post #18

[seoulfulness]

Fics ( #17)

untitled f(x), krystal/sulli
Each Day That Passes EXO/SNSD, Baekhyun/Taeyeon
beneath the ice cracks super junior-m/f(x), zhou mi/victoria
food for the heart ze:a, kevin/siwan
don't forget me girl's day, sojin/yura
I would trust you (with my password) btob, peniel/sungjae
lesson one: always have a spare key exo, baekhyun/chen
burnt

Comments

destruction resolution | infinite, myungyeol (part i)

[anonymous]

In the year 21XX, the world suddenly shifts, and the lines of reality blur. The effects are subtle, but devastating - it becomes difficult to tell what has been, what is, and what will be. People continue move at the same, constant speed, but the time and space around them twists and flows unpredictably. What a person perceives around them may not yet be, or has already been. Individually, the warping is minimal, so small that the effects are almost unnoticeable - in high population densities, though, the combined distortions are catastrophic. People could walk right by each other and not even know that they were passing another person - or, more dangerously, into them. In the first week after the shift, accidental deaths in large cities spike to unprecedented highs. Everybody knows somebody (most, more than one) who died within the first five days of the shift.

Scientists have no way to explain it. Theories are formulated, hesitantly, about black holes and the curvature of the time-space continuum, but ultimately they shrug helplessly and admit that it is beyond their understanding. So the government does the only thing that it feels it can do: new laws and regulations are established. The population is carefully redistributed, so that only so many people can live in the same area. The birth rate is controlled aggressively, as is transportation and travel. Anything that does not absolutely require face-to-face interaction is conducted over other channels of communication, which are strictly monitored for any rule-breakers, because even one person accidentally crossing out of their given bounds could be enough to cause the warping to become deleterious.

Everybody copes with the changes differently. Myungsoo, for his part, takes comfort in a clunky, outdated camera - his better ones were lost when he was forced to move out of Seoul, but he knows he’s one of the lucky ones: the government seized most cameras and camcorders shortly after the shift, to permit unapproved media from leaking into official channels. It’s oppressive, and everybody knows it, but it’s better than the alternative - without the government to organize them, everything would be chaos. The only reason that Myungsoo is allowed to keep his is because it uses film, so whatever he takes can’t be uploaded to the digital world, which increasingly has become more and more important to regulate the physical world. The Internet - already so pervasive - becomes the most powerful force in everyday life.

It doesn’t matter, really - Myungsoo doesn’t have any interest in undermining government control. And even if he did, he thinks, there is nothing so terrible it he could show the world that could make people think that the government is worse than what would happen if there was no government at all. Mostly, he’s just grateful he has it at all.

Myungsoo understands how cameras work - the lens captures light bouncing off of objects; chemical reactions occur, and the image is imprinted onto film - so he understands, above all else, that when he takes a photograph, whatever is in it must be real at that moment, even if his eyes can’t see it, or see something different. It reassures him in a time when nothing else can: when everybody else seems to turn to God, he turns to photography to reassure himself of his own reality. It is a tenuous comfort, because there are only so many rolls that he has - manufacture of film went out of business decades ago, and he only bought them as needed, not knowing that someday there would be a time when he would rely on them more than anything else.