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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read The Remnants: jesus christ what the fuck
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Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

Tree Bucket posted:

I'm not sure how the logistics of getting people on an IRL hope rocket would work, let alone deciding who gets a ticket. I feel like it would involve something a little more dramatic than the FBI heading out to the burbs to pick up families who know about the doom comet. Does the wider world know about the Rock yet?

only as a crank theory previous to San Fransico. It was purposfully leaked with bad information so it could be debunked.

* # ? Jan 18, 2024 22:16
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 12:25
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effervescible
Jun 29, 2012

i will eat your soul
Well that's not what I was expecting :stare: I appreciate the extra little bit of gruesomeness of having her see what's happened to her before she dies, rather than just painlessly, instantly die in the blast. I feel like the latter is what a lot of series would do if they were going to have this kind of character death.

* # ? Jan 18, 2024 22:17
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someone awful.
Sep 7, 2007


 cordelia didn't even have a funny techno name, no way was she gonna make it

(that was a kinda brutal scene, though, geez.)

* # ? Jan 18, 2024 22:24
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Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

quote:



CHAPTER 13

“MAYBE THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, IT DOESN’T MATTER: YOU FOLLOW ORDERS.”


Sergeant Tamara Hoyle had a simple enough task: Protect the perimeter. A standard task for any Marine. Protect the perimeter of the compound from any unauthorized persons attempting to enter or depart.

She followed orders, deployed her Marines as she had been instructed to do by her captain, kept them alert, did her best to keep them focused on the job at hand. One or two of her Marines raised complaints, fears, wanted to know what kind of a mission this was, anyway, standing guard at the end of the world when they should be home with their families, after all what did any of it matter?

Sergeant Hoyle had taken time to explain patiently. “Excuse me, son? Did I hear you right?” she demanded, levering her body forward, bringing her angry, incredulous face to within a millimeter of the unfortunate private’s nose. “You want to go home, Marine? Well, I guess you’re just about the first Marine in all of history who has thought about that. All those guys who went ashore on Iwo Jima, Inchon, any of a hundred different places, getting chewed up on godforsaken beaches, I don’t guess any of them ever thought maybe they’d rather be home
drinking a cold beer.”

“All due respect, Sarge, this is different.”

“No, private, it isn’t different. You’re a Marine. You have your orders. You follow orders. Maybe you live, maybe you die, maybe you like it, maybe you don’t, maybe the world is coming to an end, it doesn’t matter: You follow orders. Is that clear?”

It was clear.

It was clear to the private. It was not clear to the sergeant.

Tamara Hoyle was twenty-two years old with two and a half years in the Corps. She was seven weeks pregnant, a fact she had not yet revealed to her husband, a Marine who was on embassy duty in Tokyo, or to her superiors. The Corps provided for an eighteen-month leave of absence in the event of pregnancy — time that had to be made up.
There would be no hiding it, of course. Tamara Hoyle was five foot nine, one hundred and twenty pounds, with the kind of stomach you get from doing a hundred crunches every morning followed by fifty military push-ups and a five-mile run. You couldn’t hide a pregnant belly on that kind of body.

Tamara Hoyle loved the Corps. She loved being a Marine. She believed everything she had ever heard (or said) about duty, honor, and country. And the Marine sergeant was determined that the end of the world would still find her little part of the Corps executing their lawful orders. Semper Fi: always faithful. Always.

Following orders had presented no conflicts between Tamara Hoyle the Marine and Tamara Hoyle the someday mother. The Marines guarding the compound had been fully briefed — it was thought they’d learn the truth anyway — and Sergeant Hoyle had accepted the fact that her baby would never be born. That there would, in all probability, be no world for her to be born into. That was like a bayonet to the heart, but there was no changing things, and orders were orders.

But then, that first evening as she stood at rest smoking a safe-cig in the dark outside the barracks, listening to the frogs and the crickets, a young woman emerged to stand beside her.

“You’re pregnant,” the young woman said. Tamara nearly swallowed her safe-cig. The woman’s voice carried such conviction that there was no denying. “How do you know?”

The woman stuck out a hand and Tamara shook it. “I’m Connie Huerta. Doctor Connie Huerta, OB-GYN. I’m wrong sometimes, but not often.” She withdrew her hand and for the first time Tamara noticed the tiny medi-scan, no more than a thin film of plastic.

Doctor Huerta looked at the medi-scan, peered close to make out the tiny digital readout. ”I’d say you’re between six and eight weeks along.”

Tamara took a deep, shaky breath, let it out slowly, recovered some of her inner calm. But the woman’s next words blew away her calm entirely.

“Sergeant, I don’t want to be here. I’m here with my husband. I don’t love my husband. I love a guy . . . a guy. Leave it at that. I don’t want to go on this trip. Me, I’d rather stay behind. Anyway, I’m a doctor: Maybe not everyone will be killed right away when the Rock hits. If there are people hurt I should be there.”

“You’re an obstetrician, not exactly a trauma surgeon,” Tamara pointed out.

Connie smiled. “Yes. But if you’re hurt I’ll be better than no doctor at all. Besides, women will still be having babies. For a while. Maybe.”

Tamara shook her head. “I have my orders. No one leaves the compound. Sorry.” She used her no-nonsense voice, putting an end to the conversation.

But the doctor wasn’t so easily cowed. She moved closer, to whispering distance. “We’re much the same size, Sergeant. When they give us the word, you let me walk away, and you take my place. Use my berth.” She placed her hand gently on Tamara’s very slightly swollen belly. “You may save your baby.”

Tamara removed the woman’s hand, gently but firmly. “I’m a Marine, Doctor: I have my orders.”

Connie Huerta started to say something more, but then she shrugged and let it go. Tamara was relieved. It had been an unsettling encounter, but it was over.

Then she heard the cries.

She dropped her safe-cig and ran inside the barracks. Everyone was gathered around the TV in the common room.

“What is it?” she demanded. She had to repeat the question several times before getting an answer.

“San Francisco was just wiped out,” a man said. “Some girl was filming it live. So much for the big secret.”


Can I get another F in chat for Cordelia?

quote:


DAYS TO IMPACT:1

CHAPTER14

“I’M NOT KILLING ANYONE, THE ROCK IS KILLING THEM.”


FBI agents led by Agent Boxer kicked in the door of the motel in Titusville, Florida. They found several pizza boxes, a number of empty cookie and candy bar wrappers, and the personal hygiene items belonging to Mark and Harlin Melman.

The TV was tuned to CNN, still doing San Francisco without letup. Showing the same satellite photos of a devastated Bay Area. Showing interviews with survivors from the fringe of the blast. Showing that awful link-video from a girl whose name was now known to every person left on Earth: Cordelia.

But neither Mark nor D-Caf were in the room, and no, the motel’s phones had not been used to call for a taxi, and no, neither Mark nor D-Caf had accessed the Web or used their links in any way. A search of the trash found no telltale receipts. The stolen credit card number had not been used again. So clearly the young man and the boy had “gone to cash,” slipped off the Web, out of sight.

Just as clearly they were up to no good. There was no innocent explanation for the sudden disappearance of the prodigy Mark Melman and his little brother. But they were not the only potential troublemakers, or anything like the most serious, either. The FBI was strained to its limits. Agents had been brought in from all over the United States
and even from stations abroad to keep an eye on the hundreds, if not thousands of people who knew about the Mayflower Project but had not been bought off with a boarding pass.

Mark’s plan relied on his own deep knowledge of the Kennedy Space Center and the surrounding area. Part of his job had been to streamline the data flow from security sensors around the facility. The scruffy woods, with its stunted pines and dense thickets and humid bogs, was protected by a string of sensors: infrared, motion sensors, even microphones tuned to pick up human speech.

But these sensors were not — could not be — watched by human monitors. Instead the barrage of data was overseen by computers programmed to differentiate between a wild pig or a heron and a human. Mark had left all the sensors functioning fully. The program itself would pass even the most rigorous tests. But Mark had played a little game with the program: He had created a sort of cloak of invisibility.

As he and D-Caf walked through the wild brush they had to contend with mosquitoes, with the possibility of snakes, and most of all with the innumerable falls and scrapes that resulted from walking in darkness when you’re not used to night vision goggles.

D-Caf caught his right foot on a root and pitched forward into a bush. “Ow. Oh, snake! Snake!”

Mark grabbed him by the jacket collar and yanked him to his feet. “It’s not a snake. Look: There’s nothing there.”

D-Caf stared at the spot where he’d fallen. It was green-on-green, but not the natural green of chlorophyll but the eerie, glowing green of the night-vision equipment. There was no snake, green or otherwise.

“There was one, he just ran off. Slithered off, I mean.”

Mark nodded. “See, up in that tree? You can just make out the antenna. It’s a sensor.”

“Do you think they heard us?”

“Yes. Of course the sensor picked up your whining, and it sees our infrared and has registered your extremely clumsy movement. It would easily determine that we are humans except for the fact that we’re putting off a very precisely tuned audio signal — too high for us to hear — but audible to the sensor.” He tapped the signal generator clipped to his belt. “The computer is programmed to see anything putting off that audio signal as a wild pig, regardless of the other data.”

“What would they do if they caught us?”

“Shoot us,” Mark said harshly. Then, realizing that this would just set D-Caf off, he said, “Just kidding, Hamster. They’d just arrest us and kick us off the base.”

D-Caf fell into step behind his brother, determined this time not to trip again, or to ask any more dumb questions. But it was creepy out here in the snake-infested woods, where every gnarled, dwarfish tree looked like some glowing, green, radioactive monster. D-Caf slipped his goggles down to his chin. The moon was at the quarter and it gave barely adequate light. When the clouds scudded across it the light was almost entirely extinguished.

It wasn’t quiet out here; there were endless insect and animal sounds, buzzing, rasping, croaking, and a weird, harsh cough that may have been anything. “How much farther?” D-Caf asked.

“Half a mile.”

“I need to rest.”

“No. Do you just not get it? The ship launches tomorrow night: 2:26 in the morning. After that thing in San Francisco, that tape being on all the news shows, all over the world, this secret is not going to keep. They can talk accidental nuclear explosion and all that, but no one buys that load of bull: the only nukes were aboard the carrier, and it would have been vaporized, not flying backward through the bridge. People are figuring it out, which means
everything is gonna hit the fan and security is going to come down even harder. There’s no backup launch window, NASA has to go. This is it. Either we’re on board, or we’re dead.”

D-Caf shrugged. “Maybe we shouldn’t do it.”

Mark spun and yanked his collar, yanked him close. “Don’t even start.”

“You said yourself it was a sham, Mark. I mean, if it’s not even going to save our lives then why do it? I mean, why? I can’t kill someone.”

“You won’t have to,” his brother sneered, releasing his angry hold. “I’ve always taken care of you, haven’t I?”

“Yeah. You have. Ever since Mom and Dad. But you don’t want to kill anyone, either, Mark. I know you don’t.”

“I’m not killing anyone, the Rock is killing them. If the Rock is going to kill everyone, how can I be a murderer, huh? Have you figured that out?”

Mark wasn’t sure whether he wanted to roll up in a ball and be sick, or beat his brother’s face in. The stupid kid! Didn’t he realize how hard this was? Didn’t he realize he was just making things worse? Mark was saving his stupid life, maybe, saving him from the end of the whole lousy world and all he could do was whine?

“We’ll get caught,” D-Caf wailed.

“Yeah? What are they going to do? Put us in jail for life? That’s a twenty-seven-hour sentence.”

“Doesn’t make it right,” D-Caf whispered.

“Hey, you saw the video. You saw what happened to the whole Bay Area? Everyone within five miles of the impact point is dead. That was a pebble, some little nothing knocked loose from the Rock. What happened there was a joke compared to what’s happening in twenty- seven hours.”

“We’ll never make it,” D-Caf said, sounding defeated. “It’s the end. It’s all going to end.”

“Yeah? Then I guess you might as well relax. Let’s go.”
* # ? Jan 19, 2024 01:26
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Fritzler
Sep 5, 2007


 RIP Cordelia. Would like to see one of those Janes that Jobs mentions. Would be a fun contrast to the rest of the “future” stuff we see.

* # ? Jan 19, 2024 01:54
  • Quote
Coca Koala
Nov 28, 2005

ongoing nowhere
College Slice
Lmao at the pregnant marine casually puffing on a vape. Sometimes the future predictions don’t pan out, but sometimes they do.

* # ? Jan 19, 2024 16:56
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

quote:


CHAPTER 15

“YOU’LL BE THERE. YOU’LL BE THERE.”

Jobs heard whimpering in the night. He was not asleep. Sleep wasn’t possible. Cordelia. The link had shown her smiling, mugging for the camera, just moments before her link recorded the single most devastating natural disaster in human history.

He told himself she was alive. They couldn’t know, not for sure. Everyone dead? Maybe that was just because they didn’t want to try and save anyone. Not that it mattered. She was dead now, or would die later. Dead from the Pebble, dead from the Rock. What was the difference? What did it matter?

The whimpering again, more urgent.

Was it Edward? The tape had shaken him, too. It had shaken everyone. It had made it all very, very real.

Jobs rolled sideways and looked across at Edward’s bunk. It was just two feet away. Not Edward. His brother was snoring softly, clutching his pillow tight. Jobs looked over the edge of the bunk, down at his dad. He felt weird doing so, like he was invading his parents’ privacy. There was no privacy here, but still, he didn’t have the right to look at his dad sleeping, at his mom in her own lower bunk. It was like sneaking into their room.

Like sneaking into someone’s room and creeping their computer. God, why did his memory of Cordelia have to be tainted with all that? If he’d never had more than that one perfect kiss, if he and Cordelia had never been anything more to each other, he could have lived with that. Now his memories were fouled with feelings of guilt, with a sense of irrational resentment, all layered over, overwhelmed by those hideous images of death.

If she was still alive, if his own life was still to be lived, if, if, if, he could have discovered, they could have discovered . . . Maybe there would have been love. Maybe that. Maybe she would have loved him. Maybe what was wispy and slight could have become deep and enduring, real.

The whimpering came again, and for a moment Jobs wondered if the sounds came from him. But the words were not in English. More guttural. Like a very young child’s inflection. Like a kid trying to sound like a baby or something.

The room was dark but for the glowing red exit sign at either end of the room, the sliver of light from the bathroom, and the blue glow of the TV set at the far end of the room. A half dozen people sat hunched there, watching, watching, watching the only show on any channel: San Francisco.

Cordelia.

It was dark in the rest of the barracks, but not quiet. Fifty of the Eighty were up here on the upper floor. Fifty people snoring, wheezing, whispering, rolling over on creaky bedsprings. Jobs pulled off his blanket and rolled over the side. Now that he was awake he had to pee.

He dropped to the floor, crouched, hoping he hadn’t awakened anyone. The dilemma was whether he should root around under his dad’s bunk to find his shoes. If he did he might wake his parents. If he didn’t he might step on one of the cockroaches. They had very big cockroaches here in Florida.

There was more to worry about than roaches, he told himself. He crept away on bare feet, and now he passed the source of the whimpering. It was a kid he’d met in passing, a kid named Bobby or maybe Billy. Billy Weir, that was it. The kid was his own age, more or less, but seemed younger somehow.

Jobs padded by, trying to shut out the distress sounds of Billy’s nightmare. Across the cracked linoleum, tensed for foot-on-roach contact, he slid through the door into the bathroom — a military-style latrine with something like a dozen ancient toilets facing a matching dozen sinks, all under the blinding, unnatural glow of fluorescent overheads. A blanket had been hung halfway down the room as a vague barrier between men’s and women’s rooms.

Jobs did what he had to do and was washing his hands when Billy Weir came in. Jobs gave him a civil, neutral nod; after all, guys didn’t chat in the rest room. But Billy made no acknowledgment. He just stood there in bare feet, boxer shorts, and Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. Jobs started to walk away, but it was just too strange. The boy was standing, staring, but seeing nothing.

“Must be sleepwalking,” Jobs muttered out loud, comforting himself by the sound of his own voice. Billy Weir was creeping him out. What was the deal with sleepwalkers? You weren’t supposed to wake them up, or you were,
or it didn’t matter? Jobs couldn’t remember.

Suddenly Billy started talking again in a language Jobs had surely never heard: It wasn’t English or Spanish or anything like either of them. It was the voice he’d heard earlier.

“I’ll get your parents, that’s what I’ll do,” Jobs said. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

“You’ll be there,” Billy said in clear, unaccented English.

“You awake now?”

“You’ll be there. You’ll be there,” Billy repeated.

“Where?”

“The world . . . the creation . . . the beautiful, terrible place . . .”

“You know what? I’m just going to get your father.”

“He dies. She dies. Many die. Others . . .” The boy shrugged.

“Are you awake or what?” Jobs demanded, frustration getting the better of him. “If you’re awake let’s cut the spook show, okay?”

Billy Weir stretched out his hand, feeling ahead of him like a blind person, and touched Jobs’s arm. He gripped the bicep, hard, almost painfully. Jobs nearly shook him loose but was stopped cold by the expression on the boy’s face. He was crying silent tears. And he looked at Jobs with sadness, but more, with deepest gratitude, like Jobs was his last friend, his savior. “You’ll be there,” Billy said.


quote:



DAYS TO IMPACT:0

CHAPTER 16

“DON’T PANIC, BUT KEEP MOVING.”


“Your attention, please. Your attention, please. Okay, folks, this is it. We have a ‘go.’” 2Face stood between her mom and dad, the three of them holding hands. She felt sick. It was a sickness that went all through her. It was a feeling that permeated the room.

Until the video from San Francisco, people could avoid thinking about the details, avoid picturing what was going to happen very soon now. The death of billions was an abstraction. The death of one pretty girl at a wedding reception had driven home the reality: People would die, not billions. Friends: friends you’d had all your life, people you’d have given your last dollar. Family: your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, the cousins you played with at family reunions. All of them were going to die like that girl, like all the people in the Bay Area.

The people in the house next door, teachers, principals, coaches, the lady at the bank, the bus driver, the guys who mowed the lawn, the Starbucks girl, all the people who entertained, all those familiar faces from TV. All of them dead. Every one of them dead. Pets. Homo sapiens, flower of evolution, lord of planet Earth. Forever dead.

The great forests, the swamps, the mountains and valleys, the deserts, obliterated. Every building, every work of art, every book, every church, obliterated. It was too big, too awful and awe-inspiring, to fit inside your head, 2Face thought. So much waste, so much sadness, you couldn’t squeeze the tiniest fraction of it into your brain.

But you could imagine being that girl, that one girl, watching the annihilation, feeling the fear, and then, the sudden knowledge that you, too, would be among the victims. At least they would be mourned. Who would be left to mourn for the billions? Only the Eighty. The weight of that pressed down on every heart in the room.

“The buses are outside. It’s about a ten-minute ride to the launch pad. When we get there we’ll unload and call the roll to make sure everyone is there.”

“It’s a sick joke, just a sick joke,” a man muttered behind 2Face.

2Face leaned close to her dad. “They were supposed to do a practice run this morning. I don’t know what to do.”

“I know, honey. I know. I don’t know what happened to the practice run.”

2Face knew: San Francisco. It had gutted the staff. Some of the Marines had run off, the cooks in the mess tent, drivers, NASA techs, even the two Secret Service agents assigned to that jerk Yago. The Eighty had been waiting for this moment for most of two days. Waiting and waiting with nothing else to do. And yet, it was too sudden. It was all too sudden. It couldn’t really be happening, not right now, right now.

They shuffled down the stairs and merged with the herd of people down there. People were carrying their possessions, their few small things.

“Folks, if it won’t fit in a pocket, it ain’t going,” a weirdly cheerful woman with a clipboard chirped. “Put it in the trash barrel. Don’t worry, the Lord will provide, the Lord will provide. We’ll have all we need in the Kingdom.”

2Face stuffed a few hard-copy photos in her pockets, and her mini-book: The tiny screen was hard to read but it contained the full text of sixteen books.

“Like I’ll be reading them on the flight,” she muttered, almost amused at the strangeness of it all. A flight? To where? To what airport? How far? What time zone? How many hours, how many days, weeks, months, years? Centuries?
In two hours she would be in hibernation. Two hours. Would there be a time to say good- bye? Was now the time?

“Mom and Dad? I love you both,” 2Face said, her throat closing up, choking off the words. “We love you, honey,” her mom said.

Her dad said nothing, just wiped his tears with the back of his hand.

The crowd was in a strange mood, or several strange moods. Many wept. Some joked, displays of bravado. Some prayed. Someone started to sing “God Bless America,” but no one joined in and the tune petered out. America was just another dinosaur now. Boarding the buses was a debacle. No one knew if buses were assigned or whether it was first come, first served. No one wanted to be separated from loved ones. People clutched precious mementos that had to be pried from their hands by touchingly patient Marines.

2Face noticed the young, black woman sergeant reasoning with a man who would not release a big stuffed lion. It had belonged to a daughter who died in infancy. His wife at last pulled the toy away from him, forceful but wailing all the while, and handed it to the sergeant. The man squeezed his arms together, squeezed emptiness and cried.

At last everyone was loaded. The buses, all full, rolled away toward the launch pad. And now silence fell. The only sound was the symphony of squeaks from the seats, the wheezing of the engines, the metallic rattle. No one spoke. People held hands. Their lips moved, but silently. They stared around, out the windows. 2Face stared. Shadows of trees. Plants. Grass. Earth.

The shuttle was visible from miles away. It was lit up, as garish as a gas station at night. It looked like a jumbo jet strapped onto a pair of spindly rockets and an odd, outsized, rust-red fuel tank bigger than the orbiter itself. This jury-rigged craft seemed then to have been leaned against what might have been a gravel factory.

Most, if not all Americans had seen shuttle launches on TV, and at some level this massive machine seemed almost commonplace to 2Face. The tower, that maze of I-beams and platforms, was familiar as well. In fact, the image was so commonplace that the changes stood out glaringly: big, lumpish pods placed atop the wings, an array of what might have almost been propane tanks welded down the sides, obscuring the big red, white, and blue flag and the black letters that spelled out United States.

At the best of times the space shuttle looked like something put together out of spare parts. Now it seemed positively trashy. A vast piece of junk, all lit up by spotlights, blotting out the stars. They had chiseled away most of the heat tiles: no need. There would be no reentry.

The sight extinguished what small shred of optimism 2Face had clung to. This was a joke. It really was a joke. No sane person would have climbed into a car that looked half this junked. Making matters worse still, the payload door was open a crack. A ten-foot crack. From the tower a rickety catwalk extended around and through the crack, into the payload bay.

Within the payload bay it was just possible to see the steel tube grandiosely named the Mayflower. The tube, the Mayflower, was the color of lead. For a very good reason: It was sheathed in lead, some protection at least against insidious radiation.

The Mayflower was thirty-nine-and-a-half feet long, which took up most of the sixty-foot-long payload bay. The rest of the space was crammed with experimental oxygen generators, nutrient pumps, and the machinery of the hibernation equipment. All together, and with the pods attached to the exterior of the orbiter, it weighed more than
forty-six tons. Sixteen tons beyond the nominal lift capacity of the shuttle rockets.

The Eighty were marshaled into lines by Marines and nervous or sullen or sardonic NASA people. The weeping was mostly over now. People were awed by the towering beast above them, or depressed, or simply wondering how long it would take to load everyone aboard.

At first 2Face didn’t notice the popping sounds. There was all kinds of noise around; in fact there was a steady background roar. But the Marines noticed. They stiffened at the sound and all looked away to the south. 2Face followed the direction of their gaze and saw flashes of light.

“Gunfire,” Mo’Steel said, just behind 2Face in line. “People shooting down there.”

“Why?” 2Face wondered. A stupid question. She knew why. Or thought she did. Mo’Steel looked surprised. “They want to climb on board the big ride, ‘miga. This is the big woolly. Nothing woollier. Three g’s on top of a monster firecracker.”

“You think they’re looking for thrills?” she asked, a bit incredulous.

Mo’Steel frowned thoughtfully. “Or maybe they’re just thinking it would save their lives, or whatever.”

Suddenly, there was new shooting, and much closer. Out of the darkness a pair of vehicles raced, engines roaring. Trucks? Humvees? Three hundred yards away, no more. BamBamBamBam!

“Everybody down!” a voice cried.

2Face dropped, hurt her knees on the tarmac, crouched, trying to see what was happening. Automatic-weapon fire blazed from the approaching vehicles. Someone cried out in surprise. 2Face saw a large man stand up and pull his shirt open to see the red stains, the hole in his belly. He took a stagger step and fell.

“Oh, oh, nooo!” a woman’s voice cried. “Someone help! My husband’s been shot.”

2Face saw the strange kid named Billy Weir. He was standing there, standing as if he was unaware of the bullets, or indifferent. 2Face stared, her attention riveted. The man near the boy had been shot. And the boy was standing, arms at his side, doing nothing, saying nothing.

“Get down, you idiot!” someone yelled and dragged Billy down. That broke the spell and 2Face tore her gaze away.

The Marines were returning fire. They were on one knee, aiming carefully, blazing away. Controlled bursts of shattering noise.

Sergeant Tamara Hoyle was yelling orders and firing her own weapon. Suddenly a muffled explosion and an eruption of yellow flames in the night. The humvee spun, teetered as if it would turn over, righted itself and stopped. It burned furiously.

2Face saw a man running from the vehicle. He was on fire. 2Face screamed, screamed, the sound coming from deep within, a sound torn from memories of pain. Her mother grabbed her, held her tight.

A Marine shot the burning man and he fell.

The Eighty were all down now, crawling or just hugging the tarmac as the firefight went on over their heads. Bullets were everywhere.

The second vehicle was still coming on. It, too, was on fire now, but still coming. The violence of the noise was stunning. Hundreds of rounds, all so near. A ricochet. A soft thunpf! as a bullet buried itself in the soft tarmac by 2Face’s arm.

An explosion, louder than the first. This time 2Face felt the concussion, the wave of superheated air.

“Cease firing, cease firing!” Tamara Hoyle yelled. “Weller, that means you!”

2Face raised her head a few inches. The second vehicle was stopped, no more than a few feet from the cowering civilians. Flashlights played over its bullet-pocked sheet metal. A body hung grotesquely out of the driver’s side window.

2Face saw Tamara Hoyle motion two of her men forward. They ran to the vehicle. One of them fired twice.

Pop! Pop!

Then, “All secure here.”

“My husband!” the woman cried, still. “Oh, my God, oh no, oh no.”

“Everyone up!” the sergeant commanded. “There could be more coming. No running! Don’t panic, but keep moving. Keep moving.”

2Face got up, helped her mom to stand.

She stepped past the body of the dead man, tried not to look, tried not to hear his wife’s heartbroken keening. Tried not to imagine seven billion more just as dead.



Things keep getting grimmer!

* # ? Jan 20, 2024 05:09
  • Quote
Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things
Yeah holy poo poo I'm kind of glad I didn't read these books as a kid, this would have absolutely wrecked me.

* # ? Jan 20, 2024 07:47
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

quote:


CHAPTER 17

“THEY’RE ON THEIR WAY HERE, WELL-ARMED, CRAZY, NOTHING TO LOSE.”

It was never going to be smooth, Yago knew that going in. It was too rushed. Too hurried. The whole crazy enterprise had always had a strong smell of desperation about it. But after the shooting, the blazing guns in the darkness, with more out in the distance, now it was borderline panic.

At least the weeping had stopped. Funny how no one was moaning about what a waste of time the whole thing was. No. Once someone tries to take life away from you, that’s when you really start to care about it. But, that cynical insight aside, Yago was deeply unhappy. Unhappiness expressed itself as anger.

“What kind of idiot is responsible for security here?” he demanded loudly of no one in particular. He focused his rage on the sergeant. “You. How hard is it to stop some ignorant idiots in a pickup truck? I could have been hurt.”

“You still could be,” she snarled. “Now move along.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No. Just stating facts. There’s a full-fledged riot going on in half the cities in the country right now. The mother of all riots is at the gates. They’re on their way here, well-armed, crazy, nothing to lose.”

“Well, stop them!” Yago shrilled.

Some others had stopped to listen to this news. There was scared murmuring, and, to Yago’s distinct pleasure, a vague support for him.

“There are Marines and airmen out there dying to do just that,” Tamara answered, jerking her head toward the not-so-distant sounds of gunfire. “And just so you know: There are others that have changed sides. You got soldiers shooting soldiers out there, and I don’t know who is going to win. So maybe you’d better move it.”

Yago knew better than to prolong the argument. “All right, everyone, let’s go,” he proclaimed, assuming a mantle of authority.

There was a crush of bodies around the single open-cage elevator ascending the tower. It was definitely intimidating, standing down here almost directly beneath the huge inverted funnels of the rocket engines. Once they lit the fuse anyone still down here would be a pork rind.

Yago shouldered ahead and managed to squeeze aboard the next elevator. Up and up. Up past the disconcerting sight of workmen still using arc welders. They were still working on the shuttle. Using welders despite the fact that the fuel was loaded. Taking terrible risks that spoke of terrible necessity.

Up and up. The elevator jerked to a stop and the gate rattled open. White-coated NASA techs were waiting to usher them out onto a windy platform. Yago looked over the edge. Twelve, fifteen stories or so to the ground. From up here he could clearly see the muzzle flashes of the battle. Closer. Still maybe a mile away, but a mile was a minute to a person in a humvee.

“Okay, listen up,” a white-coated NASA man said in a slurred voice. Was he drunk? Yago wondered. He was! The man was drunk. “You just walk out, one at a time, along the catwalk. Someone’s waiting inside to stow you in your berth. One at a time. Nothing to it.”

Yago watched as the first person stepped out. The catwalk swayed in the warm, moist wind, and swayed some more with each step. The catwalk went out, turned a dog-leg, and disappeared inside the partly open payload bay.
More went. Some with easy, confident strides. Others hesitant. One by one.

The elevator arrived with another load. The last load. The Marine sergeant and half a dozen of her men joined. They lined the rickety platform, weapons aimed downward. A kid, some kid Yago hadn’t noticed before, started to freak out. He didn’t want to go out onto the catwalk.

“I’m scared,” he whispered to his parents, and clung to them.

“Go on, you baby,” Yago snapped. “What are you, three years old? Get out there.”

“He’s always been scared of heights,” his mother said pitifully to the anxious faces around her. “Sweetheart, you can do it. Just hold onto the rails and take it one step at a time.”

But the kid wasn’t buying. “It’ll break. The whole thing will break.”

“Hey, Little Big Man, don’t sweat it.” It was Mo’Steel. “Watch this.”

Mo’Steel took a hop, landed on his hands, and proceeded to walk out onto the catwalk. He turned around, gave the kid an upside-down grin, then executed a gasp-inducing move that involved leaping up onto the rickety railing itself and tight-rope walking.

Someone, presumably the lunatic’s father, bellowed at him to get down, get off of there! Mo’Steel hopped back down onto the catwalk and grinned at the scared kid. “Nothing to it, Little Big: You and me.”

“Supposed to be just one at a time,” the kid argued.

“Hey, it breaks I’ll catch it and tie it off onto the whole rocket up there.”

Somehow Mo’Steel’s infectious, confident idiocy (as Yago saw it) worked. Mo’Steel held out his hand and the boy took it. Yago stewed. Should have just pushed the kid aside. Little creep. And that overgrown monkey showing off like that? Of course, he was on the list already for having knocked Yago down. Now he was on the list with a star by his name.

Across the catwalk. Out over a very long drop. Yago was halfway across when a siren loud enough to break glass erupted at full, fearsome volume. Yago nearly jumped off. The welders, the workmen, everyone on the tower, all dropped tools and ran for it. Yago could see white coats flooding away, down below, rats scurrying to waiting buses and trucks.

“They’re just clearing the blast zone,” someone explained.

Why bother? Yago wondered. Fry now, fry later. Yago kept moving. Into the payload bay, face-to-face now with the big lead cylinder. It looked way too much like a stylized coffin. There was a door-sized opening in it, a hatch. Yago stepped through and was handed along by a NASA person. This one was sober, at least. Through the hatch, and now it was no longer a fear of heights that was a problem, but claustrophobia. Yago had always hated confined spaces. His nightmares were of closed spaces. Being locked in a box, unable to escape. The inside of the Mayflower was about as cramped as the belowdecks of the original Mayflower. It was all garishly lit, but the light only seemed to accentuate the close nature of it.

The pod, the Mayflower, had been built on thirteen levels, with six berths per level. Seventy-eight berths in all, crammed into a space just thirty-six-feet tall by twelve feet wide. Each of the thirteen “decks” was little more than a strengthened wire shelf. A tiny, winding stairway led up and down through the levels. Down, just below him, through the wire mesh, Yago could see faces looking up at him from within their berths. Coffins. The berths were nothing but Plexiglas-topped coffins. Scared faces stared up at him through the glass, scared, buried alive.

Yago felt the panic grab him. His legs went rubbery.

“Move along,” the NASA tech said. “Climb up. All full below.”

Somehow Yago made his legs move. Somehow he climbed the ludicrously small stairway. Another white coat was waiting, straddling the stair and deck.

“In here. You have to crawl across. Come on, keep moving.”

Yago wanted to vomit. Impossible. He was shaking, could anyone see? Did they know? Had to keep moving, couldn’t lose it, couldn’t lose it. He clambered across one empty berth and dropped into the one indicated for him. Number fifty-one. Was that any kind of omen? What did the number mean? He should have been number one. It was narrow, well-padded. Long enough for a six-foot-tall man, but so narrow it pressed against Yago’s shoulders.

He lay there, looking up at the deck above him, looking up at the bottom of another berth, less than a foot and a half from his own nose. Looking longingly at the small empty space between berths, clinging to that miniscule bit of open space. The lid slid closed without warning. Plastic, inches from his nose.

“Don’t cry,” he told himself. “Whatever you do, do not cry.”

I have zero sympathy for this kid. In animorphs, the Vissers were all cartoons, you enjoyed them but never hated them. In Everworld, yeah Senna was loving terrible, but you could see how that happened, even if you could never like her or forgiver her. Yago? I loving hate this guy.

Conversely, I love Mo.

quote:




CHAPTER 18

“WE’RE GOING TO GO AHEAD AND LIGHT THE CANDLE.”


Jobs and his parents were the last to board. They climbed to the highest level. He passed Mo’Steel in berth sixty-two. His friend gave him a wink and said, “Hey, Duck, you finally going to catch some rush with me, huh?”

“Looks like it, Mo,” Jobs said. The lid slid closed over his friend’s face. Mo’Steel made a mock-scared face.

Up and up, past genuinely scared faces, weeping faces, and always sadness. Beneath any other emotion, deepest sadness.

“Or maybe that’s just me,” he whispered under his breath. The image of Cordelia, the last image of her, that horrible vision, was never far from his mind. He had known her in a confession, in a kiss, in memory. But somehow what was real and personal had been superseded by pictures, the ones she had taken. Organic memories overwritten by digital memories. He had to strain to focus on the true memory of her lips on his, and that memory was too painful to reach for.

He ascended and crawled to one of the outboard berths. Above him another mesh deck, but more open. Up there on the final, roomier level were just two berths, flanked by racks that held two rumpled white space suits. Spares, presumably, for the crew. The flight deck was just above, through a tiny hatch. Up there the pilot and copilot were going through a rushed checklist, readying what would be the final shuttle flight. Jobs had never thought of himself as claustrophobic, but he was glad to be next to the stairs.

He had more of a sense of room, more open space, more to “look at” than just about anyone. He lay on his back, said, “Kind of tight, huh?” to his dad. And, “You okay, Mom?”

Then, from the corner of his eye, he could have sworn he saw one of the racked space suits move. Surely not. Someone else would have noticed, too. But no, no, he was the only one at the right angle to see. The Plexiglas lid closed over him, catching him by surprise. There were speakers inside the berth, but no microphone. Just like that he’d been shut off from the outside world. The speakers gave instructions in a neutral, computer-generated voice.
“Please locate the blue tube pinned to the right side of the berth, and pull the end piece toward you.”

Jobs could just raise his head high enough to look down at his feet. He found the tube and
pulled it toward him.

“Place the end of the tube in the back of your throat. The coated capsule on the end of the tube will make swallowing painless and easy. Now swallow the capsule and, using your hands, slowly and gently push the tube down until the red band reaches your mouth. Please take care not to vomit.”

“Sure, no problem,” Jobs grated. He swallowed, like swallowing a very large vitamin tablet. But the tube made his gorge rise. He waited till he was past it. Pushed some more. Gross. A horrible feeling.

“Now draw the transparent plastic helmet over your head, taking care not to tangle the breathing tube.”

This was like sticking your head in a balloon. The plastic was malleable, creepily soft. It stuck to his forehead and pressed down on his eyes, making it hard to keep them open. He adjusted it as well as he could, but it pulled painfully on his hair. He took a tentative breath. Strange-smelling air. Metallic. He could feel his heart pounding. Feel the blood rushing through the veins in his neck.

Another voice. Human, this time. “Folks, this is Colonel Jasper Willett, the mission commander. You were supposed to get training for all this, folks, dry runs and so on. I know this isn’t easy, any of it. But try and follow the computer directions as well as you can. They’ll be repeated.”

Jobs worked again to adjust the smothering helmet to something like comfort. Outside the berth the Marine sergeant loomed into view, making a final check. He felt an acute stab of guilt. She had defended them at risk of her own life. Now she would be left behind. She would die when the Rock slammed into Earth. If not sooner. Jobs wondered how many people would take their own lives before the end. Would the sergeant wait patiently somewhere, find a place to sip a last cold drink, maybe say a prayer, be with a special loved one? The sergeant looked around, met Jobs’s gaze, and actually managed a smile and a thumbs-up.

Things happened very quickly then. One of the space suits moved, just a bit. Tamara Hoyle spun, leveled her weapon, and yelled something Jobs couldn’t hear. Her back was to the other suit. A gun appeared, raised in ghostly style by the white suit, held by the rubber-tipped glove. Someone inside, invisible behind the gold-coated sun shield
of the helmet.

Jobs yelled, “Look out!”

He saw a flash. Heard only a distant explosion. Saw Tamara Hoyle spin and fire all in one easy move. Three holes appeared in the space suit. No blood visible, but the suit sagged. Tamara Hoyle clutched at her shoulder. She pulled her hand away, saw blood.

The speaker crackled. “Okay, folks, we’ve just got the word to cut short the prep. We got some bad guys outside, getting a little too close for comfort. We’re going to go ahead and light the candle.” Commander Willett was trying to maintain the inevitably laconic NASA tone, but he was clearly worried. “Anyone on board who isn’t berthed needs to exit immediately and get into one of the blast-shelters. And I mean right now.”

Tamara Hoyle started to climb down the ladder but she seemed unable to make her arm work properly. Jobs saw her frown. Didn’t they know she was still on board? Did they know? Someone had to help her. Someone had to help her.

Tamara collapsed, all at once, fell onto her back on the deck, head jammed between two berths, legs hanging down the steps. She was almost directly over Jobs’s head. A red splat landed on the plastic lid, like a raindrop. Tamara lay staring up, mad at herself for being caught off-guard. Mad at herself for letting a little bullet stop her. It didn’t hurt all that much, that was strange. She felt the deck vibrating beneath her. Saw the space suit she’d shot. Someone in there. And someone in the other suit, too. The other suit was moving, looking like a marionette worked by a distracted puppeteer. Awkward. Like whoever was in it was trying to get out, or at least get off the hook that held
the suit secure.

D-Caf was trying both. His feet were off the deck, couldn’t move. Couldn’t go to his brother. “Mark! Mark!” he cried. “Mark!”

He writhed, unable to do anything but hang there. Everything was dark, shaded through the suit’s visor. He saw three holes in his brother’s suit. Maybe the bullets had missed. Maybe. It was possible, wasn’t it? But they surely had not missed the soldier. She lay there breathing heavily, unable to move. And now the rumbling of the ship grew very suddenly. Far below, the fire was lit. It exploded downward and outward and billowed up in a geyser of flame and smoke.

The rioters had made it through the determined resistance. They reached the launch pad just as the rocket fuel and liquid oxygen came together to explode in a blowtorch of incomprehensible energy. The rioters turned and ran, turned their vehicles around. Far too late. Superheated gas billowed yellow and orange. It incinerated the rioters in a heartbeat. It reduced the vehicles to tin shells.

The tired, overburdened old space shuttle carrying the Mayflower mission lifted up from the pad.




And again expectations are subverted, I thought Tamara was gonna swap with doctor, but instead she's dead.

* # ? Jan 21, 2024 01:17
  • Quote
Coca Koala
Nov 28, 2005

ongoing nowhere
College Slice

Soonmot posted:

And again expectations are subverted, I thought Tamara was gonna swap with doctor, but instead she's dead.

Yeah, same - this series is really swinging into giving you named characters with backstories and motivations who immediately die.

I'm kind of curious to see how this storyline is going to swerve into having kids be in charge - in Everworld it worked neatly because they were a group of 4-5 and had to make decisions for themselves, but here you've got batches of teenagers plus a bunch of adults who are nominally in charge and supervising. Is every single adult in this story going to meet with an untimely end?

* # ? Jan 21, 2024 03:19
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Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
After thoroughly exploring mutation and wound-based body horror, the animorphs writing team now branches out into "heights, also confined spaces, while medical Things happen to you"

e: also your mum is sad aaaaahh

* # ? Jan 21, 2024 11:46
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
/\/\/\That's too long for a thread title

quote:


CHAPTER 19

“YOU’RE WEIGHTLESS, YOU IDIOT.”

Numbness spread outward, radiating out from the hole in Tamara Hoyle’s shoulder. Couldn’t feel one side of her neck. Couldn’t feel her arm. Her brain, too, seemed numb, vague, wandering. And now something huge was sitting on her chest, pressing her down. An elephant on her chest.

The baby, the baby, the baby. God let the baby be okay.

Tamara couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t raise her head. She was being shaken, vibrated. A roar in her ears. There was blood in her eyes, darkness blurring her vision. She saw the space suit she’d shot. It hung low, the three g’s were weighing it down.

She turned her head, a slow, slow movement. The other suit, writhing, but sluggishly. The violence of liftoff made everything blur, like someone holding a jerky video camera. Things left trails. Hallucinatory.

Her legs were dangling down the stairwell and now the deck was tilting sharply. She would slide down, was sliding, slipping. It would kill her. A three-gravity fall was not good. She still had her weapon, felt it in the one hand that could still feel. Had to wedge it. Had to jam it into the wire mesh, use it to hold on. But the deck was tilting further still, way over, like a pitched roof. And she was weak. Slow.

Fuzzy.

The gun was torn slowly, inexorably from her hand. Her strong grip not strong enough. Slipping and sliding on her own blood. She fell, an eruption of stars in her head, and she lay where she fell, crumpled and jammed into a ball.

Jobs banged on the top of his berth. It was like he was lifting weights with each move. Had he been the only one to see? He was at an angle, maybe so, maybe no one else knew. Maybe it was up to him, him and no one else. He couldn’t see what had happened to the Marine. He could see the other suit, though, the terrorist or whatever he was.

The lid didn’t open. Inside release? Surely they’d built in a panic-button? A release? They wouldn’t lock people into these things with no way to get out. But now there was something else happening. Weird. Like when he had his appendix taken out and they’d given him anesthesia. That’s what it felt like, only slow, very slow-working. The hibernation technology was beginning to work. He was being drawn under, down into a state that would be far, far deeper than sleep.

He scrabbled around, searching with lead fingers, unable to turn his head far enough to see around inside the berth. Oh, man, so sleepy. Where was the release? Where . . .

Where would you put it, Jobs? he asked himself silently. Come on, man, where would it have to be? Should be an easy engineering question. Easy. Unless your brain was being shut down. D-Caf could see him. He could see the kid in the nearest berth on the deck below, seemingly panicking, pushing, trying to get out. It only added to D-Caf’s own panic. Mark had been shot and now he was trapped. The g’s were draining the blood out of his head. His feet ached and buzzed. His head was woozy, dreamy, scared, unable to focus, inchoate panic. Had to get out. Mark. Help him.

The ship was tilted over, D-Caf was on his back now, less straight downward pressure, and now he got his heels into a seam and kicked. The suit jerked up and out of its rack. He slid down the wall and slammed way too hard into the pitched deck. His knees buckled. The wind was knocked out of him. But his brain was clearing a little. A little, not much.

D-Caf crawled uphill, more and more uphill toward Mark. Crawled through blood. He clawed his way to his brother, weeping inside his helmet, crying, “Mark! Mark!” And then, quite suddenly, the ceaseless roar stopped. Not silence, but near silence, comparative silence.

And all at once he could move quite easily. Too easily. He smacked his helmet into a bulkhead.

“Weightless. I’m weightless, Mark,” he said.

He pulled himself cautiously up to be level with Mark. How did you open these stupid helmets? The ring. Okay, yeah, he could do it. D-Caf removed his brother’s helmet, talking to him all the while. The helmet came off. A lava lamp of blood bubbled up from inside. Mark was slumped down inside. Dead. Dead beyond any illusion.

D-Caf cried out. He shoved back and floated across the space, slammed into one of the unused berths and bounced upward to slam against the now-overhead bulkhead. What was he going to do? What was he supposed to do now? Mark was dead. And the two empty berths they were going to take away from the pilot . . . The pilots were still alive. That was the problem. They were still alive.

D-Caf was alone, completely alone now. What was he supposed to do? No Mark. No Mark to make the decision.
The gun, Mark’s gun, their father’s gun was hanging suspended in midair. D-Caf reached for it.

He heard a noise, an exhaust sound, air rushing.

He slapped the bulkhead and spun around. He caught the gun, fumbled it, grabbed for it, just as Jobs came flying too fast, too hard up out of his berth, up the stairwell. Jobs had meant to hit the terrorist, because terrorist he surely was, with his shoulder but caught him only a glancing blow. He stuck out his hand, grabbed the gunman, spun him
around, and then himself hit the far bulkhead. The impact stunned him. There was a shocking jolt of pain in his head and neck.

“You’re weightless, you idiot,” he scolded himself, “not massless.” In the middle of it all, fighting an armed bad guy, he still felt a stab of embarrassment at mishandling weightlessness.

Jobs flattened against the bulkhead as well as he could, and now pushed off with much less force. He drifted, spread-eagle. The gunman was spinning in midair, just like a top, maybe twenty rpm’s. Every three seconds or so the gun came around. Jobs drifted. The gunman came around.

Bam!

Flame shot from the muzzle. It canceled D-Caf’s rotation, but knocked him slowly backward. Jobs was helpless, still floating, nothing within reach, slowly descending on D-Caf, who now leveled the gun. The hatch opened. A space-suited astronaut stuck his head in. The gunman jerked, wavered, as if uncertain who to point the gun at.

Jobs stretched with all his might and just tapped a passing support beam. Now his drift was a spin. He could hear a muffled, faraway voice yelling. Something. Yelling, yelling. The astronaut slid into the room, held his hands up in a placating gesture.

The terrorist fired.

The faceplate of the astronaut’s helmet cracked like safety glass. Jobs was upside down now. He kicked at the overhead and hit the gunman from above and behind. The gun flew and banged loudly around. The terrorist slammed into the deck with Jobs now clinging to him, a monkey on his back.

The gunman was yelling, yelling, and now, in direct contact, Jobs could understand. “It’s a mistake! It’s a mistake! I didn’t mean to shoot! I didn’t mean to shoot!”

A kid’s voice! Just the same, whoever he was, he was writhing, squirming, trying to throw off his tackler. But the suit was far too big for him. It was like trying to fight from inside a big canvas bag.

And all at once there was another set of powerful arms added to the struggle. The other astronaut. Jobs caught a flash of the name stenciled on his suit: col. j.w. Willett. Between them the commander and Jobs pried off the helmet. The two of them blinked in surprise.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” the kid cried. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You shot him in the face, you lying little —” Jobs yelled. “You shot him!”

“I was scared, I didn’t mean to shoot!”

A floating balloon of blood splashed greasily across the young killer’s face. The copilot’s, the Marine’s, or the other bad guy’s, no way to know. The commander left the sobbing kid in Jobs’s hands and went to check on his copilot. When he came back his face was dark and murderous.

“He’s dead,” he grated.

Jobs noticed a hole in the commander’s right hand. Stray bullet? “They shot someone else, too,” Jobs said. “The Marine. The sergeant, I think she was. I don’t know what happened to her. This guy was in one suit, someone else was in the other suit. It was the other guy who shot the Marine.”

The commander removed his own helmet. He ripped off his gloves and looked at a round, red hole right in the center of his palm. “I have to contact Houston. I don’t have authority to deal with this. There’s nothing about this in the mission plan.”

Jobs nodded. He was completely ready to let the commander decide. And if Colonel Willett said call Houston, that was fine.

“What’s your name?” Willett demanded of the blubbering killer.

“D-Caf. It’s D-Caf. You can call me Harlin if you want to, though,” he answered. “That’s my brother over there. Mark. Mark Melman. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.”

“You show up with a gun, you’re trying to hurt someone!” Jobs snapped. “There’s one, maybe two people dead. Not trying to hurt anyone?”

“It was the Rock, not us,” D-Caf moaned.

“First, we get you out of that suit,” Willett ordered D-Caf. “There’ll be air pressure in here for the next few hours. A little less with the hole you managed to shoot in the hull. And after that you can breathe vacuum.”


Okay, maybe Tamara isn't dead, but things sure aren't looking good for D-Caf!


quote:


CHAPTER 20

“GET ME HIS BERTH NUMBER. I’LL THAW HIM OUT.”

The shuttle carrying the Mayflower Project orbited Earth. Those humans below on the planet who knew about them were few. Those that cared, fewer still. Sliding across the day-night barrier into the shadow of Earth, Willett and Jobs could see the lights of a thousand cities and towns. Some were made extra bright by the raging fires of uncontrolled rioting.

The man and the boy were exhausted. They had tied D-Caf up to a support beam. They had maneuvered the unconscious but still breathing Tamara Hoyle into the berth once assigned to the man who’d died on the ground. They’d bandaged the hole in her shoulder. A Band-Aid for a bullet wound.

They had contacted Houston. Houston had said it was up to them. Houston, most of it, most of the men and women who manned the consoles and stood by at the ready, most of them had gone home to family to wait for the end.

Earth was done with the Mayflower. Good luck, Mayflower. Leave us.

“The woman may live,” Willett said. “For a while, anyway. At least we got the tube in her. Maybe the hibernation will help somehow. I don’t know what to do with the kid.”

Jobs shrugged. He didn’t know, either.

“One thing I know: I’m not a jury or a judge,” the astronaut said.

“No,” Jobs agreed.

“I’ll put him in Tom’s berth. Not that it matters much. See this?” He pointed to a readout on the overhead console.

Jobs had been surveying the cockpit with some interest. It was his kind of place: hundreds of knobs and dials and LED readouts.

“That’s the solar sails.”

“The readout’s blank,” Jobs said.

“Yeah. Nothing. No feedback. Could be the readout is just malfunctioning. Could be the processor. Could be a software glitch. My guess? Wire’s been severed. Which means they don’t deploy. Which means we drift out of this solar system of ours at a very leisurely pace.”

“Solar sails?”

Willett nodded. “Yeah. Microthin sheets of some new composite. Supposed to be incredibly strong. And supposedly more efficient, much more efficient. When they were first looking at solar sails as a means of propulsion, most guesses were they’d give us 150,000 miles per hour maximum before we left the solar system. But these are supposed to be different. Don’t ask me how.”

“What kind of speed can we achieve with these new sails?”

“The contractor claims we can loop around the sun and come out the other side doing just under a million miles per hour. Pretty slow, still, considering you’re using light for your wind and the light is moving 186,000 miles per second. And pretty slow if you’re talking about traveling light-years through space. But better than orbital speed by a long shot. Of course, that’s if they were spread. And right now they’re snug in their pods and not going anywhere.”

“Isn’t there some way to fix them?”

Willett smiled. “The standard NASA answer is ‘can do.’ But NASA . . . Well, they hung in there pretty good, you know. They stuck it out till we were off. But they have wives and husbands. They got kids and grandkids they want to spend their last hours with.”

“Yeah.”

For a long while neither of them spoke. Through the windows Jobs could see the sun come up, peeking around the rim of the planet. Daylight somewhere over West Africa. Sunrise, but everyone onboard was fast, fast asleep. They were the only two people awake, aside from D-Caf.

Then Willett said, “We would need an EVA. Someone would have to go out there and literally pry open those pods. There’s supposed to be a manual release there. Supposed to be a crank you can turn, cranks ’em right out. So they tell me.”

Jobs said, “Maybe we should try that.”

Willett held up his bandaged hand.

Jobs held up his own hand. “I could do it.”

“It’s a two-man job. Worse than that, it’s a tight space, no room. You’re small enough, maybe, but we’d need a second man, small as you.”

“I have a friend,” Jobs said.

Willett looked intrigued. “Would he do it? Go outside, I mean?”

Jobs smiled. “If I didn’t take him he’d kill me.”

Willett hesitated. Then, “Get me his berth number. I’ll thaw him out.”



Jobs and Mo'Steel do a spacewalk

* # ? Jan 22, 2024 01:54
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
We're getting 4 chapters today because the last two are super short and that's it for book 1!

quote:



IMPACT

CHAPTER 21

“THAT’S THE ROCK.”


“Mo. Wake up.”

Mo’Steel opened one eye. Then the other. Jobs was leaning right over him. “Are we there?”

Jobs shook his head. “No. You’ve only been under for a couple hours.”

“Huh.” He snorted, rubbed his nose, and sat up. “What’s it about, Duck?”

“Bad stuff, Mo. People getting shot. Some crazy kid and his big brother got in, shot that Marine sergeant.”

“That hot-looking black fem?”

Jobs cocked an eyebrow. “I didn’t really think about whether she was hot, Mo.”

“Mmm. You wouldn’t. So things are screwed up and we’re gonna auger into the sun or whatever and you woke me up so I wouldn’t miss it?”

“Kind of. Here’s the thing: One of the pilots is dead. The other is injured. Some kind of solar sails or whatever won’t deploy. Unless someone goes outside.”

Mo’Steel blinked. Then his eyes lit up. “Outside? Ride the big rocket from the outside?”

For a moment Jobs thought his friend might cry. Mo’Steel grabbed his arm and squeezed. “You’re the best, man.”
seriously love mo

“The commander wanted to know if you’d do it. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous. The suits won’t fit us, the jetpacks are hard to control, we screw up at all and we could end up being separated from the ship. That’d mean we’d probably orbit till we entered the atmosphere and burned up.”

Mo’Steel sat bolt upright. “Let’s go!”

“You’re a dangerously disturbed person, Mo. But one more thing before you say yes: the Rock. It’s coming. We have a very small window for an escape burn to push us out of orbit. The calculations are all based on the sails being deployed before the burn. Colonel Willett may have to light the rockets while we’re still out there.”

“Very woolly,” Mo’Steel agreed, nodding with approval, as though this particular ride had been worked out just for his amusement. “Hey! We’re weightless.”

“Yes. You can thank me later.”

They suited up as quickly as they could with one-armed help from Willett. Slipping into a suit to hide as D-Caf had done was one thing. Actually donning the suit properly so that it would work out in the vacuum of space was another.

Willett walked them through the procedure as well as he could while simultaneously prepping the ship for a burn with his one good hand. Jobs noticed that he had Mark’s revolver on his lap. Jobs wondered how many rounds were left.

“You’ll need to loosen all the bolts holding the sheathing in place. Cast the sheath off. This is important: Don’t throw it forward or back, throw it away from the ship.” He made a motion with both hands and winced at the pain. “And remember your basic physics: equal and opposite reaction, right?”

“Under the sheathing you’ll find the sails coiled up. It’ll look like a big wad of Mylar. Crumpled-up foil. Supposedly this stuff, though, has a shape memory. Meaning, once you crank the ‘mast’ all the way out, the sail should snap into place and spread out on its own. Should. No one’s ever tested this. Like I told you, the calculations — such as they are — call for the sails to be fully deployed prior to escaping orbit. I don’t know how critical that is. Figure we should do our best.”

Mo’Steel nodded. “Don’t worry, Captain. My boy’s got the tech chops.”

Willett looked at Jobs with a flicker more interest. “Steven Jobs, huh? That’s the name you chose? Not Gates or Boole or Eckert or Shastri?”

Jobs smiled. “Steve Jobs made a revolution in a garage.”
DON'T GET ME loving STARTED ON THIS BULLSHIT, JOBS!!

“Fair enough,” Willett said with a sigh. “One of my own boys is pretty good at . . .” He fell silent. He glanced at the revolver. “Okay. I punch up the burn in twenty-five minutes. The Rock . . . it’s going to happen soon. I’ll call you in at the five-minute point. That’s just maybe enough time to get into the airlock and brace yourself.”

“Mmmm.” Mo’Steel rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, anticipating the rush. No time for more. No time for anything like the usual NASA care and caution and endless preparation.

Jobs caught sight of a small framed picture wedged into one of the control panels. It showed a middle-aged woman, a girl, and two boys, all in their early twenties or late teens. He wondered if he should say something. But here, now, more than at any time in his life, Jobs found the right words would not come. He wondered if he should take the gun. But how could he explain it?

Watching a wreck, watching a slow-motion disaster, unable to do anything, anything at all to stop it. Unable even to think of comforting words. Powerless . . .

Jobs turned away. Mo’Steel slapped his shoulder, oblivious, of course, to his friend’s particular concern. They sealed each other’s helmets and stepped into the miniscule airlock. Waited while the air was sucked away, drawn back into the ship.

The indicator light was green.

Mo’Steel threw the latch and levered the hatch open.

Earth was right there, right there, filling the frame. Mo’Steel pushed off very slowly and drifted up through the hatch, or down through the hatch, or left or right or whatever. It was all the same, he thought happily. He drifted through and arrested his movement by reaching down to grab the hatch threshold. He extended outward, legs pointing at Earth. He reached down to lift his friend up/down after him.

Jobs floated out into space, held Mo’Steel’s hand, and they both looked back along the orbiter’s back. The tall tail just touched the rim of the planet. The disorientation was extreme and impossible to resist. The ship was above, below, Earth was down or up, impossible. Hard not to feel like that big old ball, that blue and green and brown ball in the black sky was going to fall on them and crush them. At the same time, it was hard not to feel like you were falling, like you ought to be screaming.

It was impossible to make any sense of it. At least it would be to Jobs, Mo’Steel realized. Funny how you could see tension even through a space suit. It was the way Jobs held himself, all clenched up. Clenched up and hanging upside down above the big ball.

“Don’t think it, Duck,” he advised. “Gotta just do, not think. Follow me.”

Jobs closed his eyes, tried to dispel the sense that he was falling. Opened his eyes again, and this time narrowed his gaze, focused on his friend. This was Mo’s thing, follow Mo. Mo’Steel held Jobs’s shoulder, got behind him, and keyed his maneuvering jets. The two of them eased forward, Jobs balanced like a clumsy but insignificant weight.

They flew at a snail’s pace. Willett had emphasized conserving the maneuvering jets. So they flew very slowly above the orbiter, passing along the long, tight-closed seam of the payload bay, within which slept the Eighty, oblivious, unaware.

“There are the pods,” Jobs said.

“Left or right?”

“Left.”

Mo’Steel keyed his thrusters and they changed vector to intercept the pod on the left wing.

“I think I can land right on it,” Jobs said and stuck his feet out.

“I don’t think so, Duck. Gotta kill momentum with the jets. You’d just bounce off.”

Moments later they were stopped dead — relative to the shuttle. In reality they were traveling at 18,000 miles per hour, give or take. But the elongated pod now appeared to be hanging vertically in front of them, hanging on a long, curved, white wall.

“Wrench,” Jobs said. He felt more comfortable now. This was man and machine. He could do that.

“Forgot the wrench,” Mo’Steel said.

“What?”

“Joke. Untie the gut-knots there, ‘migo.”

Jobs cursed Mo’Steel under his breath, took the wrench, and began loosening bolts. There were twelve, all around the edge of the thin sheathing. He took each bolt and stuffed them into a net bag hanging or floating from his waist.
On the seventh bolt he noticed the small round hole.

“There’s what did it, there’s what cut the wire. Bullet hole. Must have been a stray round from the fight on the ground.”

“Hey, look,” Mo’Steel said.

“What?”

“Is that it?” Mo’Steel tapped Jobs’s shoulder and pointed.

Jobs looked. A small, tumbling, moving object that caught and reflected the sun’s light. Small at least compared to the immensity of the planet. How could that rock possibly hurt this beautiful planet? Surely somehow it would stop, or miss, or not really do the damage everyone said.

Surely not.

People wouldn’t die. No. Continents would not be shattered. No. Something would stop it, something, someone would not let it happen.

“Yeah, Mo. That’s it,” Jobs said. “That’s the Rock.”

gently caress me, the kids are actually going to see the earth get destroyed.


quote:


CHAPTER 22

“TWO WHOLE SECONDS TO SIT HERE AND CHAT.”

They pushed the sheath away. Jobs squeezed his arm and shoulder and part of his upper body into the tight gap between the folded mast and the outer shell of the shuttle. Mo’Steel had to squeeze in beside him to hold down a latch-pawl to allow the crank to turn. Jobs turned the small hand crank once. Twice. Almost impossible to get any kind of leverage. He was eating up time and knew it. But the gloves were bulky and way too big, the space too tight.

He turned again and again and nothing happened.

The Rock was in view. Coming. Coming. No drama, no tail of sparks, no swooshing sound. It occurred to Jobs that it was a pretty lame special effect.

The mast began to lift. Now there was more room, and now he could get leverage, with Mo’Steel anchoring him. The crank turned quickly. The mast rose, as thin as a kid’s fishing rod. The crumpled foil sail rose, too, like wadded-up tinfoil.

Up and up.

Slow. Too slow.

“Boys, this is Colonel Willett. I see you’re making progress, but we’re ten minutes to burn.”

Jobs keyed his intercom. “Right. Almost have the left sail extended. Mo, I’m wearing out: Take a turn.”

They traded places and Mo’Steel spun the crank as fast as he could. Each working till he was sweating and gasping, then handing it off. At last the crank stopped. The sail was extended.

They jetted as quickly as they could over the hump of the shuttle’s back to the right wing. Removing the sheathing was easier this time. They squeezed themselves into place and started to turn the crank.

“Gotta call time, gentlemen,” Willett said. “Maybe one sail deployed is enough.”

Jobs said, “Commander Willett, I’m not an astrophysicist, but aren’t we talking about calculations for escaping solar orbit? I mean, we can burn our way out of Earth’s orbit, but then we have to loop the sun and head out without being captured by the sun’s gravity, right? If we mess with the formula we could end up in orbit forever. Or worse.”

“Son, these calculations are half guesswork anyway. You have to understand, this isn’t the usual NASA mission. No one knows anything for sure.”

Jobs looked at Mo’Steel, caught his attention. He lifted his gold visor and pressed his helmet into contact so they could talk without using the mike and being overheard.

“Mo. I think maybe we gotta do this. But he has to fire the rockets. Maybe we can use our tethers, stay alive, hold on . . .”

“Ride the big rocket and Mother G trying to kill us real hard? You asking or telling?”

“You in?”

“What, like you’re going to take a ride while I bunny?” Mo’Steel laughed, but not happily.

He knew the difference between wild risks and sheer suicide. “I’ll ride along with you, Jobs.”

Jobs keyed his mike. “Commander, we’re staying out here.” He began cranking again, winding as hard and fast as he could.

So the book has been so good at subverting expectations that I fully believe one or both of these kid could die.

“Three minutes to burn,” was Willett’s only answer.

Jobs and Mo’Steel cranked wildly, spelling each other every minute to keep the speed up, smooth now, practiced. The mast extended languidly. The sails grew. Not fast enough. Not fast enough.

“Two minutes,” Willett said. “There’s a sort of carabiner on your belts. You can clip it to the loop on your lifeline and then clip the carabiner to the sail crank itself.”

“Roger that,” Jobs gasped.

“Roger that?” Mo’Steel mocked. “You gone astronaut now?”

“One minute. Repeat, one minute.”

The mast rose. Up and out, impossibly far, with spiderweb veins extending much farther still, extending the Mylar for thousands of square feet. Fully extended, each sail could have blanketed a pair of football fields.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Let me in,” Mo’Steel yelled. He grabbed the crank and worked it like a fiend.

Jobs found the carabiner and with numb fingers snapped it through the loop in his own lifeline. Now for Mo’Steel.

“Twenty.”

Where was his friend’s carabiner? “Turn a little, Mo!”

“I’m turning as fast as I can!”

“I mean your body. Turn this way!”

Jobs snatched the carabiner. It spun away, cartwheeling through space. A desperate lunge, a grab with clumsy gloved fingers.

“Ten seconds to burn.”

He snagged the carabiner. Snap!

“Eight . . . seven . . .”

He lunged, drew Mo’Steel’s lifeline up, and snapped the carabiner onto the handle.

“Six . . .”

Mo’Steel yelled, “What are you doing? I can’t turn the thing if —”

Jobs pulled himself up, too fast, slammed his shoulder into the shuttle skin, spun outward, dangling in space.

Mo’Steel grabbed his arm, pulled him down, yanked the lifeline, and snapped it into place. “Three . . .”

“See? Plenty of time,” Mo’Steel said. “Two whole seconds to sit here and chat.”

“One.”

Less than twenty feet away, the orbiter’s engines exploded into life. No smoke, no roiling cascade of superheated gas, just a jet as neat and symmetrical as a gas stove. Jobs and Mo’Steel were slammed hard downward. Suddenly there was a downward.

Suddenly there was weight as well as mass. Jobs was hanging by his waist, feeling like he weighed two tons. It was not the exorbitant acceleration of liftoff, but it still squeezed his lungs, bent him back, turned his spine into a letter U.

He was upside down, hanging head downward now, a tin can tied to a speeding car. The lifeline was extended fully, and stretching. The cone of fire was only a few feet below, blue-bright, weirdly silent. Was he going to die? Was it now, his death?

He remembered the kid, the strange sleepwalking kid, Billy Weir. “You’ll be there,” he’d said to Jobs. “You’ll be there.”

Where? There.

The burn obscured a part of the planet turning beneath him. But the shuttle was rotating slightly at the same time, and now he could see the Rock.

“Mo! Are you okay?”

No answer. Maybe he hadn’t keyed his mike. Maybe the burn was blanking out the signal. Or maybe Mo wasn’t there to answer. The acceleration seemed to go on forever. He had been hanging there, dangling helpless,
straining for every breath forever.

And suddenly, all at once, it ended.

The cone of fire was gone. The acceleration ceased. The ship was now moving at better than 25,000 miles per hour, but once again the sense of speed disappeared along with the sense of weight.

No death. Not yet.

“You boys still there?” Willett called.

“I’m okay,” Jobs answered.

“Aaahhhh! Aaaahhhh!” Mo’Steel screamed into his mike.

“My friend is okay, too.”

“Head for the airlock, you did good,” the commander said.

Jobs moved hand-over-hand with ease up the length of the lifeline. Mo’Steel met him at the crank and they unhooked.

“Okay, that beat The Pipe,” Mo’Steel said.

But Jobs didn’t answer. He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and pointed. Mo’Steel turned and the two of them hung there, suspended, side by side, as the Rock came to the end of its long trip.



quote:


CHAPTER“IT’S OVER.”

23

Up close, so near Earth, the Rock looked very small. Seventy-six miles in diameter, it was nothing next to the planet measured in thousands of miles. But, up close, so close, Jobs could see the speed of it. Against the backdrop of space you couldn’t sense the awesome speed. But now, as it angled into the atmosphere, in the brief second in which it could be seen outlined against blue ocean, it seemed impossibly fast. The Rock entered the atmosphere and for a flash became a spectacular special effect: The atmosphere burned, a red gash in its wake.

It struck the western edge of Portugal. Portugal and Spain were hit by a bullet the size of Connecticut. The Iberian peninsula was a trench, a ditch. The Mediterranean Sea, trillions of gallons of water, exploded into steam. Every living thing in the water, every living thing ashore, was parboiled in an instant. Portugal, Spain, southern France, all of Italy, the Balkans, the coast of northern Africa, Greece, southern Turkey, all the way to Israel was obliterated in less than five seconds. They were the cradles of Western civilization one second, a hell of superheated steam and flying rock the next.

The destruction was too swift to believe. In the time Jobs could blink his eyes, Rome and Cairo, Athens and Barcelona, Istanbul and Jerusalem and Damascus were gone. Not reduced to rubble, not crushed, not devastated. This wasn’t like war or any disaster humans understood. Rock became gravel, soil melted and fused, water was steam, living flesh was reduced to singed single cells. Nothing recognizable remained. The impact explosion was a million nuclear bombs going off at once. The rock and soil and waters that had once defined a dozen nations formed a pillar of smoke and flying dirt and steam. The mushroom cloud punched up through the atmosphere, flinging dust and smoke particles clear into space.

Jobs could see a chunk of Earth, some fragment left half-intact, maybe twenty miles across, spin slowly up in the maelstrom. There were houses. Buildings. A hint of tilled fields. Rising on the mushroom cloud, flying free, entering space itself.

The entire planet shuddered. It was possible to see it from space: The ground rippled, as if rock and soil were liquid. The shock wave was an earthquake that toppled trees, collapsed every human-built structure around the planet, caused entire mountain chains to crumble. The oceans rippled in tidal waves a thousand feet high. The Atlantic Ocean rolled into New York and over it, rolled into Charleston and over it, rolled into Miami and washed across the
entire state of Florida. The ocean waters lapped against the Appalachian Mountain chains, swamped everything in their way, smothered all who had not been killed by the blast or the shock wave.

People died having no idea why. People were thrown from their beds, dashed against walls that collapsed onto them. People who survived long enough to find themselves buried alive beneath green sea many miles deep. Jobs saw the planet’s rotation slow. The day would stand still for the few who might still be alive.

The impact worked its damage on the fissures and cracks in Earth’s crust. Jobs watched the Atlantic Ocean split right down the middle, emptying millions of cubic miles of water as if it was of no more consequence than pulling the plug on a bathroom sink.

The planet was breaking up. Cracking apart. Impossibly deep fissures raced at supersonic speeds around the planet. They cut through the crust, through the mantle, deeper than a thousand Grand Canyons.

Now the Pacific, too, drained away. It emptied into the molten core of Earth itself. The explosion dwarfed everything that had gone before. As Jobs watched, motionless, crying but not aware of it, Earth broke apart. It was as if some invisible hand were ripping open an orange. A vast, irregular chunk of Earth separated slowly from the planet, spun sluggishly, slowly away. The sides of this moon-sized wedge scraped against the sides of the gash, gouged up countries, ground down mountains.

And now this wedge of Earth itself broke in half. Jobs saw what might have been California, his home, turn slowly toward the sun. If anyone is left alive, he thought, if anyone is still alive, they’ll see the sunrise this one last time.
Earth lay still at last. Perhaps a quarter of the planet was bitten off, drifting away to form a second and a third Earth. The oceans were gone, boiled off into space. The sky was no longer blue but brown, as dirt and dust blotted out the sun. Here and there could still be seen patches of green. But it was impossible to believe, to hope, that any human being had survived.

All of humanity that still lived was aboard the shuttle that now slid slowly toward the distant sun.

The mike crackled to life. “Come on in, boys. It’s over.”

that was some very evocative writing

quote:


CHAPTER 24

“PUT ME TO SLEEP, OR KILL ME, BUT MAKE IT STOP.”


In his berth Jobs swallowed the tube, forced it down into his stomach. The transparent lid closed over him. Sleep. Sleep. Death. What did it matter? How did you live when your world was dead?

He felt the drowsiness of hibernation. Do it faster, he thought, put me to sleep, turn off my brain. Turn the lights out on the movie in my head, the pictures of all the faces, all the people I’ve known, the ones I liked and loved, the ones I cared nothing for, the ones I never knew.

“Put me to sleep, or kill me, but make it stop,” he whispered.

He was still awake to hear the distant, muffled explosion. A gun. Colonel Willett would not be coming along on this trip.

Sleep took Jobs. And Mo’Steel. The hibernation equipment slowed their hearts and then stopped them. Slowed the bouncing electrical impulses in their brains, and stopped them. They were as dead as the people of Earth, but with at least a hope of rebirth somewhere, sometime.

Tamara Hoyle was already deep in the hibernation death-sleep. But the technology had never been designed for pregnant women. The machine knew nothing of the fetus inside her.

2Face slept, her berth between those of her parents.

Yago slept, as alone now as ever.

D-Caf slept, calm at last.

Billy Weir lay unmoving, his body paralyzed. He could not hear. Could not see. Could not move. The hibernation equipment slowed every process, stopped every activity. But Billy Weir did not sleep. His brain did not shut down.
The Mayflower fell toward the sun, accelerating all the while, faster and faster yet still painfully, pitifully slow in the distances of space. It would fall toward the sun for years. And slowly come around the sun, for years. And gain still more speed and race away from the sun and past the shattered remains of dark Earth for years stretching into decades.

Centuries.

And still, Billy Weir would not sleep.



Well that's ominous.

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 02:02
  • Quote
someone awful.
Sep 7, 2007


 this is heavy in a way i was really not expecting, even from the premise. fascinated to see where the next book goes.

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 02:44
  • Quote
Remalle
Feb 12, 2020


 Still don't know how I feel about the names (really, Jobs?) but I loved this first book. Can't wait to see where it goes from here!

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 03:05
  • Quote
Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
Longer than you think, dad! Longer than you think!

e: more seriously, that was a well-written asteroid impact! The initial one felt kind of abstracted- lots of superheated steam &etc, but no mention of what that actually looks like. Maybe I'm spoiled from one too many Kim Stanley Robinson books; that man will happily spend whole chapters describing the colour of a specific geological process.
I think it was mentioned upthread, but murdering Cordelia after giving her an extremely "protagonist" introduction was a smart move from the authors. This book is happy to kill off characters!

Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jan 23, 2024

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 03:15
  • Quote
bird food bathtub
Aug 9, 2003

College Slice
Well poo poo, this series is taking some amazing and dark turns. Centuries in hibernation but still being conscious? That's a recipe for a completely broken psyche.

It's also got enough aftershocks of the expectation subversion that, yeah, I genuinely was unsure if they were going to survive the space walk.

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 18:17
  • Quote
QuickbreathFinisher
Sep 28, 2008

by reading this post you have agreed to form a gay socialist micronation.
`
Read this last night and have been revisiting the imagery mentally all day. What a haunting and beautiful description of the end of the world.

It feels a little too pat to have the only girl our protagonist has ever kissed also be the girl made famous by her death and footage of the mini asteroid, but that's a minor complaint. Really enjoyed this book and from scanning the somewhat shoddily written wiki, have no real idea where things will go other than darker and weirder. Excited to ride the asteroid as it were.

Tree Bucket posted:

Longer than you think, dad! Longer than you think!

The Jaunt was my first thought as well :hfive: I'm sure little Billy will suffer no ill effects from centuries of consciousness with zero sensory input.

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 19:06
  • Quote
Jim the Nickel
Mar 2, 2006


friendship is magic
in a pony paradise
don't you judge me
Whew, that description of the Earth breaking apart has always stuck with me. Looking forward to the next few months rediscovering the wild poo poo ahead with y'all.

* # ? Jan 23, 2024 22:22
  • Quote
Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf
I believe the "Earth dies" chapter was included as a preview in Animorphs #54

* # ? Jan 25, 2024 02:25
  • Quote
wizardofloneliness
Dec 30, 2008

 Oh man, I was really into this series when I was a kid. Well, for the first 4 or 5 books, then I lost interest. A giant asteroid destroying the earth was one of my big fears as a kid, but I also loved reading and watching stuff about huge natural disasters, so I was pretty obsessed with the first book.

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 02:34
  • Quote
Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys

QuickbreathFinisher posted:

The Jaunt was my first thought as well :hfive: I'm sure little Billy will suffer no ill effects from centuries of consciousness with zero sensory input.

Little Billy was already pretty weird. I mean he can't get any worse right?

wizardofloneliness posted:

Oh man, I was really into this series when I was a kid. Well, for the first 4 or 5 books, then I lost interest. A giant asteroid destroying the earth was one of my big fears as a kid, but I also loved reading and watching stuff about huge natural disasters, so I was pretty obsessed with the first book.

Ah! I assumed there was only one of these, for some reason. Does the series have an ending? Does this series' Visser 3 get hurled out of an airlock at any point? Are there more cool "earth gets disintegrated" chapters!!? Although I guess you can only really do that once, right

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 02:45
  • Quote
Coca Koala
Nov 28, 2005

ongoing nowhere
College Slice
lotta planets out there, and a lot of rocks just waiting to hit them.

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 02:54
  • Quote
Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
Well, once per book, I mean.
There's still hope peril for the actual earth!

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 02:57
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
There are 14 books and we will start book 2 tomorrow, sorry for the delay, have been getting hyperfocused on a couple video games the last couple days.

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 08:36
  • Quote
Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
14 books-! No way. I really thought there was only one.
In order to get in the right headspace, I'm gonna go google up the top-selling video games for the year Remnants came out.

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 09:41
  • Quote
bird food bathtub
Aug 9, 2003

College Slice

Soonmot posted:

There are 14 books and we will start book 2 tomorrow, sorry for the delay, have been getting hyperfocused on a couple video games the last couple days.

You can admit you're running around capturing Legally Distinct Not-Pokemon here. This is a safe space and nobody will judge you.

I just got into the volcano zone for some really good miners and bred an Anubis with rank 4 crafting it's amazing.

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 13:38
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
Palworld only started for me yesterday, before that it was a mix of tavern master, dave the diver, and bg3

* # ? Jan 26, 2024 16:05
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer


quote:

DESTINATION UNKNOWN

REMNANTS #2

Prologue


It took less than a year for Billy Weir to lose his mind.

He lay still, absolutely still, unable to move a muscle, unable to move his eyes, unable to control his breathing, paralyzed, utterly, absolutely paralyzed. The technology of the hibernation berth had worked. It was ninety-nine-point-nine-percent successful. It had stopped his heart, his kidneys, his liver. It had stopped every system, down
to the cellular level.

It had failed to still his mind.

The system supplied his minuscule needs for oxygen and water and nutrition. But it did nothing for the sleepless consciousness imprisoned in the all-but-dead body. He raved silently. He hallucinated. He regained his sanity and lost it and regained it as the years passed, as the decades passed, as the very definition of madness became irrelevant.

He was in hell. He was in heaven. He floated, disembodied. He was chained to his own corpse. He rose and sank. He thought and imagined, and he almost flickered out, extinguished.

He begged for death.

And all of it over again, again, again. Time was nothing, leaping by in years and decades, crawling past so slowly that each millisecond might be a century. In his madness he remembered every memory. He remembered when his name was Ruslan, not William. He remembered the cold and loneliness of the orphanage in Chechnya after his
parents were killed. He remembered his adoptive parents, their comfortable Texas home, school, church, McDonald’s, the backyard pool, his room. He remembered every song he had ever heard, every TV show, every friend, acquaintance, enemy, every passing face in the mall. He remembered the wallpaper. The flyspecks on it. Everything.

He dredged everything up out of his memory, everything, every fragment of everything. Memory was all he had. Memory and the unchanging tableau of the hibernation berth’s lid, the wire mesh catwalk above it, the shadow of the berths stacked above his. At some point, after a very long time, he began to remember memories that were not his. The memories that belonged to the other sleepers became his as well. Real, imagined, or it made no difference?

He reached out with his mind, searching, desperate, like no human child had ever been desperate before; he strained to touch something new, anything that would feed the hunger. But the hunger was a bottomless pit, a gulf that could never be filled, a silence that could not be broken.

Real or unreal? he asked himself, wondered, then, after a while, stopped caring. Let any image come, he welcomed it. Let any new idea appear, it was a banquet, and he didn’t care if it was real or unreal.

The years reeled by. He felt the deaths all around him. He felt the dim lights go out one by one. He felt all the awesome emptiness of space as the shuttle rode feeble light waves far, far beyond the orbit of dead Earth. And when at last the new thing happened, the unexpected thing, the impossible thing, he still did not know if it was real.
The unexpected brought hope, and hope shattered him all over again.

Billy Weir lay still.

Waiting.

oh what the gently caress, that is a grim start to book two. We have 62 pages and the first 10 are today.


quote:


CHAPTER 1

“IS ANYONE THERE?”



Jobs opened his eyes.

He closed them again, and slept.

More than a day later he opened his eyes again. Blinked. The blink seemed to last long minutes. His eyelids slid slowly, slowly up, and slowly, slowly down. Like rusty garage doors.

What he saw meant nothing. The rods and cones in his eyes sent messages down a nerve wire that responded as slowly as his lids. Nerve fired nerve in ludicrously slow motion. When at last the images reached his brain they did not electrify his visual centers. The images seeped like a stain, transmitted reluctantly by rusty neurons.

Blink.

See.

Process.

But no one was yet at home in Jobs’s brain. This slow-motion action was carried on automatically, mechanically. A very old car engine being started. Starter grinding. Crankshaft turning resentfully. No spark to light the gas.

Then, all at once, he was there.

He was there. Aware. Aware of being aware. Able to form a question. Able to wonder. To experience confusion.

Where was he?

For that matter, who was he?

His eyes scanned slowly, left to right, practically screeching in their sockets, ball bearings that had not been lubricated in far too long.

Something close. Partly clear, frosted over. And something beyond the partly clear partition. A wire mesh, just a couple of feet above his face.

He was on his back. Arms at his side.

Sebastian Andreeson. That was his name. Yes.

No. Jobs. That was the name he’d taken.

Jobs. Okay.

Now where was he? And why did he feel so awful?

He hurt. Everywhere. From fingernails to toenails and everything in between. His head hurt. Hurt like he’d caught a fastball in the temple.

His mouth hurt. Sandpaper and twigs.

His skin itself hurt, as if someone had removed it, stretched it out, and reattached it badly. It didn’t seem to fit.

Where am I? he wondered, but no sound came out. He knew sound should have come out, but surely that dry, wispy rattle couldn’t be the right sound.

He tried to move a hand.

Exquisite pain. Pain that made his breath catch in his throat, and that in itself hurt. Still, he had to move. Painful or not, he had to find out what was going on. He couldn’t just lie here. Wherever “here” was. He was a little afraid. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t normal. Was it?

He searched his memory. Not like opening computer files. More like prying open the door to a cobwebbed library full of ancient crumbling p-books. He tried again to move his hand. It still hurt. Nevertheless, he moved it, raised it slowly to touch his face. He touched his chin. Not very useful, but reassuring. The other hand. Move it, too. There you go, Jobs, both hands together. There you go. The release switch is right there.

“How do I know?” he wondered aloud.

Doesn’t matter how I know, he told himself, silently now, I just know. The release for the hibernation berth . . .

What? Hibernation berth?

Brain waking up. Door to memory open. Okay. Rest a minute.

Hibernation berth, we know that. Right?

Yes, Jobs, we know that.

Suddenly memory came pouring forth, a waterfall of memory, a drowning surge of memory. Mom — Mayflower — shuttle — asteroid — Mo’Steel — solar sails — the Rock — the commander shooting himself — that crazy kid and his murdering brother and the Rock and oh, god, Cordelia, no, no, no, no, everyone smashed to pieces, Earth broken, broken, all those people dead —

“Ahh, ahhh!” he moaned.

His right hand found the release, pushed it, and the Plexiglas lid slid open halfway and stuck.

He pushed up, hard, both hands, agony!

Tried to sit up and failed. A vast weariness came over him. His head swam, and he slipped back and under, under, under.

Many hours later Jobs opened his eyes again.

He knew who he was and where he was. And even why he was there. The Mayflower Project. Earth’s pitiful, last-second reaction to annihilation. The asteroid everyone just called the Rock. Jobs had seen it hit. There had been problems deploying the solar sails, he and the pilot were the only ones conscious. So Jobs revived Mo’Steel and the two of them had gone EVA to repair the problem. They had been out there, hanging in orbit, with a perfect, uncluttered view as the massive asteroid struck Earth and took seven billion lives.

He sat up. Carefully. Cautiously.

He stared at the hibernation berth next to his own. His dad’s berth. The Plexiglas was dark. The dull yellow lights showed something fibrous, as if the berth had been filled with . . .

Jobs reeled. His stomach heaved with nothing to expel. A weird moan came from his dry throat.

The berth was filled with what could only be fungus of some sort, generations of it, filling the berth. Like bread mold. That’s how it looked. Green and black. No shape visible within, nothing human, just a six-foot box filled with decay.
Jobs’s hands shook. He reached to open the lid.

No. No. No, he couldn’t. No, there was nothing in there, nothing for him to see. Let it be an undifferentiated horror, don’t let some faint outline of the familiar appear. He didn’t want to see his father’s skull, his teeth grinning up through the rot, no.

He turned away.

“Is anyone there?” he croaked.

No answer.

It took forever to roll out of the berth. He moved like the oldest man on Earth. He moved like some arthritic hundred-year-old. He panted, exhausted, on his knees, wedged between his own berth and his father’s. He crawled, gasping with exertion. His mother’s berth. Oh, please, not that rotting filth.

Anything but that.

He pulled himself to where he could look in, weeping without tears. His mother was still there. Her skin was crumpled parchment. Her eye sockets were sunken, eyes gone. Some of her teeth lay in a heap in the back of her throat. They had fallen from absent gums. A gold crown still gleamed. Dead. No possible doubt. Dead. Dead for a long time, dead.

His brother? Edward?

He crawled to his brother’s berth, and there, breathing peacefully, his brother rested, as though napping. Jobs lay half-across his brother’s berth and fell asleep.


okay yeah chapter 1 did not get anymore less grim holy poo poo yall


quote:


CHAPTER 2

“IF THIS IS A DREAM, IT’S THE MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER, AND BROTHER OF WEIRD.”

“You’re alive,” a voice said.

A hand shook Jobs’s shoulder, but gently, seemingly knowing the pain he was in. Slowly he revived. He saw a half-ruined face. A pretty girl, Asian, with half her face melted like wax.

“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m 2Face. We met back on Earth. Do you remember Earth? Do you remember what happened?”

He nodded dully. He looked, helpless to stop himself, at the filthy decay of his father’s berth.

“A lot are like that,” 2Face said. “I don’t think very many of us are still alive. On my way up here I saw a few who looked alive. Sleeping, still. And there are some that . . . some, I don’t know.”

Jobs searched her face. She looked as if she had been crying. But maybe that was because of the drooping eye on her burned side.

“Do you think you can walk?” 2Face asked.

“I don’t know,” Jobs said.

“I think maybe we should get out of here,” 2Face said.

Jobs shook his head. “We have to help these . . .”

“We’re too weak. I keep falling asleep. I just heard you, so I climbed up here. But we have to get out. Outside. This place is . . . there are dead people everywhere.” Her voice that had been so calm was edging toward hysteria.
“There’s just things, people, stuff you don’t, I mean, I was climbing up here because I heard you moving and I passed by . . . and my mom . . . it’s just . . . and they don’t even smell, you know, not like dead people, like nothing,
or like, like yeast, like bread . . .”

“Take it easy, take it easy, don’t think about it,” Jobs said.

“Don’t think about it?!” 2Face screamed. “Don’t think about it?!”

Jobs grabbed her face in his hands. The melted flesh felt strange. She stared at him, wild. “We start screaming, we’re never going to stop,” Jobs said. “My brain is ready to explode, my mom and dad and everything. But we have to think. We have to think.”

She nodded vigorously, searching his eyes as if looking for reflections of her own panic. “Okay, we stick together, okay?”

“Yeah,” Jobs agreed readily. “We stick together. Help each other. Neither one of us thinks too much, okay? We just try and figure out . . .” He couldn’t imagine what he had to figure out. The images of his parents, the fear that his little brother might awaken and see them for himself, all of it was too much, like he was trying to take a drink from a fire hose, too much data, too much horror.

2Face said, “Okay, come on, we stick together.” Her calm had returned, almost as if it was her turn to be rational while he fought the torrent of fear and grief. “Okay, we need to find out what happened. Are we . . . I mean, where are we, the ship, I mean? Did we land somewhere? Are we still in space?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Jobs nodded, anxious to come to grips with simple problems. “Yeah. We’re not weightless. Okay. We’re not weightless. So we can’t be in space. Unless we’re accelerating. Then we’d have weight.”

“That’s good, think about that,” 2Face said.

“Let’s go up. To the bridge. We can see where we are.”

“To the bridge. Maybe the captain is up there, he can tell us, if he made it, I mean.”

“He didn’t,” Jobs said, remembering a dull thump, the sound of a gun being fired. The sound of a man’s choice not to live on when his wife and children and home and very species were gone. “Long story. There were some problems. Come on. Let’s go to the bridge.”

Each step up the ladder was painful. But each step was less painful than the step before. They climbed past the place where D-Caf and his brother, Mark Melman, had stowed away. Where Mark had shot the Marine sergeant. What was her name? Jobs couldn’t remember. Had she survived? How could she, she’d been shot, badly wounded when they bundled her into a hibernation berth. His own perfectly healthy parents had not survived, how could a
wounded woman?

And Mo’Steel. What about Mo? He should check on Mo. No. No more hideous Plexiglas coffins. He didn’t want to see any more horrors.

They reached the crawlway that connected the cargo area to the flight deck. The hatch was open. Jobs went in first.
He had to climb up. The tunnel was meant to be used either in a weightless environment or crawled through when the shuttle was at rest horizontally. The tunnel opened onto a space below the flight deck. It was mostly crammed with lockers. What they contained he didn’t know, but water would have been his first choice. He was desperately thirsty.

There was a ladder that in this position was more an impediment than a help. He crawled onto the flight deck. It was designed for horizontal flight, with the seats set in such a way that during the landing phase, the pilots would be positioned like the pilots of any commercial jet.

So when Jobs entered the flight deck the seats were above him, over his back. He stood up and stretched. Looking straight up, Jobs could see a sliver of light through the small cockpit windshield. Like looking up through a skylight. Strange. The sky was blue, and for a moment he felt a leap of irrational hope. They were home! On Earth. All of it a dream.

But the blue of the sky was not the depthless, indeterminate blue of Earth’s sky. The sky seemed to be made up of blue scales. Dabs of blue and dabs of violet. Even streaks of green. And the cloud he saw was no cloud that had ever floated through Earth’s sky. It was white in parts, but also brown, with streaks of brown dragged across the white.

The whole mass of the sky moved, vibrated. As if the wind blew, but blew nowhere in particular, just reshuffled the scales and smears of color.

“What is it?” 2Face asked. She was staring up past him.

“I don’t know.”

He helped her to her feet. They stood on what would normally be a vertical bulkhead. The shuttle had landed. Somewhere. Gravity was downward, which meant that, impossible as it clearly was, it had landed nose up. It had landed in takeoff position. Utterly impossible.

The shuttle had no way to achieve this. The thought had been that the ship’s computers would, on sensing the right circumstances, trim the solar sails to achieve deceleration and enter orbit around some theoretical, hoped-for, prayed-for planet. After that, the thinking was that any orbit would inevitably deteriorate, and the shuttle would then be able to land in its normal configuration under the guidance of a revived pilot.

Of course, the shuttle normally landed on a smooth, paved runway. Not on prairie. Not on water. Not on mountainsides. Not in craters. Jobs knew (just as everyone aboard knew) what a mishmash of faint hopes and ludicrous delusions this mission represented. There never had been anything more than a disappearingly
small chance of success.

Fly through space toward no particular goal, have the solar sails work both to accelerate and decelerate and then have the absurd good luck to land on a planet with reasonable gravity and a very convenient landing strip positioned wherever they happened to touch down?

Absurd.

But to do all that and somehow end up vertical?

“Maybe we’re still asleep,” Jobs muttered.

“I don’t think so, Duck. I don’t have dreams like this.”

The voice was instantly familiar.

“Mo?”

Mo’Steel leaned out into view overhead. He was perched in the captain’s seat. He was smiling, but nothing like his usual Labrador-retriever grin.

“I’m alive,” Mo’Steel reported. “If this is a dream, it’s the mother, father, sister, and brother of weird. We got all of weird’s cousins in on this. Come on up. You gotta see this. You have got to see this.”

Okay, we're in for a ride, gang!

* # ? Jan 27, 2024 03:01
  • Quote
Mazerunner
Apr 22, 2010

Good Hunter, what... what is this post?

Coca Koala posted:

Yeah, same - this series is really swinging into giving you named characters with backstories and motivations who immediately die.

I'm kind of curious to see how this storyline is going to swerve into having kids be in charge - in Everworld it worked neatly because they were a group of 4-5 and had to make decisions for themselves, but here you've got batches of teenagers plus a bunch of adults who are nominally in charge and supervising. Is every single adult in this story going to meet with an untimely end?

you jinxed em

* # ? Jan 27, 2024 11:21
  • Quote
Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
Welp, the sleep pod filled with fungal spores sure is an image!

* # ? Jan 27, 2024 11:34
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

quote:



CHAPTER 3

“OKAY, THIS IS NOT CERTIFIED ORGANIC. THIS IS MESSED UP.”


It took some effort but 2Face managed to climb up to where Mo’Steel sat. He took her hands and hauled her up by main force. He was amazingly strong, especially given the weak-kitten state she and Jobs were in. He must have been awake longer. He seemed more fully recovered from hibernation.

Once up, 2Face helped Mo’Steel pull Jobs up to their now-cramped spot. They squeezed together onto the back-support of the copilot’s chair, with their heads pushed into gray panels of switches and knobs and LEDs. Mo’Steel nodded toward the other seat. A space suit was strapped in place minus helmet. A skull lolled against the collar.

“The commander,” Jobs said. To 2Face he explained, “He decided he didn’t want to come.”

“Yeah,” Mo’Steel said.

2Face stared. It was almost comical. A grinning Halloween skeleton dressed up as an astronaut. Surely it had been there a long time. She tore her eyes away, unwilling to think about it. Her mother was dead. She had no grief to spare for this poor man.

Mo’Steel said, “If you stand up you can look out and around through the side window here. Careful, though, it takes a while before the old body gets hooked up right. And watch this panel here, sharp edges.”

Jobs stood. 2Face stood, held on to what should have been an overhead array of switches. She looked.

She gasped.

The ship stood tall, the only man-made thing. Filling the narrow view was a landscape that seemed to literally vibrate with color and movement. Green and yellow and blue. There were trees with royal-blue trunks and branches, brown trunks, even purple. Leaves that were more like rough smears of color, light and dark greens, honey-golds. The branches seemed to poke in and out of the leaves with only the most rudimentary logic.

Tall grass, or at least something that at first glance looked like grass, extended down a hill to a blue-and-violet river bordered in umber. Beyond the river the grass took over again, offset by a smear of reddish-brown. In the distance was the suggestion of a village, whitewashed walls tinged green and red tile roofs set at improbable angles. Above it all, the pulsating blue sky, so alive, but at the same time flat, without depth.

“Excellent, huh?” Mo’Steel asked.

“What is it?” 2Face wondered aloud. “None of it seems real. I mean, I think it’s real, but it’s like . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I mean, the sky, it’s as if the blue isn’t air but a million small blue birds flying around all packed in close together.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jobs said. “The colors are so intense. How can it be real, though? Look at the way the river moves. Shouldn’t water move like water, no matter where you are? It’s more like . . . like it kind of smears past, like, like big sections of it kind of move together.”

“Maybe it’s ice. Maybe it’s not water at all,” 2Face suggested.

“Or maybe our heads are all messed up,” Mo’Steel suggested. “You know? How long were we asleep? You know your eyes don’t totally focus when you first wake up and stuff sounds too loud and all?”

2Face tore her gaze from the agitated, too-bright landscape. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s all in our heads.”

“This ship is standing upright,” Jobs said cautiously. “That’s impossible. Unless it’s real, I mean. But theoretically it’s impossible. So maybe this is just a dream.”

“Deep,” Mo’Steel mocked.

“Maybe my mom isn’t dead,” 2Face whispered. “Maybe none of them are dead. If it’s a dream. We don’t know, right?”

The three of them sat down, wedged uncomfortably together, hugging to keep from falling, sharing one seat until Mo’Steel leaped the gap to reach the chair occupied by the skeleton.

“We’re going to need to bury him, I guess.”

“No hurry,” Jobs said darkly.

Mo’Steel pulled at the seat belt but it came apart in his fingers. The corpse shifted, slid, fell off the side of the chair, fell to the bulkhead with a sound like a dropped bundle of sticks.

“Sorry, Commander,” Mo’Steel said without seeming very disturbed. “What are we going to do?” Mo’Steel asked Jobs, sounding to 2Face as if it couldn’t possibly be his responsibility to figure it out himself. 2Face wasn’t sure she liked him. She was drawn to Jobs’s quiet, thoughtful way. But Mo’Steel had a way of being jumpy in his own skin, like there were too many calories being burned. He reminded her of the landscape she’d just observed.

“I guess sooner or later we need to go back downstairs,” Jobs said. His reluctance was evident in his look and tone. He didn’t try to hide the fact that what was down there in the Mayflower capsule horrified him.

2Face definitely shared that sense of horror. Pain was down there. Loss. Unimaginable loss. Mo’Steel rocked back and forth on his heels and looked like he’d rather talk about something else. He stood up and looked out of the port-side window and yelped.

“Yah-ah-ah!” He pulled back, blinked, looked again. He pointed accusingly. “Okay, this is not certified organic. This is messed up.”

“We’ve seen it,” 2Face said, feeling a little annoyed.

“Uh-uh.” Mo’Steel shook his head vigorously. He pointed at the starboard-side window. “You’ve seen that. You have not seen this.”

Jobs frowned and with help from his friend made his way across to the far seat. He took a long look, several breaths, and took 2Face’s hand to guide her across. She pushed between the two guys and looked.

No, she had not seen this.

It was in black-and-white. Entirely. Not a splash of color, not a glimmer. The sky was gray with puffy white clouds. The ground was broken up into a series of deep channels or canyons cut deep around precarious mesas. Looming in the distance, rising up from the fractured plain was a massive mountain range, snowcapped at the jagged peaks.
No color. None. Light gray and medium gray and darkest gray shadows edging to black in the deep places.

They raced back at dangerous speeds to check the first view. It was still there, still a wild profusion of greens and blues and golds. Two landscapes. Completely incompatible. Completely impossible.

“The dream thing is seeming more and more likely,” 2Face said.

“There should be a chronometer of some kind,” Jobs said suddenly. He began searching the ranks of dials, readouts, and switches. Most of the readouts were blank. But when he toggled certain switches some of the readouts came to life.

“There should be some kind of mission clock,” he muttered. “Time from launch or whatever. There. There it is.”

A small digital readout displayed a long string of numbers.

“It’s still running. Look. Not seconds, minutes. It’s only showing minutes,” 2Face said, looking over his shoulder.
“Two-hundred-sixty-two million, eight-hundred-seventeen thousand, nine-hundred-and-twelve minutes,” Jobs said. “Mo?”

To 2Face’s amazement Mo’Steel calculated instantaneously.

“Five-hundred years, twelve days, and some spare change, Duck,” Mo’Steel said.


quote:


CHAPTER 4

“WE HAVE TO DO WHAT WE CAN.”


As they descended into the capsule again, Jobs was grateful for the mysterious landscape of the planet. Grateful for the mystery of how the shuttle carrying the Mayflower capsule had come to land in so impossible a position. Anything that took his mind off the work at hand was welcome.

His father and mother were dead. If his brother, Edward, was still alive at all, he was unconscious.

Five centuries. They had drifted through space for five-hundred years. Not strange that the untested hibernation equipment had failed his parents, more surprising that it had preserved him. Nothing man-made worked for five hundred years.

Another mystery. More unknowns. So much better than the knowns.

“I don’t think we’d better open any of these units,” Jobs said. “Even if we see someone we thinkis alive, we better let them be. I don’t understand how this system works. But it must have a programmed revival sequence.”

“I hear something,” 2Face said. “Listen.”

Jobs heard it, too. A human voice. Groaning.

Mo’Steel scrambled into the “basement,” through the hatch and then down the circular steps as fast as a monkey, sliding more than stepping.

“Someone’s alive down here,” he called up.

Jobs and 2Face followed at a more normal pace.

“How did he do that?” 2Face whispered. “The thing with the minutes, I mean.”

In a low voice Jobs said, “Mo’s crazy, he’s a wild man, doesn’t care about much except the next adrenaline rush. Doesn’t mean he’s stupid, especially with numbers.”

“Idiot savant,” 2Face muttered.

“Mo’s my best friend,” Jobs said. He would have said more, but Mo’Steel didn’t need defending. If 2Face was as smart as she seemed, she’d come to appreciate Mo’Steel. If not, well, that would be her loss.

“Sorry,” 2Face said.

They reached the level where Mo’Steel squatted beside a young woman. Jobs recognized the Marine sergeant. Her uniform, like his own clothing, was brittle and in tatters, but the dark camouflage pattern was still recognizable. She was not alone in her berth. A child lay there, a boy, seemingly asleep on her belly. It wasn’t a newborn. It might have been a two- or three-year-old. And there was a weird, cylindrical, almost translucent piece of skin that seemed to hold them together. It began near the sergeant’s shoulder and snaked its way into the baby’s side. Tamara was awake. Confused, as Jobs had been on waking, sleepy.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Mo’Steel comforted her in a gentle voice. “No rush. You’re not going anywhere yet.”

The woman blinked and tried to focus. She tried to speak but only a groan was heard. 2Face leaned over. “You’re on the shuttle still. We’ve landed. Somewhere. We don’t know where.”

Jobs pointed to a small round hole in the woman’s uniform near where the long, cordlike piece of skin started, and gave 2Face a significant look. 2Face tugged gently at the cloth. It tore easily. The bullet hole in her shoulder could be clearly seen as a neat round scar, lighter than the surrounding flesh. Tamara seemed to be trying to form a question.

“You were shot. You may not remember it right away,” Jobs said. “A stowaway shot you. But it looks like it healed during hibernation. Maybe the machine . . . maybe just time . . .”

“No,” Tamara said, forcing the word out. “Baby . . . my baby . . .”

“She must have been pregnant when she went into hibernation,” 2Face said in a low voice.

Then, loud enough for Tamara to hear, “The baby was born. God knows how. It’s right here. It’s on you. In fact, it’s attached to you.”

Tamara nodded slowly. Her hands felt blindly and Mo’Steel gently guided her fingers to her baby’s face. The baby opened its eyes. Jobs recoiled, banged his head on the low deck above. 2Face cried out, an expression of pure horror. The baby’s eyes had run, liquid, out onto its mother’s belly. It stared at them now with empty eye sockets.

“Wha . . .?” Tamara moaned.

Mo’Steel was the first to recover. “Nothing. Nothing, lady. Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

Tamara slipped back into sleep. The baby, at any rate, blinked its empty eyes and seemed to be watching them with great interest. Jobs, 2Face, and Mo’Steel pulled back.

“Radiation,” Jobs whispered. “Five centuries in space. This capsule is lead-lined, but five-hundred years of hard radiation while the kid is slowly, slowly somehow growing and, I mean, during cell division and all . . .” He stopped, unable to speak. He felt like a mountain was falling on him. Like a man standing on the beach as a tidal wave hits. He was being buried alive, smothered, crushed.

Way too much.

Jobs felt Mo’Steel’s hand on his shoulder.

“It’s woolly, Duck, but you gotta strap it up and keep moving. We can’t go all slasher chick and start screaming. There’s weirder stuff than this coming.”

Jobs nodded, but he wanted very badly to punch his friend in the face. He didn’t want to be comforted, let alone be told he had to be a good soldier and get on with his life. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to wake up and not be here. It was too much, too much. Impossible to process a tenth of it, a billionth of it. His hands were shaking. A result of the hibernation? No. A result of waking up and seeing.

“We need to get some kind of grip on things here,” 2Face said. “Let’s check every berth. Let’s see what’s what. How about that? One by one, bottom to top, okay?”

“What she said,” Mo’Steel agreed. He was looking very earnestly at his friend.

Jobs covered his face with his hands. “As far as I know we have no food. No water. We’ve probably all taken a hundred lifetimes’ worth of radiation. I don’t know what that is outside there on the planet, but it can’t be natural. Maybe no air outside. My folks are dead. Yours, too, mostly. The whole human race is dead. Maybe just the three of us and . . . and that woman and some kind of mutant alien baby.”

“Yeah. Like I said, very woolly.”

2Face said, “Jobs, you said yourself: It can’t be. The planet out there, the ship standing this way. It can’t be. Not unless there’s something else.”

“Yeah?”

“So, what’s the something else, Jobs? Don’t you want to find out?”

He laughed bitterly. “You’re trying to appeal to my curiosity?”

“We have to do what we can,” 2Face said. “You’re right, the human race is all over. Except for us. Me, I’m not going to roll over and die. You want to give up, Jobs, I can’t stop you, I guess, but I have to try. We’re it, however many of us are alive on this stupid ship. That’s not why we should give up, that’s why we can’t give up.”

“Well, good luck, Eve, go forth and multiply,” Jobs snapped.

2Face started to answer back, but Jobs saw Mo’Steel take her arm and shake his head. “He’s coming around.”

Jobs glared at his friend. “You think you know me, don’t you, Mo?”

“Yeah, ’migo, I know you. There’s some deep stuff to figure out here. You can’t leave it alone. I know you pretty good, Duck: You can’t leave it alone.”

Jobs nodded dully. He looked up at 2Face. The smooth half of her face was set, determined. The burned side, with its drooping eye, seemed to weep. There was a poem in there somewhere, Jobs thought. He should formulate a plan. He should step up and try to figure it all out. But right now the strength wasn’t in him.

“Lead on,” he said to 2Face.
* # ? Jan 28, 2024 04:37
  • Quote
bird food bathtub
Aug 9, 2003

College Slice
Ah there's that Animorphs body horror.

* # ? Jan 28, 2024 05:27
  • Quote
Coca Koala
Nov 28, 2005

ongoing nowhere
College Slice
Let’s read The Remnants: jesus christ what the gently caress

* # ? Jan 28, 2024 23:26
  • Quote
someone awful.
Sep 7, 2007


 oh no i don't like that at all :gonk:

* # ? Jan 28, 2024 23:34
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

Coca Koala posted:

Let’s read The Remnants: jesus christ what the gently caress

I think we have our new title!

quote:



CHAPTER 5

“YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE.”


It had taken . . . how long so far? 2Face had no way of knowing. No watch, no clock, maybe no need for them.
It was taking a long time as time is experienced — subjectively. Time dragged when it was measured out in hideous deaths and uncertain lives.

And then there was the thirst. She wanted water. Needed it, and soon. And they had no idea where even to begin looking.

So they kept up the grim task of accounting.

Of the Eighty who had originally been chosen to fly on the Mayflower Project, one had died in the riot on the ground. His berth had been taken by Tamara Hoyle, who had been shot—but not killed— by the stowaway Mark Melman who had, in turn, been killed.

The mission copilot had been killed by D-Caf Melman. D-Caf had been given the hibernation berth belonging to the man he had killed. The mission commander had taken his life into his own hands.

So seventy-nine people had entered hibernation. Of those, they had already confirmed twenty-one who were very definitely dead. Thus far 2Face had counted nineteen, plus Tamara’s “child,” who were either alive and active or in
various states of revival.

Among the confirmed dead were both of Jobs’s parents, Mo’Steel’s father, and 2Face’s mother. Older people had fared worse. Some adults had made it, like Mo’Steel’s mother and 2Face’s father and even Tamara Hoyle.

They climbed up a level.

“Cheese,” Mo’Steel reported, checking the first berth. It was the shorthand term for the death that Jobs’s father had died. A death that filled the berth with green–black mold.

“Cheese” for the moldy ones. “Crater” for the ones, like one young girl, who had been killed by micrometeorites. And “facelift” for the ones who had been dried out, stretched, were nothing but parchment skin over skeletons. It was brutal jargon for a brutal job. They were protecting themselves, 2Face knew. They couldn’t weep for each death. There were seven billion dead.

“Oh, god.” Jobs recoiled from the next berth.

“What?” 2Face asked. She was still worried about him. She didn’t know if he was a strong person who had suffered a moment of weakness, or a weak person. They needed strength.

“You don’t want to see,” Jobs said.

2Face hesitated. But no, she couldn’t start giving in to the fear now. She pressed past Jobs and looked. A man. His body looked like a target, like he’d been shot full of holes, bloodless holes. Something had burrowed tunnels, some as small as a quarter inch in diameter, some three times as big, in every exposed inch of flesh. He was dried out like so many of the others, mummified. But none of the others had been eaten alive like this. Jobs wiped his face with his hands. He looked sick. But then, 2Face supposed she did, too.

This was vile work.

Beside the worm-eaten man was a girl in the early stages of revival. 2Face had met her in passing, just yesterday. Just yesterday five-hundred years ago. A “Jane.” Not 2Face’s kind of girl at all. But what could silly school cliques possibly matter now? She spoke some calming words to the girl, who fell back asleep.

“This one’s alive, too,” Mo’Steel reported from across the aisle.

The occupant of the berth was a kid, maybe twelve years old. Maybe younger. Or maybe he was just small for his age. He had dark, deep, almost sunken eyes. His skin was pale as death, so fragile you could see individual veins in his arms and face. His hair was black. His eyes were open, staring, as blank as a doll’s eyes.

“I know that kid,” Jobs said. “His name’s Billy. Billy something. Weir. Billy Weir?”

“Weird? Billy Weird? Needs to think about picking a new name,” Mo’Steel said.

Jobs leaned in and said, “Billy. Billy. You were right: I’m here.”

2Face exchanged a surprised look with Mo’Steel.

“Before we left, back at the barracks. He was walking in his sleep,” Jobs said. “Talking. I think he was asleep, anyway. He said,‘You’ll be there.’ He said that to me.”

“Billy, wake up, man,” Mo’Steel said.

No response.

“Are we sure he’s alive?” 2Face wondered.

“He’s alive,” Jobs said. “He’s alive. It takes a while.”

“His eyes are wide open. But he’s not focusing at all.”

“He’s breathing.”

2Face covered Billy’s eyes with her hand, then removed it. She watched the pupils closely. They had widened in the dark and were now contracting in the light. “Okay, he’s alive.”

“Hey,” a voice called. “Hey. Hey!”

“A live one,” Mo’Steel remarked. “Up there. Come on. Old Billy here is not a morning person. Give the boy some time. Let’s go see who’s yelling.”

2Face agreed. But Jobs would not stop staring at the impassive face of Billy Weir. “Come on, Jobs,” she said. “We’ll come back.”

“He said I’d be here,” Jobs said.

“Yeah. Come on.”

“That’s a total of . . .” 2Face hesitated.

“Start with eighty including the baby,” Mo’Steel said. “Looks like thirty-four alive or at least look alive. Forty-six . . . otherwise. You want the percent? Forty-two-point-five percent made it. Fifty-seven-point-five percent passed on.”

“So far,” 2Face said.

So there are going to be adults around. It will be interesting to see how and why the kids are in charge.

quote:


CHAPTER 6

“ARE WE THERE YET?”


Billy Weir’s eyes saw. His brain processed. But all at a glacial pace. The faces were gone almost before he could take notice of their presence. He was still taking note of the ship’s landing. That, too, had happened too quickly to notice.

Had they ever really been there, those faces?

There.

More.

Faces.

Gone.

Fast as hummingbird’s wings. The faces darted into view and disappeared. Impossible to recognize. Impossible when they moved so fast.

More?

Gone.

He wished they would slow down so he could see them. He wished they would stay long enough for him to be sure they were real.

He heard a buzzing sound. Like bees, but only for a split second.

Silence returned. The silence he knew.

The silence he had listened to for five-hundred years.

It was unfair now, not to know, unfair. Or perhaps unreal.

Once before he’d thought he’d seen faces, impossible faces. Once before he’d thought he had heard voices. But those voices had hurt.

He remembered the pain. He had welcomed the pain, blessed the pain. It was something. Something in the valley of nothing. Pain meant life.

Those faces, these faces, they were real, weren’t they?

Are we there? he wondered. Are we there yet?



quote:


CHAPTER 7

“SUFFOCATE IN HERE OR SUFFOCATE OUT THERE. TAKE YOUR CHOICE.”

Yago had a headache that would have killed a lesser person. He wanted a couple of aspirin and a glass of chilled spring water, possibly with a slice of lemon. But that was not happening.

The first thing he’d focused on after waking up was the creepy face of the femme who’d breezed him back into the world. That was no way to wake up. 2Face, that was her name.

He’d fallen back to sleep, and when he revived again it was Jobs he saw first, and that monkey-boy friend of his, and then some old guy named Errol Smith, and a woman named Connie Huerta who said she was a doctor although it turned out she was an obstetrician and didn’t even have a Raleeve or an aspirin with her, which was not all that helpful.

And as Yago regained full consciousness others came by to offer help or just stare balefully. Some weepy dope who was apparently 2Face’s father from the way he kept boo-hooing at her. And then there was a “Jane” who called herself Miss Blake. At least she was nice-looking, not some half-nightmare like 2Face.

For some strange reason 2Face seemed to be the one handing out orders. Her dad, Shy Hwang, and Errol and the doctor, as the only revived adults, should have been the ones to assume command, but none of the three seemed to be up for it. So, somehow, it was 2Face the freak chick who was making the calls, and so far Yago, who was feeling like a squashed bug as he climbed, rickety as a three-legged chair, from his berth, had decided to play along.

The plan was to get out of the Mayflower, which was fine as far as he was concerned. He suffered from a touch of claustrophobia — many great men did. Jobs had said something about the external environment being very bizarre.

“As long as there’s air,” Yago had said.

“We don’t know that,” Jobs answered.

“Um, what?”

Jobs had shrugged and explained in a distracted way that it didn’t really matter much since now that they were off hibernation the air in the Mayflower couldn’t last for long. “Suffocate in here or suffocate out there,” he’d muttered. “Take your choice.”

Fortunately Yago was too dopey still to experience the full-fledged panic that usually followed the word suffocate.

“Strap it up,” he told himself. “Keep it together. Be out soon. There’s going to be air. You didn’t come all this way to suck vacuum.”

Of course, there was the question of how exactly they were going to get out. Jobs and Errol, busy little tool-jockeys, were evidently already at work on the problem and managed to open the cargo bay doors of the shuttle. Which was fine, but it turned out no one had ever considered the possibility that the ship would land vertically. The whole idea had been that the ship would land horizontally, like it was supposed to do. Then the hibernation berths would open and the people would simply step out and promptly fall any number of feet to the nearest external bulkhead, then, having survived those injuries, would crawl to the only exit door.

Idiots.

“We don’t have a way out?” Yago asked in a shrill voice.

“They were in a hurry putting this mission together,” Jobs said in defense of the NASA people. “To be honest with you, I don’t think they really considered there was much to worry about. We weren’t going anywhere.”

Yago felt a surge of rage, rage at stupidity. He hated stupidity. Hated having to tolerate it, hated having to bite his tongue and swallow the bile. But, by god, if they weren’t already dead along with the rest of H. sapiens, he’d like to find a way to hurt the NASA clowns who’d put this fiasco together.

And yet, he was alive. Alive and seething. It reassured him. Anger was an attribute of the living.

“I have to get out of here,” Yago said.

“Yeah. We all do.”

Yago had relapsed back into his berth, too groggy to argue. And some time later he saw Mo’Steel and Jobs come huffing and puffing up the ladder carrying an inert but apparently conscious kid. Jobs kept talking to him.

“We’re there, Billy. We’re there.”

That was okay, but it was the next person to climb past that brought Yago up and fully awake with a jolt. A young black woman cradling a great big baby. The baby stared right at Yago with cavernous eye sockets. And no eyeballs.

“Okay, I’m awake,” Yago said.

He began to climb after the others.

Up and up. Past berth after berth of stomach-roiling death. He hoped no one was going to open some of those berths. The smell would probably be fatal all by itself. As he climbed, he kept a rough count, anything to avoid thinking about the cramped, crowded, airless . . .

Maybe forty percent had died, he estimated, weighted toward older passengers. Good. The fewer adults he had to contend with, the better. He could deal with the likes of 2Face and Jobs. Adults would be tougher to manipulate and eventually control, though useful in the short run.

There was no doubt of the final outcome: Yago would rule these pitiful remnants of humanity. But first, he needed air. Hard to take over a world without air. Kind of pointless.

He reached the narrow platform just inside the external hatch. The dozen people so far revived crowded close together, crammed on the platform and on the nearest stairs. Yago strained to keep away from the eerie baby and to get close to Miss Blake. Being a Jane, she’d be easy to cow.

“Okay, are we all agreed we open the door?” 2Face asked.

Suddenly she was taking a vote? That was weak. A leader should lead, Yago observed. But a rather larger part of his mind was taken up with controlling the claustrophobic panic that kept threatening to boil over and result in shrill screaming and wild thrashing.

Couldn’t do that. Couldn’t panic.

Everyone agreed to open the door. Yago suspected he was not the only one unnaturally eager to push that door open. 2Face nodded. Jobs set down the blank-faced, wide-eyed Billy Weir and worked the lever. Impossible not to hold your breath. Pointless, Yago realized, but impossible to resist. The air outside could be sulfuric acid. Or there could be no air at all.

Jobs swung the door open.

No air rushed out of the Mayflower.

No sulfuric acid rushed in.

Yago breathed. Held it. Breathed again.

Suddenly the baby began to chuckle.

That sound, added to the tension of remaining a second longer in this space-going mausoleum, snapped something in Yago.

“Move!” he shouted.

He pushed past the doctor, elbowed Miss Blake aside, and all at once hung at the edge of a precipice. The shuttle’s cargo doors were open, exposing the lead-lined Mayflower capsule to eerie sunlight. It was a straight drop down the dull metal capsule, a straight drop down to a crash against the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay.

Yago windmilled his arms, trying to cancel momentum. The doctor grabbed the back of his shirt but the rotten fabric tore away.

Yago fell forward, screaming.

Mo’Steel’s arm shot out and caught Yago’s spring-green hair. He pulled Yago back inside and sat him down with his legs dangling.

“When you’re right on the edge like that, you don’t want to windmill, and you don’t want to go all spasmoid, you want to sit down,” Mo’Steel advised. “Use your heels, bend at the knees, move your butt back, and sit down. It’ll bruise your butt but that’s a lot better than falling.”

“Shut up!” Yago snapped.

Yago stared at the landscape, panting, and wondering how his body could still produce sweat, as dehydrated as he was.

The view was overwhelming. Overwhelming. Too much color on the one side, too little on the other. The shuttle stood perfectly on the dividing line between the two environments. Yago’s first thought was that it was all an optical illusion. A picture. But he could feel the awesome depths of the gray-shade canyons to one side, and feel, too, the restless movement in the greens and golds and blues and pinks on the other side.

He glanced up at the sky. He had to close his eyes. The sky was similarly divided, all in blue with flat-looking clouds with brown-purple edges on one side, gray on gray over the canyon. The survivors were all silent, staring.

“What is it?” Errol asked.

“Artificial,” Jobs said. “Has to be. Nothing evolves naturally like this. This can’t be the natural state of this planet.”

Shy Hwang said, “Maybe it’s not real. Maybe . . . I mean, maybe we’re dead. Maybe we’re all dead.”

Yago snorted in derision. “Yeah, maybe it’s heaven. Right. We flew to heaven on a magic shuttle full of dead people.”

“The air seems breathable,” a woman said. “Of course, there’s no way to know what the nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 ratio is, or what trace gases may be present.”

Yago, with his junior politician’s memory for names, remembered her as Olga Gonzalez, Mo’Steel’s mother. What was her job? Something scientific, no doubt—most of the Eighty had been NASA or NASA contractors.

“How do we get down?” 2Face asked.

The Marine with the unsettling baby in her arms stepped forward to get a better look down.

“Spot me,” she said to Mo’Steel.

Mo’Steel put a sort of loose half nelson on her and two others in turn held Mo’Steel. Tamara Hoyle looked down at the drop, at least forty feet. She stepped back.

“Rope is out. First of all, I don’t think there’s any aboard, and second—judging by the way our clothes have rotted — even if there was, we’d never be able to trust it. But there should be plenty of wire on this ship. We braid it together and make a cable.”

“We can’t go ripping wire out of the ship,” Errol protested. “This ship is all we have.”

“This ship is never going to fly again,” Olga Gonzalez said.

“This ship is all we have,” Jobs said. “But we should be able to safely harvest wire from the hibernation berths that have failed.”

“Good. Let’s do that,” 2Face said.

And again Yago grated at her assumption of authority. Who was she to be making decisions? But now was maybe not the time for a fight. Although now was definitely the time to start looking at options. Surely one of these adults could be manipulated into pushing 2Face aside.

Yago surveyed the disturbing landscape. Maybe it wasn’t much of a kingdom, but it was going to be his.
* # ? Jan 28, 2024 23:49
  • Quote
Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
Thank you, Bilirubin for the title change!

quote:



CHAPTER 8

“USUALLY THERE’S NO PAIN, BUT THIS MAY BE DIFFERENT.”


It took hours and Mo’Steel was growing ever more impatient. He assumed he’d be the first person down the wire, and he was totally adrenal. Slippy-sliding down a wire to be the first person to step foot on a new planet, that was exalted.

Besides, he had to get away from his mom. She kept bursting into tears over his dad and over the whole world and all. Mo’Steel had loved his dad, but he lived by the creed of no regrets. Sooner or later you were going to miss your grip on the world, you were going to push the limit too far, and Mother G. would grab you, run you up to terminal velocity, and squash you flat.

True, it wasn’t gravity that had killed his dad. But, Mother G. or whatever, the principle was the same: Sooner or later they canceled your account, had to happen, no point in boo-hooing over it. It was the deal, if you wanted the rush of the big ride you had to accept the fact that every ride comes to an end.

Still, he would miss his dad. He’d gone to cheese, and Mo’Steel regretted seeing him that way. He regretted that memory maybe squeezing out the good stuff his dad had been.

“Come here, I need your help.” It was the doctor. Mo’Steel glanced at Jobs to see whether his friend needed him, but Jobs was underneath one of the berths working away at removing wire and optical cable.

“All yours, Doc,” Mo’Steel said.

He stepped over a prone and still-staring Billy Weir, then climbed down the ladder to a berth where the doctor had laid Tamara Hoyle and her baby.

“You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?” the doc asked.

Mo’Steel laughed. “I’ve seen my own bones poking out through my own skin and didn’t faint,” Mo’Steel answered. It was something he was proud of. He was the Man of Steel, with more titanium and petri-dish replacement parts than the whole rest of his class put together.

The doctor nodded. “Okay. How about bashful? You’re not going to go all giggly, right?”

Mo’Steel frowned. What did she mean? Then he looked at Tamara Hoyle and her baby. And the weird piece of skin that kept them attached. He swallowed hard and tried not to lose his balance. Blood was one thing. This was
different.

“Uh, maybe you need to get, like, one of the femmes,” Mo’Steel protested.

“I tried. That girl, the one in the frilly dress and the antique shoes? What’s her name? Miss Blake? She agreed to help, but I don’t think she’s physically strong enough. 2Face is stronger, but she’s busy and your mom, she’s . . . she’s upset. I need someone steady.”

“Okay,” Mo’Steel moaned. “Okay. Okay. I can do it.”

She drew Mo’Steel close and spoke in a whisper. “My surgical steel instruments are in decent shape, but I have no bandages, they’re all decayed. I don’t have a lot of confidence in any of my topicals; I don’t know what five centuries does to antibiotics or antivirals. I don’t even have soap or water. And I don’t have any idea what kind of shape our immune systems are in. But the thing I need you for is that this umbilical cord — if that’s what this is — is not
normal. Usually there’s no pain, but this may be different. I need you to be ready to take hold of the sergeant in the event she begins to move around. Can you do that?”

Mo’Steel nodded, not trusting his dust-dry mouth to form an answer.

“Okay, Sergeant Hoyle — Tamara,” Dr. Huerta said to her patient, “this shouldn’t be any problem at all. If you feel any discomfort, just let me know.”

“I’m okay,” Tamara said. She stroked the baby’s head.

The baby opened its empty eyes and yawned. Mo’Steel saw a mouth full of tiny white teeth. Good thing they had a doctor. She could deal with the baby. The baby scared Mo’Steel. Doctors were used to that stuff. Used to giant, silent, eyeless babies. Right.

Doctor Huerta took up position at bedside, kneeling over the young woman. Mo’Steel squatted behind Tamara’s head, arms akimbo, ready to make a grab. Doctor Huerta retrieved a piece of fiber-optic cable Jobs must have given her and began to cinch it around the cord, two inches from the baby’s side.

The baby turned its head sharply to look at her.

Doctor Huerta began tying off the cord close to the mother’s shoulder. Mo’Steel looked studiously away, suddenly fascinated by the bulkhead. The baby stirred and a low, animal moan came from its mother.

“Did you feel that?” the doctor asked her. She held the scalpel poised in her hand, ready for the first cut.

Suddenly the baby lunged. Its chubby fist grabbed for the scalpel. Doctor Huerta yanked it away. The baby bared its teeth in a dangerous scowl and, as Mo’Steel watched in growing horror, his mother’s face mirrored the expression.
Tamara made her own grab for the scalpel and caught the doctor’s wrist. The doctor lost her balance and Tamara let her fall.

Mo’Steel yelled, “Help! Help down here!”

The doctor fell straight back, hitting her head on the edge of the berth. The scalpel flew from her hand. Mo’Steel lunged for the doctor but he was awkwardly positioned and now, as he tried to lean over Tamara, the baby was clawing feebly at his chest and neck.

It didn’t take long to realize that the doctor was not moving. Wasn’t breathing.

“Help! Someone help me down here!”

Mo’Steel coiled his legs and leaped across Tamara, hit his head on the deck, and came up, brain swimming, swirling. The doctor was still. He fished for the scalpel but was knocked violently off-balance by a kick from Tamara.
He went facedown and the Marine was on him. They struggled, shoving and pushing to find the scalpel. Jobs appeared, tumbling down the stairs. He stepped on the scalpel just as Tamara touched it with outstretched fingers.

“Cut the cord!” Mo’Steel yelled. He yanked Tamara back with all his strength. He was strong, but the whipcord Marine sergeant was stronger. Her hands closed around his throat and already he was seeing double as she stopped the flow of blood to his brain.

Jobs knelt, picked up the scalpel. He made a quick, slashing cut, severed the cord, and instantly the death grip on Mo’Steel’s throat loosened. Mo’Steel pushed Tamara back and slid out from under her. The Marine sat up, then bent forward and began vomiting. The baby lay on its back, gasping, staring blindly.

More people arrived, running to respond to Mo’Steel’s earlier cries.

Too late. Way too late. The doctor was dead.

lol. I was just thinking that it was good they at least had a doctor with them. Also, this is an interesting look at Mo's outlook. He's kind of cold, in his way.

quote:


CHAPTER 9

“WE DIDN’T LAND. WE WERE CAPTURED.”


Miss Violet Blake’s mother was alive. Her father was not. Violet had seen her father, and the image had been burned so deeply into her thoughts that she could not imagine ever closing her eyes again without seeing his poor face disfigured by those countless holes.

A hideous death. More horrible for her than for him, perhaps. He would have been, should have been, unconscious when the thing happened to him.

She prayed he’d been unconscious.

So many dead. A world dead. And now, new death, murder even, perhaps. Some said the Marine sergeant, Tamara Hoyle, had struck blindly, a panic reaction in part caused by the confusion of waking from a five-century nap. Mo’Steel said no, it had been deliberate. The woman herself, the sergeant, said nothing and no one had yet questioned her.

What would Violet say to her mother when she awoke? How could she console her? She had never been close to her mother. Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake was her daughter’s polar opposite. An entrepreneur, a businesswoman who had built the software giant Wyllco Inc. from scratch, starting with three employees and some aging tablet computers. Her signature software RemSleep 009 had made Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake a billionaire. And it had made her indispensable to NASA.

It would have been easier for Violet Blake if her father had been the one to survive. She’d always been her daddy’s little girl. It was her father who had first introduced her to art, to serious music, to literature. It was her father who had given her Pride and Prejudice, and it was there, in the mannerly, elegant, understated, and unhurried world of Jane Austen that Violet had found her place in the world.

Violet was a freak in the world of school, because to reject a world dominated by soulless technology, a world where no thought ever seemed to go unspoken, where no feeling went unexpressed, a world devoid of politesse, a world without delicacy or tact, to reject that world was seen as unnatural, perhaps even dangerous. When she refused to wear a link even her teachers turned on her, demanding to know how she could stand being so “out of touch.”

Violet had felt wrong growing up, wrong deep down in her soul. And she’d gone on feeling wrong till she found other girls like herself, girls who wanted to be girls. The frilly dresses and carefully piled hair were just the outward signs of a much deeper sense that the world had conspired to deprive girls of a unique girlness, and to deprive everyone of privacy, peace, contemplation.

It wasn’t about playacting. Miss Blake knew she was not living in early-nineteenth-century England. Unlike some Janes, she did not attempt to copy the speech patterns of Austen characters. And it was not about being passive or witless. On the contrary, Austen’s heroines were strong, determined, unafraid to make judgments or to express opinions. Violet loved art. She enjoyed simple rituals. She enjoyed conversation. She enjoyed silence. And none of that found a place in the world of 2011.

Her father had understood immediately. Her mother had laughed at her, first in disbelief, then with outright contempt. “Well, congratulations, Dallas,” her mother told her once, “you’ve finally found the way to take a shot at me. I guess every teenager has to go through a phase like this.”

“Mom, I am just trying to live my own life,” Violet had responded. “And I would consider it a kindness if you would call me by my chosen name: Miss Blake.”

“Miss Blake? Good lord. What’s that? First name ‘Miss’?”

“Dallas is not a name that pleases me. And the one great advantage of this day and age is that everyone feels free to change their name. I’ve chosen Violet as my first name. Violet Blake. You can call me Violet, but I’d prefer Miss Blake.”

“Violet? Your name is Dallas. It has meaning. It’s the city where you were born.”

“And with each use of that name I am reminded of an event that I don’t even remember!”

“That’s not the point. I remember, and it’s an important memory. You’re my only daughter. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, Mother, I do. I always do,” she’d answered, but of course the insult was lost on her mother.

Her father had comforted her. He had called her Violet.

Once she declared herself as a Jane her vague interest in art became a true avocation. Let others delve deeply into the cold minds of machines, let others unravel the secrets of the double helix; she would learn the timeless truths to be found in art. It was a perfectly useless thing to learn, according to her mother. It would never earn her a dime, never get her a place in a competitive university. It would never make her rich.

And yet, now, as Miss Violet Blake gazed out over the landscape below the shuttle, she alone understood what it represented.

The young man named Mo’Steel was descending, hand over hand, one powerful leg wrapped around the thin cable. He landed on the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay. Then, still holding the wire, he tightrope-walked out along the declining edge of the tail and finally hopped to the ground.

He stood almost directly on the impossible dividing line between the gray canyon and the brilliant meadow. The canyon was unmistakable to Violet. It was an Ansel Adams. A photograph, not a painting.

The meadow, with the frenetic river cutting through it, was more difficult. Not a Cézanne, the colors were too bold. Van Gogh? Perhaps. Monet? Yes, possibly. But, if she’d had to pick one answer on a multiple-choice test she’d have said Bonnard. Pierre Bonnard.

Mo’Steel was kicking his way through impossible plants that seemed to have been assembled out of swatches of lavender and emerald, apricot and gold.

“Careful, Miss Blake, don’t lean out too far,” Jobs said. He was at her elbow.

Violet drew back. “I suppose you’re right.” She glanced over her shoulder. She kept expecting her mother to come striding up, ready to take charge and begin rapping out orders. But Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake was only in the earliest stages of revival. Two others had assumed complete consciousness, their awakening perhaps accelerated by the horrific event that had resulted in the doctor’s death. In any case, all three had been in berths close to that
tragedy.

Mo’Steel walked a little distance out into the colorful meadow. He looked up and waved, his face a broad, slightly deranged grin. “Come on down. It is deeply weird down here.”

The girl 2Face yelled down, “Okay, Mo, stay close, okay?” Then, in an aside to Jobs and Errol, said, “Weird doesn’t begin to describe it. One or the other, maybe, but two totally different environments divided so sharply?”

It occurred to Violet that there was irony here. 2Face, a girl whose own face encompassed two entirely opposed concepts, the lovely and the hideous, found this bifurcation disturbing.

“It has to be artificial,” Errol said, not for the first time. “You’d almost think it was man- made.”

“If I may . . .” Violet Blake began.

Olga Gonzalez came up the stairs and an-nounced, “We found some water!”

She carried a translucent plastic gallon jug, three-quarters full. “We were able to bleed it off the hibernation machinery.” She was in one of her more manic moods. Violet had seen these moods turn to despair within a moment’s time.

“You think it’s safe to drink?” 2Face asked.

Olga shrugged. “We have the equipment from the storage lockers. The chemical testing strips are all long gone, of course. But the microscope still works and at least I don’t see any obvious microorganisms. It’s as clean as distilled water. Which is not to say there aren’t other contaminants. I gave it a taste. No alkali taste. Nothing obvious. I won’t bore you with a list of colorless, tasteless, odorless pathogens that might be present in fatal concentrations.”

2Face took the bottle and raised it to her lips. She had to use a finger to keep the liquid from dribbling out the disfigured side of her mouth. She handed the jug to Errol. The water made its rounds, everyone desperately thirsty. Only Yago drank too deeply, swallowing more than his share.

“Maybe that water in the river is drinkable,” Shy Hwang suggested. “And there may be edible fruit around.”

“If I may . . .” Violet began again.

“None of the food on board survived,” Olga said. “Not in any edible form, anyway. There’s some powdery residue in some of the freeze-dried packs, but I doubt there’s any nutritive value.”

“Great, so we starve?” Yago said.

“Let’s get down to the ground, then we can see what’s what,” Jobs said. “Who’s next?”

“I’ll stay,” Errol said. “So we can see about belaying this cable in such a way as we can use it to run a bosun’s chair up and down to ferry the weak and the wounded.” He glanced at Billy Weir, who had been propped into a sitting position. His undead eyes stared out across the landscape below.

“And the dead folks,” Jobs said. “Sooner or later I guess we’ll have to get all these people down and bury them.” Jobs continued, “I’ll stay here with you, Errol. I can work on the bosun’s chair. We have some tools now, from the chest. I can strip panels from the bulkheads and make a frame from decking.”

He actually seemed mildly excited by the project. A true techie, Violet thought with distaste. One of those people.

“I wish I knew what was down there,” Shy Hwang said. “It’s so . . . there could be anything. Wild animals, deadly snakes, things we haven’t even thought of.”

“If I may . . .” Violet said a third time.

“What? You want to say something, Jane?” 2Face snapped at her.

“If I may, I was going to offer some reassurance. I doubt you’d find wild beasts in early-twentieth-century France.”

2Face stared at her. “Uh-huh. Well, thanks for the update on France.” She shot a look to Jobs, a look suggesting the possibility that Violet was crazy, possibly dangerously so.

“I believe this landscape was derived from a painting. Monet or Bonnard, I think.”

“What are you talking about?” Olga demanded.

“The gray-shade is derived from an Ansel Adams photograph. Or at least from someone mimicking Adams’s style. The detail can only be photographic. But this sky, this meadow, that river are all clearly derived from a painting. Pierre Bonnard was a —”

“She’s right!” Yago cried. “It’s a painting. It’s not even real. We’ve been worrying about a painting.”

“Mo’s walking around down there,” Jobs pointed out. “It’s not flat. It’s not a painting.”

“I suggested it was derived from a painting, not that it is a painting,” Miss Blake said patiently. “I think it’s likely that whoever created this place used an Adams photo and an Impressionist painting to . . . to imagine . . . these environments.”

“Who are you talking about?” Shy Hwang asked.

Violet was feeling a bit put out. They were staring at her accusingly. She was flustered and couldn’t think of a ready answer.

“Aliens?” Jobs whispered.

“Well, someone,” Miss Blake said. “Surely you see that this meadow and this gray-shade canyon, not to mention that sky, did not occur naturally.”

“Aliens,” Jobs said more confidently now. “That’s how the ship came to be standing upright. That’s what happened. We didn’t land. We were captured.”

“Captured by art lovers?” 2Face demanded, incredulous.

“Most likely that this was done for our benefit,” Violet suggested. “Perhaps the aliens are merely trying to be polite.”

Jobs said, “We found a rack of DD’s—data disks — in the lockers, along with the tools and the decayed food.”

“Presumably an effort on NASA’s part to keep alive some portion of the human cultural legacy,” Shy Hwang suggested.

“Including art?” 2Face wondered. “Fine, but you’re saying someone created this environment for us? Using the DD’s? How? The data was in the locker. It wasn’t loaded into any accessible system.”

“They were on the ship,” Jobs said. “Whoever did all this, whoever created this environment? They had to have been aboard this ship.”




So the Janes are interesting huh? I wonder if that could be a sort of metaphor for somethings that could not be talked about in a YA book of this time peroid?

* # ? Jan 30, 2024 04:00
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Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
Yes of course the giant eyeless baby has little sharp teeth, a lust for blood, and mastery of umbilical mind-control...
I think this setting is bizarre enough that it kind of doesn't need a Visser/Senna/Yago character to up the stakes; I'd be happy if Yago spends the whole series thinking menacing thoughts but never actually does anything.

Soonmot posted:

So the Janes are interesting huh? I wonder if that could be a sort of metaphor for somethings that could not be talked about in a YA book of this time peroid?

I definitely got that vibe. I was skim reading (I'm supposed to be getting some work done atm...) and even read "girls who wanted to be girls" as "people who wanted to be girls." Had to go back and check it to write this post.

* # ? Jan 30, 2024 04:31
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Coca Koala
Nov 28, 2005

ongoing nowhere
College Slice
It's odd because I read that paragraph and thought "huh, this is a really interesting depiction of teenage rejection of social media" and then remembered that this was written in what, 2001? Were people really reacting that much to myspace? Maybe that's just my 2024 brain looking back and being like "yeah, social media is where poo poo really started to go downhill" and so that's what it inserts as the reason why this character is roleplaying jane austen as a form of expression.

Also wow i feel like this book would have freaked the gently caress out of me as a kid.

* # ? Jan 30, 2024 04:34
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 12:25
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Fritzler
Sep 5, 2007

Fritzler posted:

RIP Cordelia. Would like to see one of those Janes that Jobs mentions. Would be a fun contrast to the rest of the “future” stuff we see.

Glad to see a Jane finally! They are interesting, I do think someone being so nostalgic for the long past makes a lot of sense in a future setting. It is something I rarely see in sci-fi tho.

* # ? Jan 30, 2024 05:43
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