Eternal Sapphtember writing prompt — Girls who are removed
The machines, in realspace, barely resemble machines at all. Blocky memorials, perhaps; artistic statements. Square section, one hundred feet long, twenty wide and high; at one end shouldering abruptly down to a pilot cage dubiously sufficient to be called a cockpit, at the other squared precisely off. The squared end reveals the inner structure, that the monolith is not solid, but close-packed from fibres of many materials; glass optical line, dozens of different metal alloys in bar and rod and wire form, ceramics and graphite and polymers both organic and inorganic in chemistry.
In softspace, the machines — well, humans can’t really directly perceive or act on softspace. That’s what the machines are for. Softspace is more conceptual than spacelike; its logics more dreamlike than mechanistic. Anything said about what the machines do, how they act, in softspace is necessarily a metaphor.
But in softspace, the fibres bend and spread, fluid: the tentacles of an octopus, the halo around an angel, a spreading drop of living ink in water; wired straight through the pilot into their mind, an interface to the foreign realm. Hands, eyes, tongue, skin. Antenna and effector. An extension of the pilot’s will, as much as their own limbs are back home.
The We Pretty — or See we pretty corpses all/Speak our lines and tread our turns upon the stage,/Consumed in hopeless wrath and toil and rage,/Until the every last of us should fall to give its full unofficially pilot-bestowed moniker — has crashed back into our own world, once-aligned conglomeration of mass an exploded knot and tangle, a barbed-wire scrawl of char and shatter, still flickering over the threshold of real and other-real, pilot bleeding blood and colour, bones and quiddity fractured, screaming with only the wretched wracked pauses for the breath necessary not to suffocate. Rescue crews spray fire-suppression and reality fixative foams, cut away at the snarled ruin of the We Pretty with power saws, as though hacking through hostile undergrowth.
“No no no no no—” the pilot wails, as they tear her free and wrestle her to a gurney.
This is nobody’s first rodeo; they hypogun a cocktail of tranqs and analgesics, strap her weakening flails down. Ship her direct to Rehabilitation, because it’s proved more expedient to outfit that department to treat combat injuries than to properly contain the howling meme-damaged in conventional trauma wards.
“What do you see on this card, Pilot?”
She squints, in her white facility pajamas and soft, laceless shoes, across the table at the psych with his deck of white cards, held face-out one at a time for her to scrutinise them, reveal Freudian faultlines.
“Pine forests,” she says.
“And on this one?”
Her expression glazes over.
“Labyrinthine convolutions hiding from the running rat within the simple, inescapable inward spiral of hatred—”
“And on this one?”
“Folding.” She mimes with frantic hands, an incommunicable idea lodged behind her eyes. “Folding.”
“And on this one?”
“The infinite extent of laminar stacking, each planar unit in ceaseless Brownian motion relative to the ones above and below it—”
“And on this one?”
(The face of each of the cards is pristine, blank, unprinted white.)
Hospital food, served on paper plates with soft plastic spoons only; baby cutlery. She learns (re-learns) to eat with eyes averted, so that shapes in mush can’t arrest her thoughts in indefinite, blank and thought-free lacuna.
She sleep-talks, now. Mouth working and working, silent as though mute-buttoned, the only word ever slipping through, as though slotted into an endless monologue, pitched and emoted into the various rises and falls and internal drama of it: “She.”
“She—”
“She—!”
”…She.”
(“Did you have any dreams last night, Pilot?”
(And always, truthfully by any measurable measure: “No.”)
Eventually: wax crayons, paper.
“I’ve never been able to draw for shit.”
Coaxed scribbles analysed endlessly; doodled curves compared to the forensic photos from all angles of the wreck of the We Pretty. All attempts at representational art put before panels of symbolic analysts, anthropologists, psychologists, memeticists, cryptologicians. (There is no well-defined field to study softspace qua.)
Stick-figures parade: white-pajama’d pilots, child-drawing emoji-faces sad (eyedot, eyedot, downturned mouth.) Nurses (eyedot, eyedot, smile: oversized. Subtext: fake?) Doctors (no space for a mouth, faces taken up by black-hole whirling scribble-eyes. Threatening, devouring surveillance.)
“What’s that you’re drawing, Pilot?”
“That’s We Pretty.”
(It’s a field of geometrically-spaced dots, rough lines slashed across it in different colours, starting and ending off the paper. After every session, all traces of coloured wax are painstakingly obliterated from the tables.)
“The thing is,” one of the last voice recordings says. “The thing is. We’re obviously not meant to be there. We can’t even go there, not really. It’s not just hostile in the way that outer space or underwater is, the other places we can’t go without machines; without the machines we can’t see or touch or really exist in softspace. The thing is.”
“What’s the thing, Pilot?”
“We can only go there by loading ourselves into the machines. And the — whatever it is that fights us, out there, the fucking — whatever we’re supposed to call them, or scuttlebutt calls them, the machine elves or Tuatha or — they don’t. They don’t seem to have machines, not like ours, do they? They’re not popping UFOs into ourspace, so far as we can tell. Just us, taking our — probably horrible to them, changeling machine-things, over there. With these inexplicable kernels inside them, these — alien thinking-things, us, burrowed into the insides of them, the only, the only part we think of as real, the part that to them must be — hard to even recognise as real. A weirdly vital ineffable component of, of, of, fucking kaiju.”
“Do you think of yourself as monstrous, Pilot?”
For the first time since retrieval: a laugh. Jagged, rusty.
“Loaded question.” A pause. “Of course, over here, we’re not inexplicable blobs divorced from the way the universe works. We’re objects, aren’t we? Too, too solid flesh, piloted from the inside.”
“Piloted from the inside?”
“So to speak.”
The rest is redaction.
