Post by Nireva Hale on Oct 16, 2015 21:22:39 GMT -5
This is the last time I'll abandon you.
And this is the last time I'll forget you. I wish I could.
______________________________Muse - Stockholm Syndrome
It was moments like this, Dusana thought to herself, that she couldn't help but feel rather ambivalent at how far humanity had progressed in the past millennium. For any self-perpetuating species, a thousand years was a colossal length of time; one in which the hours could be measured in the millions and the accomplishments achieved therein were equally numerous. Just staring outside was enough to tell her that. Towering spires of nanosteel and glass stretched high enough to part the clouds with their presence while, all around them, vehicles of all shapes and sizes buzzed around them like fireflies, their fusion-based propulsion systems more than sufficient to keep them aloft.
There was once a time when flight was strictly the realm of deities; the feats by which gods and their brethren were defined. In such an age, talk of a mortal man or woman performing such a deed would have been confined to the ravings of the insane. Were they to look upon the vision of the future which graced the view from her window, Dusana surmised that their minds would scarcely comprehend even the fact that the building was flying, much less the cars. Just six centuries earlier, mankind were struggling to leave the ground, floundering with their attempts to solve the problem of triaxial control, a concept that was now a fundamental cornerstone of the notion of powered flight even today.
Now, however, humanity had finally figured out how to venture into deep space. All this time, science had tried to build grander and more powerful means of propulsion in the pursuit of making interstellar flight feasible but, until government-funded scientists succeeded in putting folded-space theory into practice sixty years ago, the endeavour had been fruitless. What was the point in travelling at seventy percent the speed of light when it would still have taken years to reach any meaningful exo-solar destination? By encasing the spacecraft in "bubbles" of near-unstable energy and then distorting space around its direction of travel, ships were capable of jumping from one point in space to another. Six centuries of trying to move the ship had got them nowhere but, when they'd tried to move space itself, everything had seemed to make more sense.
Dusana was a commander in the Interstellar Defence Corps, or ISDC. Just as the Navy had once ferried military troops and assets over the oceans and the Air Force had done so through the skies, the ISDC was tasked with performing the same duty through the void of space. In addition to combatants, the ISDC were everything from logisticians and diplomats to scientists and surveyors. It was, as the news on Earth were so fond of calling it, the Second Age of Exploration. Only this time, humanity had largely learned from their mistakes of centuries past. Rather than subjugating and enslaving all they came across, the representatives were more than cognizant of their spacefaring naivete and took the utmost care when exploring the once untouchable celestial bodies in the night sky.
As a commander, Dusana was currently third-in-command of the ISDS Harlequin, a bulky and comparatively sluggish vessel which often roamed the solar system, defending the ISDC's numerous assets. For the past eight weeks, the Harlequin and its crew had been on extended leave while the ship was given a bow-to-stern overhaul. During her last two-year tour of duty, technology installed on ISDC ships had advanced sufficiently to warrant her return for upgrades in order for one of their mainstays to remain capable. According to the ship's captain, the overhaul of the two kilometre long ship was estimated to take a minimum of six months, leaving over a thousand members of the IDSC on extended leave.
Many of them, Dusana included, welcomed it. After two years in her uniform and jumping through the proverbial hoops as she obeyed the chain of command, she had wished for nothing more than to be human again. And so, not twenty-four hours after disembarking and going through the requisite procedures of declaring her operative status, she'd retreated to her home and, barring essential trips, had pretty much remained there the whole time. For her, time alone was almost her sole respite and, with half of the next year to kill, she was happy to catch up on her solitude.
In much the same manner as her life on-board the Harlequin, her days at home were incessantly punctuated with the deep, pulasting thrum of the array of fusion engines which suspended the plot of semi-artificial land upon which her home was sitting. It was certainly an acquired taste, with some showing such distaste for the noise that they forked over more money to have auditory dampeners installed. It was a quality-of-life option that BiomeTech - the makers of these luxury penthouses - offered to its exclusive clientele, but it had been one Dusana had politely declined. The penthouses were exorbitantly expensive and, more often than not, purely the domain of the wealthy and influential. She, being a career soldier (albeit a high-ranking one), was neither, but her connections meant that her individual social standing mattered little.
A high-pitched trilling heralded the sudden arrival of a minimalist user interface on the glass of her window. Having tracked her location, the penthouse's AI had calculated the likely location of her arms and, with her wingspan and other measurements already logged for convenience's sake, had positioned the touch-sensitive interface within easy reach. This was how landlines were done nowadays. Gone were the physical handsets and docking stations of old, long since replaced by semi-autonomous voice-governed interfaces and super-high definition auditory transmitter/receiver arrays dotted about the house. Dusana doubted that anyone else knew what a telephone was anymore. She still had one, gathering dust in a cupboard but, in the twenty-sixth century, it was nothing more than an obsolete relic. There was nowhere to plug the thing in and, since the migration to planet-wide data centres and hyperband internet which was now powerful enough to offer lagless data streams between planets, the device would never have picked anything up even if she could.
"AI, answer call." Normally, residents personalised their homebound AI, selecting a voice and choosing a name by which it would identify. With much of Dusana's time being spent offworld, however, she simply hadn't had the time and, for month after month, she'd left it at its factory default state; a nameless servitor which responded in an androgynous monotone. At her behest, the noise ceased, replaced by the sounds coming from the other end of the line. As the interface gracing the window expanded, a video screen phased into life, the transition from the outside view to showing the identity of her caller about as slick as the modern furnishings around her. Or the BiomeTech rep who had given her the guided tour. She'd hated that guy. It was a wonder she hadn't punched him.
The familiar sight made her smile. The brown-haired woman on the screen - who the communication software had identified as Diane Elisheva by way of the twenty-sixth century equivalent of an IP address - looked to be of eastern European descent, her features reminiscent of what had once been the Black Sea region. From the screen alone, Dusana was quick to note the contradictions in how the woman carried herself. Despite it being late in the evening, Diane was still dressed in an expensive, finely-pressed suit, with the top button of her blouse undone. If she'd been wearing a tie, it was now elsewhere, nowhere to be seen. While still in her executive office, Diane's legs were crossed, her expensive heels visible atop the desk as she lounged in rather an unprofessional manner on her leather office chair.
And then she spoke; a voice which had stayed with Dusana for as long as she could reliably remember. "Still enjoying your time off, Lucia?"
No matter how long they lived, Dusana was never going to escape that name. "I'm a commander in the ISDC now, Mother." Although they appeared to be similarly youthful, Dusana and Diane were in fact immortal, with the latter having given birth to the former in the middle of the Italian Renaissance. Dusana - who, back then, had gone by the name Lucia Cammeresi - was now over a thousand years old. Although her official documentation staunchly reported evidence to the contrary, she had been born in the year 1569. "There's no need to keep checking up on me."
"Yeah, if only Khalidah would stop fucking pestering me, maybe I wouldn't be so damn motherly." The jesting remark coaxed laughter from the two of them. Although she too had changed her identity to remain incognito as the years passed, Khalidah was how both Diane and Dusana referred to their mutual progenitor - Dusana's grandmother - whenever they spoke privately. It was a name she had used at the beginning of the twenty-first century, back when Dusana had first met her. At that time, Dusana had spent most of her life estranged from her immortal predecessors and had only entered back into the fold by sheer dumb luck when she had reunited with her mother at work. Although a thousand years had passed her by, Dusana was still very much the baby of the trio, with Khalidah often remarking that she predated written or otherwise recorded history. Dusana had often pegged her age at around thirty thousand years and even that was a complete guess.
The only person who knew how old Khalidah was... was Khalidah herself. "And you know how much I fucking hate it when you call me 'mother'." She did. Dusana had done it for centuries just to get a rise out of her. Once upon a time, it had been a verbal tic of hers; something she couldn't really help. It was all part of her upbringing. "So stop. Please?"
"Fine, Diane. I never ask you to refer to me by rank, anyway." Getting up from her own chair, Dusana made her way around to where she'd left a bottle of spiced rum and, with it in her hands, she scoured her kitchen area for a suitable glass to drink it from. Every step of the way, the camera tracked her through the house, the audio stream not once losing any modicum of fidelity. "You, uh... still keep in touch with her?" Over the past few centuries, the trio had flitted in and out of each other's lives as they picked their own routes through their unending existence. With advances in technology, it was becoming harder for them to avoid having the truth get out, with automated biometrics and innumerable backups of pertinent medical records being the figurehead of modern-day electronic security. "Khalidah, I mean."
A vague noise of non-committal flowed from the work-weary woman on the other end of the line as she shifted her posture in her chair. "Not for a few years now. You know what Ma's like. She'll just... leave; head off on her own agenda which she insists is for our greater good then check back in every so often to make sure we haven't died. We've both lasted this long thanks to her so I figure nothing needs to change on that front."
With her glass weighed down by rum, Dusana made her way back to the chair by the window and, with the bottle now much closer, she resumed what had previously been a very languid solo drinking session. "I know. I... appreciate what she's doing." Spending four centuries without her family had, in hindsight, been hellish enough. She'd been deprived of conversation with like-minded individuals about secrets she'd harboured her whole life. She'd been forced to guard her every word for fear of outing herself as anything from a medical curiosity to the devil made manifest over the years. And, as much as she'd gained through her life, there were things she'd lost. Some of these things, like the ability to use an old-fashioned telephone, were matters of convenience.
But others were immeasurably more. Some things - some people - in her life had been deemed irreplaceable but, nevertheless, time had claimed them and she'd been forced to watch them slip away from her. Over and over. It was the sole overriding drawback to eternal life. To watch almost every connection she ever made be worn away by the vagaries of time. Even this - her career as an ISDC commander - would eventually erode and be forgotten. And, for a few short moments, this crushing realisation showed on her face. She dealt with it every day, but it didn't change the fact that it was difficult to do so. She barely noticed that she'd trailed off into silence until Diane's voice rang out around her. "What's wrong, Lucia..?"
Her mother's brash and boorish tone of voice was gone in an instant, replaced by the caring tones she'd never be able to forget. And, in her moment of weakness, four syllables fell out of her mouth; a spoken desire for her sense of loss five whole centuries in the making.
"...I miss Jenna."
