abrock
July 11th, 2004, 09:24 AM
EDIT: Formatting not very good, copy/pasted from a word doc. Sorry.
-2-
Pain
She stood alone in the twilight, outlined against the cityscape on the observation deck of Acrology 9, basking in the glow of a rare sunset. Seeing the sun was a rare enough occurrence in City 24 that Natasha never seemed to grow tired of it. Even diffused through the diamond-aluminum alloy panels, which comprised the shell of the biospheres that shielded them from the invisible horrors of the deadzone, it was a beautiful sight to her eyes. Textdox mentioned that before the Collapse the sun had actually been visible every day. Every day! Perhaps that was why people had taken it for granted… or maybe they hadn’t. Very few people complained about it anymore, and in fact many seemed to begrudge their sustainer of Terran life for keeping them trapped inside the biospheres. Of course, Natasha knew the truth: It was more the Unified Union government keeping them prisoner than any natural restrictions. With the technology available to humans after the Second Industrial Revolution they could have mass produced proper protections to allow people access to the deadzone at their whim, but they hadn’t, for the simple yet all important reason of control.
Why anyone would actually want to visit the deadzone was another story. There were tales of mutants, monsters, and bands of renegade humans, but Natasha knew most of them to be simply scare tactics to keep the populace from finding things out for themselves. The environment was deadly though, that was certainly no lie. The nuclear exchanges with China which led to the Collapse had done a bang-up job of eliminating most of the life on Earth outside of the biospheres. She had personally avoided the horror of the Collapse, having been born 7 years after, but the few textdox and old fashioned photoprints which had survived convinced her to be thankful she had not lived to see it in person.
‘Spirit,’ it was Runa’s voice in her netlink. ‘Where are you? I’m on my way back.’
Natasha smiled to herself and brought her thumb and pinky together to complete the bioelectric loop which activated the netlink send function, and, still absorbing every ray of UV shielded sunlight as if it were vintage wine, she replied softly.
‘I’m watching the sunset… join me if you like.’
She thought about the netlink for a brief minute and wondered why the concept had not caught on with the popular crowd sooner. A tiny bioelectric transceiver implanted inside the ear canal offered high quality and extremely secure 2-way communications, with the added bonus that it was comfortable and never needed to be removed unless it became faulty, which was a rare enough event in itself that Natasha had never witnessed it happen. The only downside was that only someone with your exact netlink encrypt could communicate with you, and the encrypt had to be programmed in before the netlink was surgically implanted. This discouraged its use as a versatile communications platform, but for small teams of 2 or 3 running Infiltration, Interchange or, heaven forbid, Evacuation missions, the netlink was a godsend.
‘I’ll do that,’ Runa’s voice echoed back after a moment. ‘Just give me a minute to put away the drinks and check the mail. The last Halcyon contact gave a tentative date for the next party, remember. I hope he decides soon; I hate long waits.’ A ghostly grin touched the corners of Natasha’s mouth as she pictured her friend’s face grumbling out that last part. Runa truly hated inactivity; the girl always had to be doing something. Natasha assumed it had something to do with a genetic condition which gave her more free energy than most people, but she also knew that Runa followed the mantra that inactivity led to complacency, complacency led to mistakes, and mistakes led to death. Normally, Natasha might have seen fit to argue the point, but she had seen enough death in the past 5 months to know that the diminutive blond had a point. In many ways, Runa was the rough realist, while Natasha was the… what was that word she had heard them use in school to describe those people who lived a carefree life and smoked a lot of… hippies, that was it. She giggled to herself. Such a silly word… hippies!
-2-
Pain
She stood alone in the twilight, outlined against the cityscape on the observation deck of Acrology 9, basking in the glow of a rare sunset. Seeing the sun was a rare enough occurrence in City 24 that Natasha never seemed to grow tired of it. Even diffused through the diamond-aluminum alloy panels, which comprised the shell of the biospheres that shielded them from the invisible horrors of the deadzone, it was a beautiful sight to her eyes. Textdox mentioned that before the Collapse the sun had actually been visible every day. Every day! Perhaps that was why people had taken it for granted… or maybe they hadn’t. Very few people complained about it anymore, and in fact many seemed to begrudge their sustainer of Terran life for keeping them trapped inside the biospheres. Of course, Natasha knew the truth: It was more the Unified Union government keeping them prisoner than any natural restrictions. With the technology available to humans after the Second Industrial Revolution they could have mass produced proper protections to allow people access to the deadzone at their whim, but they hadn’t, for the simple yet all important reason of control.
Why anyone would actually want to visit the deadzone was another story. There were tales of mutants, monsters, and bands of renegade humans, but Natasha knew most of them to be simply scare tactics to keep the populace from finding things out for themselves. The environment was deadly though, that was certainly no lie. The nuclear exchanges with China which led to the Collapse had done a bang-up job of eliminating most of the life on Earth outside of the biospheres. She had personally avoided the horror of the Collapse, having been born 7 years after, but the few textdox and old fashioned photoprints which had survived convinced her to be thankful she had not lived to see it in person.
‘Spirit,’ it was Runa’s voice in her netlink. ‘Where are you? I’m on my way back.’
Natasha smiled to herself and brought her thumb and pinky together to complete the bioelectric loop which activated the netlink send function, and, still absorbing every ray of UV shielded sunlight as if it were vintage wine, she replied softly.
‘I’m watching the sunset… join me if you like.’
She thought about the netlink for a brief minute and wondered why the concept had not caught on with the popular crowd sooner. A tiny bioelectric transceiver implanted inside the ear canal offered high quality and extremely secure 2-way communications, with the added bonus that it was comfortable and never needed to be removed unless it became faulty, which was a rare enough event in itself that Natasha had never witnessed it happen. The only downside was that only someone with your exact netlink encrypt could communicate with you, and the encrypt had to be programmed in before the netlink was surgically implanted. This discouraged its use as a versatile communications platform, but for small teams of 2 or 3 running Infiltration, Interchange or, heaven forbid, Evacuation missions, the netlink was a godsend.
‘I’ll do that,’ Runa’s voice echoed back after a moment. ‘Just give me a minute to put away the drinks and check the mail. The last Halcyon contact gave a tentative date for the next party, remember. I hope he decides soon; I hate long waits.’ A ghostly grin touched the corners of Natasha’s mouth as she pictured her friend’s face grumbling out that last part. Runa truly hated inactivity; the girl always had to be doing something. Natasha assumed it had something to do with a genetic condition which gave her more free energy than most people, but she also knew that Runa followed the mantra that inactivity led to complacency, complacency led to mistakes, and mistakes led to death. Normally, Natasha might have seen fit to argue the point, but she had seen enough death in the past 5 months to know that the diminutive blond had a point. In many ways, Runa was the rough realist, while Natasha was the… what was that word she had heard them use in school to describe those people who lived a carefree life and smoked a lot of… hippies, that was it. She giggled to herself. Such a silly word… hippies!