I looked straight ahead, because the sterile hospital wall and corporate approved painting of...
Unknown Quest [Weird]
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Beginning
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I looked straight ahead, because the sterile hospital wall and corporate approved painting of flowers was less obnoxious than turning to the left and looking out through the floor to ceiling window to the outside world. I had a good room - benefit of being a "hero" - but not good enough to be on a floor that could see the horizon past the sea wall. Instead my view was of the digital signage that played silent commercials four storeys tall in full colour brilliant enough to be seen through the perpetual drizzle and gloom that had overtaken the city. The resource expenditure was of course beyond obscene, but someone had run the math and decided that the cost in electronics and electricity was worth it to continue to advertise to the masses fortunate to dwell within the steel and concrete citadel against the sea.
Like most kids, I had once dreamed of coming to a city like this, one of the elite centers of civilization that was defiant against the rising tides. Like most bright teenagers of middling means, I had thrown myself into getting a good education, good enough to earn a ticket out of the mud and encroaching slums. And like most bright young adults I had come to realize just how fundamentally awful the world was, getting burned by the forces that liked the world ordered just the way they liked it even as millions drowned, starved, or cooked in heat waves the human body could not tolerate. So I had been forced to put my head down, work as a glorified technician with a PhD in one of the few fields trying to both keep people literally above water and even undo some of the damage. And what does it get me?
A ship of Theseus existential crisis caused by being the hero of the hour/only on scene witness to what was quite possibly the worst nuclear disaster in history. I close my eyes and I imagine I can hear the whine of drills and saws debriding lesions and tumours, can smell the acrid smoke of a laser burning away necrotic and cancerous tissue. By all accounts I the majority of my body was now less than a week old, composed of lab grown tissue, 3D printed organs, and injected stem cells. To say nothing of the various metals, ceramics, and polymers acting as support or artificial organs for things that were still cooking. It was amazing what decades of billionaires attempting to buy off the reaper at the expense of the planet and their fellow human beings could deliver. I hadn't even got the good stuff by all accounts.
I wasn't entirely sure how long I lay there, staring at the opposite wall to avoid staring at the monument of greed to my left, or the computer terminal that I had no interest in to my right. I know that I first recalled being told that a week had passed since the 'accident', but time after that became blurry. I tried to track things by the nurses and doctors coming to tend to me, or the investigators and regulators coming to ask questions about the incident, or the politicians and celebrities come to congratulate me for my courage to try to stop the disaster. Unfortunately, I was all jumbled up in memory. A consequence of the damage to my body, the cocktail of drugs they had me on, and the fact that apparently my brain was undergoing radical remodeling as regular stem cell injections had new neurons replace dead and dying ones. I was quite glad that somehow the intellect that I valued so highly was being preserved enough that I could comprehend these things, but then again going off their reactions everyone around me was less than pleased by my progress.
I hoped I was making sense to them when I spoke. I sounded like I was making sense when I spoke to them, but I guess I kept telling things out of order. Understandable, but definitely frustrating for them.
Lightning flashed in the clouds somewhere in the distance. My mind swam through the bitter math, of the fact that the ecosystem had too much energy in it and it was tearing itself and our society apart, but the only way to correct the damage was for society to have more energy. Skyscrapers had been filled with algal tanks to replace vast swathes of the sea that had been rendered lifeless by industrial and agricultural runoff, but the carbon they sucked out of the atmosphere was often returned by turning the algae into fuel to burn, and the grow lamps frequently were powered by natural gas or even coal plants run by companies looking to cut corners. Even the 'renewables' required enormous quantities of fuel to be burned to put men and machines into space, asteroid mining being the only way to get economical amounts of rare elements that had been depleted on Earth by demand for electronics, solar panels, and wind turbines.
"Why did Dr. Donaldson continue with the experiment?" The investigator to my right asks me.
I wanted to say that it was because the company was only giving us a limited number of shots with the reactor while still demanding success, and everyone was too scared to lose their jobs to stand up and call for a stop. Too scared to be thrown from the company town into the squalor of the slums and camps, where diseases from centuries past and areas remote stalked among the violence and exposure to the elements. I wanted to say that I hadn't even been brave to try to shut it all down, but that I had been panicking from having a different perspective and a more fertile imagination that just turned out to be correct. I wanted to say that I was pretty sure all of my coworkers had been the lucky ones, to die so fast they wouldn't have felt any pain, instead of being torn apart and put back together like the worst fever dreams of Shelley. The human body treated as a squishy machine that could be patched up until it was more economical to throw it out.
I was scared that if I said something the zeitgeist didn't approve of that they would take me off the mindbogglingly expensive treatments keeping me alive, so I held my tongue. Or at least I thought I did, the investigator seemed to react like I had said something he didn't like at some point. Instead I said, "Lee was confident that the exotic particle production was within tolerable levels, and anyway my primary worry was that we were going to blow out the reactor, not... what happened."
Yeah. Just go and turn one of the finest fusion researchers in the world into an arrogant glory hound who brought forth disaster because he didn't want to turn back. Don't blame the company that hired him, don't blame the society that empowered the company or that produced the tremendous need for clean energy production now rather than later. That's red talk, the sort that gets a university student brought to a poorly lit room and given a 'friendly warning' that his activism isn't appreciated, he's being monitored, and if he wants to play martyr they have all sorts of things they can do to the people around him that they wouldn't do to a fine, upstanding drone with his head down.
"Did I say that?"
"No."
"Okay."
My eyes flicker. Am I asleep or unconscious? Am I dreaming, watching in third person as the doctors and their robots cut open up face to grind away a fresh knot of tumours in my jaw. I watch in horrified fascination as their tools grind away the material like rust being sanded away. Black blood and pus erupted from an abscess within the bone, and it was dutifully suctioned away. The doctors joked about 'practice', and my mind flashed to gaunt faced refugees squatting around the heat provided by an industrial waste outflow pipe, and then to black and white images of barely alive skeletons in stripes, preyed upon by a sadist who draped himself in the legitimacy of a white coat. I then watched as they printed a mixture of bone stem cells and artificial coral cement into the hole they had dug, filling it in like a drilled cavity. Tissues were carefully folded back over the incision site, each layer resealed with binding polymers that would heal over the damage. Within a day I would have nothing more than a stiff jaw and there wouldn't even be a scar.
"I've had 157% of my bone marrow replaced since this all began."
Someone screamed in shock at my speech. The anesthesiologist began to panic as I watched myself calmly stare at him.
"That was just a dream."
"Was it?"
Who was speaking? I looked to the right again, to see the investigator asking me basic questions about how the day had started. I replied, "It started with them drawing samples to compare to previous samples. See how my genome is stabilizing or not from all the radiation damage."
"I mean the day of the incident," the investigator prompted.
"Haven't we been over this already?" I asked, puzzled.
He looked at me, frustrated, but said, "We're going over it again, to make sure we have our facts straight."
"Oh, well, things started normal enough. Pre-experiment meetings and briefings, everyone going over the details of the experiment one last time. It was scheduled for the afternoon, so the morning was mostly paperwork, and-"
"No, that's something for the civil authorities, you were telling me about the turbulence in the third stage strange-pinch," she told me, clearly frustrated by my rambling.
I blinked a few times as I tried to piece together the elements of my thoughts and the narrative of events. I frowned, my face pulling at the bandages from the latest round of surgeries, before I just shook it as best I could in my frail state. "Right, right, the third stage pinch. The whole point of the process was to see if we could control such a complex system, and if it gave the expected increase in efficiency for muon production our models had predicted. Everything was going well until I started to notice kaon production far outside the bounds of our models and made the suggestion to stop, lest unexpected particle flux damage the system."
"Doctor, that's a bit more information than we know what to do with," one of the two investigators told me.
I blinked at them and then scratched at the surgical scar from where they had replaced my eye with something they had grown in a petri dish and then sculpted with printer nozzles and lasers. I sighed and said, "I keep losing my train of thought."
"Entirely reasonable sir. If you could just start back at where you last remember..."
I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the back wall. I inhaled deeply, and smelled the burning of plastic and the distinctive heavy metal tang of aerosolized thorium. I opened my eyes, and I was back in the facility, down in the concrete bunker of the power supply room. The guard I had been struggling with in my attempt to get to the master power switch was dead, half of his body flashed to steam and char by being just a few meters away when the impossible happened. The concrete behind him had turned to slag and glass, affected even more by the exotic particles that had begun to interact with them. I could feel myself heating up from a walking ghost level of secondary neutron radiation coming off that wicked substance.
This was a dream. The steam explosion from the guard had knocked me out, and I had been unconscious an entire day while the facility burned and first-responders tried to figure out what the hell had happened. A robot had dragged me out. I had read this report.
I turned to myself and asked, "If you weren't awake and they weren't there, who are you to believe? The report, or your own eyes?"
I turned away from the slagged wall, towards the thick cables leading towards the heart of the reactor. Further out the damage was catastrophic, the equivalent of a neutron bomb going off, but here in the heart of this place it was pristine and almost peaceful. The burning of the fission reactor facilities had yet to reach this deep into the bunker of the experimental reactor area. The lights were out of course, the blackness complete and welcoming. Walking into the darkness, I marveled at the comforting thrum of the compact accelerator ring, a constant gigahertz heartbeat that the human ear interpreted as a more organic three-quarters hertz beat. Of course the reactor was dead, but that eternal thrum and beat still guided me onward. Reaching out, I ran my hand across the unpolished concrete of the wall.
Hand still upon limestone polished smooth by water and time, I turned my head to the left, gazing out at the digital billboards that lined the seawall, inhaling the rich and comforting smell of burning pine. Ochre and charcoal beasts danced by the flickering light of the bonfire and the torch, the dancer's movements giving life and motion to the paintings, all in time to the beating of the drums and the droning chant of the swaying observers. My eyes locked with the naked woman, skin covered in tattoos and belly showing the bulge of pregnancy. She stopped in her dance, holding forth her torch to banish away the shadows that had concealed me, even as the others present maintained their beat.
"Spirit of wolf's friend, spirit of earth's bones and blood, spirit of sun's fire! I call upon you for all my people in these trying times, I call upon you to grant us a boon!"
I held out my hand, and where the light of the bonfire fell upon my flesh bullets and bayonets cascaded like rainwater to splash into grain upon the stone floor, swirling around the storm drain to be swept off to poison the sea.
"What payment have you, and what do you seek?" I asked.
She held up a card.
What was the card?
[] [Card] Spades
[] [Card] Hearts
[] [Card] Clubs
[] [Card] Diamonds
What did she seek?
[] [Boon] Life
[] [Boon] Knowledge
[] [Boon] Strength
[] [Boon] Justice
Like most kids, I had once dreamed of coming to a city like this, one of the elite centers of civilization that was defiant against the rising tides. Like most bright teenagers of middling means, I had thrown myself into getting a good education, good enough to earn a ticket out of the mud and encroaching slums. And like most bright young adults I had come to realize just how fundamentally awful the world was, getting burned by the forces that liked the world ordered just the way they liked it even as millions drowned, starved, or cooked in heat waves the human body could not tolerate. So I had been forced to put my head down, work as a glorified technician with a PhD in one of the few fields trying to both keep people literally above water and even undo some of the damage. And what does it get me?
A ship of Theseus existential crisis caused by being the hero of the hour/only on scene witness to what was quite possibly the worst nuclear disaster in history. I close my eyes and I imagine I can hear the whine of drills and saws debriding lesions and tumours, can smell the acrid smoke of a laser burning away necrotic and cancerous tissue. By all accounts I the majority of my body was now less than a week old, composed of lab grown tissue, 3D printed organs, and injected stem cells. To say nothing of the various metals, ceramics, and polymers acting as support or artificial organs for things that were still cooking. It was amazing what decades of billionaires attempting to buy off the reaper at the expense of the planet and their fellow human beings could deliver. I hadn't even got the good stuff by all accounts.
I wasn't entirely sure how long I lay there, staring at the opposite wall to avoid staring at the monument of greed to my left, or the computer terminal that I had no interest in to my right. I know that I first recalled being told that a week had passed since the 'accident', but time after that became blurry. I tried to track things by the nurses and doctors coming to tend to me, or the investigators and regulators coming to ask questions about the incident, or the politicians and celebrities come to congratulate me for my courage to try to stop the disaster. Unfortunately, I was all jumbled up in memory. A consequence of the damage to my body, the cocktail of drugs they had me on, and the fact that apparently my brain was undergoing radical remodeling as regular stem cell injections had new neurons replace dead and dying ones. I was quite glad that somehow the intellect that I valued so highly was being preserved enough that I could comprehend these things, but then again going off their reactions everyone around me was less than pleased by my progress.
I hoped I was making sense to them when I spoke. I sounded like I was making sense when I spoke to them, but I guess I kept telling things out of order. Understandable, but definitely frustrating for them.
Lightning flashed in the clouds somewhere in the distance. My mind swam through the bitter math, of the fact that the ecosystem had too much energy in it and it was tearing itself and our society apart, but the only way to correct the damage was for society to have more energy. Skyscrapers had been filled with algal tanks to replace vast swathes of the sea that had been rendered lifeless by industrial and agricultural runoff, but the carbon they sucked out of the atmosphere was often returned by turning the algae into fuel to burn, and the grow lamps frequently were powered by natural gas or even coal plants run by companies looking to cut corners. Even the 'renewables' required enormous quantities of fuel to be burned to put men and machines into space, asteroid mining being the only way to get economical amounts of rare elements that had been depleted on Earth by demand for electronics, solar panels, and wind turbines.
"Why did Dr. Donaldson continue with the experiment?" The investigator to my right asks me.
I wanted to say that it was because the company was only giving us a limited number of shots with the reactor while still demanding success, and everyone was too scared to lose their jobs to stand up and call for a stop. Too scared to be thrown from the company town into the squalor of the slums and camps, where diseases from centuries past and areas remote stalked among the violence and exposure to the elements. I wanted to say that I hadn't even been brave to try to shut it all down, but that I had been panicking from having a different perspective and a more fertile imagination that just turned out to be correct. I wanted to say that I was pretty sure all of my coworkers had been the lucky ones, to die so fast they wouldn't have felt any pain, instead of being torn apart and put back together like the worst fever dreams of Shelley. The human body treated as a squishy machine that could be patched up until it was more economical to throw it out.
I was scared that if I said something the zeitgeist didn't approve of that they would take me off the mindbogglingly expensive treatments keeping me alive, so I held my tongue. Or at least I thought I did, the investigator seemed to react like I had said something he didn't like at some point. Instead I said, "Lee was confident that the exotic particle production was within tolerable levels, and anyway my primary worry was that we were going to blow out the reactor, not... what happened."
Yeah. Just go and turn one of the finest fusion researchers in the world into an arrogant glory hound who brought forth disaster because he didn't want to turn back. Don't blame the company that hired him, don't blame the society that empowered the company or that produced the tremendous need for clean energy production now rather than later. That's red talk, the sort that gets a university student brought to a poorly lit room and given a 'friendly warning' that his activism isn't appreciated, he's being monitored, and if he wants to play martyr they have all sorts of things they can do to the people around him that they wouldn't do to a fine, upstanding drone with his head down.
"Did I say that?"
"No."
"Okay."
My eyes flicker. Am I asleep or unconscious? Am I dreaming, watching in third person as the doctors and their robots cut open up face to grind away a fresh knot of tumours in my jaw. I watch in horrified fascination as their tools grind away the material like rust being sanded away. Black blood and pus erupted from an abscess within the bone, and it was dutifully suctioned away. The doctors joked about 'practice', and my mind flashed to gaunt faced refugees squatting around the heat provided by an industrial waste outflow pipe, and then to black and white images of barely alive skeletons in stripes, preyed upon by a sadist who draped himself in the legitimacy of a white coat. I then watched as they printed a mixture of bone stem cells and artificial coral cement into the hole they had dug, filling it in like a drilled cavity. Tissues were carefully folded back over the incision site, each layer resealed with binding polymers that would heal over the damage. Within a day I would have nothing more than a stiff jaw and there wouldn't even be a scar.
"I've had 157% of my bone marrow replaced since this all began."
Someone screamed in shock at my speech. The anesthesiologist began to panic as I watched myself calmly stare at him.
"That was just a dream."
"Was it?"
Who was speaking? I looked to the right again, to see the investigator asking me basic questions about how the day had started. I replied, "It started with them drawing samples to compare to previous samples. See how my genome is stabilizing or not from all the radiation damage."
"I mean the day of the incident," the investigator prompted.
"Haven't we been over this already?" I asked, puzzled.
He looked at me, frustrated, but said, "We're going over it again, to make sure we have our facts straight."
"Oh, well, things started normal enough. Pre-experiment meetings and briefings, everyone going over the details of the experiment one last time. It was scheduled for the afternoon, so the morning was mostly paperwork, and-"
"No, that's something for the civil authorities, you were telling me about the turbulence in the third stage strange-pinch," she told me, clearly frustrated by my rambling.
I blinked a few times as I tried to piece together the elements of my thoughts and the narrative of events. I frowned, my face pulling at the bandages from the latest round of surgeries, before I just shook it as best I could in my frail state. "Right, right, the third stage pinch. The whole point of the process was to see if we could control such a complex system, and if it gave the expected increase in efficiency for muon production our models had predicted. Everything was going well until I started to notice kaon production far outside the bounds of our models and made the suggestion to stop, lest unexpected particle flux damage the system."
"Doctor, that's a bit more information than we know what to do with," one of the two investigators told me.
I blinked at them and then scratched at the surgical scar from where they had replaced my eye with something they had grown in a petri dish and then sculpted with printer nozzles and lasers. I sighed and said, "I keep losing my train of thought."
"Entirely reasonable sir. If you could just start back at where you last remember..."
I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the back wall. I inhaled deeply, and smelled the burning of plastic and the distinctive heavy metal tang of aerosolized thorium. I opened my eyes, and I was back in the facility, down in the concrete bunker of the power supply room. The guard I had been struggling with in my attempt to get to the master power switch was dead, half of his body flashed to steam and char by being just a few meters away when the impossible happened. The concrete behind him had turned to slag and glass, affected even more by the exotic particles that had begun to interact with them. I could feel myself heating up from a walking ghost level of secondary neutron radiation coming off that wicked substance.
This was a dream. The steam explosion from the guard had knocked me out, and I had been unconscious an entire day while the facility burned and first-responders tried to figure out what the hell had happened. A robot had dragged me out. I had read this report.
I turned to myself and asked, "If you weren't awake and they weren't there, who are you to believe? The report, or your own eyes?"
I turned away from the slagged wall, towards the thick cables leading towards the heart of the reactor. Further out the damage was catastrophic, the equivalent of a neutron bomb going off, but here in the heart of this place it was pristine and almost peaceful. The burning of the fission reactor facilities had yet to reach this deep into the bunker of the experimental reactor area. The lights were out of course, the blackness complete and welcoming. Walking into the darkness, I marveled at the comforting thrum of the compact accelerator ring, a constant gigahertz heartbeat that the human ear interpreted as a more organic three-quarters hertz beat. Of course the reactor was dead, but that eternal thrum and beat still guided me onward. Reaching out, I ran my hand across the unpolished concrete of the wall.
Hand still upon limestone polished smooth by water and time, I turned my head to the left, gazing out at the digital billboards that lined the seawall, inhaling the rich and comforting smell of burning pine. Ochre and charcoal beasts danced by the flickering light of the bonfire and the torch, the dancer's movements giving life and motion to the paintings, all in time to the beating of the drums and the droning chant of the swaying observers. My eyes locked with the naked woman, skin covered in tattoos and belly showing the bulge of pregnancy. She stopped in her dance, holding forth her torch to banish away the shadows that had concealed me, even as the others present maintained their beat.
"Spirit of wolf's friend, spirit of earth's bones and blood, spirit of sun's fire! I call upon you for all my people in these trying times, I call upon you to grant us a boon!"
I held out my hand, and where the light of the bonfire fell upon my flesh bullets and bayonets cascaded like rainwater to splash into grain upon the stone floor, swirling around the storm drain to be swept off to poison the sea.
"What payment have you, and what do you seek?" I asked.
She held up a card.
What was the card?
[] [Card] Spades
[] [Card] Hearts
[] [Card] Clubs
[] [Card] Diamonds
What did she seek?
[] [Boon] Life
[] [Boon] Knowledge
[] [Boon] Strength
[] [Boon] Justice
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
[X] [Card] Hearts
[X] [Boon] Justice
A heart full of justice!
[X] [Boon] Justice
A heart full of justice!
I disagree, this quest should have more and very complex mechanics!
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
[X] [Card] Spades
[X] [Boon] Life
[X] [Boon] Life
- Location
- United States
[X] [Card] Hearts
[X] [Boon] Justice
[X] [Boon] Justice
- Location
- California
[x] Diamonds
[x] knowledge
[x] knowledge
[X] [Card] Hearts
[X] [Boon] Justice
This hand of mine is burning red!
[X] [Boon] Justice
This hand of mine is burning red!
[X] [Card] Hearts
[X] [Boon] Strength
[X] [Boon] Strength
- Location
- France
[X] [Card] Clubs
[X] [Boon] Life
I have no idea what I am doing.
[X] [Boon] Life
I have no idea what I am doing.
