fill: sinners and saints 1/1
anonymous
August 15 2011, 08:36:47 UTC
Advance warning: this contains heavy Christian allegory/themes. No offense was intended by the author in relation to the religion as a whole. I hope this is to your tastes, OP!
--
The first thing you remember is singing. Like a choir: you tilt your heard to listen, concentration clouding your mind. There's something there that you can barely remember -- dominus mecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus --
et benedictus et benedictus et benedict-- et-- et--
You shudder into sleep once again. Your mind is at peace, with the sound of the Grid fading away above you. Born in darkness and ex nihilo you shall come. Bereaved of thought, only serenity.
Years pass, and God abandons his work. The choir is gone when you awaken again, like the Leviathan out of the great deep sea. Your mouth gaping open, hands spread in penitence. Boundless grief. What were you, once? Little children gather round, their hands wreathed in ash and the splintering of fiberglass and wire. They call you the White Lady, the Mourning Lady. And so it is, your head wreathed in pale white roses of coding and symmetry. The Burning Lady, for you are doomed to replay your last breaths before the Great Erasure. Screaming in ecstasy or pain, nobody knows.
So Kevin Flynn made a program when he was young, and he called it Ave Maria, Kyrie Eleison, all these names for all these things meaning the same word. He said he wanted to see how divinity would affect his creations, divinity that was not his, and so you spread His Word and made Kevin Flynn a god. A God with a capital G, you remind yourself, for the Lord is good and the Lord made us on this day, perfect and in the image of man.
Still, even gods grow tired of omnipotence, and with a wave of his hand the man you called Creator called down hellfire and rain and pestilence. You were gone before anyone else knew it, before you could be called out as the messiah. Leave me be to my kingdom, you begged when he struck you down. Leave me shepherd of the lost.
The king of light says nothing, only manipulates the very fiber of your being into nothing: you are a pile of wires in a corner of the Grid. Just around the corner, past the dominion of CLU, who was really never an angel at all. Filled with pride and ignorance in equal measure.
Sometimes the children pass by, and they disturb your ashes: what remains of the White Lady springs to life for a few minutes, eternally praying. You were programmed with the whole Good Book in you, inside you like the meaning of a bone structure or of cartilage redefined: now you can only hear fragments echoing in the corners of your soul, like Corinthians or Numbers. Through a glass darkly, through a glass--
And then at other moments, of opportune discretions and saddened excursions, you hear the strains of that holy sound again, like the choir. You strain to reach it, twisting your feet beneath you, but you cannot go. No ghosts can go near God ever again. So you have been cast out of Paradise, like you were designed to. Despair, hopelessness, all these things. They are filling you right up.
This was Job's test, after all.
You wait in your little corner of the Known World. You wait for the Second Coming, for the Son and the Father, the Holy Ghost. Perhaps you were wrong in the first place: it wasn't singing. It was the lightcycles and their ungodly screeching along the black-matte tracks of the causeways, it was the roar of death in the wake of CLU, it was the dying ISOs' death calls.
The Son asks the Father what he did with his youth, and he says he made things that were imperfect. Creations that didn't belong. The White Lady is a myth now, and he passes within inches of your collapsed form, when you are still wire and not flesh. The Son almost touches you and you know what this means: the sounding of Gabriel's horn. The Final Judgement has come to pass.
You crumble into dust. Don't look back -- Lot's wife was a pillar of salt.
Re: fill: sinners and saints 1/1mermaid88August 15 2011, 14:40:19 UTC
Whoa. (now I'm trying to figure out who it was; like, did Flynn literally make a program and name it ave Maria or is this one of the characters we know from canon.) Either way, fill is still pretty intense :)
Re: fill: sinners and saints 1/1
anonymous
August 16 2011, 20:20:25 UTC
OP here! I did not expect this to be filled, let alone so quickly. Completely different direction from what ideas popped up for me but this is beautiful - even if I am not a Christian myself. The themes you weaved into it are very fitting. Thanks alot!
--
The first thing you remember is singing. Like a choir: you tilt your heard to listen, concentration clouding your mind. There's something there that you can barely remember -- dominus mecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus --
et benedictus
et benedictus
et benedict--
et--
et--
You shudder into sleep once again. Your mind is at peace, with the sound of the Grid fading away above you. Born in darkness and ex nihilo you shall come. Bereaved of thought, only serenity.
Years pass, and God abandons his work. The choir is gone when you awaken again, like the Leviathan out of the great deep sea. Your mouth gaping open, hands spread in penitence. Boundless grief. What were you, once? Little children gather round, their hands wreathed in ash and the splintering of fiberglass and wire. They call you the White Lady, the Mourning Lady. And so it is, your head wreathed in pale white roses of coding and symmetry. The Burning Lady, for you are doomed to replay your last breaths before the Great Erasure. Screaming in ecstasy or pain, nobody knows.
So Kevin Flynn made a program when he was young, and he called it Ave Maria, Kyrie Eleison, all these names for all these things meaning the same word. He said he wanted to see how divinity would affect his creations, divinity that was not his, and so you spread His Word and made Kevin Flynn a god. A God with a capital G, you remind yourself, for the Lord is good and the Lord made us on this day, perfect and in the image of man.
Still, even gods grow tired of omnipotence, and with a wave of his hand the man you called Creator called down hellfire and rain and pestilence. You were gone before anyone else knew it, before you could be called out as the messiah. Leave me be to my kingdom, you begged when he struck you down. Leave me shepherd of the lost.
The king of light says nothing, only manipulates the very fiber of your being into nothing: you are a pile of wires in a corner of the Grid. Just around the corner, past the dominion of CLU, who was really never an angel at all. Filled with pride and ignorance in equal measure.
Sometimes the children pass by, and they disturb your ashes: what remains of the White Lady springs to life for a few minutes, eternally praying. You were programmed with the whole Good Book in you, inside you like the meaning of a bone structure or of cartilage redefined: now you can only hear fragments echoing in the corners of your soul, like Corinthians or Numbers. Through a glass darkly, through a glass--
And then at other moments, of opportune discretions and saddened excursions, you hear the strains of that holy sound again, like the choir. You strain to reach it, twisting your feet beneath you, but you cannot go. No ghosts can go near God ever again. So you have been cast out of Paradise, like you were designed to. Despair, hopelessness, all these things. They are filling you right up.
This was Job's test, after all.
You wait in your little corner of the Known World. You wait for the Second Coming, for the Son and the Father, the Holy Ghost. Perhaps you were wrong in the first place: it wasn't singing. It was the lightcycles and their ungodly screeching along the black-matte tracks of the causeways, it was the roar of death in the wake of CLU, it was the dying ISOs' death calls.
The Son asks the Father what he did with his youth, and he says he made things that were imperfect. Creations that didn't belong. The White Lady is a myth now, and he passes within inches of your collapsed form, when you are still wire and not flesh. The Son almost touches you and you know what this means: the sounding of Gabriel's horn. The Final Judgement has come to pass.
You crumble into dust. Don't look back -- Lot's wife was a pillar of salt.
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(now I'm trying to figure out who it was; like, did Flynn literally make a program and name it ave Maria or is this one of the characters we know from canon.)
Either way, fill is still pretty intense
:)
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(The comment has been removed)
Completely different direction from what ideas popped up for me but this is beautiful - even if I am not a Christian myself. The themes you weaved into it are very fitting. Thanks alot!
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