Cohost writing prompt: @survivor-who — Survivor Who Is Trying Not to Hold a Grudge
The thing about mad scientists — back before reality cracked like a peppercorn — is that they all had a vision. A dream of the future. A utopia.
The thing about utopia is: mine is not yours is not theirs. We all know what dystopia looks like: everybody's miserable. It's realism, with the brightness knob turned down. But utopia is the poorly-founded concept that there's an other direction for the knob to turn, a slider that can be pushed over until everybody experiences a negative amount of miserable. That better world is a more coherent idea than a hammer so perfected that it does also drive screws.
And now here we are, living in someone's utopia: everything shattered into crazy-paving pockets of geography, ruinous entropy storms rattling through the cracks between, every little stable island washed up from a different point in time: two blocks thataway, you can run from dinosaurs. Five blocks thataway, you can cower on the post-inhabited surface of the earth, under a worn-out, red and bloated sun.
A lot of survivor enclaves kill mad scis on sight or suspicion. The world-murderers. But they didn't, of course; not en masse. Only one, unknown, one among them would have killed reality in this particular way, and we're all sentenced to their utopia now. Their peers even more bitterly than the rest of us, because theirs would have been better, damn it, YOUR APOCALPYSE IS INFERIOR AND DERIVATIVE AND INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT—
There's something almost, almost endearing about the futile ranting they do at the fucking state of things. Not the way everyone else at breaking point does, no, not missing toilet paper or ice cream or antibiotics, their family or their cat, their sense of certainty in the world; no, just the fucking outrage that somebody got there first.
You watch them through the rifle sight as they come out of the prismatic haze of the storm at the edge of your patch of stable ground, in some kind of bulbous robotic armour suits, obvious madtech; pause, waving their arms around in a scanning-local-conditions sort of way. Two of them. They pop their helmets; one young, one older. Obviously travelling together for some time, maybe even from before everything broke, if one of them's built them matching suits. Never yet saw a mad sci who could copy another's work without the madness and their own preoccupations leaking in; those suits are the work of a single hand.
You don't see them work together too often.
You breathe. Consider. Stable enough to work together; practical enough to build protective gear. Useful, potentially.
(Unspeakably dangerous, potentially.)
Tap-tap on the side of the trigger guard. Tap-tap-tap—
You remind yourself: world-murderers is demographic scapegoating for a single person's actions. They didn't do it. They're victims and inhabitants of this bullshit, just like you; not whatever bizarrely broken worldview looks upon the shattered universe and unironically thinks, Yes! Just like that.
...You can always shoot them later, if they're assholes.