We're just icicles.
Formed differently from the rest, in heat, from salt and sweat and everyone tells us we're everlasting, that we don't melt. Our seasons are everlasting, like the evergreen trees on old Earth, in the legends.
I think we're born to melt. Everything is. When we're formed, we're formed full, the moment we're touched by light, oxygen.
That's when we begin to melt.
Everything begins from its melting point. And we aren't everlasting and sometimes we break off before the seasons end.
Today we were 28.6,725 miles from any 'danger zones' as the Captain calls them. It was just dry clay and dust for miles, within human viewing limits. They let us go outside for a while, which was new to me. It was new because there used to be thousands of people here centuries ago, but they'd turned into the clay and rocks under my feet from a bacteria spread during the first war and it was just their voices left on the wind, and under the rocks.
(I got a lecture for licking rocks then. I washed it off!)
The rock only tasted dry, but it made going outside much more interesting.
The voices led me far away from her, far away from everyone, and down into a little pocket of the earth. I'd been in so long, I had to remember how to be something animated again.
And that's when I could smell the water.
Only human spatial perception hid this, and I found it. There was life, and moving, running water.
I splashed around in it for a bit, barefoot. It was cold enough that I couldn't feel the rocks under my feet and just enough light came in to play too; penetrating through the trees, decorating the water's surface.
It was like a mirror. I broke it every time I moved through it.
But it was okay to break the glass. I didn't cut myself this time!
After that, I broke some of the branches off to wear climbing up the trees and I watched the voices move around for a bit.
It was real coolness at the top of my tree, in wet skirts and skin. I could feel real, just about.
I have blood still. I felt it under my skin. Red, real-girl blood. The voices were almost envious of me.
Afterwards, I got chased by the light, which it was fun.
(But I lost my sweater somewhere with the voices.)
That makes me a bit more real. A girl getting chased by the sun, laughing in the dust, dancing in the old riverbeds centuries ago I would have drowned in, scaling up rocks and becoming little more than a windvoice myself. Except that I had a corporeal form, and theirs had turned to atomic motes centuries before.
It was okay. They liked having the company. It helped them remember who they were. Who they used to be.
Sometimes, they were even better conversationalists than everyone else ever is.
And they promised me time travel, though logistically impossible in my lifetime, odds calculated at nine thousand to one that I would ever live to see the day when such technology would be in the beta testing stage, their scientists promised me that it could happen. That they'd been working on it during the first war here, because no one would ever think of finding something so dangerous and altering in a place of farming life and animal excrement.
There's a planet they told me about. I can't get there, but they met a man from there. He didn't help them, not in the sense everyone helps everyone else, but pretended to drop a few clues here and there about how to create a crude prototype.
Maybe I will find him, one day. And we will go there.
Or maybe I will, if I listen to the wind a while longer. I'm sure the directions are somewhere.
I just have to listen for them.
Things are on the wind. Just listen, and they'll speak to you.
At dinner, I told everyone how I tried to bring the water-light back with me, because it was a good source of vitamin D, which we don't get enough of, or, at least, I don't think we do. Without it, we'll die faster than expected. They didn't understand. They never do.
She does, though. And she agreed with me. She thinks you can't live among metal and oil for as long as they have without your body's chemistry deteriorating.
I said I was sorry I couldn't bring any back for her. She's one of the best of all and she should have had some.
She told me it would only have the opposite effect on her and said it was alright.
So maybe one of them understands.
::sigh:: Later I asked Simon to leave the door to my room open. The goldfish wanted to go out. He told me it would be too cold.
I told him we were already breathing in artificially created, recycled air and that we wouldn't get cold, due to the controlled climate we were in.
My brother is so stupid sometimes. I don't understand how he ever got to be a doctor.
--------------
Blog Like It Isn't You Day!
Formed differently from the rest, in heat, from salt and sweat and everyone tells us we're everlasting, that we don't melt. Our seasons are everlasting, like the evergreen trees on old Earth, in the legends.
I think we're born to melt. Everything is. When we're formed, we're formed full, the moment we're touched by light, oxygen.
That's when we begin to melt.
Everything begins from its melting point. And we aren't everlasting and sometimes we break off before the seasons end.
Today we were 28.6,725 miles from any 'danger zones' as the Captain calls them. It was just dry clay and dust for miles, within human viewing limits. They let us go outside for a while, which was new to me. It was new because there used to be thousands of people here centuries ago, but they'd turned into the clay and rocks under my feet from a bacteria spread during the first war and it was just their voices left on the wind, and under the rocks.
(I got a lecture for licking rocks then. I washed it off!)
The rock only tasted dry, but it made going outside much more interesting.
The voices led me far away from her, far away from everyone, and down into a little pocket of the earth. I'd been in so long, I had to remember how to be something animated again.
And that's when I could smell the water.
Only human spatial perception hid this, and I found it. There was life, and moving, running water.
I splashed around in it for a bit, barefoot. It was cold enough that I couldn't feel the rocks under my feet and just enough light came in to play too; penetrating through the trees, decorating the water's surface.
It was like a mirror. I broke it every time I moved through it.
But it was okay to break the glass. I didn't cut myself this time!
After that, I broke some of the branches off to wear climbing up the trees and I watched the voices move around for a bit.
It was real coolness at the top of my tree, in wet skirts and skin. I could feel real, just about.
I have blood still. I felt it under my skin. Red, real-girl blood. The voices were almost envious of me.
Afterwards, I got chased by the light, which it was fun.
(But I lost my sweater somewhere with the voices.)
That makes me a bit more real. A girl getting chased by the sun, laughing in the dust, dancing in the old riverbeds centuries ago I would have drowned in, scaling up rocks and becoming little more than a windvoice myself. Except that I had a corporeal form, and theirs had turned to atomic motes centuries before.
It was okay. They liked having the company. It helped them remember who they were. Who they used to be.
Sometimes, they were even better conversationalists than everyone else ever is.
And they promised me time travel, though logistically impossible in my lifetime, odds calculated at nine thousand to one that I would ever live to see the day when such technology would be in the beta testing stage, their scientists promised me that it could happen. That they'd been working on it during the first war here, because no one would ever think of finding something so dangerous and altering in a place of farming life and animal excrement.
There's a planet they told me about. I can't get there, but they met a man from there. He didn't help them, not in the sense everyone helps everyone else, but pretended to drop a few clues here and there about how to create a crude prototype.
Maybe I will find him, one day. And we will go there.
Or maybe I will, if I listen to the wind a while longer. I'm sure the directions are somewhere.
I just have to listen for them.
Things are on the wind. Just listen, and they'll speak to you.
At dinner, I told everyone how I tried to bring the water-light back with me, because it was a good source of vitamin D, which we don't get enough of, or, at least, I don't think we do. Without it, we'll die faster than expected. They didn't understand. They never do.
She does, though. And she agreed with me. She thinks you can't live among metal and oil for as long as they have without your body's chemistry deteriorating.
I said I was sorry I couldn't bring any back for her. She's one of the best of all and she should have had some.
She told me it would only have the opposite effect on her and said it was alright.
So maybe one of them understands.
::sigh:: Later I asked Simon to leave the door to my room open. The goldfish wanted to go out. He told me it would be too cold.
I told him we were already breathing in artificially created, recycled air and that we wouldn't get cold, due to the controlled climate we were in.
My brother is so stupid sometimes. I don't understand how he ever got to be a doctor.
--------------
Blog Like It Isn't You Day!
