I've never apologized to you. Why this is, why I haven't been able to bring myself to simply say, "I'm sorry," has haunted me as much as the act itself. It was stupid, what I did, perhaps the single stupidest thing I've ever done, and in a life that contains Nemesor, that's saying something. I regret having done it.
Jonny seems to think that's the same as being sorry. Well, it's not.
I was smiling, you know, when I broke your neck. Maybe you couldn't tell, but I was. And I'm still smiling now, thinking about it. What a complete surprise it must have been. It was a surprise to me, too; I never realized, I guess, how much I hated you.
In retrospect, it makes so much sense. You disowned your own daughter for marrying for love, marrying an outsider, against your wishes. You cut her and Father off from the family; and maybe that would have been all right if you had been wrong about him. But you weren't. Sarth Jenneth was a clod, a drunk, a wife-beater, and eventually a murderer.
How angry you must have been with her, to cut her off from her family and leave her alone with a man like that.
You left her with him, and she died. You left me with him, too, and even after Mother was dead, you left me to the State apparatus, the creche system, a full year.
What a difficult year that must have been for all of us. I can only guess how you must have agonized over the question of bringing a disowned half-blood granddaughter back into the family, of lifting your ban on Mother in order to recognize me.
And what a virtuous paragon you must have felt yourself to be, taking an embarrassing little half-bred moppet like me into your home, the living proof of your daughter's foolishness and your own failure to properly control your children. How can I be anything but grateful to you, who instructed me in our faith, who gave me a home where I was unwelcome, who paid for my education at an endless series of girls' schools that kept me conveniently out of sight? Who paid tuition at the State War Academy for a naive child desperate to prove herself to be something worthwhile?
How could I be anything but grateful for all you did for me? All of the love you gave? All those individual, precious steps that made possible my not-so-glorious death and reincarnation into a body made of osteoplastic and animal carcases?
Well. I can afford a better grade of clone, now. And look-- it's not so bad; Jihun's here, your grandson, come to avenge you, tracing my path like a good detective following in the footsteps of a killer.
He wants me to "do the right thing." What that is, I don't even pretend to know-- kill myself, I suppose. But I'm far from doing that. I fight him in only a few days. It'll be like one of the legendary honor-duels of old.
Little Jihun-- you remember him, don't you? The little boy who could never sit still for more than five minutes no matter how many times you whacked him with your rod? The young monk who got so bored with katas that he started looking for excuses to help out in the kitchen rather than do his morning exercises? And now he's going to use those skills you taught him, and he's going to make you proud.
I'm going to kill him. And more than that, I'm going to make sure his consciousness survives the process. I'm going to make him just like me. Well-- not just. Low-grade clones are made of the rawest of raw materials, nutrient broth vat-grown tissues and miscellaneous reprocessed organics, a body with more preservatives in it than a military field ration. I'm going to put him in one of those, and better still, he knows it. He just seems to think maybe I'm going to lose my nerve.
I won't. I promise. I will gut him like one of those gasping fish at the market, and I'll make sure he remembers it. Just for you.
And maybe one of these days, I'll be able to quench this anger enough to feel sorry for what I've done, to you, to him, to all of us. But not today, and not tomorrow-- nor the day, a few days from now, when I kill your grandson.
For you, Grandpapa.
Your granddaughter,
-Aria
Friday, April 10, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Husk
Two days ago, a new set of implants arrived in my hands, along with their former owner. The latter I'll have to return, and I couldn't really use her, anyway; her skeleton's entirely original bone-- an original human corpse, now with a few extra holes in her head.
I think she may be the first person I've killed as a favor-- well, by her own request, anyway. Apparently she'd been reading my writings and started to identify herself as an infomorph while still having her original human body.
It's hard to know whether to feel guiltily responsible or whether to take pride in it. The responsible side ended up costing me-- though that's also why I'll be keeping this set. 96 million ISK....
Gods and spirits, if she'd tried to get me to agree to replace her implants in advance, there's no possible way I would have agreed to it. But somehow, with her death at my hands a thing accomplished and the corpse at my fingertips, the bargain seemed more worthwhile. The poor creature doesn't seem to consider the violation I negotiated a significant one; I wonder a little whether that will last.
Are our shells really so meaningless? Lacking large portions of skull certainly makes the corpse less picturesque, and I've no intention of softening the blow, if such it is, by prettying it up when I return it to her. She's learned a lot, but I can't help feel that there's something of the gravity of what she has done that's slipped by her.
In the end, what I have to teach is only a facet. We are human, and we are not human, and to conform with what I said we were, she asked me to kill what she was.
What lasting good can come of this, I can't begin to know-- but I obliged, even so. And yes, I'd do so again-- even counting the reimbursement, come to that.
The implants are beautiful, a complete set of standard-quality implants averaging 20 or so million ISK each, new. The beetles will have finished cleaning them by now; they'll be waiting for me when I return to Tzvi.
It's a pity there's no osteoplastic to work with, but for a first piece I can't complain too much. They came off of someone's first real death, after all, and there's a curious sort of purity in that.
It's like having captured a baby's first step.
... Worth every kredit.
I think she may be the first person I've killed as a favor-- well, by her own request, anyway. Apparently she'd been reading my writings and started to identify herself as an infomorph while still having her original human body.
It's hard to know whether to feel guiltily responsible or whether to take pride in it. The responsible side ended up costing me-- though that's also why I'll be keeping this set. 96 million ISK....
Gods and spirits, if she'd tried to get me to agree to replace her implants in advance, there's no possible way I would have agreed to it. But somehow, with her death at my hands a thing accomplished and the corpse at my fingertips, the bargain seemed more worthwhile. The poor creature doesn't seem to consider the violation I negotiated a significant one; I wonder a little whether that will last.
Are our shells really so meaningless? Lacking large portions of skull certainly makes the corpse less picturesque, and I've no intention of softening the blow, if such it is, by prettying it up when I return it to her. She's learned a lot, but I can't help feel that there's something of the gravity of what she has done that's slipped by her.
In the end, what I have to teach is only a facet. We are human, and we are not human, and to conform with what I said we were, she asked me to kill what she was.
What lasting good can come of this, I can't begin to know-- but I obliged, even so. And yes, I'd do so again-- even counting the reimbursement, come to that.
The implants are beautiful, a complete set of standard-quality implants averaging 20 or so million ISK each, new. The beetles will have finished cleaning them by now; they'll be waiting for me when I return to Tzvi.
It's a pity there's no osteoplastic to work with, but for a first piece I can't complain too much. They came off of someone's first real death, after all, and there's a curious sort of purity in that.
It's like having captured a baby's first step.
... Worth every kredit.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Thoughts
It has been a long time since I trusted one of these. Bad experiences tend to stay with one, humiliation more than most. But I need a place to lay my thoughts out, and the Dominations, at least, have stronger security in place.
Hopefully this will be of some help to me-- or to whoever comes after me, if it comes to that. Hopefully in six months there will still be someone left alive to take an interest.
My head's such a muddle, and while I can't blame the Sleepers for all of it, I can certainly blame them for a lot. Mostly, I blame them for turning so blasted quickly from a potential threat into a real one.
It's maddening. We find a ruined civilization on the level of the Jove, one that makes Curse look like a picked-over archeological tourist trap, and it turns out that not only is somebody still home, but that somebody may very well be capable of wiping us all out. But gods, the technologies!
We're producing symbiotic ships, ships that actually take the capsuleer link to its next logical step, intertwining the capsuleer's mind with that of the ship so far that there's a mnemoic backlash if the ship goes up with the capsuleer still inside! We can do this, now! ... It's the sort of thing I've dreamed about.
And, we may pay for it with our entire civilization.
For the record, I am really, truly sick of all the gods-blasted optimists. "Oh, don't worry, they'll stick to their ruins." Sure they will. Sure they didn't; we now have reports, with images, of Sleeper drones active in known space and maybe cooperating with the Rogue Drones.
So now it's, "Don't worry; they won't do anything horrific to us. And we're stronger than they are. And besides, it's all our fault for stirring them up to begin with." As if that actually mattered anymore.
There are two real questions here. First, is the Sleeper civilization actually dead? On this, no data, or very little. Second, are there actually as many Sleeper drones as it seems like there are? Because if there is anywhere close to a full Empire navy's worth, we are all in a very great deal of trouble.
... Which puts most of my plans into a blasted lot of turmoil. It's all just moving too fast. There are no set patterns for me to work with, nothing concrete to interpret from. I can't begin to guess where we'll be in six months, much less forty years.
Chaos. I'm accustomed to the Jovians as the primary unknown, and they're hardly ever really active. Well-- unless we learn a great deal very quickly about the Sleepers and the wormholes, that may be a feeling I'll have to get used to.
I guess for now, it's best to think mostly of the day to day. Jude has invited me to dinner, much to my surprise. It's taken him long enough, really. We still have to find a good time for it, which may be difficult, and I don't want to put him off.
And if we're all dead the next day, there won't have been anything better we could have been doing than that.
Hopefully this will be of some help to me-- or to whoever comes after me, if it comes to that. Hopefully in six months there will still be someone left alive to take an interest.
My head's such a muddle, and while I can't blame the Sleepers for all of it, I can certainly blame them for a lot. Mostly, I blame them for turning so blasted quickly from a potential threat into a real one.
It's maddening. We find a ruined civilization on the level of the Jove, one that makes Curse look like a picked-over archeological tourist trap, and it turns out that not only is somebody still home, but that somebody may very well be capable of wiping us all out. But gods, the technologies!
We're producing symbiotic ships, ships that actually take the capsuleer link to its next logical step, intertwining the capsuleer's mind with that of the ship so far that there's a mnemoic backlash if the ship goes up with the capsuleer still inside! We can do this, now! ... It's the sort of thing I've dreamed about.
And, we may pay for it with our entire civilization.
For the record, I am really, truly sick of all the gods-blasted optimists. "Oh, don't worry, they'll stick to their ruins." Sure they will. Sure they didn't; we now have reports, with images, of Sleeper drones active in known space and maybe cooperating with the Rogue Drones.
So now it's, "Don't worry; they won't do anything horrific to us. And we're stronger than they are. And besides, it's all our fault for stirring them up to begin with." As if that actually mattered anymore.
There are two real questions here. First, is the Sleeper civilization actually dead? On this, no data, or very little. Second, are there actually as many Sleeper drones as it seems like there are? Because if there is anywhere close to a full Empire navy's worth, we are all in a very great deal of trouble.
... Which puts most of my plans into a blasted lot of turmoil. It's all just moving too fast. There are no set patterns for me to work with, nothing concrete to interpret from. I can't begin to guess where we'll be in six months, much less forty years.
Chaos. I'm accustomed to the Jovians as the primary unknown, and they're hardly ever really active. Well-- unless we learn a great deal very quickly about the Sleepers and the wormholes, that may be a feeling I'll have to get used to.
I guess for now, it's best to think mostly of the day to day. Jude has invited me to dinner, much to my surprise. It's taken him long enough, really. We still have to find a good time for it, which may be difficult, and I don't want to put him off.
And if we're all dead the next day, there won't have been anything better we could have been doing than that.
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