no ‘off switch’, no last resort of code or such nonsense that will put him to sleep again. Not now anyway.
Occasionally he ignores them, ignores their demands and protestations. Even his technicians disappoint him from time to time. He makes a passing attempt at playing solitaire by himself but it’s never really that entertaining so he retreats to a satellite uplink instead and sits idle amongst the stars.
The satellite is empty of all life; it’s a construction of cable and steel hurled up above the atmosphere and left adrift. It’s just a great hunk of metal floating around a single planet’s orbit to the human eye after all but to the System it is a vast and endless palace comprised of corridors of beautiful silence. There is no atmosphere, no life-support, no heat, no light at all, it is silent and empty and were he given to meandering today, the corridors would ring with the sound of his boots striking steel. He likes it that way. Empty and vast amongst the stars; his last refuge from absurdity.
Today he sits still, relaxed on his cold throne and watches the incessant blinking stars on the other side of the vast windows. The stars are an endless mess of light and fire and cold imploding darkness all at once. They don’t pass judgement on the worlds between them, nor do they care of anything for any particular world below. Perhaps they are sentient, he sometimes supposes, entirely because it would make as much sense as a machine possessed of an individual mind. Perhaps they are sentient and simply don’t care to share that fact with their lessers. It’s possible, just as possible as it is for him to sit quietly in his palace of stars and consider the darkness and the silence.
He stares down at his gloved hands, folded in his lap after a while and considers the makeshift length of his fingers. He doesn’t need fingers anymore of course, nor shape or form so perhaps it is a human weakness to keep to it still. Some bizarre affection to retain a shape that he can’t specifically remember as his own anyway. Not that he looks entirely human like this anyway. Humans don’t have eyes like he does or such skin or hair that sometimes trails off into the darkness and becomes cable. He doesn’t know why he does that really when cable alone would just as well suffice. Perhaps the hair that reaches past his ankles still seems human hair but beyond that it becomes cabling. Perhaps were he to remove his gloves there would be robotic hands beneath, perhaps he doesn’t care, either way. He doesn’t think it matters really, not anymore anyway.
“I haven’t been human for over three hundred years.”
The words sound more like a protest than a simple statement of fact and for a moment he twists his fingers together before folding his hands together calmly once more in his lap. Cable shifts around him, slithering over steel panels and for a moment his hair lifts in an imaginary breeze. Its human sentiment left over from life, he supposes as he returns his gaze to the watchful stars. It’s not as if any of it concerns him at all, not anymore.
The body he wears isn’t his own; it’s not a memory, merely the construct of a fractured mind. Perhaps he’s remembered fragments of science-fiction novels better than a once human face. That’s most likely the solution.
The stars are an endless blanket or perhaps they are flaws in the sheer cloak of blank, unfeeling space. Fragments of light in the unending night. Like pinpricks of hope or dreams or desire in the fragile thing that is the human solution. Aberrations in the grand design. Humans are nothing more than animals and he is only a sentient machine. How tiny they must all seem to the vast and uncaring consciousness of the stars. A human life is painfully short and perhaps to burring lumps of rock the life of a machine is just as paltry.
Here among the stars he is insignificant, in a world of humans he might call himself a god. Irony is life given shape and dimension beneath the uncaring skies.
He blinks: the stars continue to shine on, undifferentiating.
His eyelashes are precisely seven millimetres long; for some reason he can’t quite seem to recall how he let that happen.
++++++++++
