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Entry tags:
- a knife wants to cut,
- actually a toddler,
- fucking trolleyology,
- girl from a lacuna,
- interdimensional discard pile,
- little orphan angry,
- nobody's child,
- nobody's mother,
- poor life choices,
- seriously mira what are you doing,
- temper tantrum,
- they kept her sharp,
- tool of the gods,
- well if he can't even explain,
- what good is the admiral anyway,
- why does she like arthas
6. Open spam + Open video + private to Arthas
[Open Spam - hallways, deck, dining hall]
[Mira has finally read her file. And it's useless. Worse than useless. There's nothing about her past, her family, not even the name of the planet with the kites. The admiral is supposed to be omnisciennt, and she's still no one, from nowhere.
Worse - she's barely even no one coherently, they've broken her down and made her forget again and again. When you sharpen a knife, you have to scour away the layer of oxidation, the nicks and imperfections, all the little cumulative effects of time and life and use. They kept her very sharp.
She hurls her pot of sempervivum against the wall, hears the ceramic shatter brightly, watches the dark soil scatter across the pristine floor, the bulbous clutches of stiff leaves lolling askew in the mess. She throws her chair, and her lamp, and her notescreen, everything she can pick up that isn't extruded from the walls, but most of it isn't as breakable.
She snatches up the file and storms to the deck, cheeks hot and red, eyes wet, half blinded, flings the pages over the deck railing. She imagines jumping after them, but not seriously - she told Harvey the truth, she doesn't want to die. She wants to live, and she feels like she never, ever has. Not even the killing was hers, they didn't even let her keep the one thing that was always bright and real, the one thing they wanted her for. She wants to scream and hurt and break things, and there's nothing to break in the cold inverse-crush of space. She knows this from both of her lives.
She makes a strangled, frustrated animal noise in her throat, whirls, stalks toward the dining hall, which has plates and fruit bowls to smash and tables to flip over. She doesn't have a plan or a goal, just hurt and rage and viciousness.]
[Public, later]
[Her eyes are still a little red; she doesn't look like death warmed over but she doesn't look happy, either. Her tone is terse, not quite defiant. Challenging, maybe.]
If you knew, I mean really knew, that killing someone innocent would save millions of lives, improve more, would you do it?
[Private to Arthas]
What would you do if you couldn't remember who you were before?
[Who would be left?]
[Mira has finally read her file. And it's useless. Worse than useless. There's nothing about her past, her family, not even the name of the planet with the kites. The admiral is supposed to be omnisciennt, and she's still no one, from nowhere.
Worse - she's barely even no one coherently, they've broken her down and made her forget again and again. When you sharpen a knife, you have to scour away the layer of oxidation, the nicks and imperfections, all the little cumulative effects of time and life and use. They kept her very sharp.
She hurls her pot of sempervivum against the wall, hears the ceramic shatter brightly, watches the dark soil scatter across the pristine floor, the bulbous clutches of stiff leaves lolling askew in the mess. She throws her chair, and her lamp, and her notescreen, everything she can pick up that isn't extruded from the walls, but most of it isn't as breakable.
She snatches up the file and storms to the deck, cheeks hot and red, eyes wet, half blinded, flings the pages over the deck railing. She imagines jumping after them, but not seriously - she told Harvey the truth, she doesn't want to die. She wants to live, and she feels like she never, ever has. Not even the killing was hers, they didn't even let her keep the one thing that was always bright and real, the one thing they wanted her for. She wants to scream and hurt and break things, and there's nothing to break in the cold inverse-crush of space. She knows this from both of her lives.
She makes a strangled, frustrated animal noise in her throat, whirls, stalks toward the dining hall, which has plates and fruit bowls to smash and tables to flip over. She doesn't have a plan or a goal, just hurt and rage and viciousness.]
[Public, later]
[Her eyes are still a little red; she doesn't look like death warmed over but she doesn't look happy, either. Her tone is terse, not quite defiant. Challenging, maybe.]
If you knew, I mean really knew, that killing someone innocent would save millions of lives, improve more, would you do it?
[Private to Arthas]
What would you do if you couldn't remember who you were before?
[Who would be left?]
[private]
I never just do one symbolic thing, my love.
[private]
[Bitterly, for reasons she isn't thinking about.]
[private]
It's 'ow my mind works. I can't change that. I'm sorry.
[private]
It's not bad. It's. Poetic.
[Poetry is for people.]
I just don't know how to think like that.
[private]
Oh, Mira. It's for you to destroy those buggers, if you choose. I don't 'ave the right to do it for you. Right now, looking at you and knowing what's been done, I want to blast 'em into atoms and stamp on each one.
Do you read much?
[private]
[And that hurts, she realizes only as the plain facts of the words are already in her mouth, that stings like saltwater in a wound. My world. She was never really a part of it, but what else could she call it? She is from somewhere. She is from their dominion, even if she can't scale it down further, can't pinpoint any one rock in the Home Cluster or the Outworlds. She has no first language but she knows them all, from that world. She feels some loyalty to it, and not just to them, to the lives she stepped through and struck and shifted, even if it was at their orders, like a terrible gardener with silver shears at the bidding of an impossibly lofty lord.]
No. Not that I can recall.
[Dryly. But less bitter than it was.]
[private]
[For a moment she looks impossibly ancient, impossibly other; and then her face cracks into a pained smile and she's only Iris again; the same woman who fell on her arse skating, who swears while she chops onions, who can't be trusted with any recipe more complicated than roast potatoes - not because she can't cook, but because she can't resist experimenting.]
...By accident. I'm angry, Mira, 'cause I love you and I won't 'ave anyone messing you about again. Telling you what to think. Sometimes I'm scared to talk to you in case I dye you Iris-coloured like knickers in the wash. You remind me so much of me and that's dangerous, when you've been left so little of you.
But that's really 'ow we all do it. Absorbing bits and pieces of what's around us. That's why books: all those bits left for the future by other minds than us. We're all of us made up of a mosaic of everyone before us. Me included: I just got to pick and choose what to make meself out of and Mira? So do you. It's the upside of being abandoned and alone.
Harvey's a reader. Get 'is recommendations and all. 'E's a very different thinker than me, but both of us - all of us - we love you without ulterior motives.
Ursula LeGuin. That's my recommendation. Human writer, late 20th to 21st centuries. She 'ad beautiful ideas and she strung 'em together beautifully, but what she wrote about was people - all the infinite variations of 'ow people work off each other.
[private]
[A very small smile, wistfully reflective. She draws a knee up to her chest, but only one, a perching sort of fold, rather than pulling herself defensively all in. Her voice is quiet, less sorrowful or angry. A spare, windswept sort of reflection, clean in the wake of blustery storms, like cobblestones after rain.]
I didn't get to. I didn't get to keep anything I picked up. Even my keepers never talked to me in the same mouth twice. Nothing to leave a mark. Though that was probably just out of convenience.
It got to the point where I didn't want to talk to anyone, didn't even want anyone to notice me there, when I wasn't being someone in particular for a mission. Because it was so pointless, because they couldn't touch the real me or see me, and I couldn't care about them because we'd just...drift on.
I didn't know, or I didn't know that I knew. But I think I realized, without thinking about it, that I hadn't brought things with me.
Sometimes I still want to be invisible. But it hasn't happened with you.
[This is how she says, I choose these pieces, as close to it as she has the confidence to come.]
[private]
You will be. But not at the expense of being Mira-coloured. That's what Iris means, you know: an old Terran word for the colours in refracted white light. S'probably why I picked it.
[Iris narrows her eyes as Mira tells her story, and she doesn't rage at the sickening cruelty of it - at least, not aloud.]
There's prisons like that, on some worlds. You whirl from one party to the next, and never remember what you've forgotten. Dead 'ard to break out of. Dead 'ard to remember you even want to, or why.
...I've 'ad a lot longer building meself. When I first come out into the world, I was shyer. I got a taste of it again, that flood. Watching people, not being part of it. Just so it's not the only choice left you. I won't 'ave that for you.
[private]
[She tastes champagne, feels the fizz in the back of her throat like trapped bees.]
Even when I was sick of it, the endless amusements of pleasurecraft, I knew I was waiting for something better, that I'd have my mission if I just smiled and dawdled a bit more.
Mira means sight.
[Haha.]
I don't know if they gave it to me or not.
[private]
[Iris is remembering the pleasure prison her mad future self trapped her in, last time she left the barge; she thinks of Shada, too, where she may or may not have been. She doesn't want to keep secrets; but she doesn't, either, want to parade her endless experiences in Mira's face, so for now, she keeps silence.]
I've always been a party girl, me. But it makes you sick fast if you don't 'ave the real stuff next to it. This cruise is a bit odd, admittedly; but it can get pretty bloody real.
[private]
[Dryly, darkly. But there's something satisfying in being prickly, in resisting the praise and the optimism. This, this little cluster of sound, this is something she has been allowed to carry with her, something that has marked her. And she is angry about her past, she is not bubbly and blithe, she is not champagne, and she is not a wild little windstorm that will bluster and blow away, either, even if her instincts run to drama and breaking things. She did that - she did that a lot - and she is still angry. She can hold this anger, squeeze it tight until it turns hard and sleek and strong under the pressure, like metamorphic rock, like shale into slate.
It is also an experiment in levels of symbolism. She is perversely proud of the reversal.]
But I like sight.
[Contemplative again; she holds the anger, but holds it in abeyance. It will be there when she needs it, a buried coal.]
I remember, on the Queen Favor, the food was so lavishly ridiculous. A hundred spices, a lineage of hydroponic cultivars for every scrap of vegetation, a tittering half-macabre morality drama about the free-range antigravity fois gras, or whatever. I used to daydream about plain bread. Ben lets me knead the dough for rolls every day, now.
[There is reality here. Substance and sustenance, flour under her fingernails. Traces.]
The cycles feel similar to my life, sometimes, the lull and the chaos, but it's faster. Like a mouse's heartbeat instead of a person's.
[private]
Good point. I never subscribed to gods, so I think of miracles as more like little gifts from the multiverse. Like the perfect scent of a common lawn daisy. To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower - hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
William Blake wrote that. 'E did rather filter everything through 'is specific theology, but that bloke were a true visionary.
[She grins.]
I'll take you to meet 'im once you graduate. I reckon you'd get on. 'E'd absolutely get what you mean about bread and foie gras, too.
[private]
[Just melancholy, now. If she can have nothing else about her past, can't she at last have this?]
It's not implausible. The linguistic origin matches my genetic heritage.
[private]
[private]
But they were the sort to snip away every other connection I had. Leaving just one, it's odd. Sloppy.
I can't decide which way makes more sense.
[private]
[She rather thinks Mira knows that already. But she can't not offer the option.]
[private]
I want - I deserve to know things other than that.
[private]
[private]
I know.
I still deserve to know her name.
[She sounds a little petulant, unsure if she really has the right at all, if it is a completely outrageous demand. The world is unfair; no one gets all the things they want; she is insignificant in the universe. She scowls, on the edge of pouting, and doesn't retract it.]
[private]
I chose the name I go by now. I know exactly where I came by it and why. We'll go on a quest for yours the moment I'm allowed to take you off 'ere.
You deserve a lot more, but there's a fair chance of finding that.
[private]
I don't feel like I can choose properly. If I don't know the weight of what I'm choosing between.
...thank you.
[private]
I wanted to know, once. I found out some of it - people I might've been related to - and we didn't understand each other. I didn't belong there any more than I 'ad anywhere else. So I left some spaces empty. There's a certain power you can draw from a waveform you never collapse; like the universes at the 'eart of your artificials. Paradox is a strong force, and a dangerous one.
And then again maybe I'm just making the best of a thing I couldn't find. That's another uncertainty I keep at me core. And you aren't me. So it's your choice and you 'ave forever to make it in. If you're still deciding when you graduate, we can go explore somewhere else.
[private]
[But she smiles a little, nods.]
I'll think about it.