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.
tags
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.
tags