Citizen Pantisocrat
Shadetree Physicists
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Posted - 2015.07.15 14:38:29 -
[1] - Quote
The sounds of war: all of them brief, with tremendous echoes. I wanted sleep, even medicated sleep, to cast its great long dark blanket over those sounds and muffle them, suggest silence to them, and keep them empty as the space in which they soundlessly resounded. Ironic to me was that if I had simply been floating through space - always a fantasy of mine, to fly and not to have to breathe - I would not have heard them; but it was only couched in the cockpit of my Incursus that the hybrid shells rattled against the windowpane, so to speak, and the volley of warheads rang like a demon bell somewhere off to the right or left, making me sweat. The worst part about it was that each one of these experiences made me reflect unduly on the absurdity of my biology versus what it was I was tasking myself to do. My skin, my eyes, my thoughts themselves were hardly fit to move at these speeds, to pursue these targets, to capture and hold these contested locales: so I would plug expensive upgrades into my neural system and await the next time all of it was vaporized; then do it again, believing in the small progress I associated with staying alive just a little bit longer each time. Yet behind those sounds, when they faded was no peace, but a simple specter made of the quiet that follows a battle waiting with neon-bright scythe in hand.
I liked flying for the Gallente Federation, and was able to partake in some of the unnatural pride of looking back on a life given for a worthy cause. The old trifecta - liberty, equality, fraternity - seemed to stretch through eons, touching back on a world I had never known, and spindling out into an uncertain future. In the great lengths of nothingness where we live, it is easy to feel like there is no such thing as morality, no such thing as good and evil, no easy divide; there is no enemy; there is no home worth fighting for. But in the midst of a fleet, in the midst of a losing battle against a corrupt corporation, against a too-sceptered state, one brave salute from a comrade going to his death, or one crackling anthem piped through the interstellar com could change the heart to gold, change the shoulder bones to eagles' wings. Somehow I could give myself over to an abstraction, and fight on. Even the handle I used as a combat pilot, which was taken from the pages of ancient history and the documentation of the same fight for liberty that raged then, became the name I went by. My real name is meaningless; I have almost forgotten it.
Yet, finally, I have docked the Incursus, and deliberately turned my hands to more passive activities. I still fight, but I fight in small engagements to protect the interest of corporations loyal to the Federation. I build and explore. I feel that my exterior actions mirror my interior quest; I search for peace, unity, and harmony this way. I make and am made; find and am found. It is not a perfect life, and it is not necessarily useful to anyone except me. I still lay awake looking up at the stars out of the window above, knowing I am not only adrift in my vessel but adrift within myself. For when I look into the silence and shadows inside of me, and listen for the song which is supposed to be divine, and guide us through life to our purpose, I still hear the reports of turrets, the explosions, the fading cackle of an irreverent victor. I think of the betrayers, the outlaws, the mercenaries, and the predators still out there, slowly moving toward the security I have sequestered myself in, and know it is only a matter of time until I am forced, for the good of somebody somewhere, or for the good of some other abstraction new and different, yet not unchanged from the ideals of old, to undock my Incursus, the dark lady Christabel, and return to the front to chase another life, and be chased by another death. |