28 December 2006

skonen_blades: (blurg)
That last piece was all over the map and I really wanted to tidy it up and make it work. I love the imagery. Here is Winter Redux. Compare! Contrast! Let me know what you think.

Winter (Edit)

Her hair was a bright neon blue that glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as her lips and fingernails. It was the same colour as her pubic hair and nipples.

It was the same colour as her glittering eyes.

She was dead.

Her piercing stare disturbed the scientists outside her observation cell. She had died suddenly two hours before. Her body lay on the small bed provided for her. She stared out at the scientists, unblinking, awkward and forever confused, with the dried path of a staining blue tear tattooing the contour of her cheek.

She’d been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Her skin was the white of the snow she was stumbling through.

There are pale girls in the world. There are girls that look like they’ve washed up on a beach. There are girls whose skin is so translucent that one can see a delicate tracery of blue veins beneath the surface of their skin.

They looked like a riot of colour compared to the skin of this girl we found in Alaska.

We’d nicknamed her Winter because of it.

In the short time we had with her, she’d picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as she seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them. It was literally like she’d been born yesterday.

Her story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that she had come here from space and had left her ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing plane had spooked her ship. The ship bolted and she was left alone.

She insisted that she was the only one on the ship. She insisted that the ship was probably worried about her and was looking for her.

She'd been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the 'ship' of her story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing during the time frame she mentioned had witnessed nothing.

A tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry at the base of her spine had not issued any transmission that we could detect after her death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing. It was as dead as she was by our measurements.

While she was alive, it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to her sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. The boys upstairs were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.

Her death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out. She has looked at us through the safety glass with a confused look on her face and died that way.

If her story was true, we had come up with a saddening hypothesis:

Our friend Winter was manufactured. Her warranty was up and she had been switched off like a light.

Her ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. There are samples that a ship can obtain and analyze but what better way to truly experience a world than through the sensory apparatus of its dominant life form?

It made a woman and pushed her out into the snow to wander around while the ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.

Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.

The ship wasn’t coming back for Winter any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.

We will begin research on Winter. We will try to reverse engineer how she was made. She will hopefully become Eve to a new generation of government-manufactured troops. She will hopefully become Eve to a new generation of medical breakthroughs, cloned organs, and cancer cures.

Winter’s Eve.




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skonen_blades: (Default)
He sits at the end of the bar with metal jutting out of his head. He was one of the first to receive the implants.

They’d done a lot with tinier and tinier ento-nerve breeding. They’d gotten the miniature steam tubes down to a fraction of a millimeter. Cooling was still the big problem in his day.

That was why he had four giant steaming bars of copper sticking out of the base of his skull. A steady drip of cooled oxygen dripped into a grommited hole in his head just above his ear with the precision of a well-wound clock from what looked like a hamster feeder.

Jack Furstens. We just called him Firsty. It was play on words since the pioneering operation he had endured had left him with a lisp and he drank here a lot. Firsty it was.

He has the same tech as the rest of us but we were younger and had received our implants after the advent of elektriks. Good old Peter Edison had discovered that this invisible stream of electrons could be made to travel down through wires that were smaller than the vacuum tubes and steam pipes. They ran cooler and could be put into a smaller space.

Used in conjunction with the bioware and steamdrivers, the new ‘computers’ were durable, stable, ran cooler, and only needed a little bit of upkeep. Some water here, a few crumbs there and little charge in the battery and Bob was your uncle. The fans were a little noisier but hey, it was a noisy city.

Firsty was a volunteer who went under the knife to get one of the first implanted cranial computers. With a series of punch cards, he could know Spanish or any of a dozen other languages. One of the problems was that no-one manufactured punch cards anymore.

His head was almost entirely hardware in an era that was starting to use ‘soft’ware to program their computers. Firsty’s head would have to be given to a hobbyist/mechanic/surgeon for the proper changes just to add another language or specialized field of knowledge to his existing slots list.

The heavy machine that had been grafted into his head was unable to be removed without fatal consequences. The bioware had grafted in surprisingly well. Might as well pull a tree out by it’s bloody roots.

He was a dinosaur. He was an oddity. He was a footnote in history.

We bought the Time Magazine with Firsty on the cover off of a collector at a boot sale down at the market last year. We had it framed and put above the bar for his birthday as a surprise.

The picture is Firsty in front of the glass and iron hospital service that performed the operation. There are zeppelins in the sepia sky in the background. He’s very handsome. His implants are rimmed with shining brass flanges to hide the entry and exit pustules. The copper gleams. He looks like he’s had one of those old fashioned espresso machines installed behind his face. It looks like Dr. Frankenstein took up industrial design and watchmaking. It’s a breathtaking shot.

He’s smiling with abandon like he just won the heavyweight championship of the world. He’s happy in a way I’ve never seen. I don’t think I’ve even seen his teeth since I worked here.

His face went pale when he saw it. He asked us to take it down. We thought he was joking with that flatline deadpan of his. When we laughed, he threw his glass from across the bar with amazing accuracy and smashed the frame to pieces. We swept it up and he continued drinking like nothing had happened.

I had it reframed. It’s in my office now where he’ll never see it.

Firsty. He’s down at the end of the bar with steam coming off of his head. He sticks to chilled drinks. He’s nearly had enough. I know the signs.

I’m polishing a glass when I hear his heavy head bounce off of the oak of the bar with a sound somewhere between a cash register and a parking meter before he slides off the stool to the ground.

The boys’ll put him in on the couch in the back.




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