(no subject)
artificia
by wrongly_amused
for lightning_queen
[raiden/mei ling | very vague dave/hal]
'a door leading nowhere is always open'
credit the inspiration
He realized the emptiness of the room right around the time he'd recognized the emptiness of Her womb: stark, barren, and containing space enough to deceive the idle mind into believing it existed. It had always been empty and would remain in essence - void; intangible; null. That he'd slept in it seemed needlessly prolix, like shuffling from one nondescript volume of fallacy and fancy into another, and there were times of incognizance where he couldn't recall if breathing meant taking in or taking out.
So he might have suffocated there or not - the ghosts in the hall couldn't be sure, and they generally were not an honest lot to begin with. They could have warned him about the dangers of dreaming in empty spaces, how quickly the mind forgot the difference between solid ground and sinking sand; its danger rested in the illusion of structure, as though it was geometrically and divinely predisposed to make a space for someone, something, and he had a place there.
But the room?
[was empty]
and so was he.
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Rose was a voice. Rose was a space. Rose was a compacted array of longitudinal wave structures, stimulating the sensitive interior of his auditory canal between a frequency of 20-20,000Hz. (Could be more, he'd figured once, but could be less, too.) Rose was real, affecting sense and sensibilities, real as any woman who could be heard only by himself and artificial AI could be.
Rose was also a liar. But that didn't bother him so much
- these days, anyway.
The really pressing matter, the one that left him straining and insomnolent in a field of whitewash, was whether Rose, herself, had been anything more than a lie.
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The room was a lie.
The room was a lie encased in the mythology of having existed, the not-lie at the base of his history, that he had lived and breathed and bedded for so long, he couldn't be sure of the difference.
He was a son of the sons of the long line of Adam, of lies and false promises and lost gardens, and like any good son of snakes, he had opened his mouth, unhinged his jaw, and swallowed it all down, one by one, in whole and half pieces. He had grown fat on excuse, anorexic on amnesia; now he starved for something other than abstraction.
Sometimes he dreamed of the Big Shell, cold and metallic and smoothly exotic, and sometimes he longed for Africa again, brazen and hot and wildly extant, gun in his hands and sun on his back as he cleared battles and took lives, punched a hole into the wide fabric of existence and called it his own. Some[all the]times, he is ashamed he dreamed at all.
In the end, he followed the snake and his ghost not for any of the right reasons - just the ones he hoped were real. He loses his voice, his life, his heart, everything -
[and nothing.]
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The desert is wide and vast and never full.
The problem with space is that nobody hears you scream.
The problem with space is that they sometimes do.
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Mei Ling is a voice. Mei Ling is a space, a transverse wave function of 3020Hz, that others have heard, reflected, ricocheted and rattled through ear drums, through dimension and divide, and when they are first introduced, he knows that he has found something. Something good. Something better. Something real - perhaps enough to fill a wide and empty space.
Failed existentialism isn't so bad, he figures, if the company is good. A girl with a voice and a face like a shot in the dark, the kind of girl who wouldn't bother to suffocate in open air or dream of the desert.
He could fall in love with that.
As postscript, I'd like to point out that if you weren't satisfied with my take on it, I don't mind the criticism. I'm actually finishing up the other requests you made, so they'll be duly posted.