Athlacarta: The First Letter
Feb. 2nd, 2008 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsDear Adler,
I know we are still human. After all these many generations of vagrancy, when so many of us spend much or all of our lives without setting foot on the soil of any world at all, that does not change what is fundamentally within us. A few hundred years of relative freedom is barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket compared to the millennia we spent earthbound. The human organism is programmed to understand that the world will end under some kind of deafening holocaust of fire. It is the wrath of God, or man's fatal mistake sundering the sky with gouts of nuclear madness. It is the explosion of the sun, the implosion of the earth itself.
That's not how it happened.
The first shots were fired in the night, in silence... during the hours when the station lived in the shadow of the great and lifeless stone sphere it orbited. Since I left you, I have attended countless functions that claim to be support groups for survivors, where the story is told, and always begins with the sound. Every one of these people is lying. Nobody who lives today heard the first of the explosions, and on this fact I would swear my life.
I cannot fathom why, after these years, but I feel it should be you who knows the truth. Back then, you didn't give me a choice. It is for this reason that I do not offer one to you now. If you have read this far, you will read further. This much I remember.
So... the station passed into shadow and we, obedient to the programming of our humanity, went to sleep. I listened to that vast network of machinery shutting down around me. I grew up there. It was the lullaby of my childhood, and it was fitting that night would be the last I would hear it. Inch by inch she closed down. Power was diverted into patterns of nightly hibernation and silence, because the community bunkers were so far away from any part of the station that would have been staffed during the night. As it had during any of the other thousands of evenings of my young life – I was only thirteen, at that time, after all - silence, total and pure, granted me sleep.
I woke later to the chill and nauseating vertigo of my blankets and my equilibrium being stolen from me. In that early consciousness, I could think of nothing but that it was still silent... that much was right. There was no alarm, no emergency lightening glowing some eerie warning in my bedchamber. We had drills, in my youngest years, to prepare us if there was ever an error in the station's gravitational synthesis. But the event had never occurred genuinely. Not during my lifetime, and not in the station's history.
I lay there for a long time in that black maw of silence and vertigo until I eventually bumped into the wall of my bedroom and instinctively grabbed hold of a cubby fixed into the wall. The station was still silent... everything sounded so right, even as every cell in my body began to scream out that something was terribly, terribly wrong. correspondence
I clawed my way to the door and listened. That is how I can tell you here and now that no one heard those shots, no one woke to some uncanny understanding. They all came out of sleep just like I did... confused and tied into slow terror, with no brave ideas of what was to come. We – every one of us on Athlacarta – were infants, born blind into a world we had no concept of, unable to so much as exert a finger's worth of control on our surroundings.
Do not think that you would tell me, as I have been told before, that I will be able to find some closure, talking to other people who were there, or other people who know what I've been through. I haven't met an honest man among them yet, and I don't need their pity.
Sincerely yours,
Cass.
I know we are still human. After all these many generations of vagrancy, when so many of us spend much or all of our lives without setting foot on the soil of any world at all, that does not change what is fundamentally within us. A few hundred years of relative freedom is barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket compared to the millennia we spent earthbound. The human organism is programmed to understand that the world will end under some kind of deafening holocaust of fire. It is the wrath of God, or man's fatal mistake sundering the sky with gouts of nuclear madness. It is the explosion of the sun, the implosion of the earth itself.
That's not how it happened.
The first shots were fired in the night, in silence... during the hours when the station lived in the shadow of the great and lifeless stone sphere it orbited. Since I left you, I have attended countless functions that claim to be support groups for survivors, where the story is told, and always begins with the sound. Every one of these people is lying. Nobody who lives today heard the first of the explosions, and on this fact I would swear my life.
I cannot fathom why, after these years, but I feel it should be you who knows the truth. Back then, you didn't give me a choice. It is for this reason that I do not offer one to you now. If you have read this far, you will read further. This much I remember.
So... the station passed into shadow and we, obedient to the programming of our humanity, went to sleep. I listened to that vast network of machinery shutting down around me. I grew up there. It was the lullaby of my childhood, and it was fitting that night would be the last I would hear it. Inch by inch she closed down. Power was diverted into patterns of nightly hibernation and silence, because the community bunkers were so far away from any part of the station that would have been staffed during the night. As it had during any of the other thousands of evenings of my young life – I was only thirteen, at that time, after all - silence, total and pure, granted me sleep.
I woke later to the chill and nauseating vertigo of my blankets and my equilibrium being stolen from me. In that early consciousness, I could think of nothing but that it was still silent... that much was right. There was no alarm, no emergency lightening glowing some eerie warning in my bedchamber. We had drills, in my youngest years, to prepare us if there was ever an error in the station's gravitational synthesis. But the event had never occurred genuinely. Not during my lifetime, and not in the station's history.
I lay there for a long time in that black maw of silence and vertigo until I eventually bumped into the wall of my bedroom and instinctively grabbed hold of a cubby fixed into the wall. The station was still silent... everything sounded so right, even as every cell in my body began to scream out that something was terribly, terribly wrong. correspondence
I clawed my way to the door and listened. That is how I can tell you here and now that no one heard those shots, no one woke to some uncanny understanding. They all came out of sleep just like I did... confused and tied into slow terror, with no brave ideas of what was to come. We – every one of us on Athlacarta – were infants, born blind into a world we had no concept of, unable to so much as exert a finger's worth of control on our surroundings.
Do not think that you would tell me, as I have been told before, that I will be able to find some closure, talking to other people who were there, or other people who know what I've been through. I haven't met an honest man among them yet, and I don't need their pity.
Sincerely yours,
Cass.