Title: The Value of Spooning
Prompts: Crossover (muse and any other scifi universe); and "there is no spoon"
Characters: Lee Adama, John Connor, small reference to Kara Thrace
Fandoms: BSG 2003, Terminator, Matrix (warning: scene re-told with dramatic license to fit context)
Warnings: no spoilers
Rating: General
Word Count: Around 2,200 (a genuine short story!)
Author's Note: I have to confess I previously found the idea of cross-overs uncomfortable (I don't like my foods touching each other on the plate either : -) ). I just joined the Scifi Muses community on LJ, however, to stretch my writing skills into new areas, and I'm not one to back down from a challenge, so I took a deep breath and dove into the waters. Hopefully the result is of some merit.
The burned-out cement room where they had collapsed was dark and smelled of Sterno gel and saltpeter. As out of breath as Lee Adama was, he couldn't get a good, clean intake of air, instead sputtering and hacking. His throaty sounds mingled with those of the other soldiers who'd made it back to "camp," all attempting to negotiate the apparently tricky balance between satisfying their lungs with oxygen and scorching them with chemical particles. Lee settled for shallow breathing through a scrap of cloth John had tossed to him many hours before, a prescient move he could only appreciate now.
"Connor…Connor, how did the mission go today?" It was a grunt named Will Hanson; Lee had met him yesterday.
The room was too buried in shadow for John to see the man clearly, but he turned his head in the general direction of the voice anyway. "We were able to send Mayfair and Sossamon back. They're already off-mission, though, because the T-300s were too close on our tails…" he paused. John was obviously finding it difficult to finish the statement. "They decimated the controls just as the pulse started; we don't know what year they arrived in, or in what…condition."
No one else in the room spoke, but the sound of people awkwardly shifting against the floor communicated a great deal. Lee didn't know any of these men and women, but he was certain they were human, and he knew all too well the anguish of precarious missions that had been ended before they began by machines relentlessly pursuing an agenda of extermination.
Lee rested his head at a sharp angle against the cool blocks of the wall, eyes closing. He was so tired…so bereft. The conditions here were worse than those in the Colonial Fleet after more than three years of running; worse than the environment that had defined New Caprica; and surely as horrific as those the humans would have encountered if they'd remained on the twelve colonies after the Second Cylon War. He still couldn't accept the situation, the discoveries and revelations of the past 36 hours. What has it all been for? It seems humanity is doomed to be destroyed by its own technological creations, no matter the beginning evolutionary path. Maybe the stuff of our DNA is inherently flawed…and there is no God or gods, no divinity in any aspect of this macabre drama.
Lee slumped to the floor, drawing himself up in a tight ball, arms locked around his legs. He'd come here…gods, the frakking irony…come here to establish contact with the humans of Earth. The fleet was hanging back at the outer edges of this solar system, far enough to avoid detection—he hoped. Can these machines scan far into space? The idea the fleet could be boxed in, trapped between two types of machine—species—his mind nearly short-circuited at the living nightmare he'd uncovered. A different kind of fear than he'd ever experienced seemed to spread from the inside of his heart outward. It was radiating…radiating…
As President of the Colonies of Kobol, Lee Adama had insisted he should be the one to go down to the surface, make the first overtures. He'd flown the raptor himself, bringing only one marine with him…for protection…as though a speck of biological matter could stop the inanimate, the synthetic astuteness of the machines. Their human—oh, so human—DNA programming was no match for the artificial intelligence around them.
These Earth machines, the "terminator" models as John Connor and the others referred to them, shot the raptor out of the air as soon as it entered the lower atmosphere. There was no grand landscape to admire, no sense of safety to revel in, no time to think or feel or process—it was exactly the same as the minutes and days and years before. They stretched endlessly back, and now endlessly forward. Again.
Lee felt a hand on his arm; it was John. "I know you're tired, but I can also tell you're…in shock. I realize this is a very alien experience—"
"No, John. It's not. It's frakkin' indistinguishable from where I've been, where my people have been." Lee sat up, knowing the ice-cold substance flowing from his pumping heart into every tiny capillary in his body was going to overcome him soon, no matter the position he tried to arrange himself in. Life-ending fear was like that.
"Okay, then, Lee, tell me about the similarities. Maybe all this isn't what you—what you envisioned it would be, but help comes in strange forms. If we have related enemies, we may have related solutions."
Lee shook his head, snorting a laugh. "Solutions. John, this was my…our solution. Our salvation. And it's a vacuum, just like out there." He pointed upward, as though, even outside, the stars possibly still existed to look at through the permanent black fog that passed for sky.
"And I can't even tell them, tell my people, that the joke's on us. What if your 'terminators' find them, John? I can't warn the fleet now, can't even explain that they have to choose between that vacuum and this one." He buried his head in his hands. …Can't even comfort Kara, let her know that her love is what made every other struggle worth the cost.
A metal object was slowly wedged into Lee's right hand as he cradled his face. His vision useless, Lee ran his fingers along the item, tracing until the shape made sense. "A…a spoon?"
"Well, at least we seem to have the same language for things. Yeah, that's a spoon."
"I don't know what—"
"My mother gave it to me, as an icon."
"An icon? That's a pretty pedestrian object to be an icon." Are these humans rational?
"Somewhere…I can't remember where my mom said she picked it up…she learned this story. It meant a great deal to me, once I finally made sense of it. I was pretty messed up emotionally when she first passed it along…I didn't believe there was a solution to the problems ahead. I was told, from the time I was born, that the world as I knew it was going to be destroyed in a series of nuclear explosions, triggered by a network of self-aware machines. I was the appointed "leader" of the remaining human race, after the annihilation—the one that hadn't even happened yet."
Gods, there are eerie correlations here. "The twelve colonies were obliterated by nuclear weapons too, set off by self-aware machines. We named them Cylons; they evolved, learned to develop bio-Cylon models…look and act like us."
John touched Lee's hand, now resting between them, to acknowledge the shared pain. "Yeah…funny how they hate us and yet emulate us."
"Yeah." Gods knew how often Lee had that same thought.
"But unlike us," John commented, "your race pursued space travel—"
"We discovered there were others like ourselves on nearly every proximal planet in that solar system; it was a necessity."
"Well, you can put your mind at ease about the Terminators discovering your fleet. For all their advancements, they haven't pursued that path; there's no one from our world—human or machine—out in space."
"And yet you…you said you send people back in time? We were never able to unlock that mystery. How did it—"
"How did we solve the challenges? I guess that goes back to the story I was about to tell you regarding the spoon."
"The one that—"
"—that inspired me. Yes."
It was Lee's turn to touch John gently. "Well, go ahead; you've piqued my curiosity, and that's saying something, given the situation." Lee let out a long sigh.
"The story was about a search for someone, the one who would be the 'savior' of humanity. Children—boys and girls—were brought before a woman called the Oracle. Ironically—or prophetically—the 'chosen one,' the savior, had to be found to save his people from machines…the machines literally controlling the minds of every animate, carbon-based, living creature.
"The Oracle would meet each child individually and give that person a spoon. She'd ask the child to bend it without touching it, other than to hold the bottom of the stem."
Lee snorted again. "A sleight of hand would determine the salvation of mankind?"
"No, Lee, No. You're too concrete, too dejected to see it yet. Let me finish." Lee murmured his agreement.
"Several children were able to bend the spoon. The mind is capable of a great many things, including moving energy, moving atoms at will. But those individuals weren't the right fit.
"See, the potential 'candidate' also had to be able to explain how he or she accomplished the task. The Oracle had been given the answer from the greater universal source, and she would recognize it immediately.
"One day, a young man was brought to her. He was able to bend the spoon. When asked to explain it, the man simply stated 'You can't focus on bending the spoon, for that's impossible. Instead, realize there is no spoon.' "
Lee squirmed in frustration. He couldn't see where this was going at all, and things were absurd already without listening to a stranger's story that held no meaning.
"I'm going to save you a lot of time, my friend, and explain why that sentence unlocked everything. What he meant was that to solve a challenge, you have to redefine it from the inside out. And you start by realizing what you think is an obstacle…isn't. If you focus on the obstacle—bending the spoon—you expend your energy to no avail. Worse, you're fixated on that problem, and fail to see the next challenge in the journey.
"If you realize there is no spoon—the obstacle is only an obstacle because you defined it that way—you can navigate through the experience and continue on the journey."
"The spoon feels pretty real and pretty rigid to me, John," Lee said with bitterness.
"It did to me too, back then. But it's just energy, Lee, energy our mind constructs into the form of a spoon, with mass and substance and intrinsic function. We could direct our minds to see it as what it truly is—millions of electrons buzzing around, waiting for us to see "them" to manifest the construct—and choose to see that same energy in a different form altogether.
"That's how we solved the riddle of time travel, how to finally understand time as one of our great scientists, Einstein, understood it to be—a dimension flowing in more than one direction. And it's how we'll defeat the machines, Lee. Even with an artificial intelligence that learns and evolves, their minds are still synthetic. They're bound by the rules of their construct, their programming, no matter how sophisticated. We aren't."
"There is no spoon." Lee was whispering the words, a tingling spine and building headache indicating his mind was stretching itself, transfiguring into a new level of understanding. The idea wasn't integrated yet, still inchoate but…substantial. Ground he could stand on. Lee realized he could hold onto the meaning and grow from it, grow with it.
A new perspective shoved its way into consciousness. Lee gripped John by the shoulders, excited. "John! What if we…with my help, could you construct a transmitting beacon, a dish to communicate with my ship, the Galactica? Based on what I've seen just in my few hours here, the technology tools seem to be available, if we can get our hands on them."
"What's your plan, Adama?"
"The human race has a new set of perspectives to exchange, John. Our enemy has been similar, but there are key differences, and if we could recognize compounding weaknesses, we might find a way to exploit that…"
"…Choose a new path."
"But what if—what if the machines join forces too? Gods, that—"
"Lee, we can only move along the path. Don't create obstacles in advance. They could also become enemies."
"Is this land, this Earth, recoverable from the damage done?"
"As much as we're recoverable as humans, yes. Same energy, Lee, always available for our choices in creating."
Lee was startled by the spark of life surging within him again. The frigid substance hadn't receded from every vein and artery within him, but his heart was pumping with a renewed heat. The fear was transforming too, molecule by molecule. He smiled; no one could see it, in the dark, but the warmth of the emotion touched the man next to him all the same.
John fumbled lightly to hand Lee a wadded-up piece of clothing, tied with string to hold the semi-shape together. "This can be your pillow, for the moment. I'll share my blanket."
"Thanks," was all Lee could think to say. He stretched out parallel to the wall, the floor less acrid-smelling than the rest of the space. He could breath easier. As John arranged himself for sleep too, and the blanket fell across Lee's body, he allowed himself the first sensation of comfort in the past two days. As he finally drifted into dreaming, he thought about the blonde bundle of energy back on Galactica, and what she'd say to bolster him. Fight 'em until we can't. It was a mantra the humans—from every time and place—would rally around, from now until…it didn't matter until when. All that mattered was that they would keep getting up, keep choosing to move forward.