brush away my tears
my melancholy grey
scare away my fears
don't let me fade away
from below, the water calls
voicing just like you
softly now, the darkness falls
steady midnight blue
hold me close tonight
take me from this pier
i would be alright
if only you were here
clinging tightly to the rail
staring down at the deep
one plea echoing
rescue me
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Inhuman
When a nuclear power plant melts down, most people won't go in to investigate. I'm not most people.
I'm actually not a person at all, at least, that's what people tell me. I look like them, talk like them, you know, all the things I ought to do. I don't know why they call me inhuman.
I just know that they always send me into places like this, where they think no one will survive. The back of my mind wonders if they're trying to kill me, but that's just the part of my mind that still cares about that sort of thing. The truth is, I love these places. The smell of ozone, the burn of the sun, the knowledge that I could step on something oozing radioactivity and never walk again, it's all I live for anymore. The grass under my feet is green, but it will die in a few hours. I am the last one to see it green for a thousand thousand years.
The helicopter that brought me here is long gone, taking it's furious rotors with it. I've tried to tell them not to use helicopters in these places, and they never listen. I wait patiently for the dust to fall, keeping my feet planted securely on the living ground, shifting my pack around on my body, but never letting any of it touch the ground. I scan around me with and without my binoculars. The ancient Soviet relics have survived ten meltdowns now, not a single scratch on their pristine glass. The body is still painted its original foresty green in places. without them, I judge about half a mile to the plant, and over the smoothest track i can see, I guess about a seven minute walk on a pleasant, sunny day. The back of my mind, the part that still cares, laughs as it glances up to the dismal sky. The binoculars show me that my guess was only off by a matter of fifty meters or so, but they also tell me that my smooth track is already covered in ash. Now that the helicopter is gone, I can see the little flakes of radiation falling around me. Time to move.
Moving is easy, actually. The trick is moving in the right direction. I have to get upwind of the plant, but I also have to avoid losing my legs to the dying ground. I really didn't even have a chance to put away the binoculars this time, and as I ran, the strap flopped against my legs. I practice this stuff all the time, this precise and insane dash. I can't put my feet down aywhere that looks even remotely different than where I just was, but that means half the time, and as I get closer to the plant, most of the time, I'm making two-meter leaps. The back of my mind makes a note to wring the neck of the helicopter pilot as soon as I return. My groundspeed is far above a walk now, and I close the distance between me and the plant in about as much time as I had predicted for a liesurely walk. I have hooked far to the outside of my original intended path, coming up on the complex of buildings from the north.
Finally out of the ashfall, I can pause for a moment to catch my breath. I'm a lot closer to it now, and I can actually feel the heat wafting from the buildings. It's only a degree or two at the moment, but it's enough to make me glad I'm wearing what I am. Moving around the north side, back and forth, I can see which building is my target.
It's funny, they always hand me maps before sending me places. I always tell them I won't be needing them. They never believe me. Last time, they found the maps in my hotel room just after I left for France to recon the accident there, and they were furious. This time the pilot was charged with handing me the map as I got off the helicopter. I told him that if he didn't forget, he'd find bits of map in his stool for weeks. Maps are useless in places like this, useless and redundant. You can see exactly where things are the moment you get to the complex, no matter where it is. They're all the same, really. A front office here, a coolant pipe there, a reactor building here, here, and here, it's actually kind of boring once you've done this a few times.
Now I can put the binoculars away, I realize. Into their green kevlar case they go, and into the lumpy ruck on my back. I click on the Geiger counter strapped to the back of my glove, punch the record feature built into my mono-goggle, and tighten the holster safety on the CZ-75B they gave me.
Yes, they gave me a gun. They tell me it's so I can put the poor plant workers out of their misery when I find them. I've never used it.
That's not to say I've never found living plant workers in these things. I just didn't care.
Now that I'm recording, I figure I better just let them get their money's worth of footage. That's the whole reason i'm here anyway. I'm the first wave of reconnaisance, making the maps for the little robots that will come in after me and clean up. I walk slowly around the sides of the complex that are less dangerous, observing the buildings on the southwest side burning brightly. The reactor building was in the southeast side, and it wasn't visibly burning. It was just sitting there, belching transparent heat and grey ash like a volcano. I could hear nothing from the reactor building, only the crackle of the others. I walked inbetween the outlying buildings, seeing no life at all, not even skeletons. My analytical mind filed that under "Strange Things" and ignored it. They told me that most of the workers had been safely evacuated. The office building on my left was largely intact, and I fought the urge to explore it.
It's actually comforting to know that in a place like this, nothing is going to jump out and try to kill you. Everything here is either dead or dying, and nothing has the strength to force you to join them. You don't even have to worry about diseases in here. Your only enemy is the Invisible One, the particles of destruction slamming into your DNA and RNA patterns at nearly the speed of light. The only real thing you have to fear here is knowing that your next mitosis cycle will not be anything like the last one.
The still-camera pod hanging off to the side on my mono-goggle took a few automatic snapshots in the microwave band, the infrared band, then the ultraviolet band, sending data into the bulky solid state memory on my back. The warm brick of the power supply was alongside it, cooking away.
I have never wished for another job. I only work about every three to five years, I go adventuring with Danger on a leash, I don't have to deal with the idiots that are allowed to breed, and I name my own salary. Ducking around these buildings, I see only ash and emptiness. My body tells me I need to work quicker, adrenaline pulsing into my veins. I welcome the sensation, but control it viciously, spending some memory on a few random snapshots of the ground and laughing to myself. I come to a low warehouse and discover that it has been sunk into the earth. It's probably to store waste or spare fuel or something, and I move on.
Most of the ground is safe so far. The ash has piled up and drifted like blizzard snow, leaving about half the ground area of the complex perfectly safe. A few of the doorknobs show signs of contamination, making me wish i could explore the buildings behind them.
It's time to go into the reactor building. I stare at it for a little bit, wondering if this will be my last time. A creaking beam gives way and more of the west wall caves in. I can hear something inside flowing like water, with the occasional pop of a bubble. The back of my mind is silent now, as though switched off. I no longer have any part of me that even cares if this is my last time, except for the statistic. Nothing pushes me in, not even the people footing my bill.
Nothing holds me out, either. I walk to the main doors of the reactor building, which are still mostly intact, but hanging open. Someone had ripped off one of the crash bars when the building was evacuated. I switched on my heavy-duty air filters and battened down all the various tiny hatches on my suit and walked through the gaping entrance. The lobby was painted in cool greens and pale orange, a potted fake elm lying on it's side, pot in pieces. The front desk had been moved in the commotion. I wondered how it had happened, sizing up the desk to weigh about 250 kilograms. Looking up, the tall glass windows were sagging over me, and that was my cue to keep moving. I hopped over the desk and took more manual snapshots of the security desk, wondering if the information in the photos would help find the cause of the accident.
From this moment on, I would be performing feats of courage and brash stupidity that most humans will never even have the opportunity to chicken out from. Into the building, deep into the intestines of the disaster, I only hoped to come out alive again.
I think the difference between me and most people is that I do not perceive things to sound like other things. The building creaking under me sounds like a building. The fires outside sound like fires consuming office buildings. The heat in here was only radioactive decay, not some monster breathing upon me. I have no fear of things for what they are not. Things that cannot exist in a certain time or place have never frightened me. Even the robot operators spook sometimes and pull their bots from the disaster long before they should, claiming to see ghosts or nonsense like that.
My feet click softly down the tile hallway that heaves slowly under me. The soles of my boots are made of depleted Uranium, lined with lead, shielding my feet and legs from the brunt of the particulate radiation. My dim red headlamp switched on as soon as I walked into the building's natural shadows, casting shadows the color of blood. The heat in here has already crumbled parts of the walls, dust and minute rubble at my feet. It's hotter in here than it has been in any disaster in twenty years. The telemetry from the helicopters that I saw just an hour ago told me that this meltdown was comparable to the meltdown in Ukraine in 1985.
I'm actually not a person at all, at least, that's what people tell me. I look like them, talk like them, you know, all the things I ought to do. I don't know why they call me inhuman.
I just know that they always send me into places like this, where they think no one will survive. The back of my mind wonders if they're trying to kill me, but that's just the part of my mind that still cares about that sort of thing. The truth is, I love these places. The smell of ozone, the burn of the sun, the knowledge that I could step on something oozing radioactivity and never walk again, it's all I live for anymore. The grass under my feet is green, but it will die in a few hours. I am the last one to see it green for a thousand thousand years.
The helicopter that brought me here is long gone, taking it's furious rotors with it. I've tried to tell them not to use helicopters in these places, and they never listen. I wait patiently for the dust to fall, keeping my feet planted securely on the living ground, shifting my pack around on my body, but never letting any of it touch the ground. I scan around me with and without my binoculars. The ancient Soviet relics have survived ten meltdowns now, not a single scratch on their pristine glass. The body is still painted its original foresty green in places. without them, I judge about half a mile to the plant, and over the smoothest track i can see, I guess about a seven minute walk on a pleasant, sunny day. The back of my mind, the part that still cares, laughs as it glances up to the dismal sky. The binoculars show me that my guess was only off by a matter of fifty meters or so, but they also tell me that my smooth track is already covered in ash. Now that the helicopter is gone, I can see the little flakes of radiation falling around me. Time to move.
Moving is easy, actually. The trick is moving in the right direction. I have to get upwind of the plant, but I also have to avoid losing my legs to the dying ground. I really didn't even have a chance to put away the binoculars this time, and as I ran, the strap flopped against my legs. I practice this stuff all the time, this precise and insane dash. I can't put my feet down aywhere that looks even remotely different than where I just was, but that means half the time, and as I get closer to the plant, most of the time, I'm making two-meter leaps. The back of my mind makes a note to wring the neck of the helicopter pilot as soon as I return. My groundspeed is far above a walk now, and I close the distance between me and the plant in about as much time as I had predicted for a liesurely walk. I have hooked far to the outside of my original intended path, coming up on the complex of buildings from the north.
Finally out of the ashfall, I can pause for a moment to catch my breath. I'm a lot closer to it now, and I can actually feel the heat wafting from the buildings. It's only a degree or two at the moment, but it's enough to make me glad I'm wearing what I am. Moving around the north side, back and forth, I can see which building is my target.
It's funny, they always hand me maps before sending me places. I always tell them I won't be needing them. They never believe me. Last time, they found the maps in my hotel room just after I left for France to recon the accident there, and they were furious. This time the pilot was charged with handing me the map as I got off the helicopter. I told him that if he didn't forget, he'd find bits of map in his stool for weeks. Maps are useless in places like this, useless and redundant. You can see exactly where things are the moment you get to the complex, no matter where it is. They're all the same, really. A front office here, a coolant pipe there, a reactor building here, here, and here, it's actually kind of boring once you've done this a few times.
Now I can put the binoculars away, I realize. Into their green kevlar case they go, and into the lumpy ruck on my back. I click on the Geiger counter strapped to the back of my glove, punch the record feature built into my mono-goggle, and tighten the holster safety on the CZ-75B they gave me.
Yes, they gave me a gun. They tell me it's so I can put the poor plant workers out of their misery when I find them. I've never used it.
That's not to say I've never found living plant workers in these things. I just didn't care.
Now that I'm recording, I figure I better just let them get their money's worth of footage. That's the whole reason i'm here anyway. I'm the first wave of reconnaisance, making the maps for the little robots that will come in after me and clean up. I walk slowly around the sides of the complex that are less dangerous, observing the buildings on the southwest side burning brightly. The reactor building was in the southeast side, and it wasn't visibly burning. It was just sitting there, belching transparent heat and grey ash like a volcano. I could hear nothing from the reactor building, only the crackle of the others. I walked inbetween the outlying buildings, seeing no life at all, not even skeletons. My analytical mind filed that under "Strange Things" and ignored it. They told me that most of the workers had been safely evacuated. The office building on my left was largely intact, and I fought the urge to explore it.
It's actually comforting to know that in a place like this, nothing is going to jump out and try to kill you. Everything here is either dead or dying, and nothing has the strength to force you to join them. You don't even have to worry about diseases in here. Your only enemy is the Invisible One, the particles of destruction slamming into your DNA and RNA patterns at nearly the speed of light. The only real thing you have to fear here is knowing that your next mitosis cycle will not be anything like the last one.
The still-camera pod hanging off to the side on my mono-goggle took a few automatic snapshots in the microwave band, the infrared band, then the ultraviolet band, sending data into the bulky solid state memory on my back. The warm brick of the power supply was alongside it, cooking away.
I have never wished for another job. I only work about every three to five years, I go adventuring with Danger on a leash, I don't have to deal with the idiots that are allowed to breed, and I name my own salary. Ducking around these buildings, I see only ash and emptiness. My body tells me I need to work quicker, adrenaline pulsing into my veins. I welcome the sensation, but control it viciously, spending some memory on a few random snapshots of the ground and laughing to myself. I come to a low warehouse and discover that it has been sunk into the earth. It's probably to store waste or spare fuel or something, and I move on.
Most of the ground is safe so far. The ash has piled up and drifted like blizzard snow, leaving about half the ground area of the complex perfectly safe. A few of the doorknobs show signs of contamination, making me wish i could explore the buildings behind them.
It's time to go into the reactor building. I stare at it for a little bit, wondering if this will be my last time. A creaking beam gives way and more of the west wall caves in. I can hear something inside flowing like water, with the occasional pop of a bubble. The back of my mind is silent now, as though switched off. I no longer have any part of me that even cares if this is my last time, except for the statistic. Nothing pushes me in, not even the people footing my bill.
Nothing holds me out, either. I walk to the main doors of the reactor building, which are still mostly intact, but hanging open. Someone had ripped off one of the crash bars when the building was evacuated. I switched on my heavy-duty air filters and battened down all the various tiny hatches on my suit and walked through the gaping entrance. The lobby was painted in cool greens and pale orange, a potted fake elm lying on it's side, pot in pieces. The front desk had been moved in the commotion. I wondered how it had happened, sizing up the desk to weigh about 250 kilograms. Looking up, the tall glass windows were sagging over me, and that was my cue to keep moving. I hopped over the desk and took more manual snapshots of the security desk, wondering if the information in the photos would help find the cause of the accident.
From this moment on, I would be performing feats of courage and brash stupidity that most humans will never even have the opportunity to chicken out from. Into the building, deep into the intestines of the disaster, I only hoped to come out alive again.
I think the difference between me and most people is that I do not perceive things to sound like other things. The building creaking under me sounds like a building. The fires outside sound like fires consuming office buildings. The heat in here was only radioactive decay, not some monster breathing upon me. I have no fear of things for what they are not. Things that cannot exist in a certain time or place have never frightened me. Even the robot operators spook sometimes and pull their bots from the disaster long before they should, claiming to see ghosts or nonsense like that.
My feet click softly down the tile hallway that heaves slowly under me. The soles of my boots are made of depleted Uranium, lined with lead, shielding my feet and legs from the brunt of the particulate radiation. My dim red headlamp switched on as soon as I walked into the building's natural shadows, casting shadows the color of blood. The heat in here has already crumbled parts of the walls, dust and minute rubble at my feet. It's hotter in here than it has been in any disaster in twenty years. The telemetry from the helicopters that I saw just an hour ago told me that this meltdown was comparable to the meltdown in Ukraine in 1985.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Whip
listen to the sound
shoulder
fire in a perfectly straight line
again and again and again
ribs
curling around and leaving red
back
across the white expanse
cool evening breeze made cold
shoulder
again
cracking softly
like a lover's whisper
shoulder
fire in a perfectly straight line
again and again and again
ribs
curling around and leaving red
back
across the white expanse
cool evening breeze made cold
shoulder
again
cracking softly
like a lover's whisper
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