LJ Idol Week 42: Flies

[crisp_sobriety]

What follows is the best account I can give of the last three times I saw my brother.

The third-to-last time, it was mid-August, and he rang my doorbell. I can still remember what he looked like when I answered. A mirage with the heat-lines from the road all around him.

I said, “Jesus,” and he smiled.

Back then -there are years and years in

Comments

[reckless_blues]

Oh God, it's the guy in my icon.

(Well, that's Bachelor Dankovsky from the game Pathologic - he got his bachelor's in medicine and never a degree, but he's known as a doctor and researches the possibility of human immortality.) (I've got the worst crush on him...)

It's an interesting topic to me, too - almost as soon as you approach the practical concerns, you have to argue with the fact that humanity will be fundamentally changed by having defeated death. Especially if your personal approach isn't to preserve the body but the information-theoretic definition of life, that is, you forsake the flesh and just upload everybody into the cloud - so we aren't subject to hormonal fluctuations or gut flora and we can't do things like eat or fuck anymore. Even if we stay in our bodies and simply don't age the question gets hard - I've always thought that people say "Life is meaningful because it ends! Time is short! Make the most of it!" and so on just do it as a defense mechanism against mortality and none of that structure is at all necessary. But they do have a point that human philosophy, human drives, and so on, are going to change radically in response to all this ... So I'm attracted to stories with this sort of metaphor. I liked it a lot.

I like sibling stories, too - where they know each other so well they learn a lot more just from what they sense about each other, and much less by what they actually say.

[crisp_sobriety]

Danyul. :3

"I've always thought that people say "Life is meaningful because it ends! Time is short! Make the most of it!" and so on just do it as a defense mechanism against mortality and none of that structure is at all necessary. But they do have a point that human philosophy, human drives, and so on, are going to change radically in response to all this ...So I'm attracted to stories with this sort of metaphor."

Same. It's an interesting topic to me as well, which is probably why immortality is something that has come up so much in my entries.

That, and for this story in particular, I find people with unlikely or seemingly impossible ambitions compelling. I like characters with fire in their soul, who can't sleep for wanting so bad. And, in a lot of cases, are willing to work to the breaking-point to achieve it.

And like I said in another comment, the twins are what interested me most in writing this. I was thinking what it would be like to have a sibling who was dangerously, freakishly brilliant, and being a twin, they don't even have the relief of an age difference between them. And I think it's interesting when people are actually far more similar than appearances would let on.

Thank you. :)