Winter
Her nickname around the lab was Winter. We hadn’t been able to get a straight answer out of her about her name. It seemed that we couldn’t guess the right words.
Winter it was, then.
She had vibrant blue hair that went from a dark violet that was nearly black at the roots that faded to yellow at the tips like corn silk. In between, most of it was the piercing cerulean of a sky on a perfect summer’s day. It gave off a phosphorescent light of its own when the lights in her cell were off.
Just like her eyes. Just like her nails. Just like her lips and nipples.
Other than that, her skin was white.
There are pale girls in the world. There are girls that look like they’ve washed up on a beach. There are girls whose skin is so translucent that one can see a delicate tracery of blue veins beneath the surface of their skin.
They look like a riot of colour compared the skin of Winter.
Winter’s skin made photocopier paper look beige. Winter’s skin made snow look grey. Winter’s skin made brand-new non-stick plastic look like a Pollock painting. It practically glowed.
Winter landed in the North in a silver aerodynamic ship of extraterrestrial design. She was spotted by satellites. The U.S. Army moved in to capture her. As soon as we got close, her ship bolted and left her behind.
We weren’t able to get an answer out of her as to why that happened. Through clumsy miming, she insisted that she was alone on the ship and that ‘Ship’ panicked and fled and was probably worried sick about her.
We kept grilling her for the truth but it was quickly becoming moot.
She was dying.
Just like in War of the Worlds, our little microbes were eating her from the inside out.
It was unexpected seeing as she had a human form and her skin seemed to be made of a porcelain-like compound structure with the tensile strength to stop a bullet. There didn’t appear to be any pores and she didn’t seem to need to breathe our air. If it wasn’t for the fact that our atmosphere wasn’t crushing her, I’d hypothesize that she could float around in the vacuum of empty space with no ill effects.
That’s when it hit me. There were three grooves on the small of her back. They looked like someone had pressed three tic-tacs hard into the base of her spine and then pulled them off.
Our friend Winter was manufactured.
Her ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. There are samples that a ship can obtain and analyze but what better way to truly experience a world than through the sensory apparatus of its dominant life form?
It made a woman and pushed her out into the snow to wander around while the ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.
Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.
‘Ship’ wasn’t coming back for Winter any more than we would return to a picnic for a lost fork.
We're researching her skin to make soldiers. We're trying to reverse engineer how she was made.
I still feel bad for Winter. She died two weeks ago in her cell on sub-basement B on May 15th. She died in the Spring. She cried blue tears.
tags
Winter it was, then.
She had vibrant blue hair that went from a dark violet that was nearly black at the roots that faded to yellow at the tips like corn silk. In between, most of it was the piercing cerulean of a sky on a perfect summer’s day. It gave off a phosphorescent light of its own when the lights in her cell were off.
Just like her eyes. Just like her nails. Just like her lips and nipples.
Other than that, her skin was white.
There are pale girls in the world. There are girls that look like they’ve washed up on a beach. There are girls whose skin is so translucent that one can see a delicate tracery of blue veins beneath the surface of their skin.
They look like a riot of colour compared the skin of Winter.
Winter’s skin made photocopier paper look beige. Winter’s skin made snow look grey. Winter’s skin made brand-new non-stick plastic look like a Pollock painting. It practically glowed.
Winter landed in the North in a silver aerodynamic ship of extraterrestrial design. She was spotted by satellites. The U.S. Army moved in to capture her. As soon as we got close, her ship bolted and left her behind.
We weren’t able to get an answer out of her as to why that happened. Through clumsy miming, she insisted that she was alone on the ship and that ‘Ship’ panicked and fled and was probably worried sick about her.
We kept grilling her for the truth but it was quickly becoming moot.
She was dying.
Just like in War of the Worlds, our little microbes were eating her from the inside out.
It was unexpected seeing as she had a human form and her skin seemed to be made of a porcelain-like compound structure with the tensile strength to stop a bullet. There didn’t appear to be any pores and she didn’t seem to need to breathe our air. If it wasn’t for the fact that our atmosphere wasn’t crushing her, I’d hypothesize that she could float around in the vacuum of empty space with no ill effects.
That’s when it hit me. There were three grooves on the small of her back. They looked like someone had pressed three tic-tacs hard into the base of her spine and then pulled them off.
Our friend Winter was manufactured.
Her ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. There are samples that a ship can obtain and analyze but what better way to truly experience a world than through the sensory apparatus of its dominant life form?
It made a woman and pushed her out into the snow to wander around while the ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.
Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.
‘Ship’ wasn’t coming back for Winter any more than we would return to a picnic for a lost fork.
We're researching her skin to make soldiers. We're trying to reverse engineer how she was made.
I still feel bad for Winter. She died two weeks ago in her cell on sub-basement B on May 15th. She died in the Spring. She cried blue tears.
tags