Desperation used to be a simple art. Simple but full of muscle memory that made practice seem like genius to the uninitiated. A robot can reproduce a painting immaculately given the right code. Biocomputers take time to reprogram, to remake, to reform their conditioning. Semantics, they're delicious. You could serve them up on a plate and swallow them whole - people frequently do, of course. It's a subroutine of being a person.
The duality of feeling your body rot - your very cells tearing free from ion to unfamiliar ion in this cloud of desolation. The extreme irony of the primordial shell's lucid dreamtime of darkness opposed to the stark clarity of the primordial mission. The definition is lost in translation, of course. The wavelengths that would sterilize a human feed the corporeal. Shells within shells.
You wrap your proboscis around the medulla oblongata and slurp in those wonderful preconditions and unconscious, non-cognitive concepts that your donor helpfully supplied you with. A half-lifetime of pseudo experience. It's worn thin for you of course, Noah. The parity of an old married couple who are resigned to one another's dependency - but not codependency, no. Our experiences have been edifying enough to pass the long days.
A thundercrack of ionic gas hurtles through the nebulae. Light is relative. It nourishes the soul and kills the host. Being here is to be a diabetic baby in a candy factory.
Recklinghausen carries the familiarity of a mackerel slipping back into the shoal. All art and poetry here - no creature comforts. No satisfyingly ergonomic armchairs. Our observations do not carry enough weight to cause the wider shoal to consider the value of a chiropractor - a pity, considering our delicate physiques. So much extra mass for a spine designed under a single, middle-aged sun.
Aah, the satisfaction of stretching fingers. The vibrations from the cruise engines, the delicate itch of gamma radiation in the drive torus. There's a suspicion in the aggregate that the Mindshare, in its equitable wisdom, chose to touch the Rheinland first from the propensity of MOX cores over the Pygar discovery. A fallacious assumption, of course. But it brings a smile. That's a medullaic reaction that no divinity could recode.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Twenty Seven years ago, you had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. From the perspective of the Order - although they tended to be more calculative. Degrees of separation didn't permit sympathy nannying. The Pygar expedition was famous across the houses, and you were young and impressionable. A flight officer in your twenties.
Fast forward considerably and you were blasting your way through the bretonian interior as the fourth fleet fell apart around you. Join the Navy, see the sector, was the promise. It turned out to be exceptionally accurate. Promise kept. Tau thirty one had a radiant beauty that reinforced the mission - the sector was gorgeous and the collective You deserved to inherit its place in the stars.
The rations wore thin and the need for calories grew difficult. You were in your second teenage phase at that point, with all the growing pains and aches that came of growing into yourself - without of the added extra hair in amusing places. Perhaps it was a stroke of fortune when the mothership sharded into twisted structural alloy and spread itself amongst the void. Your cognition was somewhat frazzled in those weeks. You remember only phases. It was all various shades of horrifying - but you walked free.
You had plenty of time to dwell upon the minute during the silences that followed. The first broken promise - again, all for the best, was that you would never be alone. At first, you were overwhelmed; an orchestra thundering at all hours and dreams and silences - you couldn't make much sense, for you never were musical till then. A generation of holopersuits and kept your sensitivities rather blunt, back then.
Still, they left their scars. You remember a lieutenant screaming about how he couldn't breathe. The experience had no use to the greater whole, so it simply sat, floating around. A node would eventually take interest and whisk it away from you. You felt glad of it - it was a therapy where you didn't need to take any steps to self-improve.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)