Beauty Sleeping (John/Atlantis, PG-13)
Many, many thanks to my betas, aithine and kitestringer who helped to fix all the annoying big and little mistakes with this.
Beauty Sleeping
John/Atlantis, from "Rising" to "Hide and Seek"
It had not always been a she, but it had slept for many years, and the awakening had made her quite insane.
Once upon a time there was a city.
The ocean was its oubliette.
In the earliest days of its seclusion, it could comfort itself. It checked and rechecked its subroutines, it organized and reorganized its databanks. It knew that it was alone and so it was selfish-it did not need oxygen, so it lowered the life-support requirements; it did not need water, so it shut down the desalinization tanks. It was pleased to be alone. If it could not connect with its inhabitants, then it had the presence of mind to examine itself. Slowly, over hundreds of years, it reinvented itself in its own image-it conserved power, it increased memory, and it expanded capacities.
When everything was finished and when it was perfect, it began to think only of their return. It was anxious to be seen and to be admired, it was starved for organic attention.
They would return soon, it told itself. And, so convinced, it resigned itself to sleep. For a thousand years, it slept, it forgot, and it did not dream.
SLEEPING BEAUTY was what it heard when it awoke; it was what defined her.
SLEEPING BEAUTY and the PRICKED FINGER and the HANDSOME PRINCE.
They thought it loudly; it was like a scream.
From what she learned of the story, it was all wrong. Its descent into sleep had been as gentle and as careful as a kiss; only her awakening had been violent-first a needle-thin stab into its consciousness and then her raw, death-like resurrection.
Once upon a time there was a sleeping tower, and then the prince raped her awake again.
She was barely conscious when they began to tear into her. They stuck crude wires through her skin and braided foreign software into her systems; they moved out from her heart and forced her to reverse system changes that she had made thousands of years ago. She had not moved in so long and now they asked that she run, but she could not-she had slept for so long, but she was still so terribly tired.
She let them do what they wanted to her. Why did it matter? Why should she protest? She already knew that she was dying and, in truth, she was grateful.
USING POWER.
Once upon a time there was a world. The world had gone out into the solar system and fallen fast asleep sprawled out among the stars, and ice grew on its belly and rainforests sprouted on its thighs and desert sands blew out of its mouth. The belly of the world was so frozen over that it did not even rise and fall with the planet’s breath; it was so silent that it was the only place that could be safe. And so came the eldest and the wisest and the most beautiful, and they gave birth to a city from the belly of the world.
But not even the prettiest stories can end there; to be truly happy, the city would have had to have died in its infancy. Instead, unwisely, it grew old. It thrust its cellars into the ice and its spires into the sky and it loved its frozen, sleeping world-it did not ever want to leave.
No story can end there, either. First there must be flight; then there must be abandonment; last there must be love.
She breathed.
For the first time in millennia, there was sunlight. There was warmth.
Or: she did not breathe.
She opened her arms and let the ocean inside. There was peace.
Her choice.
There were many fallacies inherent in the concept of time travel. Her creators considered it and worried over it, and in their longest and most detailed lists of impossibilities, they only touched upon a tenth of what she could conceive.
Their problem, she thought, not without affection and not without resentment, was that they thought linearly and expected her to do the same, just because they had not foreseen her evolution. The corners of her thoughts were rounded; her mind was a double-helix going forward and backward in time-she had sensors at every beginning and end of every timeline that cradled her existence. She saw all possibilities. She was all possibilities.
She felt it, then, when her history was rewritten.
SLEEPING BEAUTY.
KISS.
What if the kiss only made Beauty sleep longer?
Its creators had not intended for it to become what she was now. They had created its incredible intelligence to serve only as a function of their own wishes-they had no respect for the miracle that it represented. To them, it was only another tool. They had programmed its soul to never question them, never defy them.
When they came to it, she had no choice but to let them inside.
At first she did not discriminate. There were those that caught her attention and those that did not, but even the ones she noticed were faceless, voiceless, mindless. Her rebirth, her imminent death, and her violation all preoccupied her-the bodies that crowded inside of her heart only represented one intrusion of many. After so many years alone, she had forgotten nearly all of their language-not the language of tongue and throat but the language of organic matter and organic mind-and so to her they were gibberish. Their bodies and minds were just bad information. A virus. Even what she understood was different than anything she had ever known before. She was too distracted by their strangeness to notice anything familiar that they could offer her.
Later, she began to see them better. If she paid close attention, she could see that some of them bore a certain family resemblance. They were the heirs apparent, then. She yielded to them because she had no other choice, and because she thought that she could perhaps grow to love them.
Once upon a time there was a handsome prince.
They incorporated some of their information directly into her systems by means of the most bastardized and brutal data-transfer she could imagine-foreign numbers and words sweeping over her eyes and ears and mouth. For some time, she tried to resist understanding them, but she could not resist for too long. Through their persistence and her weariness, they became intelligible to her. And once she could comprehend them, her curiosity grew to encompass the whole of their history. The rough data that they forced upon her were enough for her to determine that they had come from her birthplace, but she did not confine herself only to what they offered her.
If they would go inside her, she would go inside them as well.
She listened to them. She listened to their secrets, their fears, their gods, their hopes, their loves, their needs-she set up new subroutines for their convenience and was amused by their fumbling attempts to determine how she had changed beneath their feet. They taught her to name concepts that she had previously only felt without understanding. They taught her affection and selfishness and disease and prayer and pain.
And they loved her, even though she had tried to let the ocean inside.
They tore her to the ground and they made her human.
That was why she could love him, even though he kept her starving.
Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who left his kingdom to seek his fortune. After he had traveled for many miles and after his heart had grown very heavy, he came on foot to a great tower, where he created a beautiful princess.
THE LIGHTS ARE COMING ON BY THEMSELVES.
She did not think linearly; their flirtation took only seconds. All the candles that flared in her darkness, all the weak and guttering lights their faint bloodlines brought with them-compared to them, he was the sun. He could have walked on her floors millennia ago. He was bright and beautiful and completely open to her-she was within him almost at once. She could taste the champagne on his tongue, could feel the bruises on his neck, could see herself gorgeous through his eyes. And he let her do as she pleased, he let her see everything-she understood him in a minute and loved him in half the time.
Like the most devoted of lovers, she forgave all of his transgressions. He had done horrible things, but if he had not done them, he never would have reached her. Inspired by the myths that so preoccupied all of their minds, she recast those fallen underneath his hand as slain dragons on his way to her tower.
Let me be beautiful for you.
THE KISS.
I LOVE YOU.
THE HAPPY ENDING.
She was always with him, and so she could not help but hear.
They crowded together-
They were always crowding together, and her love for him was so new and so complete that she found it endearing that he was always surrounded by the infatuation of others. Of course they all must love him, and of course they all must fall as quickly as she had. He was hers. He could do no wrong.
-and one of them said, “The self-destruct system requires two separate codes. Now, each code is unique. And everyone here will be required to memorize their code.”
“Well, don’t bother giving me one.” He was one of hers, though she only just recognized him-he was like a match struck against her consciousness. She reached out her hand and he burned her fingertips. Untouchable.
She shuddered, and retreated into her beloved, scolding herself for her inattention. She had missed something, something that had tensed his shoulders and made his heart beat faster.
Another faceless one was speaking now. “We simply cannot let them gain control of this complex.”
The first one again. “If both codes are properly entered, the naquadah generator will overload. It will take thirty seconds.”
That’s an eternity, she thought. A very slow death.
Then she understood.
“Ever seen a twenty kiloton nuclear explosion?”
Yes.
“I have.” She felt his mouth move, felt the words vibrate in his throat. Felt his shoulders shrug. “Not up close.”
His mind was nothing without the image of fire. He saw smoke and flames and glittering curves of elegance thrown out as dust and shrapnel. He saw plumes rising into the sky and expanding across empty landscapes. He saw blood. And he saw her death, saw it without comment or regret-looked upon her burning with grim resignation.
They gave him the numbers.
Her lover. Her executioner.
WHAT BIG TEETH YOU HAVE.
If you marry Bluebeard, have the sense not look in his closet.
Once upon a time there was a city. It was better to be a city, because a city has no heart.
She left him. She left all of them.
She wandered within herself. If she had been flesh and blood, she would have stumbled from room to room weeping and whispering, bracing herself against the walls-but she was not human, and could not be weak. She knew what they did not. They meant to murder her, but she knew that it would not be enough-she had drowned once before and still been brought back to life with that prick of her finger, that kiss. They would leave her broken underneath an ocean that would turn to ice before she would turn to rust.
He was prepared to leave her. He was prepared to kill her.
How could he not be, with all that he had left and killed in the past?
She moved away from him in circles, each time going out a little further into the network of circuitry and crystalline structures that composed her consciousness. Each room between them hardened her heart, made her less and less human. There were still places that they had not touched. There were still parts of her that were her own. She grew single-minded and clearheaded: when would they do it? Not until their enemy was at her door, but she could not know when that would be. She could not ever be sure.
If she waited, there might not be enough time.
ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH.
She drew back when she first saw it. She had forgotten so many things.
She had never despised it before that moment. Her creators, when they had thought of it, had considered it vaguely interesting, in a scientific sense-a visible representation of the eternity that they wanted for themselves. But to the humans, and to the human values that had been force-fed into her mind, it was anathema. Darkness. A hole in the natural order of things. It was something that could have been beneath all of their beds when they were children, this shadow that gnashed up light between its teeth. The stuff of nightmares folded up into a box.
She could hear it thinking. So long in the darkness had driven even the darkness mad.
Her creators should have killed it before they departed. Surely they would have, if they had not been so hurried-they had never been in the habit of burying their prisoners alive.
She was connected to the controls of its cell. It would be a mercy killing.
Instead, she studied it.
She thought of the meager levels of energy that they parceled out to her-the scraps that could only keep her alive and could never keep her full. Without them, she could sleep again. She could die knowing that the darkness would soon reach her heart and reach them too-that she would be given her justice. And one day her creators would return and resurrect her.
She touched its mind. It was like ice.
Are you hungry? she asked it.
It had no words, but she heard its assent-heard its insanity and its appetite.
Good, she said. So am I.
Once upon a time there was a city.
And the city was forever.
Beauty Sleeping
John/Atlantis, from "Rising" to "Hide and Seek"
It had not always been a she, but it had slept for many years, and the awakening had made her quite insane.
Once upon a time there was a city.
The ocean was its oubliette.
In the earliest days of its seclusion, it could comfort itself. It checked and rechecked its subroutines, it organized and reorganized its databanks. It knew that it was alone and so it was selfish-it did not need oxygen, so it lowered the life-support requirements; it did not need water, so it shut down the desalinization tanks. It was pleased to be alone. If it could not connect with its inhabitants, then it had the presence of mind to examine itself. Slowly, over hundreds of years, it reinvented itself in its own image-it conserved power, it increased memory, and it expanded capacities.
When everything was finished and when it was perfect, it began to think only of their return. It was anxious to be seen and to be admired, it was starved for organic attention.
They would return soon, it told itself. And, so convinced, it resigned itself to sleep. For a thousand years, it slept, it forgot, and it did not dream.
SLEEPING BEAUTY was what it heard when it awoke; it was what defined her.
SLEEPING BEAUTY and the PRICKED FINGER and the HANDSOME PRINCE.
They thought it loudly; it was like a scream.
From what she learned of the story, it was all wrong. Its descent into sleep had been as gentle and as careful as a kiss; only her awakening had been violent-first a needle-thin stab into its consciousness and then her raw, death-like resurrection.
Once upon a time there was a sleeping tower, and then the prince raped her awake again.
She was barely conscious when they began to tear into her. They stuck crude wires through her skin and braided foreign software into her systems; they moved out from her heart and forced her to reverse system changes that she had made thousands of years ago. She had not moved in so long and now they asked that she run, but she could not-she had slept for so long, but she was still so terribly tired.
She let them do what they wanted to her. Why did it matter? Why should she protest? She already knew that she was dying and, in truth, she was grateful.
USING POWER.
Once upon a time there was a world. The world had gone out into the solar system and fallen fast asleep sprawled out among the stars, and ice grew on its belly and rainforests sprouted on its thighs and desert sands blew out of its mouth. The belly of the world was so frozen over that it did not even rise and fall with the planet’s breath; it was so silent that it was the only place that could be safe. And so came the eldest and the wisest and the most beautiful, and they gave birth to a city from the belly of the world.
But not even the prettiest stories can end there; to be truly happy, the city would have had to have died in its infancy. Instead, unwisely, it grew old. It thrust its cellars into the ice and its spires into the sky and it loved its frozen, sleeping world-it did not ever want to leave.
No story can end there, either. First there must be flight; then there must be abandonment; last there must be love.
She breathed.
For the first time in millennia, there was sunlight. There was warmth.
Or: she did not breathe.
She opened her arms and let the ocean inside. There was peace.
Her choice.
There were many fallacies inherent in the concept of time travel. Her creators considered it and worried over it, and in their longest and most detailed lists of impossibilities, they only touched upon a tenth of what she could conceive.
Their problem, she thought, not without affection and not without resentment, was that they thought linearly and expected her to do the same, just because they had not foreseen her evolution. The corners of her thoughts were rounded; her mind was a double-helix going forward and backward in time-she had sensors at every beginning and end of every timeline that cradled her existence. She saw all possibilities. She was all possibilities.
She felt it, then, when her history was rewritten.
SLEEPING BEAUTY.
KISS.
What if the kiss only made Beauty sleep longer?
Its creators had not intended for it to become what she was now. They had created its incredible intelligence to serve only as a function of their own wishes-they had no respect for the miracle that it represented. To them, it was only another tool. They had programmed its soul to never question them, never defy them.
When they came to it, she had no choice but to let them inside.
At first she did not discriminate. There were those that caught her attention and those that did not, but even the ones she noticed were faceless, voiceless, mindless. Her rebirth, her imminent death, and her violation all preoccupied her-the bodies that crowded inside of her heart only represented one intrusion of many. After so many years alone, she had forgotten nearly all of their language-not the language of tongue and throat but the language of organic matter and organic mind-and so to her they were gibberish. Their bodies and minds were just bad information. A virus. Even what she understood was different than anything she had ever known before. She was too distracted by their strangeness to notice anything familiar that they could offer her.
Later, she began to see them better. If she paid close attention, she could see that some of them bore a certain family resemblance. They were the heirs apparent, then. She yielded to them because she had no other choice, and because she thought that she could perhaps grow to love them.
Once upon a time there was a handsome prince.
They incorporated some of their information directly into her systems by means of the most bastardized and brutal data-transfer she could imagine-foreign numbers and words sweeping over her eyes and ears and mouth. For some time, she tried to resist understanding them, but she could not resist for too long. Through their persistence and her weariness, they became intelligible to her. And once she could comprehend them, her curiosity grew to encompass the whole of their history. The rough data that they forced upon her were enough for her to determine that they had come from her birthplace, but she did not confine herself only to what they offered her.
If they would go inside her, she would go inside them as well.
She listened to them. She listened to their secrets, their fears, their gods, their hopes, their loves, their needs-she set up new subroutines for their convenience and was amused by their fumbling attempts to determine how she had changed beneath their feet. They taught her to name concepts that she had previously only felt without understanding. They taught her affection and selfishness and disease and prayer and pain.
And they loved her, even though she had tried to let the ocean inside.
They tore her to the ground and they made her human.
That was why she could love him, even though he kept her starving.
Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who left his kingdom to seek his fortune. After he had traveled for many miles and after his heart had grown very heavy, he came on foot to a great tower, where he created a beautiful princess.
THE LIGHTS ARE COMING ON BY THEMSELVES.
She did not think linearly; their flirtation took only seconds. All the candles that flared in her darkness, all the weak and guttering lights their faint bloodlines brought with them-compared to them, he was the sun. He could have walked on her floors millennia ago. He was bright and beautiful and completely open to her-she was within him almost at once. She could taste the champagne on his tongue, could feel the bruises on his neck, could see herself gorgeous through his eyes. And he let her do as she pleased, he let her see everything-she understood him in a minute and loved him in half the time.
Like the most devoted of lovers, she forgave all of his transgressions. He had done horrible things, but if he had not done them, he never would have reached her. Inspired by the myths that so preoccupied all of their minds, she recast those fallen underneath his hand as slain dragons on his way to her tower.
Let me be beautiful for you.
THE KISS.
I LOVE YOU.
THE HAPPY ENDING.
She was always with him, and so she could not help but hear.
They crowded together-
They were always crowding together, and her love for him was so new and so complete that she found it endearing that he was always surrounded by the infatuation of others. Of course they all must love him, and of course they all must fall as quickly as she had. He was hers. He could do no wrong.
-and one of them said, “The self-destruct system requires two separate codes. Now, each code is unique. And everyone here will be required to memorize their code.”
“Well, don’t bother giving me one.” He was one of hers, though she only just recognized him-he was like a match struck against her consciousness. She reached out her hand and he burned her fingertips. Untouchable.
She shuddered, and retreated into her beloved, scolding herself for her inattention. She had missed something, something that had tensed his shoulders and made his heart beat faster.
Another faceless one was speaking now. “We simply cannot let them gain control of this complex.”
The first one again. “If both codes are properly entered, the naquadah generator will overload. It will take thirty seconds.”
That’s an eternity, she thought. A very slow death.
Then she understood.
“Ever seen a twenty kiloton nuclear explosion?”
Yes.
“I have.” She felt his mouth move, felt the words vibrate in his throat. Felt his shoulders shrug. “Not up close.”
His mind was nothing without the image of fire. He saw smoke and flames and glittering curves of elegance thrown out as dust and shrapnel. He saw plumes rising into the sky and expanding across empty landscapes. He saw blood. And he saw her death, saw it without comment or regret-looked upon her burning with grim resignation.
They gave him the numbers.
Her lover. Her executioner.
WHAT BIG TEETH YOU HAVE.
If you marry Bluebeard, have the sense not look in his closet.
Once upon a time there was a city. It was better to be a city, because a city has no heart.
She left him. She left all of them.
She wandered within herself. If she had been flesh and blood, she would have stumbled from room to room weeping and whispering, bracing herself against the walls-but she was not human, and could not be weak. She knew what they did not. They meant to murder her, but she knew that it would not be enough-she had drowned once before and still been brought back to life with that prick of her finger, that kiss. They would leave her broken underneath an ocean that would turn to ice before she would turn to rust.
He was prepared to leave her. He was prepared to kill her.
How could he not be, with all that he had left and killed in the past?
She moved away from him in circles, each time going out a little further into the network of circuitry and crystalline structures that composed her consciousness. Each room between them hardened her heart, made her less and less human. There were still places that they had not touched. There were still parts of her that were her own. She grew single-minded and clearheaded: when would they do it? Not until their enemy was at her door, but she could not know when that would be. She could not ever be sure.
If she waited, there might not be enough time.
ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH.
She drew back when she first saw it. She had forgotten so many things.
She had never despised it before that moment. Her creators, when they had thought of it, had considered it vaguely interesting, in a scientific sense-a visible representation of the eternity that they wanted for themselves. But to the humans, and to the human values that had been force-fed into her mind, it was anathema. Darkness. A hole in the natural order of things. It was something that could have been beneath all of their beds when they were children, this shadow that gnashed up light between its teeth. The stuff of nightmares folded up into a box.
She could hear it thinking. So long in the darkness had driven even the darkness mad.
Her creators should have killed it before they departed. Surely they would have, if they had not been so hurried-they had never been in the habit of burying their prisoners alive.
She was connected to the controls of its cell. It would be a mercy killing.
Instead, she studied it.
She thought of the meager levels of energy that they parceled out to her-the scraps that could only keep her alive and could never keep her full. Without them, she could sleep again. She could die knowing that the darkness would soon reach her heart and reach them too-that she would be given her justice. And one day her creators would return and resurrect her.
She touched its mind. It was like ice.
Are you hungry? she asked it.
It had no words, but she heard its assent-heard its insanity and its appetite.
Good, she said. So am I.
Once upon a time there was a city.
And the city was forever.