I BRING THEE . . . FANFICTION!
I may explode Livejournal with the sheer number of tags for this entry.
FIC!
Title: Millenium
Rating: Uh G or whatever, I don't care.
Crossover with: *deep breath* Discworld, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, House MD, Iron Man (in alphabetical order, of course)
First part of a series: Yes.
Will this series be continued?: Probably not.
Songfic?: Why yes, yes it is. To, obviously, Robbie Williams' 'Millenium' which I listened to about a hundred billion times during the writing.
Contains: Mild angst, mentions of death, flowery writing, lots of science terminology, philosophizing, me being a retard
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
Millennium
The universe cannot, really, be described as a ‘universe’, as that implies an end, and a singular existence. But then, ‘multiverse’ is also inaccurate, because there is just one expanse of space, one stretch of infinity for matter to plunge into and burn bright, literally or not.
What there is is more than something that can be summed up in one word. There is a universe. There are multiple copies of it. And each and every one is just a little bit - just a crucial little bit - different from all the others. And they ride and plunge through space and time in tandem, but not in synch.
One might equate it to watching a rollercoaster that’s racing alongside itself on an infinite number of tracks, each one differing from the others in nanometers and microseconds.
There used to be a race of people who understood this, who could control it. They are dead now, all of them. But not before taking on an apprentice race who proved amazingly capable of understanding the concept, if not controlling it.
Of course, they too are all dead. Well, mostly.
Some say that we are players
some say that we are pawns
but we've been making money since the day that we were born
Got to slow down,
cause we'll low down.
In one version of the universe there is a giant turtle in space. On that turtle ride four elephants. And on those elephants sits a platter of dirt and mineral and water and magic, like a disgustingly-assembled, rich, wonderful galactic pizza.
On this pizza of the stars is a city, more disorganized and illogical than the whole planet. It’s a diving, twisting, writhing organic mass of infrastructure and humanity, heaving with money and life and death and blood and tears and industry. And like any city, any beast, it has a ruler, a head.
The head of the beast is in stark contrast to that which he controls. He’s straight lines and muted colors, black on white, a quiet voice in a loud room that draws the attention in to a single point. He’s calculating, cold rationality in a world gone mad for money and sex and life.
He’s Havelock Vetinari. Even his name can’t be having with twisting curves of letters like ‘s’ and ‘u’. The hooked ‘r’ and rounded ‘a’ cower amongst the severe lines and angles and boundaries drawn by the more upstanding letters.
And he’s working, always. Usually at a big wood desk, with neat stacks of white paper, printed with black ink. Black and white, trying to define a city that smells like green and sounds like an attempt at organizing insanity. Defining the undefinable.
He’s always found it a little funny, truth be told.
Even now he’s working, away from the desk. Dressed all in black, alone, drifting through towering shelves of books, watching the numbers printed in gold on their spines go up. He’s not doing anything, but he’s moving pawns across the board, he’s making all his opponents look down at their pieces and wonder what the hell is going on. He’s bringing everything together.
Or he was. And then the man who lived his life in a series of lines that look straight made the L-space curve.
Round and round in circles
live a life of solitude
'till we find ourselves a partner someone to relate to
Then we slow down,
before we fall down.
He’d had two halves once. Two halves of a whole. He had been one of them.
Around him, things whizzed and popped and banged and sparkled. They jumped and skittered and zipped. The smoke hung in the room, reeking of acid and explosives and burnt paper. Things were bright and shiny and sparkly. Except the shopkeep.
He was bright, he was interesting. His shock of red hair was perfect in the shop, brightly colored as his wares. His freckles were scattered in a devil-may-care pattern across his nose and gaunt cheeks. A thick jumper was pulled down over his thin frame, its red and orange argyle pattern all at once clashing and matching his hair, its colors joining in the delightful romp of all the others in the room.
And in this mess of color and excitement and chaos, of explosives and illusions and magic, the shopkeep stood, stony-faced, a marble statue at a Mardis Gras celebration.
Once he’d been half of a whole. Now he was just a half.
The shopkeep made all of his wares. He’d been part of an equation that ended in a hit every time for years. Now he was a crippled formula, one variable short of an absolute answer. He still went through the motions, he still managed to complete the right equation eight times out of ten, but without the x to his y, without the sine to his cosine, his cotangent, it was a longer process, a difficult process, and a painful one. Before the formula had flowed, as happy and careless and reckless as the shop around him. Now it would halt and jerk and twist and stall, and he would puzzle it out, and most times it worked.
But it still wasn’t right. It was never one hundred per cent. The margin of error was always there, lurking in the sidelines.
But day after day the stony-faced man opened his shop, and smiled for the customers, and laughed and pretended he wasn’t half-dead. The shop never closed, excepting for two days out of the year. Christmas and . . . the other day.
Because the shop filled the space, a little. It wasn’t the other half, not by a long shot, but it was a shadow of the other half, a ghost in the mist of what should have been. Without the shop he really would be half dead. With it he was only almost there.
And then one day, when the shop was empty and the stony-faced man was sitting behind the counter, pouring gunpowder into a paper cup, the wind picked up. And the lights and colors and sparks and bangs of the room where bathed in blue. And he looked up as papers and baubles flew toward him, eyes wide, paper cup tumbling from his fingers.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
Live for liposuction
detox for your 'rents
overdose for Christmas and give it up for Lent
My friends are all so cynical refuse to keep the faith
We all enjoy the madness 'cause we know we're gonna fade away.
Death is a product of life. Disease, often, is the catalyst. He knows that, better than most people in his death-phobic society. When people come and look at him with imploring eyes to tell him that now wasn’t time, death could be held off for another precious quanta of time, he always wanted to tell them that death would come when it would. You couldn’t hold it off forever, and any more time given would just be a brief reprieve, a short-lived appeal to the final judge. But he never did, because though he couldn’t care less, he knew they were afraid, and sick, and dying, and to tell them that would serve no purpose.
Well, most of the time he didn’t tell them.
He spends his time in his glass-enclosed office, up in his ivory tower that he constructed himself. And from the tower, made of ivory and encased in glass, he casts stones. And he doesn’t particularly care if he hits anyone, because so far no one has been able to bring his tower crashing down.
He’s not a neat man. In a self-contained society that lives and often dies on rationality and logic and quantitative data, he’s a rogue cannon, operating on a system of gut instinct, cleverness and raw intelligence that more often than not hits the target, though it may take out all the surrounding buildings as well. But it’s a risk he’s willing to take, and for all the others who want to operate like a precision missile, taking out on the target in an organized, sane fashion, he only has his results to flaunt. Sometimes it’s faster to slash and burn through a jungle than tread softly and track your prey before shooting it with an elegant poisoned dart.
He takes his pills and he limps through the hospital, dressed as he cares, shunning the lab coat that’s so symbolic of the logical, organized and deathly slow process modern medicine can so often be. And then he takes more pills, because he likes the way they make him feel, and because he hopes desperately that one day he might feel different. He knows not everything can be cured with a pill, but some part of him does have an ill-placed sense of hope.
And he makes appeals to the Reaper for people, day in and day out. He wins more than he loses, but sometimes the Reaper has an airtight case, and there’s only one possible result. After those cases, he’s a little more liberal with the pills. Maybe because he wants to feel better. Probably because he wants to punch the Reaper in the face personally for trying to force past the threshold to his tower.
And one morning, on the way in to do battle with an intangible foe for one more day, nine or ten or twenty more hours, the foe decided to try and meet him halfway.
The man in the ivory tower destroyed it almost by himself, while the foe lurked on the sidelines. And the tower was brought down the minute the skinny suit-clad pedestrian bounced off his windshield.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
Come and have a go if you think you are hard enough
Come and have a go if you think you are hard enough
Millennium
Millennium
The key, he’d learned at an early age, was not to focus on the biology. Biology was messy, and inexact, and frequently contradictive. No, the key was to ignore the biology altogether, and focus on the numbers.
The numbers and the cold, hard, exact science of chemistry and engineering. That’s where the beauty of everything lay. That’s where the power to shape the world waited to be unlocked.
Years later, as a grown man, he’d reached the equivalent of Nirvana to his personal philosophy. He’s surpassed biology. He’d harnessed and exploited the beauty of physiology and mashed it together with physics and engineering and created something that was more powerful than biology alone could ever be, and more natural than engineering could hope to be.
He himself had been taken in to it. He was half man, half machine, not like the werewolves from the stories - one by day and the other by the light of the moon - but like the beautifully flowing resonance hybrid of a chemical compound. He was both at once, existing in a delicate flow that almost looked like equilibrium until you realized that one flowed to the other and back again, and while one existed the other was hidden - there in the numbers, there in possibility, but not ever there.
He was man. He was machine. In his soul he was both all the time, but sometimes it was harder to spot one or the other.
He could have easily - so easily - harnessed it to do evil or to make money or gain power. But he’d made a choice, totally coincidentally at first, to use it for good. To be responsible, to try and fix the world he’d equally unwittingly set on a path to destruction in the first place. Of course it was more difficult, and sometimes he had trouble with exactly where the line was drawn, and where his . . . abilities were needed, and where they were not. But in the end he managed it and, by and large, was tremendously popular and maybe even happy, sometimes, in the role.
And he was always on the lookout for improvements. The world of science he lived in was crystal clear, yes, but it was deep, and sometimes things lurked just out of sight, waiting to be illuminated. And he was pretty sure some of those illuminations could come in useful, if he could rein them in.
Which was why, one day, when he found something that was a perfect hybrid between man and machine, life and the simulation thereof, he stopped. And he landed, and pushed the blue-eyed visor up and ran his ironclad (alloy-clad, technically) hands down the side of the thing.
And then he’d opened the door, so carelessly unlocked, and his world of science, of life and the illusion of it, the separation of engineering and biology, imploded.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
(Sometimes you know)
And when we come we always come too late
I often think that we were born to hate
get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes.
And when we come we always come too late
I often think that we were born to hate
get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes.
He’d been born before them. Most of them. Before, even, some of their universes had split off and started running on their own parallel tracks. He could have dropped in on any of them, but he didn’t. He understood the theory, the principle, but he also understood the consequence, and he stayed within his branch of reality, although he kept no promises about not running backward while reality ran forwards.
He’d lived long enough to know the beauty of the universe. To know the power of words. To know the pain of loss. To know the dichotomy of life and death, and the fear of the latter. To know the fallibility of simple sciences. He liked to think he knew more than most, and that he was cleverer than most. And he was right, of course. The curse of the clever is to know it, and to not be able to lie to themselves about it.
But sometimes he was careless. Or reckless. Or a little bit of both at once. Usually it was fine, and he was certainly clever enough and old enough and experienced enough to pull himself out of almost any mess he got into, and usually he would, when another depended on him. And there had been many through the years, depending on him to take them home safely. So he would think fast and get out, and more often than not things went along just fine. Of course, sometimes they didn’t, and that hurt, always, but it was the nature of playing the odds.
But when he didn’t have anyone to depend on him, maybe he didn’t hurry back as quickly as he should have. Maybe his curiosity got the best of him, sometimes. And he would know that what he was doing was foolish, and that he should just turn around and go straight back to wherever he’d been, but then what was the point of being clever if you never tested yourself? Really?
Which was precisely why, on a sunny June morning, he was somewhere he never should have been, walking away from his steadfast if temperamental vehicle with a mild sense of guilt and a stronger sense of curiosity. Which probably would have, in the end, been perfectly fine and harmless, had it not been for the very inconvenient car.
We've got stars directing our fate (Millennium)
and we're praying it's not too late(Millennium)
'cause we know we're falling from grace(Millennium)
(And we won't stop)
The universes don’t ever cross over, and really they shouldn’t. But on occasion, something slips through the cracks. And in those occasions, it might turn out to be foolish to avoid crossing into another universe, because what does that do but limit you? To one universe of technology, one universe of knowledge.
All in all, sometimes in the face of a foe, if you’ve got the means, sometimes a little rule-bending is just what the doctor ordered.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
FIC!
Title: Millenium
Rating: Uh G or whatever, I don't care.
Crossover with: *deep breath* Discworld, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, House MD, Iron Man (in alphabetical order, of course)
First part of a series: Yes.
Will this series be continued?: Probably not.
Songfic?: Why yes, yes it is. To, obviously, Robbie Williams' 'Millenium' which I listened to about a hundred billion times during the writing.
Contains: Mild angst, mentions of death, flowery writing, lots of science terminology, philosophizing, me being a retard
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
Millennium
The universe cannot, really, be described as a ‘universe’, as that implies an end, and a singular existence. But then, ‘multiverse’ is also inaccurate, because there is just one expanse of space, one stretch of infinity for matter to plunge into and burn bright, literally or not.
What there is is more than something that can be summed up in one word. There is a universe. There are multiple copies of it. And each and every one is just a little bit - just a crucial little bit - different from all the others. And they ride and plunge through space and time in tandem, but not in synch.
One might equate it to watching a rollercoaster that’s racing alongside itself on an infinite number of tracks, each one differing from the others in nanometers and microseconds.
There used to be a race of people who understood this, who could control it. They are dead now, all of them. But not before taking on an apprentice race who proved amazingly capable of understanding the concept, if not controlling it.
Of course, they too are all dead. Well, mostly.
Some say that we are players
some say that we are pawns
but we've been making money since the day that we were born
Got to slow down,
cause we'll low down.
In one version of the universe there is a giant turtle in space. On that turtle ride four elephants. And on those elephants sits a platter of dirt and mineral and water and magic, like a disgustingly-assembled, rich, wonderful galactic pizza.
On this pizza of the stars is a city, more disorganized and illogical than the whole planet. It’s a diving, twisting, writhing organic mass of infrastructure and humanity, heaving with money and life and death and blood and tears and industry. And like any city, any beast, it has a ruler, a head.
The head of the beast is in stark contrast to that which he controls. He’s straight lines and muted colors, black on white, a quiet voice in a loud room that draws the attention in to a single point. He’s calculating, cold rationality in a world gone mad for money and sex and life.
He’s Havelock Vetinari. Even his name can’t be having with twisting curves of letters like ‘s’ and ‘u’. The hooked ‘r’ and rounded ‘a’ cower amongst the severe lines and angles and boundaries drawn by the more upstanding letters.
And he’s working, always. Usually at a big wood desk, with neat stacks of white paper, printed with black ink. Black and white, trying to define a city that smells like green and sounds like an attempt at organizing insanity. Defining the undefinable.
He’s always found it a little funny, truth be told.
Even now he’s working, away from the desk. Dressed all in black, alone, drifting through towering shelves of books, watching the numbers printed in gold on their spines go up. He’s not doing anything, but he’s moving pawns across the board, he’s making all his opponents look down at their pieces and wonder what the hell is going on. He’s bringing everything together.
Or he was. And then the man who lived his life in a series of lines that look straight made the L-space curve.
Round and round in circles
live a life of solitude
'till we find ourselves a partner someone to relate to
Then we slow down,
before we fall down.
He’d had two halves once. Two halves of a whole. He had been one of them.
Around him, things whizzed and popped and banged and sparkled. They jumped and skittered and zipped. The smoke hung in the room, reeking of acid and explosives and burnt paper. Things were bright and shiny and sparkly. Except the shopkeep.
He was bright, he was interesting. His shock of red hair was perfect in the shop, brightly colored as his wares. His freckles were scattered in a devil-may-care pattern across his nose and gaunt cheeks. A thick jumper was pulled down over his thin frame, its red and orange argyle pattern all at once clashing and matching his hair, its colors joining in the delightful romp of all the others in the room.
And in this mess of color and excitement and chaos, of explosives and illusions and magic, the shopkeep stood, stony-faced, a marble statue at a Mardis Gras celebration.
Once he’d been half of a whole. Now he was just a half.
The shopkeep made all of his wares. He’d been part of an equation that ended in a hit every time for years. Now he was a crippled formula, one variable short of an absolute answer. He still went through the motions, he still managed to complete the right equation eight times out of ten, but without the x to his y, without the sine to his cosine, his cotangent, it was a longer process, a difficult process, and a painful one. Before the formula had flowed, as happy and careless and reckless as the shop around him. Now it would halt and jerk and twist and stall, and he would puzzle it out, and most times it worked.
But it still wasn’t right. It was never one hundred per cent. The margin of error was always there, lurking in the sidelines.
But day after day the stony-faced man opened his shop, and smiled for the customers, and laughed and pretended he wasn’t half-dead. The shop never closed, excepting for two days out of the year. Christmas and . . . the other day.
Because the shop filled the space, a little. It wasn’t the other half, not by a long shot, but it was a shadow of the other half, a ghost in the mist of what should have been. Without the shop he really would be half dead. With it he was only almost there.
And then one day, when the shop was empty and the stony-faced man was sitting behind the counter, pouring gunpowder into a paper cup, the wind picked up. And the lights and colors and sparks and bangs of the room where bathed in blue. And he looked up as papers and baubles flew toward him, eyes wide, paper cup tumbling from his fingers.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
Live for liposuction
detox for your 'rents
overdose for Christmas and give it up for Lent
My friends are all so cynical refuse to keep the faith
We all enjoy the madness 'cause we know we're gonna fade away.
Death is a product of life. Disease, often, is the catalyst. He knows that, better than most people in his death-phobic society. When people come and look at him with imploring eyes to tell him that now wasn’t time, death could be held off for another precious quanta of time, he always wanted to tell them that death would come when it would. You couldn’t hold it off forever, and any more time given would just be a brief reprieve, a short-lived appeal to the final judge. But he never did, because though he couldn’t care less, he knew they were afraid, and sick, and dying, and to tell them that would serve no purpose.
Well, most of the time he didn’t tell them.
He spends his time in his glass-enclosed office, up in his ivory tower that he constructed himself. And from the tower, made of ivory and encased in glass, he casts stones. And he doesn’t particularly care if he hits anyone, because so far no one has been able to bring his tower crashing down.
He’s not a neat man. In a self-contained society that lives and often dies on rationality and logic and quantitative data, he’s a rogue cannon, operating on a system of gut instinct, cleverness and raw intelligence that more often than not hits the target, though it may take out all the surrounding buildings as well. But it’s a risk he’s willing to take, and for all the others who want to operate like a precision missile, taking out on the target in an organized, sane fashion, he only has his results to flaunt. Sometimes it’s faster to slash and burn through a jungle than tread softly and track your prey before shooting it with an elegant poisoned dart.
He takes his pills and he limps through the hospital, dressed as he cares, shunning the lab coat that’s so symbolic of the logical, organized and deathly slow process modern medicine can so often be. And then he takes more pills, because he likes the way they make him feel, and because he hopes desperately that one day he might feel different. He knows not everything can be cured with a pill, but some part of him does have an ill-placed sense of hope.
And he makes appeals to the Reaper for people, day in and day out. He wins more than he loses, but sometimes the Reaper has an airtight case, and there’s only one possible result. After those cases, he’s a little more liberal with the pills. Maybe because he wants to feel better. Probably because he wants to punch the Reaper in the face personally for trying to force past the threshold to his tower.
And one morning, on the way in to do battle with an intangible foe for one more day, nine or ten or twenty more hours, the foe decided to try and meet him halfway.
The man in the ivory tower destroyed it almost by himself, while the foe lurked on the sidelines. And the tower was brought down the minute the skinny suit-clad pedestrian bounced off his windshield.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
Come and have a go if you think you are hard enough
Come and have a go if you think you are hard enough
Millennium
Millennium
The key, he’d learned at an early age, was not to focus on the biology. Biology was messy, and inexact, and frequently contradictive. No, the key was to ignore the biology altogether, and focus on the numbers.
The numbers and the cold, hard, exact science of chemistry and engineering. That’s where the beauty of everything lay. That’s where the power to shape the world waited to be unlocked.
Years later, as a grown man, he’d reached the equivalent of Nirvana to his personal philosophy. He’s surpassed biology. He’d harnessed and exploited the beauty of physiology and mashed it together with physics and engineering and created something that was more powerful than biology alone could ever be, and more natural than engineering could hope to be.
He himself had been taken in to it. He was half man, half machine, not like the werewolves from the stories - one by day and the other by the light of the moon - but like the beautifully flowing resonance hybrid of a chemical compound. He was both at once, existing in a delicate flow that almost looked like equilibrium until you realized that one flowed to the other and back again, and while one existed the other was hidden - there in the numbers, there in possibility, but not ever there.
He was man. He was machine. In his soul he was both all the time, but sometimes it was harder to spot one or the other.
He could have easily - so easily - harnessed it to do evil or to make money or gain power. But he’d made a choice, totally coincidentally at first, to use it for good. To be responsible, to try and fix the world he’d equally unwittingly set on a path to destruction in the first place. Of course it was more difficult, and sometimes he had trouble with exactly where the line was drawn, and where his . . . abilities were needed, and where they were not. But in the end he managed it and, by and large, was tremendously popular and maybe even happy, sometimes, in the role.
And he was always on the lookout for improvements. The world of science he lived in was crystal clear, yes, but it was deep, and sometimes things lurked just out of sight, waiting to be illuminated. And he was pretty sure some of those illuminations could come in useful, if he could rein them in.
Which was why, one day, when he found something that was a perfect hybrid between man and machine, life and the simulation thereof, he stopped. And he landed, and pushed the blue-eyed visor up and ran his ironclad (alloy-clad, technically) hands down the side of the thing.
And then he’d opened the door, so carelessly unlocked, and his world of science, of life and the illusion of it, the separation of engineering and biology, imploded.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium
(Sometimes you know)
And when we come we always come too late
I often think that we were born to hate
get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes.
And when we come we always come too late
I often think that we were born to hate
get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes.
He’d been born before them. Most of them. Before, even, some of their universes had split off and started running on their own parallel tracks. He could have dropped in on any of them, but he didn’t. He understood the theory, the principle, but he also understood the consequence, and he stayed within his branch of reality, although he kept no promises about not running backward while reality ran forwards.
He’d lived long enough to know the beauty of the universe. To know the power of words. To know the pain of loss. To know the dichotomy of life and death, and the fear of the latter. To know the fallibility of simple sciences. He liked to think he knew more than most, and that he was cleverer than most. And he was right, of course. The curse of the clever is to know it, and to not be able to lie to themselves about it.
But sometimes he was careless. Or reckless. Or a little bit of both at once. Usually it was fine, and he was certainly clever enough and old enough and experienced enough to pull himself out of almost any mess he got into, and usually he would, when another depended on him. And there had been many through the years, depending on him to take them home safely. So he would think fast and get out, and more often than not things went along just fine. Of course, sometimes they didn’t, and that hurt, always, but it was the nature of playing the odds.
But when he didn’t have anyone to depend on him, maybe he didn’t hurry back as quickly as he should have. Maybe his curiosity got the best of him, sometimes. And he would know that what he was doing was foolish, and that he should just turn around and go straight back to wherever he’d been, but then what was the point of being clever if you never tested yourself? Really?
Which was precisely why, on a sunny June morning, he was somewhere he never should have been, walking away from his steadfast if temperamental vehicle with a mild sense of guilt and a stronger sense of curiosity. Which probably would have, in the end, been perfectly fine and harmless, had it not been for the very inconvenient car.
We've got stars directing our fate (Millennium)
and we're praying it's not too late(Millennium)
'cause we know we're falling from grace(Millennium)
(And we won't stop)
The universes don’t ever cross over, and really they shouldn’t. But on occasion, something slips through the cracks. And in those occasions, it might turn out to be foolish to avoid crossing into another universe, because what does that do but limit you? To one universe of technology, one universe of knowledge.
All in all, sometimes in the face of a foe, if you’ve got the means, sometimes a little rule-bending is just what the doctor ordered.
We've got stars directing our fate
and we're praying it's not too late
'cause we know we're falling from grace
Millennium