http://clampfix.fanworks.net/others/machine.txt </head><body><pre> I uh, have actually had this completed for quite awhile, and then never really got up the nerve to post it. But of all the stories I've written, fanfiction and original alike, I have an inordinate fondness for this one. In a way, it wrote itself. I posted it on FF.N awhile back, but I know not everyone checks there, so...I'm going to post it here, as well...yeah. I guess that's about it. o_o;; Feedback would be /greatly/ appreciated, since I'd like to know what worked and what didn't; what could be improved, and what was well-executed. I know the formatting is a bit odd - it just sort of demanded that layout. On a side note, are there any Neil Gaiman fans in the Cincinnati area that will be attending his lecture at NKU? Title: the machine Author: k Rating: PG Warnings: If you haven't read Clover 4, this may be confusing, although I think it stands well on its own. 00. static ocean ----------------------- Darkness falls, and the city comes alive. With the absence of the sunlight, a billion pinpoints of luminescence flare into existence. Voices carry in the still night air, mingling with the sounds of technology to form shifting waves of white noise. The stars are invisible, blotted out by the brilliance of the neon sky. This is when the city is at its most dazzling; when the natural world is lost to the ever-changing organism of humanity and its toys. Follow the static ocean down between skeletal buildings, through shattered windows and pristine plastic. Slip further; move inwards; watch as the old becomes new and the barren becomes flourishing. Now...stop. Listen to the noise blanketing the city. The hum of humanity is low, dull, rumbling. The noise of flesh and a million thundering heartbeats. The siren song of technology echoes this and overlaps, whistling and sharp and relentless. The noise of information and a million screaming Modems. Isolate... ...isolate... A single sound. Low, dull, rumbling; whistling, sharp, relentless. A noise that is neither organic nor inorganic but, somehow, both. And a child, standing at a window, touching ghostlike fingertips to his own reflection. ----------- 00. end 01.i. the fool ------------------ A light splashes across a wall of transparent plastic as a vehicle makes its way down a crowded street. Like a rock cast into a tranquil pond, the light changes reflection to silhouette and back again, and the boy at the window finds himself quite suddenly returned to the realm of the flesh. Time had ceased to exist for him; he does not know how long he has been standing at the window. But, in his present mindset, he is not inclined to care. "C..." That single letter whispered like a plea or incantation; the boy's lips curve upwards, ever faintly. He watches as the reflection in the window returns the smile. The letter-name is laced with sorrow, but the smile is full of joy, and in this world of isolation there is no casual observer present to witness the contradiction. The boy stares at himself until the muscles of his jaw tighten, and eyes of gray and blue look beyond their mirror to see what lies within. It is a toy store, the boy realizes numbly. A dozen bronzed captives, tiny and fragile, carrying out meaningless motions on a checkerboard display table. The rest of the store is shrouded in darkness. But these toys captivate the boy, and his head slips ever slightly to the side, cocked in curiosity. "Hello there," he murmurs. But of course the toys, trapped within their own little world, cannot hear. The boy finds this fascinating. He sinks to his knees in front of the window, bringing himself eye-level with the fragile mechanical creatures. Water, or perhaps oil, begins to seep through the thin fabric of his pants. One of the toys is a bird-like dinosaur, moving with a delicate grace speaking of organic perfection. How strange- that a creature, dead for innumerable years, should be animated once more, in such an eerily similar form. The boy is pleased by the way that the toy moves. The beauty of prey with the danger of predator. One of the lizard's companions is disguised in a far more common, far more displeasing form. The mechanical cockroach moves deliberately, golden armor gleaming with each step. There is a ball of gleaming crystal, which does not bounce, but instead hovers, floating aimlessly while giving the unnerving impression of an all-seeing eye. There is a doll, shaped to a perfection which is inaccessible to normal human beings, and which watches its companions with sad brown eyes. Its hands are made of copper, and a trail of wires leads away from the back of its neck. And there is a mechanical bird, perched gently on an aluminum rod. This particular toy affects the boy like no other has; he shudders, once, left hand rising to clutch at his right shoulder. "You should really come in, out of the rain- illness comes quickly on silent feet when aided by the water's embrace." The voice is peculiar and musical. At first, the boy cannot decide if the speaker is male or female; he focuses his gaze on the uninvited intruder and finds that sight is only slightly more useful than sound on this one issue. The person offers him a smile, as gentle as the offer, but despite the almost maternal aspect of its constitution, the boy decides that he is being spoken to by a male. He then notices that the man is right, and that the rain has started to fall, although when exactly the clouds broke is not something he could determine. "This is your store," he queries. His questions sound more like statements than questions, and he knows this. The shop owner (and that is surely who he is) has no trouble following this oddity. "Yes, it is mine in any sense of the word, although sometimes it could be better to say that I am its, and it owns me. You see? Do come in." The boy rises, smiling once more. This smile is not for the face in the window. It's a frightening thing. But the man holds the door open for him, seemingly unperturbed by the smile, and the boy enters the shop, glancing around the interior with narrowed eyes. The first thing he realizes is that his primary evaluation was wrong. Despite the abundance of toys, this is not a toy store. Strange items line the metal shelves, and it takes the boy a minute to process that they are books, actual books of data printed on paper. This irritates him, and intrigues him simultaneously. He feels somehow cut off from this dead-tree data; his first thought is that somebody should burn the damn things, and his second thought is that they must be very old. "What kind of store is this?" he asks as the shopkeeper closes the door. It latches with a click and a musical chime. Of the two emotions he is experiencing, irritation is the one that laces his words. "This? This humble place of dust and gold - this is the Fool's store, and of the stores, there is hardly a better one for someone such as yourself." "Someone such as myself. What kind of person would that be?" "Lost! A lost little boy standing in the rain, with no companion but for his own reflection." The boy looks up at this. Surprise ripples in his eyes, before they narrow once more, emotions hiding behind the coldness of indifference. "A reflection is a companion that everyone has," he offers with a smirk. "Ah yes - but it is a companion that very few people look at with such sad eyes." The boy frowns, and the shopkeeper laughs, ducking under a shining chain to retreat behind the counter. The boy uses this time to inspect his peculiar host, trying to determine what manner of creature he is confronted with. He can tell now, under the soft white lights, that the man's femininity is only in his face and voice. His body is ensconced within thick gray robes, like some ancient priest, and as he moves the boy catches glimpses of black; an underlying jumpsuit, perhaps. The man's eyes bother him, somehow. They glitter like diamonds, impossibly pale. There is laughter in those eyes. The boy does not like to be laughed at. "You're not a Clover," he asserts, although his assertion is not quite so. The man behind the counter folds his hands on the glass, and smiles kindly. "A clover, indeed --! I am but a weed, and not a very impressive one, at that." A bell rings suddenly, the first in a quiet string that form a fragile song. The boy looks towards the window and sees that the melody comes from the crystal sphere; its surface ripples with color, as it shares its soul in sound. For some unexplainable reason, the boy shivers. There is something decidedly off about the dusty shelves, the watching toys, and their owner. The boy begins to wonder if he is dreaming. And he could swear that the man knows this. "What's your name?" The man asks. It's a jarringly normal question. No sing-song, no rhyme. The boy frowns. He sees no reason to lie. "A." The song has stopped, and time seems to stop, as well. The noises of the street are vanished. Lights shine through the glass window, as they have always done, but they stay in place, static, and the boy named A /knows/, suddenly, that there is no street beyond that glass. The lights are still because the image is an illusion. With this knowledge, comes rage, and the whisperings of fear. A turns to face the shopkeeper. Most infuriating of all, the man is still smiling, and the smile is kind, loving, and utterly inhuman. "What are you?!" A demands, reaching desperately for power, and finding only the hum of the void. "I am the Fool." ------------- 01.i. end 02.i. conversations with god ---------------------------------------- Two figures are seated in a darkened room with only a battered card table between them. A book lies open on the table, covered in dust; the book is bound in leather and is clearly very old. The air smells like wood and salt water. The smaller of the two figures, a child, reaches out to run a single pale fingertip across the browned page. "Where does it begin?" he asks. "Everywhere." "Where does it end?" he asks. "Nowhere." "Why does it exist?" he asks. "Because it always has." ------------- 02.i. end 02.ii. photographs of god ------------------------------------ "I dreamed of him last night." It is raining outside, and the lights that shine through the window are distorted into vague splashes of color. The man who speaks is curled upon a white sofa, staring thoughtfully at the chessboard floor behind hair that refuses to stay in place. His legs are drawn up to his chest, and he curls his arm loosely around them. The person to whom he speaks is also seated on the couch, frowning thoughtfully at an image that only he can see. His eyes are hidden behind a featureless visor that catches the light as he moves his head. He does not respond to the man's comment. He rarely does. The man knows this, and continues as though he had not expected an acknowledgment to begin with, which is the truth. "I dreamed that we were together again, but not at the lab. We were standing on the edge of some vast cliff and the sky was the color that exists between moments. I was his size, again; I no longer had to look down at him. We were holding hands. He looked peaceful. When I looked over the edge of the cliff, I saw that it went on forever. The fall was infinite. I asked him where B was, and he said that B had fallen over the edge; that we were the only two left standing. A and C. The beginning and the end. He said that they were all that mattered anyway; the beginning and the end. The middle is defined by them and, without them, is nothing. I said that he was wrong." A vehicle drives by, below them, with a wet sound. The man glances at the window and seems surprised to see that the lights are still moving. His companion, silent at the other end of the couch, glances up. Their gazes meet briefly, one painfully open and the other unnaturally guarded. The man begins to speak again, but his voice is quieter and less assured. "Sometimes...sometimes I feel like the beginning and the end are the same thing. Sometimes I think that he was wrong, and that the beginning and the end are defined by the middle; two sides of the same coin serving only to illuminate the space between them. I...lose my place. In my thoughts. In the world. Sometimes I think that we are always together because we are not a 'we' at all, but an 'I'." "Is that what you believe?" the silent man asks. His voice is soft. "No...no. I don't think it is." "You miss him." "...Yes." ------------- 02.ii. end 02.iii. history ------------------ The story goes like this: They were called clovers. Beings that shouldn't exist, but did; children with extraordinary powers and extraordinary lives. They were given a rank, based on those powers. One-leaf. Two-leaf. Three-leaf. And the four-leaf, a being so powerful that it could do whatever it wished. There was only one four-leaf, who lived a life of absolute solitude. There were three three-leafs. Triplets, identical in every way except for personality. They were given letters rather than names and were raised in a lab. The first triplet was A. Unstable, possessive, and scared. The second triplet was B. The perfect medium, neither one extreme nor the other. The third triplet was C. The object of A's obsession, quietly fragile, quietly alone. A killed B for C's affections. And C left, seeking sanctuary in the home of the solemn, serious two-leaf. Outside of the lab, away from the government's careful control, C's power was too great; he aged too quickly. He would continue to age, and be dead within four years. But he would bear this curse because the alternative was returning to the lab he had once called home and the boy he had once called 'niisan'. He could not return. And so he would live a new life in a new cage. And he would be happy. The story goes like this; and the story has no ending. -------------- 02.iii. end 03.i. turning point ------------------------- Darkness falls, and the city comes alive. The sky is the color that exists between moments and the streets are paved with moonlight. A boy and a man stand in the middle of the street, untouched by the traffic that flows around them. The boy takes the man's hand gently within his own. "You were wrong, you know," the man says, not unkindly. "How so?" says the boy. "The middle is what's important. Take away the middle, and what do you have?" "A beginning and an end." "A beginning and an end, with no middle. Two opposites with nothing between them. Matter and antimatter; positive and negative. That cannot be. Without a middle, a beginning and an end collide." "But without a middle, they may be together." "At what cost? It cannot be." No words. No words to obscure the heartbeat of humanity and the hum of the machine. The small hand tightens its grasp around the larger one. The two hands are very different, but appear to be no different at all. Finally, the boy speaks. "He wasn't a god. I don't know what he was." "He was something. That's enough." "This...it can't go on, can it? It was never meant to be." "Yes," the man agrees. "All or nothing." "Yes." "Nothing..." The boy rolls the word around his tongue as though tasting it. His dark eyes are made darker from contemplation. The man shifts an unreadable gaze to his smaller companion, but when he speaks, it is with unusual force. "All." The boy sighs. The man looks away. The boy closes his eyes. The man does, as well. ------------- 03.i. end 00. the beginning ------------------------- Somewhere, in the darkness, three boys sleep without dreams. ----------- 00. end</pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>