Silence
By: Smurfkiller
Author's Note: Hopefully, this is original for all of you tired of marines/Zerg fictions, although I mean no offense to those writers. "Chaparas" are halfway in-between a full chapter and a single paragraph. Most of these chaparas are short, usually a paragraph or two long.
Disclaimer: Blizzard owns Starcraft, the Everlasting Real-Time Strategy Game everyone knows by heart.
Chapara 1
I live in a world of silence.
No, I'm not deaf. I'm blind. Goddamn, you think they could cure a person born blind in this century, with all the inventions we've made in innovative ways to kill people with lasers and nukes. But no. That's all the technology humankind has invented. Weapons; to maim. While the impaired must still struggle through life.
How do I live in a world of silence, when I can hear? It's quite simple. How can I describe an everyday, ordinary object?
Take a piece of paper. I can feel it with my hands. I can listen to a friend describe it.
It's thin. That word was shown to me through me hands. I could not learn it through reading or looking it up in a dictionary.
The edges are sharp, the texture smooth. Those words too, I feel, not see.
The color- white? How can I know what white looks like, when I see is darkness? Get it? Silence. Pure, goddamn silence, because everything others can see, others can describe, I cannot. Silence.
I am one of the lucky ones, lucky to be born with a defect, born on the unfortunate planet of Chau Sara to a fortunate family of wealthy industrialists. They gave me the best care any one in this Sector could afford, but they couldn't give me my sight. Instead, they gave my oldest brother their company, my little sister a wealthy husband, and me, the captain of my own ship, the S.S. Stargazer.
Life's full of mockeries. Stargazer. What I would give for one look at my beautiful ship, to see it's jagged wings and hot thrumming heat of the engines, of it's beautiful cold blue color. All that I cannot see, cannot comprehend, only say.
Cynics like me are often hated for their pessimistic nature. I, though, am not a cynic. I'm a realist, of course, aware of how this fucking universe works. At least, I though I knew how the universe worked. Zerg changed that.
Chapara 2
Before I began, you might be wondering how I learned to write without sight. It's hard for a blind person to write. Luckily for me, I've memorized the keys on a keyboard like a musician does with the keys on a piano (I'm learning how to do that too).
It was on the Stargazer, on a freight run from Brontes to Chau Sara via Mar Sara, that news struck that the whole goddamn planet of Chau Sara was under a Confed Lockdown.
I was in my cabin, consulting a three-dimensional star chart, feeling the bumped space lines running across the vast sector, wondering which way was the quickest to get my delivery of high-grade depeleted uranium shells for the Confederate Marine Corp. I ran a lot of military freight those days, mostly for Duke's ALPHA Squadron, the "Blood Hawks," who made their base of operations right in the smack-dab capital of Sara.
Military freight was often needed these days, with the Feds on a three-front war. Umoja, that bastard neutral government, was harboring the terrorist Sons of Korhal group, and so the Feds responded with a fleet that was regularly bombarding the world of Umoja. The SoK too, was active, blasting away at backwater outposts like Chau Sara, which was why Duke and his whole goddamn Alpha squadron was there. And finally, some aliens were starting to appear too, nicknamed, like an appropriate alien race, "Zerg."
Comments:
I was planning to have a nice little run in with a hydralisk at the end with the protagonist on his ship, and make more appreciative of his remaining senses by rendering him blind and deaf due to a blow by the hydralisk's blade.