divination

strife

a little bit of extra cash never hurt anyone.

for this project, top secret, very hush-hush, morgen needed about 20 subjects. all sorts of crazy rumors spread. from the mundane: clinical trials, test runs of a new (non-invasive) technology, ranging all the way out into semicomplete faraday cage territory: illicit experiments, an underground cult pervading morgen.

whatever. I need to scratch together some flashes to get my folks out of the Stacks.

no matter what people said about the practicality of space travel, it certainly increased the range of substances that could be fashioned into radiotracers.

so they injected strife with something like a picomol of some new exotic radiotracer, strapped him into a realtime, functional MRI (nothing new there) and scanned his brain. they had him do all sorts of repetitive tests, for hours on end, until his brain completely shut off from numbness. by the fourth hour, he barely remembered where the hell he was, and was dying to get the hell out of there. at the end of the grueling six hour session, the tech unlocked him. "i'll see you in a couple of days," the tech smiled, and strife mumbled incoherently as he wobbled away. it wasn't exactly the most taxing thing in the world for a few hundred flashes each session, but it was certainly time consuming. strife plopped into bed, only to wake up what seemed like 15 minutes later to have to go back to work.

aria

despite the eridanian accords, not to mention the centuries of the acknowledgement of human rights, aria found herself in a glass case, in what appeared to be a laboratory. this from the worldbrain.

alpha centauri was colonized twice. the original settlement came directly from the sol system, but, like jamestown in north america, it faltered and vanished. the records are a little spotty because this was about the same time that world war once again consumed earth and even the moon and mars--so maybe we should say star system war--and the denizens of the sol system had a lot more to worry about than the handful of doomed colonists. after all, tau ceti and epsilon eridani had taken--those colonies had thrived. by the time peace was reestablished in the sol system, tau ceti had reached parity, techwise and economically-speaking, and eridani wasn't that far behind.

the second colonization was by the tau cetians. a little touch and go. the gaian conventions were, at this point, a historical curiosity, and this colonization had very little veneer over the obvious rapacity of the coroporations.

point to note: aria is a descendant of the first colonists. a centauran, if you will, although it gets a little confusing since it's so close to cetian. some afficianados of old lore might call them rigelians, but no one really knows what the hell they're talking about.

aria took minute comfort in the fact that she had not been tortured, raped, or killed, but thinking about how she couldn't take these things for granted absolutely infuriated her, and she had to suppress her urge at striking the "glass" barrier surrounding her.

of course, it really wasn't glass. for one thing, the "mold" would've found it quite a tasty treat, and even if this laboratory were underground and guarded by mold-killing nanos, she probably would've been free in twelve hours or so. it was something that looked like plastic, but felt as hard as steel. for the first few hours of her imprisonment, aria had taken to punching and kicking at the "glass," to no avail except for developing some nasty open blisters on her knuckles and a wearying lassitude that forced her to go to sleep. since she had no way of keeping track of time, it could've been days afterwards when she woke up again. and still, she had seen nothing of her captors.

what the fuck!