The doctor’s mask is mouthless, beaked, its eyes covered by red goggles. It wears a broad black hat and has no skin visible under its leathers. It carries a stick.
Fairfax only sees the doctor in crowds, and usually from a distance. It (he?) isn’t a hallucination; Fairfax has asked, and other people see it, they just don’t seem to care. “SCA nerd,” they say. “Steampunk. Cosplayer.”
Fairfax isn’t sure how he knows the figure is a doctor, but he doesn’t think it’s the kind that treats people.
It’s the kind that tells everyone else when you’re going to die.
“Strange happ’nins round these parts of a fortnight,” says the innkeep, leaning over the oak bar with a conspiratorial glance.
“Oh no,” says Aberdeen.
“Children afeart, animals missin’. Some say that old hermit what lives in the foothills has–”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not an adventurer,” says Aberdeen, embarrassed.
The innkeep’s dialect fades. “But your sword! Your travel stains! Your mismatched traveling band!”
“We’re a theater troupe.” Aberdeen waggles the sword. “Prop. The stains are a postmodern homage to–”
“That is obviously just to throw the dark hunters off your trail,” he snaps.
“Well, yes, but mostly for tax reasons.”
Molly and Desmond are out genderfucking when the allegory descends.
“Heads up!” Desmond shouts. “Robots!”
The robot fleet is red-eyed and jetpacked; they pour out of their mothership statement in defensive format.
“OUR SENSORS DETECT AN ABOMINATION,” they clang en masse.
Molly points to the two of them. “What, us?”
“AFFIRMATIVE.”
“This from a rampant AI with laser-hands?”
“YOUR ACTIONS HAVE SOILED THE PURITY OF THE BINARY!”
Desmond tilts her head. “Boolean gender-programming is a nasty bug.”
“THEN GENDER MUST BE DESTROYED,” howl the robots, lasers thrumming.
“No,” Molly grins, charging up their powerfist, “it must be constructed.”
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Timory drags the comb-rake along behind her, backpack spewing carbon to force them both down another row of the ship’s ablative fur. Can’t trap hypertrash at full accel if it’s matted with junk already, but she still resents the chore: a Roomba could do this. Instead she’s using her spacewalk time to dig out burrs.
It’s not a pretty beast; impacts have manged its coat, solar orbit bleached it. The fur will burn off on entry anyway, and Timory swears it makes the whole trip hotter. She’d give a great deal for a razor and a fixed point in space.
“Warning!” chirps the schedule. “This meeting takes place in the past.”
Sighing, Mauro queues up at the tempovator. At length he steps in and drops back to 2008.
“All right,” says Beatriz, “let’s get started.”
“Can we please stop reliving this?” says Mauro. “I’m from 2010. We cut some stuff for blind kids, bump the liquor tax, nobody’s happy, everything’s fine. Okay?”
“We’ll come up with a better idea!”
Mauro looks around: they’re so old. “Where are the versions of us who were here the first time?”
“Stacked in the freezer,” says Tams.
“We’re thinking of selling their organs,” says Beatriz.
“We have always been at war with Prescription,” Golda intones.
“I’m not sure it qualifies as war,” says Nestor. “It’s more a dynamic tension that informs–”
“It is too a war!”
“That sounds like received wisdom speaking.”
“It’s not!” Golda backpedals. “It’s description! That’s what we do!”
“That’s an interesting circular problem,” says Roan. “If people choose to become Descriptivists based on our self-description, have we then prescribed a philosophy of–”
“Shut up, Roan,” says Nestor.
“Don’t tell her to shut up!” says Golda.
“Don’t end a sentence with a preposi–” is all he manages before they tear him apart.