'77 East
`impulse-approved
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2017
- Messages
- 11,578
- Nebulae
- 27,425
Life's like a runaway road, it comes and it goes.
Steering wheel clutched in pale hands. Headlights shining down an asphalt-clad abyss, the rolling loop of roadsigns.
It called out to something inside, some feeling within, scratching out at the darkness.
Neither fear or anger, an emotion born of internal fault; deception.
Blink.
That eternal lie to oneself.
"It wasn't me."
Deferrals to morality, to higher powers, to religion, to God, to Humanity.
"I didn't do it."
Just because you stood there as a bystander, you had nothing to do with it.
Blink.
Thwack! - goes some bastard's head on the concrete.
Thack! - goes the nightstick.
Never mind that you wore the uniform.
Never mind the service pistol you carried.
Never mind your creed, your conscious. Orders.
Once you put on that mask, you were no longer the person you were before.
Subsumed into an army, subsumed into a mentality, you were bent and broken in their image.
Their desires, their dreams, their domestic taste for brutality. Another mass of flesh and fear for the CivPro mold.
Blink.
That's all it ever came down to, recreating man to fit the template for another proto-machine.
CivPro, the Transhuman Arm, even the identical bureaucrats perpetuating the bureaucracy.
Men molded by design, prodded and poked into compliance.
An infinite loop of suffering, that was the prognosis. Survivors of
the initial trauma creating another cycle of conflict, civil war, end
of one civilization and the return to savagery before the next. First
the Seven Hours, then the Seven Months, then likely the Seven Years
before... everyone starved to death, judging by how gradually fucked
up the supply situation kept becoming each rotation.
And at the end, at the bleakest hour par the days
that would follow, he had escaped.
Blink.
Cast off the uniform of the obedient, murderous paramilitary.
Callously thrown away the mentalities that had kept him alive
through many tours of duty in bloody hellscapes, for months.
Caught and entombed the false identity that had supplanted
his own. Fake notions of things, places, people, that had
pretended to replace his own thoughts, buried to
safeguard who he was - who he had been.
It was a new world, one without Breen or Benefactor.
It had known not the horror it could inflict on itself.
Blink.
Yet every time he opened his eyes, polarised glass stared back.
The Mask had never truly left him.
Pretending to be a machine in the old world had left it's own mark;
now he was pretending to be a man in this new one. One year
had utterly changed what he was, and what he would be.
Blink.
Perhaps this was all he had known.
Perhaps this is all he would know.
The Road kept going.
That Future could never come to pass,
but that did not mean it was forgotten.
Steering wheel clutched in pale hands. Headlights shining down an asphalt-clad abyss, the rolling loop of roadsigns.
It called out to something inside, some feeling within, scratching out at the darkness.
Neither fear or anger, an emotion born of internal fault; deception.
Blink.
That eternal lie to oneself.
"It wasn't me."
Deferrals to morality, to higher powers, to religion, to God, to Humanity.
"I didn't do it."
Just because you stood there as a bystander, you had nothing to do with it.
Blink.
Thwack! - goes some bastard's head on the concrete.
Thack! - goes the nightstick.
Never mind that you wore the uniform.
Never mind the service pistol you carried.
Never mind your creed, your conscious. Orders.
Once you put on that mask, you were no longer the person you were before.
Subsumed into an army, subsumed into a mentality, you were bent and broken in their image.
Their desires, their dreams, their domestic taste for brutality. Another mass of flesh and fear for the CivPro mold.
Blink.
That's all it ever came down to, recreating man to fit the template for another proto-machine.
CivPro, the Transhuman Arm, even the identical bureaucrats perpetuating the bureaucracy.
Men molded by design, prodded and poked into compliance.
An infinite loop of suffering, that was the prognosis. Survivors of
the initial trauma creating another cycle of conflict, civil war, end
of one civilization and the return to savagery before the next. First
the Seven Hours, then the Seven Months, then likely the Seven Years
before... everyone starved to death, judging by how gradually fucked
up the supply situation kept becoming each rotation.
And at the end, at the bleakest hour par the days
that would follow, he had escaped.
Blink.
Cast off the uniform of the obedient, murderous paramilitary.
Callously thrown away the mentalities that had kept him alive
through many tours of duty in bloody hellscapes, for months.
Caught and entombed the false identity that had supplanted
his own. Fake notions of things, places, people, that had
pretended to replace his own thoughts, buried to
safeguard who he was - who he had been.
It was a new world, one without Breen or Benefactor.
It had known not the horror it could inflict on itself.
Blink.
Yet every time he opened his eyes, polarised glass stared back.
The Mask had never truly left him.
Pretending to be a machine in the old world had left it's own mark;
now he was pretending to be a man in this new one. One year
had utterly changed what he was, and what he would be.
Blink.
Perhaps this was all he had known.
Perhaps this is all he would know.
The Road kept going.
That Future could never come to pass,
but that did not mean it was forgotten.
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