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Spring rain melts snow.
Ending Winter. This is why
Snowflakes hate rainbows.
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Ending Winter. This is why
Snowflakes hate rainbows.
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Fires can start in the rain.
They can go on to rage as the water comes down.
Fires can start in the winter as well.
It’s easy to forget those two things.
When it’s been raining in your life for years.
Or cold for much longer than a season.
You start to think the state is unchangeable.
That fire is only in the past.
That it can’t ever be here now.
Even that it won’t ever exist in the future.
But most importantly, that you can’t start a fire.
You can.
You can.
It’s the oldest trick we humans can do.
We rub together to ignite.
Burning down houses is what we do best.
Fire is a catalyst for change.
A critical mass that chains exploding molecules.
And creates a different state.
What’s burnt can’t be unburnt.
And burning only needs a spark to start.
So if your life needs burning down.
Or if a little fire could cauterize a wound.
Or if a little heat could fix something.
It’s possible.
Do you need to get rid of some flammable relationships
That have been pretending to not be paper?
Have you been on a bridge in need of destruction by fire
For years?
Break out the marshmallows.
Let the air in.
And dance around the fire with your shadow flickering behind you.
You might get a little burnt yourself.
So be careful.
But just remember:
Just because it’s cold.
Just because it’s raining.
Doesn’t mean that a fire can’t happen.
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They can go on to rage as the water comes down.
Fires can start in the winter as well.
It’s easy to forget those two things.
When it’s been raining in your life for years.
Or cold for much longer than a season.
You start to think the state is unchangeable.
That fire is only in the past.
That it can’t ever be here now.
Even that it won’t ever exist in the future.
But most importantly, that you can’t start a fire.
You can.
You can.
It’s the oldest trick we humans can do.
We rub together to ignite.
Burning down houses is what we do best.
Fire is a catalyst for change.
A critical mass that chains exploding molecules.
And creates a different state.
What’s burnt can’t be unburnt.
And burning only needs a spark to start.
So if your life needs burning down.
Or if a little fire could cauterize a wound.
Or if a little heat could fix something.
It’s possible.
Do you need to get rid of some flammable relationships
That have been pretending to not be paper?
Have you been on a bridge in need of destruction by fire
For years?
Break out the marshmallows.
Let the air in.
And dance around the fire with your shadow flickering behind you.
You might get a little burnt yourself.
So be careful.
But just remember:
Just because it’s cold.
Just because it’s raining.
Doesn’t mean that a fire can’t happen.
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Anthropocene
26 December 2013 21:09The majority of earth voted against winter this year.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t happen that often. There are still countries on Earth for whom snow is a novelty and there are those who like the seasons to change.
But this year, no winter. The vote pinged us, time zone by time zone, around the planet. We mentally filled out the ballot box in the corner of our vision and sent it back to the main computer.
It’s hard to remember a time where computers were external and even the implants had to be installed physically. Now with the biosoft rewriting the DNA, we’re ‘born soft’, as they used to say. Worldwide, we’re all linked together in our minds.
The weather satellites were a necessary revolution after the planet nearly cooked from our fuel consumption. We crowdsource everything now. There’s still an economy but local power centers and governments don’t differ from each other that wildly anymore. Earth is a country now, not a kaleidoscope of fractured cultures.
Our translators make it possible for us all to speak to each other which we do often. We debate but we rarely war. The collective IQ of the planet has risen to a nice, high average and we’ve realized the profit in peace.
We’re more like a collection of around five thousand cities connected like Christmas lights sprinkled around the globe.
We stabilized the population and we’re all born with a baseline gradient of information that trickles in. We have the wisdom of generations at our fingertips and it cannot be removed or taken away.
That was the failsafe of the architects who instilled the change in us. It was a turbulent time of near-extinction as we understand it. Wholesale slaughter had not yet begun but we were dying by the thousands. Mostly preventable disasters were occurring more and more frequently because of greed, divisiveness, and secretive governments.
A unity was needed. And those Helsinki seven delivered.
Now we are all knowledge-rich and connected through maturity. It’s truly a new age.
It’s called the Anthropocene.
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Surprisingly, it doesn’t happen that often. There are still countries on Earth for whom snow is a novelty and there are those who like the seasons to change.
But this year, no winter. The vote pinged us, time zone by time zone, around the planet. We mentally filled out the ballot box in the corner of our vision and sent it back to the main computer.
It’s hard to remember a time where computers were external and even the implants had to be installed physically. Now with the biosoft rewriting the DNA, we’re ‘born soft’, as they used to say. Worldwide, we’re all linked together in our minds.
The weather satellites were a necessary revolution after the planet nearly cooked from our fuel consumption. We crowdsource everything now. There’s still an economy but local power centers and governments don’t differ from each other that wildly anymore. Earth is a country now, not a kaleidoscope of fractured cultures.
Our translators make it possible for us all to speak to each other which we do often. We debate but we rarely war. The collective IQ of the planet has risen to a nice, high average and we’ve realized the profit in peace.
We’re more like a collection of around five thousand cities connected like Christmas lights sprinkled around the globe.
We stabilized the population and we’re all born with a baseline gradient of information that trickles in. We have the wisdom of generations at our fingertips and it cannot be removed or taken away.
That was the failsafe of the architects who instilled the change in us. It was a turbulent time of near-extinction as we understand it. Wholesale slaughter had not yet begun but we were dying by the thousands. Mostly preventable disasters were occurring more and more frequently because of greed, divisiveness, and secretive governments.
A unity was needed. And those Helsinki seven delivered.
Now we are all knowledge-rich and connected through maturity. It’s truly a new age.
It’s called the Anthropocene.
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Well, hello there! Another post is up on that site of sites, 365 tomorrows. I hope you enjoy it. It's a neat little flight of fancy involving and frighteningly huge amount of stuff in a very small amount of small. Bring on the moon colonies, I say, but not this way.
->CLICK HERE<-
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Winter Transition
3 November 2008 12:22Let’s take these fall days and make them into snowballs.
I want cool, wet Christmas to wash over me and calm me down as we slide into the New Year. I find autumn’s transition exhilarating. Winter is an eraser that makes hot chocolate more valuable than gold. That crunch of the boot on the snow, the visible breath that lets us see our own laughter, our own words. We become layered human burritos, presents to give to each other.
A promise is a promise, says January, and those resolutions are waiting, but that’s far off and this is the home stretch.
When I picture the year in my head, I see the end of December as a finish line. This is where we run headlong, exhausted and laughing, into the snowbank end of another year.
Warm beds with lots of blankets. Nose to the glass, looking at the snow, waiting for the kettle to boil for tea.
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I want cool, wet Christmas to wash over me and calm me down as we slide into the New Year. I find autumn’s transition exhilarating. Winter is an eraser that makes hot chocolate more valuable than gold. That crunch of the boot on the snow, the visible breath that lets us see our own laughter, our own words. We become layered human burritos, presents to give to each other.
A promise is a promise, says January, and those resolutions are waiting, but that’s far off and this is the home stretch.
When I picture the year in my head, I see the end of December as a finish line. This is where we run headlong, exhausted and laughing, into the snowbank end of another year.
Warm beds with lots of blankets. Nose to the glass, looking at the snow, waiting for the kettle to boil for tea.
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Winters up north are harsh.
It’s possible in northern towns to commit suicide during the winter by simply taking one’s clothes off and lying down during a windy, snowy night. The police question is always the same for winter disappearances: “Did the missing person recently suffer a breakup or a divorce?” they ask. If the answer is yes, they know that there is a good chance that all they have to do is wait until spring to find the body.
When it thaws.
February is both the coldest month and also the month of Valentine’s Day. There is always a spike in disappearances that day. Most of the missing show up later on the coast or at a friend’s house but there’s always some that don’t show up. The blanket of snow melts away slowly as the days get longer and it’s a knee or an elbow that gets revealed first. A red scarf tossed aside. Blue mittens neatly folded five feet away.
Cold bodies, well preserved with little freeze-dried broken hearts.
Time capsule anti-valentines mailed to the warmer seasons.
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It’s possible in northern towns to commit suicide during the winter by simply taking one’s clothes off and lying down during a windy, snowy night. The police question is always the same for winter disappearances: “Did the missing person recently suffer a breakup or a divorce?” they ask. If the answer is yes, they know that there is a good chance that all they have to do is wait until spring to find the body.
When it thaws.
February is both the coldest month and also the month of Valentine’s Day. There is always a spike in disappearances that day. Most of the missing show up later on the coast or at a friend’s house but there’s always some that don’t show up. The blanket of snow melts away slowly as the days get longer and it’s a knee or an elbow that gets revealed first. A red scarf tossed aside. Blue mittens neatly folded five feet away.
Cold bodies, well preserved with little freeze-dried broken hearts.
Time capsule anti-valentines mailed to the warmer seasons.
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The GPS units were subdermal, inserted at birth. They keyed the weather satellites to their locations.
Not that the magicians and demigods remembered those terms. The rituals of battery-charging, co-ordinate exchanges, system upgrades and eco-diversity manuals had become shrouded in mysticism ever since The Last Fall.
Earth was a cue ball now with a striped, greenish brown belt.
The eco-diversity manuals carried by the priests were laminated but ancient, passed down for generations. They’d become holy scripture, technical terms having lost their meaning when the cloud cover thickened and didn’t go away.
The weather satellites had been an ancient last ditch effort. They were capable of seeding clouds to make rain and heating patches to let the sun in. Twenty-two of them had made it to orbit before the program ran out of the money and the anarchy of the end days took over.
Sixteen of them were still functional. The original crew of scientists that had created the satellite program banded together with their spouses and formed a nomadic tribe determined to rebalance the environment with their satellites. They automated the battery hook-ups and power arrays. They taught their children, in simple terms, what was expected of them. They showed them the manuals.
That was five generations ago. The current weather-mage tribes were the great-great-great grandchildren of those scientists participating in a game of telephone over two centuries long.
The satellites could only create snow now thanks to the temperature of the earth. The priests had translated the concept of ‘balance’ to mean ‘unilateral’. It was their mission to cover the Earth in snow. They gathered in RTFM Sundays to chant the holy words to the faithful.
Each person keyed to a weather satellite had a geometric snowflake tattooed onto their face so that they could be recognized as a Blizzard. They were the sixteen new gods, reaching into the sky and keying their implants to bring down drifts of thick snow to blanket palm trees and deserts alike in an embrace of withering frost-storms.
The ecology of the Arctic and the Antarctic had risen to the challenge. Polar Bears, penguins, whales, and new species of fish, fauna, and fowl had evolved to fill in the gaps left by the tropical animals. Snow leopards resurged. Siberian tigers ran in vast family groups. Hairy zebras ran over now-icy African plains. The mammals grew more fur.
That included the humans. Dark eyes glittered deep beneath their white brows. Their hair thickened.
Earth was almost theirs. Success was almost complete.
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Not that the magicians and demigods remembered those terms. The rituals of battery-charging, co-ordinate exchanges, system upgrades and eco-diversity manuals had become shrouded in mysticism ever since The Last Fall.
Earth was a cue ball now with a striped, greenish brown belt.
The eco-diversity manuals carried by the priests were laminated but ancient, passed down for generations. They’d become holy scripture, technical terms having lost their meaning when the cloud cover thickened and didn’t go away.
The weather satellites had been an ancient last ditch effort. They were capable of seeding clouds to make rain and heating patches to let the sun in. Twenty-two of them had made it to orbit before the program ran out of the money and the anarchy of the end days took over.
Sixteen of them were still functional. The original crew of scientists that had created the satellite program banded together with their spouses and formed a nomadic tribe determined to rebalance the environment with their satellites. They automated the battery hook-ups and power arrays. They taught their children, in simple terms, what was expected of them. They showed them the manuals.
That was five generations ago. The current weather-mage tribes were the great-great-great grandchildren of those scientists participating in a game of telephone over two centuries long.
The satellites could only create snow now thanks to the temperature of the earth. The priests had translated the concept of ‘balance’ to mean ‘unilateral’. It was their mission to cover the Earth in snow. They gathered in RTFM Sundays to chant the holy words to the faithful.
Each person keyed to a weather satellite had a geometric snowflake tattooed onto their face so that they could be recognized as a Blizzard. They were the sixteen new gods, reaching into the sky and keying their implants to bring down drifts of thick snow to blanket palm trees and deserts alike in an embrace of withering frost-storms.
The ecology of the Arctic and the Antarctic had risen to the challenge. Polar Bears, penguins, whales, and new species of fish, fauna, and fowl had evolved to fill in the gaps left by the tropical animals. Snow leopards resurged. Siberian tigers ran in vast family groups. Hairy zebras ran over now-icy African plains. The mammals grew more fur.
That included the humans. Dark eyes glittered deep beneath their white brows. Their hair thickened.
Earth was almost theirs. Success was almost complete.
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Winter Court
5 March 2008 00:51
photo by Alyson Gaul. Spontaneous_Productions on Flickr.
“This petition is rubbish.” Her voice rang off the icicles in the main hall.
The Winter Court bristled at the Ice Queen’s outright distaste. Frostbite swirled complex black tattoos on her white skin, tracing frozen death up her arms to form a masquerade masque of dark veins. Her eyes, glittering with the colour of green ice caverns, cast about the room without humour, daring dissent.
Jack Frost gave it to her. “There’s a flush in your cheeks, majesty,” he lied. “You’re starting to think like our August counterparts.” The polished silver mask he wore glinted while his mouth twisted in a proud sneer at his wordplay. He continued.
“Myself and my sister Jill have forsaken our runs this morning to come here. While I believe that this is a waste of..” -he breathed in deep and raised his long hands-“ALL…OF…OUR…TIME…,” he shouted with all of his might.
His voice echoed around the cavernous hall of ice. His open display of suicidal disrespect brought a smirk to the lips of Black Well and Dark Water, the only two warrior caste besides the Ice King. Dark Water, the tallest of the court, chattered his teeth and looked down, letting his shock of dark hair drop to cover the mirth twinkling in his eyes. He brought up his thin hands, suddenly very interested in his own sharp knuckles.
Black Well’s metal collar, shined to court-appearance perfection, trembled above her cleavage with suppressed laughter. Her face, inlaid with iron, remained as passive as the face of a mountain.
Jack Frost continued, “…I don’t, however, believe the petition to be rubbish. We could have ignored the demands set forth by The Warm or brought them into open conflict but we are here now to address it amongst ourselves. We need to do so. We are here, leaving Winter vulnerable, because you summoned. It is not up to you to dismiss us.”
Jack’s blind sister, Jill, sighed and leaned her head on the velvet brocade of her brother’s court dress jacket. She added insult by making her boredom obvious. Her grey dress crinkled stiffly with frost.
The Ice Queen stared at Jack and Jill. The temperature rose, making everyone a little more uncomfortable.
“So be it.” said the King. His ice-mail shirt hung across his broad chest. The skin of two bears wrapped his shoulders. His blood ran hot too often when the normal subterfuge and bickering of the Winter Court wasted his time.
“Let us hear it.” he commanded.
Herald Cryo stepped forth. He dressed in a black business suit of man. His fedora was pulled down snugly above the long wool scarf he wrapped twice around the lower half of his face. The strip of flesh from nose to forehead held his darting, suspicious eyes. No one had ever seen his mouth.
He looked both ways, as if he was about to cross a street, before he spoke.
His voice came resonating softly out from the four corners of the gallery. It was his trick.
“The people of the three warmer months would suffer us a trade. The humans should be allowed to continue with their global warming.” Cryo said.
The Flake triplets gasped identically. They looked nothing like each other.
“In continuing to heat the Earth,” continued Cryo, “They will eventually suffer themselves another Ice Age. It will be years in coming but it will come. We ask your hand in allowing them to do this. As a Season, in a unanimous motion. We await your answer.”
In the silence that followed, blue-haired Floe snuggled up to red-haired Icelette. Berg looked at the two of them with jealousy.
“Remember the Ice Age, brothers and sisters?” said Snowdrift, breaking from her embrace with Long Night.
They all ran through the cherished unbroken memories of a thousand years of glaciers.
“I say we do it.” Said Crystal in her ringing voice, like a shaking chandelier.
The motion passed.
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Winter's Day
29 January 2008 18:33You throw off frost. Those around you catch cold.
To know you is to shiver.
My hands stick to you like they would to a metal pole in January.
You dare me to lick you just to see my tongue get stuck.
There are bodies in the morgue that seem snuggly in comparison.
Shall I compare thee to a Winter’s day?
Thou art more icy and more desolate.
Like the frozen Saint Lawrence, I know that there is life beneath your thick shell.
Lightless, quick moving and deadly.
If I broke your surface, I’d fall without a sound beneath the ice, swept breathless in a heart-stopping current.
Hours, days, perhaps months later, I’d be found frozen solid. The paramedics would warm me up, and I would have no recollection of what happened.
Your Nordic cheekbones are frozen blades that cut the world around you with every yes.
Or no.
You’re Jack Frost’s sister. You’re old man winter’s grand daughter.
Persephone’s body double while she’s gone.
Snow drifts are your evening gowns and you breathe out clouds.
A permanent aura of glittering crystal snowflakes give you a sparkle that passes for electricity in the darkness.
I’ve held you for so long in my heart that it’s starting to blacken with frostbite.
I need a home.
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To know you is to shiver.
My hands stick to you like they would to a metal pole in January.
You dare me to lick you just to see my tongue get stuck.
There are bodies in the morgue that seem snuggly in comparison.
Shall I compare thee to a Winter’s day?
Thou art more icy and more desolate.
Like the frozen Saint Lawrence, I know that there is life beneath your thick shell.
Lightless, quick moving and deadly.
If I broke your surface, I’d fall without a sound beneath the ice, swept breathless in a heart-stopping current.
Hours, days, perhaps months later, I’d be found frozen solid. The paramedics would warm me up, and I would have no recollection of what happened.
Your Nordic cheekbones are frozen blades that cut the world around you with every yes.
Or no.
You’re Jack Frost’s sister. You’re old man winter’s grand daughter.
Persephone’s body double while she’s gone.
Snow drifts are your evening gowns and you breathe out clouds.
A permanent aura of glittering crystal snowflakes give you a sparkle that passes for electricity in the darkness.
I’ve held you for so long in my heart that it’s starting to blacken with frostbite.
I need a home.
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Boeuf A L'eau
22 August 2007 13:39Locked out and drowning in the winter of the flakes that the skyscrapers are scraping from the sky. Blue feathers from what’s left of the angels smashed against the windshield in their failure to escape. It’s a prison with blue walls and the inmates are revolting. Let’s all lock arms and jump.
I’ve held the crystal ball, shook it, and watched the snow fall in the future. I’ve seen the calming nuclear winter come down like a blanket on my childish notions of what my life would have been like by now. I’m a whiffle person who has only become bullet proof by standing his ground and not dying yet. Like the rest of us.
I lie on a bed made for kings in a building named for Ireland in a city named for an explorer. My name is the same as old kings of Scotland. My middle name is the same as Magnus Barefoot who succeeded his father as the king of Norway in 1102, tried to build a Norwegian empire by conquering Ireland, took Dublin, died in battle and caused civil war for almost a hundred years after his death by fathering no legitimate sons. I consider myself an explorer the same as the rest of us, striking out in unmapped territory every day.
I am a cartographer who, like the French explorers who saw giant hairy cows on the islands in the great lakes and called them ‘boeuf-a-l’eau’, got it as right as I knew how under the circumstances and based on previous experience.
My words are boats that sail off of the coast of me to the ports of anyone else’s ears. Messages in bottles.
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I’ve held the crystal ball, shook it, and watched the snow fall in the future. I’ve seen the calming nuclear winter come down like a blanket on my childish notions of what my life would have been like by now. I’m a whiffle person who has only become bullet proof by standing his ground and not dying yet. Like the rest of us.
I lie on a bed made for kings in a building named for Ireland in a city named for an explorer. My name is the same as old kings of Scotland. My middle name is the same as Magnus Barefoot who succeeded his father as the king of Norway in 1102, tried to build a Norwegian empire by conquering Ireland, took Dublin, died in battle and caused civil war for almost a hundred years after his death by fathering no legitimate sons. I consider myself an explorer the same as the rest of us, striking out in unmapped territory every day.
I am a cartographer who, like the French explorers who saw giant hairy cows on the islands in the great lakes and called them ‘boeuf-a-l’eau’, got it as right as I knew how under the circumstances and based on previous experience.
My words are boats that sail off of the coast of me to the ports of anyone else’s ears. Messages in bottles.
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Hell is white.
Lucifer sits on a throne made of bones frozen solid. His skin is the colour of cot-death’s tiny lips. His long white beard moves lazily like a flag of surrender in the breeze. Fissured skin leads up to black pits that house a glint in the back hollows.
His horns are made of ice. They refract the light and sprinkle the chamber with rainbows.
Hell is cold storage.
The mist of the blue devil’s breath is a fog for the whole nine rinks.
Dante got it wrong. Hell is as far from God’s light as it’s possible to go. It makes dry ice seem like lava.
This is far below absolute zero. This is below the basement, below the bottom of the well, below rock bottom. This hell chills and numbs on a metaphysical level. The temperature is thousands of negative degrees sintigrade.
This cave where water gets so cold that it turns to liquid again is where souls go for punishment.
This is the last chance.
Ladders ring the edges of every room. Anyone can climb to heaven from here, provided one doesn’t look down or slip and fall.
Not many make it. It takes centuries.
As one’s soul thaws out, it’s very painful. Those that falter and let go of the ladder scream all the way down, flailing slower as the air cools. Their agonized screams Doppler closer and explode into crystals as they collide with the ice. Snow drifts lazily on the breeze.
They freeze into ice-dust before they even hit the ground. It’s the cold version of re-entry.
Lucifer is reminded of his own fall from grace with every scream.
Lucifer has no interest in the fate of those that end up here. He’s given up. He doesn’t run Hell, he’s just the most famous prisoner. There are many souls in the mist around his chair that took one look at the ladders stretching up into the infinite and sat down where they were.
Heaven is heat. Heaven is passion. Heaven is alive. Heaven is not boring. Heaven is sunny. Heaven has winter but Heaven’s winters are filled with snow angels and red noses on happy children.
Hell is unchanging, uncaring, indifferent, defeated cold.
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Lucifer sits on a throne made of bones frozen solid. His skin is the colour of cot-death’s tiny lips. His long white beard moves lazily like a flag of surrender in the breeze. Fissured skin leads up to black pits that house a glint in the back hollows.
His horns are made of ice. They refract the light and sprinkle the chamber with rainbows.
Hell is cold storage.
The mist of the blue devil’s breath is a fog for the whole nine rinks.
Dante got it wrong. Hell is as far from God’s light as it’s possible to go. It makes dry ice seem like lava.
This is far below absolute zero. This is below the basement, below the bottom of the well, below rock bottom. This hell chills and numbs on a metaphysical level. The temperature is thousands of negative degrees sintigrade.
This cave where water gets so cold that it turns to liquid again is where souls go for punishment.
This is the last chance.
Ladders ring the edges of every room. Anyone can climb to heaven from here, provided one doesn’t look down or slip and fall.
Not many make it. It takes centuries.
As one’s soul thaws out, it’s very painful. Those that falter and let go of the ladder scream all the way down, flailing slower as the air cools. Their agonized screams Doppler closer and explode into crystals as they collide with the ice. Snow drifts lazily on the breeze.
They freeze into ice-dust before they even hit the ground. It’s the cold version of re-entry.
Lucifer is reminded of his own fall from grace with every scream.
Lucifer has no interest in the fate of those that end up here. He’s given up. He doesn’t run Hell, he’s just the most famous prisoner. There are many souls in the mist around his chair that took one look at the ladders stretching up into the infinite and sat down where they were.
Heaven is heat. Heaven is passion. Heaven is alive. Heaven is not boring. Heaven is sunny. Heaven has winter but Heaven’s winters are filled with snow angels and red noses on happy children.
Hell is unchanging, uncaring, indifferent, defeated cold.
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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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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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Her nickname around the lab was Winter. We hadn’t been able to get a straight answer out of her about her name. It seemed that we couldn’t guess the right words.
Winter it was, then.
She had vibrant blue hair that went from a dark violet that was nearly black at the roots that faded to yellow at the tips like corn silk. In between, most of it was the piercing cerulean of a sky on a perfect summer’s day. It gave off a phosphorescent light of its own when the lights in her cell were off.
Just like her eyes. Just like her nails. Just like her lips and nipples.
Other than that, her skin was white.
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 look like a riot of colour compared the skin of Winter.
Winter’s skin made photocopier paper look beige. Winter’s skin made snow look grey. Winter’s skin made brand-new non-stick plastic look like a Pollock painting. It practically glowed.
Winter landed in the North in a silver aerodynamic ship of extraterrestrial design. She was spotted by satellites. The U.S. Army moved in to capture her. As soon as we got close, her ship bolted and left her behind.
We weren’t able to get an answer out of her as to why that happened. Through clumsy miming, she insisted that she was alone on the ship and that ‘Ship’ panicked and fled and was probably worried sick about her.
We kept grilling her for the truth but it was quickly becoming moot.
She was dying.
Just like in War of the Worlds, our little microbes were eating her from the inside out.
It was unexpected seeing as she had a human form and her skin seemed to be made of a porcelain-like compound structure with the tensile strength to stop a bullet. There didn’t appear to be any pores and she didn’t seem to need to breathe our air. If it wasn’t for the fact that our atmosphere wasn’t crushing her, I’d hypothesize that she could float around in the vacuum of empty space with no ill effects.
That’s when it hit me. There were three grooves on the small of her back. They looked like someone had pressed three tic-tacs hard into the base of her spine and then pulled them off.
Our friend Winter was manufactured.
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.
‘Ship’ wasn’t coming back for Winter any more than we would return to a picnic for a lost fork.
We're researching her skin to make soldiers. We're trying to reverse engineer how she was made.
I still feel bad for Winter. She died two weeks ago in her cell on sub-basement B on May 15th. She died in the Spring. She cried blue tears.
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Winter it was, then.
She had vibrant blue hair that went from a dark violet that was nearly black at the roots that faded to yellow at the tips like corn silk. In between, most of it was the piercing cerulean of a sky on a perfect summer’s day. It gave off a phosphorescent light of its own when the lights in her cell were off.
Just like her eyes. Just like her nails. Just like her lips and nipples.
Other than that, her skin was white.
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 look like a riot of colour compared the skin of Winter.
Winter’s skin made photocopier paper look beige. Winter’s skin made snow look grey. Winter’s skin made brand-new non-stick plastic look like a Pollock painting. It practically glowed.
Winter landed in the North in a silver aerodynamic ship of extraterrestrial design. She was spotted by satellites. The U.S. Army moved in to capture her. As soon as we got close, her ship bolted and left her behind.
We weren’t able to get an answer out of her as to why that happened. Through clumsy miming, she insisted that she was alone on the ship and that ‘Ship’ panicked and fled and was probably worried sick about her.
We kept grilling her for the truth but it was quickly becoming moot.
She was dying.
Just like in War of the Worlds, our little microbes were eating her from the inside out.
It was unexpected seeing as she had a human form and her skin seemed to be made of a porcelain-like compound structure with the tensile strength to stop a bullet. There didn’t appear to be any pores and she didn’t seem to need to breathe our air. If it wasn’t for the fact that our atmosphere wasn’t crushing her, I’d hypothesize that she could float around in the vacuum of empty space with no ill effects.
That’s when it hit me. There were three grooves on the small of her back. They looked like someone had pressed three tic-tacs hard into the base of her spine and then pulled them off.
Our friend Winter was manufactured.
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.
‘Ship’ wasn’t coming back for Winter any more than we would return to a picnic for a lost fork.
We're researching her skin to make soldiers. We're trying to reverse engineer how she was made.
I still feel bad for Winter. She died two weeks ago in her cell on sub-basement B on May 15th. She died in the Spring. She cried blue tears.
tags
Winter on the Moon
26 July 2006 20:53My skin is a grid of Chiclets.
I turn my solid white eyes over to the sky on my right. I don’t need to breathe but the batteries that power the whirring oygenator that replaced my heart can run out of power eventually. And I can still get bored.
I look back down through the thick dome glass and resume scanning. I feel like the stars in the black sky behind my back are sequins on a cape.
I can feel the subzero temperature but it’s more like I’m made of marble rather than actually cold. I’m perched way up at the apex of a recdome in a complete vacuum. I’m a snowflake on the windshield.
What that means is that I’m on the moon, I’m naked, and I’m outside. I’m stuck to the smooth surface of the dome that covers the park where the people play. I’ve been here for hours waiting for my target. I keep looking down.
They’ve done their best to recreate Central Park and for the most part they did a pretty good job.
Or so we’re told.
At night here when the Earth is full, you can still look up and see the new shapes of the continents.
Can you imagine the terror and the chaos of The Lottery? A completely viable second earth had been set up, they said. An earth where we could frolic in controlled safety. Our race would not die out. We exhaled in relief. We’d seen what the aliens could do. Their technology far outstripped ours.
The catch was that this second earth they were talking about was The Moon. A series of tunnels and domes had been set up there. The moon is not as big as Earth. The moon is in fact a lot smaller that Earth.
There was a lottery but the rules were dictated by the aliens. We had no say. Which was cool because it meant that not just the president and his staff would go on the list but sucked because the aliens didn’t have kids or wives. Those kinds of connections weren’t taken into account.
1/16th of the Earth’s population was teleported to the Moon. The rest were left on Earth and used to help with the experiment.
I was part of a batch of humans that were changed to be able to exist outside. We are the police force here. They call us the wintermen. The meaning has become lost since there are no seasons here anymore but the name is apt. We’re white, we’re cold, and we kill things.
I stare down into the park and keep scanning.
tags
I turn my solid white eyes over to the sky on my right. I don’t need to breathe but the batteries that power the whirring oygenator that replaced my heart can run out of power eventually. And I can still get bored.
I look back down through the thick dome glass and resume scanning. I feel like the stars in the black sky behind my back are sequins on a cape.
I can feel the subzero temperature but it’s more like I’m made of marble rather than actually cold. I’m perched way up at the apex of a recdome in a complete vacuum. I’m a snowflake on the windshield.
What that means is that I’m on the moon, I’m naked, and I’m outside. I’m stuck to the smooth surface of the dome that covers the park where the people play. I’ve been here for hours waiting for my target. I keep looking down.
They’ve done their best to recreate Central Park and for the most part they did a pretty good job.
Or so we’re told.
At night here when the Earth is full, you can still look up and see the new shapes of the continents.
Can you imagine the terror and the chaos of The Lottery? A completely viable second earth had been set up, they said. An earth where we could frolic in controlled safety. Our race would not die out. We exhaled in relief. We’d seen what the aliens could do. Their technology far outstripped ours.
The catch was that this second earth they were talking about was The Moon. A series of tunnels and domes had been set up there. The moon is not as big as Earth. The moon is in fact a lot smaller that Earth.
There was a lottery but the rules were dictated by the aliens. We had no say. Which was cool because it meant that not just the president and his staff would go on the list but sucked because the aliens didn’t have kids or wives. Those kinds of connections weren’t taken into account.
1/16th of the Earth’s population was teleported to the Moon. The rest were left on Earth and used to help with the experiment.
I was part of a batch of humans that were changed to be able to exist outside. We are the police force here. They call us the wintermen. The meaning has become lost since there are no seasons here anymore but the name is apt. We’re white, we’re cold, and we kill things.
I stare down into the park and keep scanning.
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Winter won.
I always got the feeling that summer begged for winter. Summer burned itself out. Winter is the natural state that occurs when summer gets exhausted and needs to recharge. When it uses up its fuel. Winter is more easily maintained.
Of course I know that it’s all to do with the rotation of the earth and the distance from the sun and all that but they’re in my head as entities.
Now the earth is white. All the animals have evolved to be white. The people look Nordic the world over. Blonde made a comeback in a big way. We are the Aryan dream. This is another ice age.
We are tribal. The population of the entire earth has receded back to the millions. Cities are harder to maintain than villages. There are still a few big cities but it’s a constant battle for them to stay powered and organized.
The darker skinned cultures are getting paler with every generation.
The already pale ones are becoming almost translucent.
Don’t get the impression that these survivors of humanity are primitive. There is technology but it’s mostly to do with the manipulation of ice and water now. They’ve found a way to harness the energy of the cold. They’ve found out that once something gets cold enough, it starts to heat up again. The nature of entropy is cyclical. This has become the basis of their new technology. Oil isn’t needed. Solar power isn’t needed. This is good because they lost the major oil centers in the WWWar and the sun shows his face every eighteen months or so through the clouds.
There is no reason to not build entire buildings out of ice since no summer will ever come to melt them.
They’ve even lost the pigments from their eyes.
Black hair is the rarity now, the ‘attractive’ hair colour.
They are a world of albinos that love the snow.
This is the white earth.
This is one of the nightmare futures.
tags
I always got the feeling that summer begged for winter. Summer burned itself out. Winter is the natural state that occurs when summer gets exhausted and needs to recharge. When it uses up its fuel. Winter is more easily maintained.
Of course I know that it’s all to do with the rotation of the earth and the distance from the sun and all that but they’re in my head as entities.
Now the earth is white. All the animals have evolved to be white. The people look Nordic the world over. Blonde made a comeback in a big way. We are the Aryan dream. This is another ice age.
We are tribal. The population of the entire earth has receded back to the millions. Cities are harder to maintain than villages. There are still a few big cities but it’s a constant battle for them to stay powered and organized.
The darker skinned cultures are getting paler with every generation.
The already pale ones are becoming almost translucent.
Don’t get the impression that these survivors of humanity are primitive. There is technology but it’s mostly to do with the manipulation of ice and water now. They’ve found a way to harness the energy of the cold. They’ve found out that once something gets cold enough, it starts to heat up again. The nature of entropy is cyclical. This has become the basis of their new technology. Oil isn’t needed. Solar power isn’t needed. This is good because they lost the major oil centers in the WWWar and the sun shows his face every eighteen months or so through the clouds.
There is no reason to not build entire buildings out of ice since no summer will ever come to melt them.
They’ve even lost the pigments from their eyes.
Black hair is the rarity now, the ‘attractive’ hair colour.
They are a world of albinos that love the snow.
This is the white earth.
This is one of the nightmare futures.
tags
