"Emptiness, consuming me. Head in hands, I can hardly speak. Lost in my solitude, lost my humanity. True knowledge leads to suffering. A constant quest, and endless dream. Searching for inner peace, hidden so deep in me. Don't wanna be the Hollow Man... Don't wanna be the Hollow Man..." -Iced Earth, Hollow Man
You know, it's funny, when I think back on it. When confronted with the Irken-in-a-jar, I reacted in a manner not very consistent with my normal motis operandi. I was an investigator, curiousity personified, damn it! I mean, lets examine the facts here, I'd just spent the last 36 hours wandering about an alien junk pile, scrambling through a derelict alien spacecraft, and confronted on all sides by the horror of decay. I'd just spent the last several hours picking my way through seemingly countless Irken corpses, bodies simply left to rot where they fell, a testiment to the neglectful nature of a galaxy spanning empire.
Now I was confronted with a little shock to the system and I screamed like a little girl?
It doesn't make any sense.
Oh but it does.
I've had a long time to think about this, and I've come up with numerous theories as to why it might have effected me so badly. Perhaps it had been the sudden nature of the creature's appearance... perhaps seeing it through the glass of the tube awakened some deep set hurt or trauma I'd felt being imprisioned in a similar fashion.
Maybe it was just a build up of all the horrors I'd seen, all the stress I'd felt, the building loneliness, the mounting fear that I was going to die out here... maybe it was just the trigger to a wellspring of desolation.
In any case, I fell on my ass, burned the shit outta my hand on the torch, and lost my glasses.
I froze.
This was, after all, my worst nightmare coming true. I don't truly know how to describe the loss of one's glasses to someone who has never experienced visual correction. There is a gut-wrenching feeling of vulnerability, of helplessness that one cannot shake, as one scrambles about, groping like some retarded sea-creature. The fear, ever-present, that you are inches from it and yet can't distinguish it from the floor. You don't move, terrified that you'll crush your only means of sight.
Now multiply that by about fifty times, since this was the pair of glasses that I was most likely going to DIE in (a sobering thought, and I wasn't drunk) and there was SOMETHING in the room with me.
I found them, put them on, sighing in relief, then took a moment to suck on my scorched hand. Rising up off the floor, I looked back into the tube.
It was a pitiful thing, really.
The Irken race is not something that inspires much terror in me, at least, not from a physical perspective. Your average Irken is lucky if he tops out at four feet, giving the impression that one is being surrounded by hideously deformed green children, or a bevy of Lawn Gnomes crafted by an insane color-blind sculptor fried on LSD.
This thing was considerably smaller, and unmodified in the sense that the everpresent metal pack was missing, nor were there any scars on its back to show its possible detachment.
A small green LED was blinking on and off, alerting some long dead alien technician that his lunch was ready, or his fetus was viable, or lord knows what the light was supposed to represent. I followed the line of tubes back, staring into each one as I passed.
Hundreds of... of silent Irken... children? Hanging suspended in fluid baths, still; unanimated. Not dead, not alive, just never was.
It was a disturbing sight to say the least.
I determined the green flashing light was an indicator of viability, because those tubes that had red flashing lights were so clouded with filth that I was unable to see their contents (and somehow I didn't think I WANTED to).
The secret of Irken uniformity of thought, of form, of callousness, revealed to me.
Were they clones? Was this simply a reserve? Somewhere were there hundreds of sad Irken couples wondering what happened to their neverborn children?
I doubted it. When one is investigating, it is important to try to keep as unbiased an opinion as possible. This was an alien species, it would be foolish to equate them with human thoughts, human ideals, human emotions. Biologically they were very different, certainly vastly dissimilar hormones coursed through their systems, who's to say they thought, or felt like us?
Perhaps to them, live birth was an atrocity.
Or maybe they didn't care at all.
The way they'd left hundreds of Irkens locked in this... limbo of existence seemed to point to the latter.
In any case, I turned and left without another word.
What? Why the imagined look of disappointment? Were you expecting me to free them? Become Den mother to a new breed of Irken? Raise them to avenge myself on my Irken tormentors?
Don't think I haven't thought about it. Dreamt about it.
This isn't a science fiction story, damn it! I'm only human! Maybe if I had my computer with me, I might have, with time, been able to discern enough about their technology to operate the mechanism, if it even still worked. Certainly it might have been nice to have someone to talk to...
I didn't have my computer however. I'm smart, and some might say a little resourceful.
Not that smart. Not that resourceful.
Besides, I had more important things on my mind, like survival.
Not to mention the fact that if I survived, I'd have all the time in the world to explore the possibilities here.
It wasn't like it was going anywhere.
It wasn't like I was going anywhere.
***
The end result of my exploration of the Irken ship were as follows. 7 relatively clean bottles of sizes varying from coke can to gallon jug (I have really fond memories of those jugs). One razor sharp tool of unknown functionality, which I hoped hadn't spent more then it's fair share of time in one Irken oriface or another. The metal pack from dear departed Ed, which I had my suspicions was still active, despite its owner's demise. Several fabric strips that looked clean enough, though spending lord knows how long in the belly of this wreck couldn't have been good for their freshness. Twenty or so feet of what appeared to be fiber optic cable, though for all I know it might have been Irken dental floss. It didn't really matter anyway, rope is a good thing to have. Not a bad haul, if I do say so myself.
But no water. No food.
I was more thirsty then I'd ever been in my entire life.
Have you ever wanted something so bad that it seemed to haunt you? Have you ever spent desperate hours searching for this thing, in vain, knowing life depended on it? I was like a majority of my species, I'd taken the simple things for granted. When one can simply walk into one's kitchen and pour one's self a glass of good ol' American tap water, one pays little mind to the source of one's provender.
I would have killed for an Evian... or even a can of cherry poop. Even IF caffeine is a diuretic.
My throat was so dry...
I stared up at the clouds above hopefully, WILLING it to rain, demanding it really. I shouted until my voice was gone, until my strength was gone, until all I could do was lie on my back and stare up, frying like a piece of Dibby bacon.
Slowly dying. By inches.
But dying, nonetheless.
Fate, however, is not that kind. Though I fought to live, though I struggled to maintain the pitiful existence that had been rendered to me, it hadn't really struck me yet, the MAGNITUDE of my fate. Remember that I hadn't been there but two days... intellectually, I realized that my race was gone, that I was alone, but emotionally? That is a concept nearly impossible for the human psyche, ever so optimistic, so hopeful, to begin to contemplate.
It was all too big for me. If I had died there, I might have died still hopeful.
I woke. Blinked, stared at the sky. It was overcast, sullenly overcast, the sky bruised and beaten with moisture, out of reach, mocking me. Something had awakened me... something...
Wetness. On my nose. It...
The bruised and beaten sky began to bleed.
This might sound like a metaphor.
No I mean it, the sky began to BLEED.
I don't know what causes it, some unknown chemical (god I hope not) too much ferrous corrosion, but the rain on Dirt is a pale, watery sort of crimson... like the blood of an anemic. Well, if the anemic mixed his... blood with.... water. Yeah.
I didn't care.
I stood and whooped for joy. I danced in it, I raised my face to the sky and drowned in it, fell down and rubbed my ass and cursed, but I was happy.
One learns to make do with the small things.
Sure it was probably contaminated... sure it was probably dirty, and who KNOWS when it would rain again? Sure I had no food, at least, none that I was sure of...
I was alive. At least for now. I would live on, at least a little while.
It was enough.
The next few hours were spent setting out every available bottle I had found to catch the precious Dihydrogen Monoxide that fell from the sky, like mana from heaven. The 2 gallon jugs I kept in reserve... I had a few ideas about how to decontaminate the water I collected, but I was gonna need containers for the (hopefully) clean water that would eventually be created. I retreated back to the airlock of the Irken ship, the rain having put out my torch, and I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Fucking... how long was it gonna rain?
Once the skies opened up, they didn't seem to stop. The smell of... iron was ever present. It got cold. I shivered, my clothing soaked through and through.
The irony of my situation, wishing for the rain to stop, was lost on me then.
I still don't think it was funny, but then, those of us who are the victims of mother Irony seldom do.
The rain stopped, and I set out for the fiery lake of pollutants.
I had work to do.
***
Take a bottle of contaminated water. put a piece of uncontaminated Irken cloth over the top of the bottle. Now heat the contents until steam soaks the cloth to sopping wetness. Don't hold the glass while you're heating it like an idiot, and don't drop the friggin' thing, and for GOD sakes, don't drop the cloth. In fact, the best thing to do is find a little plate of metal and jury rig a sort of table, then put your flaming "pot" o' pollutants under it, let it sit till the cloth is full. Then pull it off, squeeze it dry into one of the gallon jugs, and repeat.
Repeat. Repeat. To the gods of tedium and back repeat.
It was inefficient, it was slow and time consuming. It made a smell that raise a whole new level of foul. It lost alot of water that I probably couldn't afford to lose.
But it worked.
Which is a good thing, because straining the water through dead Irken's uniforms probably would have only produced a very foul sort of contaminated Irken flavored tea.
Don't laugh, it's not funny.
You'll contemplate worse ideas when you're dying of thirst.
***
I could go into detail about my search for food, my scrabbling for more water, conserving it as best I could, hoarding it like a miser. There was never REALLY enough to drink, and I had my doubts as to how well I'd decontaminated it, but the human body abides, in a fashion. I trained myself to need less, kept my movements economical. I eventually had to try the Irken snack remnants.
That was... an experience. One that I survived. Lets just say that you CAN live off it, but it tastes like shit, and you pee REALLY interesting colors.
I'm not even going to MENTION what color you... you know.
I never got enough to eat... I never got enough to drink. I was filthy, and my clothing was coming apart.
I made do.
As I said, I could go into detail, but I won't.
All the really interesting stuff started happening about a month later.
See, survival and shelter being taken care of, my pyramid of needs was was moving blissfully on down the line.
I had time to think now, you see.
Lets just say that too much time to think can be a dangerous thing.
Plato and Socrates be damned.
***
I forget what I was doing when she showed up. I think I was trying to drill a hole through a piece of metal, but I can't for the life of me remember WHY I was doing it, just that I thought I could make something useful out of it. In any case, it wasn't important.
A sound caught my attention.
A beeping sound.
I looked up.
There she was.
She was short... shorter than me, her purple hair just as I remembered it, pale faced dimly illuminated by the faint glow of a game screens backlighting, young, mysterious, just barely starting to fill out into femininity. The dark lashes and slightly darker tone under the eyes, as though she'd been GENETICALLY crafted into the epitomy of gothness, exactly the same. The Game Slave she manipulated dextrously in her small dainty hands was the source of the familiar beeping noise, countless unknown electronic baddies meeting terrible death at her veteran hands.
I blinked.
My mouth dropped open wide.
I did not question the fact that she was floating a foot off the ground.
This was, after all, Gaz.
***
A/N: Hmm... an interesting situation, don't you agree? We get to the meat of it, as it were. Could it be that his Dibness is not the only human being to survive after all? If so, how did Gaz survive? How did she get here?
Am I really that nice?
For those of you having trouble suspending your disbelief, allow me to assauge your fears that this story is taking a step into the ridiculous with but a single comment.
The human mind is full of interesting mechanisms to maintain one's grip on existence.
It also shows an amazing capacity to FUCK with itself.
Maybe we're all just a little masochistic.
In any case, hopefully the pacing isn't all shot to hell. I decided enough survival shit, time to get into the meat of the story. Let me know what you people think.
Chris, DT
You know, it's funny, when I think back on it. When confronted with the Irken-in-a-jar, I reacted in a manner not very consistent with my normal motis operandi. I was an investigator, curiousity personified, damn it! I mean, lets examine the facts here, I'd just spent the last 36 hours wandering about an alien junk pile, scrambling through a derelict alien spacecraft, and confronted on all sides by the horror of decay. I'd just spent the last several hours picking my way through seemingly countless Irken corpses, bodies simply left to rot where they fell, a testiment to the neglectful nature of a galaxy spanning empire.
Now I was confronted with a little shock to the system and I screamed like a little girl?
It doesn't make any sense.
Oh but it does.
I've had a long time to think about this, and I've come up with numerous theories as to why it might have effected me so badly. Perhaps it had been the sudden nature of the creature's appearance... perhaps seeing it through the glass of the tube awakened some deep set hurt or trauma I'd felt being imprisioned in a similar fashion.
Maybe it was just a build up of all the horrors I'd seen, all the stress I'd felt, the building loneliness, the mounting fear that I was going to die out here... maybe it was just the trigger to a wellspring of desolation.
In any case, I fell on my ass, burned the shit outta my hand on the torch, and lost my glasses.
I froze.
This was, after all, my worst nightmare coming true. I don't truly know how to describe the loss of one's glasses to someone who has never experienced visual correction. There is a gut-wrenching feeling of vulnerability, of helplessness that one cannot shake, as one scrambles about, groping like some retarded sea-creature. The fear, ever-present, that you are inches from it and yet can't distinguish it from the floor. You don't move, terrified that you'll crush your only means of sight.
Now multiply that by about fifty times, since this was the pair of glasses that I was most likely going to DIE in (a sobering thought, and I wasn't drunk) and there was SOMETHING in the room with me.
I found them, put them on, sighing in relief, then took a moment to suck on my scorched hand. Rising up off the floor, I looked back into the tube.
It was a pitiful thing, really.
The Irken race is not something that inspires much terror in me, at least, not from a physical perspective. Your average Irken is lucky if he tops out at four feet, giving the impression that one is being surrounded by hideously deformed green children, or a bevy of Lawn Gnomes crafted by an insane color-blind sculptor fried on LSD.
This thing was considerably smaller, and unmodified in the sense that the everpresent metal pack was missing, nor were there any scars on its back to show its possible detachment.
A small green LED was blinking on and off, alerting some long dead alien technician that his lunch was ready, or his fetus was viable, or lord knows what the light was supposed to represent. I followed the line of tubes back, staring into each one as I passed.
Hundreds of... of silent Irken... children? Hanging suspended in fluid baths, still; unanimated. Not dead, not alive, just never was.
It was a disturbing sight to say the least.
I determined the green flashing light was an indicator of viability, because those tubes that had red flashing lights were so clouded with filth that I was unable to see their contents (and somehow I didn't think I WANTED to).
The secret of Irken uniformity of thought, of form, of callousness, revealed to me.
Were they clones? Was this simply a reserve? Somewhere were there hundreds of sad Irken couples wondering what happened to their neverborn children?
I doubted it. When one is investigating, it is important to try to keep as unbiased an opinion as possible. This was an alien species, it would be foolish to equate them with human thoughts, human ideals, human emotions. Biologically they were very different, certainly vastly dissimilar hormones coursed through their systems, who's to say they thought, or felt like us?
Perhaps to them, live birth was an atrocity.
Or maybe they didn't care at all.
The way they'd left hundreds of Irkens locked in this... limbo of existence seemed to point to the latter.
In any case, I turned and left without another word.
What? Why the imagined look of disappointment? Were you expecting me to free them? Become Den mother to a new breed of Irken? Raise them to avenge myself on my Irken tormentors?
Don't think I haven't thought about it. Dreamt about it.
This isn't a science fiction story, damn it! I'm only human! Maybe if I had my computer with me, I might have, with time, been able to discern enough about their technology to operate the mechanism, if it even still worked. Certainly it might have been nice to have someone to talk to...
I didn't have my computer however. I'm smart, and some might say a little resourceful.
Not that smart. Not that resourceful.
Besides, I had more important things on my mind, like survival.
Not to mention the fact that if I survived, I'd have all the time in the world to explore the possibilities here.
It wasn't like it was going anywhere.
It wasn't like I was going anywhere.
***
The end result of my exploration of the Irken ship were as follows. 7 relatively clean bottles of sizes varying from coke can to gallon jug (I have really fond memories of those jugs). One razor sharp tool of unknown functionality, which I hoped hadn't spent more then it's fair share of time in one Irken oriface or another. The metal pack from dear departed Ed, which I had my suspicions was still active, despite its owner's demise. Several fabric strips that looked clean enough, though spending lord knows how long in the belly of this wreck couldn't have been good for their freshness. Twenty or so feet of what appeared to be fiber optic cable, though for all I know it might have been Irken dental floss. It didn't really matter anyway, rope is a good thing to have. Not a bad haul, if I do say so myself.
But no water. No food.
I was more thirsty then I'd ever been in my entire life.
Have you ever wanted something so bad that it seemed to haunt you? Have you ever spent desperate hours searching for this thing, in vain, knowing life depended on it? I was like a majority of my species, I'd taken the simple things for granted. When one can simply walk into one's kitchen and pour one's self a glass of good ol' American tap water, one pays little mind to the source of one's provender.
I would have killed for an Evian... or even a can of cherry poop. Even IF caffeine is a diuretic.
My throat was so dry...
I stared up at the clouds above hopefully, WILLING it to rain, demanding it really. I shouted until my voice was gone, until my strength was gone, until all I could do was lie on my back and stare up, frying like a piece of Dibby bacon.
Slowly dying. By inches.
But dying, nonetheless.
Fate, however, is not that kind. Though I fought to live, though I struggled to maintain the pitiful existence that had been rendered to me, it hadn't really struck me yet, the MAGNITUDE of my fate. Remember that I hadn't been there but two days... intellectually, I realized that my race was gone, that I was alone, but emotionally? That is a concept nearly impossible for the human psyche, ever so optimistic, so hopeful, to begin to contemplate.
It was all too big for me. If I had died there, I might have died still hopeful.
I woke. Blinked, stared at the sky. It was overcast, sullenly overcast, the sky bruised and beaten with moisture, out of reach, mocking me. Something had awakened me... something...
Wetness. On my nose. It...
The bruised and beaten sky began to bleed.
This might sound like a metaphor.
No I mean it, the sky began to BLEED.
I don't know what causes it, some unknown chemical (god I hope not) too much ferrous corrosion, but the rain on Dirt is a pale, watery sort of crimson... like the blood of an anemic. Well, if the anemic mixed his... blood with.... water. Yeah.
I didn't care.
I stood and whooped for joy. I danced in it, I raised my face to the sky and drowned in it, fell down and rubbed my ass and cursed, but I was happy.
One learns to make do with the small things.
Sure it was probably contaminated... sure it was probably dirty, and who KNOWS when it would rain again? Sure I had no food, at least, none that I was sure of...
I was alive. At least for now. I would live on, at least a little while.
It was enough.
The next few hours were spent setting out every available bottle I had found to catch the precious Dihydrogen Monoxide that fell from the sky, like mana from heaven. The 2 gallon jugs I kept in reserve... I had a few ideas about how to decontaminate the water I collected, but I was gonna need containers for the (hopefully) clean water that would eventually be created. I retreated back to the airlock of the Irken ship, the rain having put out my torch, and I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Fucking... how long was it gonna rain?
Once the skies opened up, they didn't seem to stop. The smell of... iron was ever present. It got cold. I shivered, my clothing soaked through and through.
The irony of my situation, wishing for the rain to stop, was lost on me then.
I still don't think it was funny, but then, those of us who are the victims of mother Irony seldom do.
The rain stopped, and I set out for the fiery lake of pollutants.
I had work to do.
***
Take a bottle of contaminated water. put a piece of uncontaminated Irken cloth over the top of the bottle. Now heat the contents until steam soaks the cloth to sopping wetness. Don't hold the glass while you're heating it like an idiot, and don't drop the friggin' thing, and for GOD sakes, don't drop the cloth. In fact, the best thing to do is find a little plate of metal and jury rig a sort of table, then put your flaming "pot" o' pollutants under it, let it sit till the cloth is full. Then pull it off, squeeze it dry into one of the gallon jugs, and repeat.
Repeat. Repeat. To the gods of tedium and back repeat.
It was inefficient, it was slow and time consuming. It made a smell that raise a whole new level of foul. It lost alot of water that I probably couldn't afford to lose.
But it worked.
Which is a good thing, because straining the water through dead Irken's uniforms probably would have only produced a very foul sort of contaminated Irken flavored tea.
Don't laugh, it's not funny.
You'll contemplate worse ideas when you're dying of thirst.
***
I could go into detail about my search for food, my scrabbling for more water, conserving it as best I could, hoarding it like a miser. There was never REALLY enough to drink, and I had my doubts as to how well I'd decontaminated it, but the human body abides, in a fashion. I trained myself to need less, kept my movements economical. I eventually had to try the Irken snack remnants.
That was... an experience. One that I survived. Lets just say that you CAN live off it, but it tastes like shit, and you pee REALLY interesting colors.
I'm not even going to MENTION what color you... you know.
I never got enough to eat... I never got enough to drink. I was filthy, and my clothing was coming apart.
I made do.
As I said, I could go into detail, but I won't.
All the really interesting stuff started happening about a month later.
See, survival and shelter being taken care of, my pyramid of needs was was moving blissfully on down the line.
I had time to think now, you see.
Lets just say that too much time to think can be a dangerous thing.
Plato and Socrates be damned.
***
I forget what I was doing when she showed up. I think I was trying to drill a hole through a piece of metal, but I can't for the life of me remember WHY I was doing it, just that I thought I could make something useful out of it. In any case, it wasn't important.
A sound caught my attention.
A beeping sound.
I looked up.
There she was.
She was short... shorter than me, her purple hair just as I remembered it, pale faced dimly illuminated by the faint glow of a game screens backlighting, young, mysterious, just barely starting to fill out into femininity. The dark lashes and slightly darker tone under the eyes, as though she'd been GENETICALLY crafted into the epitomy of gothness, exactly the same. The Game Slave she manipulated dextrously in her small dainty hands was the source of the familiar beeping noise, countless unknown electronic baddies meeting terrible death at her veteran hands.
I blinked.
My mouth dropped open wide.
I did not question the fact that she was floating a foot off the ground.
This was, after all, Gaz.
***
A/N: Hmm... an interesting situation, don't you agree? We get to the meat of it, as it were. Could it be that his Dibness is not the only human being to survive after all? If so, how did Gaz survive? How did she get here?
Am I really that nice?
For those of you having trouble suspending your disbelief, allow me to assauge your fears that this story is taking a step into the ridiculous with but a single comment.
The human mind is full of interesting mechanisms to maintain one's grip on existence.
It also shows an amazing capacity to FUCK with itself.
Maybe we're all just a little masochistic.
In any case, hopefully the pacing isn't all shot to hell. I decided enough survival shit, time to get into the meat of the story. Let me know what you people think.
Chris, DT