Stories are powerful things (Glossary)

Some people pointed out that having this glossary on its original entry kind of broke the magic of the story, so I'm putting it on a separate post. This explains some terms used in the story, if you need some more information, and provides links to the original content. Enjoy :)

SCP Foundation: Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation is tasked with containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm.

The Foundation operates to maintain normalcy, so that the worldwide civilian population can live and go on with their daily lives without fear, mistrust, or doubt in their personal beliefs, and to maintain human independence from extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and other extranormal influence. Each one of these contained anomalies is called and SCP, pronounced "skip", with a numerical designation afterwards.

Think Men-in-black, but with every avenue instead of just aliens. Also darker.

SCP-239: SCP-239 is an 8 year old Icelandic girl who can rewrite reality at will. The thing is, she doesn't know that, and the Foundation isn't very keen on her finding out, so they've told her that she is a witch and can do spells, but only those she properly learns and has in her spellbook. Therefore, her containment protocols are just a web of lies forged so she doesn't know what she can truly do.

When she started trying other things, they put her in a coma so she couldn't experiment. That's how fuzzy and lovely the Foundation is. Girl starting to give us trouble? Coma.

Church of the Broken God: Cult of maniacs who want to bring back their God, said to be "broken" into pieces. Some of those pieces are in custody of the Foundation, and are classified as SCPs. Has a lot to do with clockwork, cogs, gears, metal, etc. They constantly try to bring the pieces back.

Dr. Gears: Narrator of the story, he was the one who tricked the child into sleep and a coma, while saving her from being killed. He has almost no emotional response to anything, think uberSpock. This story is still in the making, but I wanted to portray him broken after years of struggle.

Dr. Clef: Friendly cameo from the SCP Foundation. Always nice to have him around.

Stories are powerful things

This is Sci-fi, and may not suit everyone's tastes, so I apologize for that. As a WIP, this isn't finished by any reasonable standard, but I wanted to try my hand either way. It's from an already established fictional universe, the SCP Foundation, and therefore there's some glossary for you. It kind of spoils the story, but you can come back to it after you've read it if you like.

Good hunting

EDIT: My cool friend Kotori, from http://kotopoto.tumblr.com/, made an awesome sketch about the child. Check it out at the end.
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She looked at me, her eyes glittering in the red, sick light of the everlasting twilight.

Her sight was confusing, constantly changing. I saw an old, matronly crone. I saw a beautiful woman. I saw a small child. I saw my mother, sternly looking at me from a wheelchair. My lover, lazily smiling in a short blue dress. I saw my daughter, running towards me in glee, small and blonde, all sun and northern wind like her mother.

My mother died when she gave birth to me.

I hadn't had a lover since my university days, and she never looked that good.

I didn't have a daughter. 

"Focus, doctor." She said sharply, her image resolving in the little kid I remembered.

I'd finally made it. I found her, who could help us. I found the anomalous child, the Witch Child, the last scrape of hope left for a dying humanity. The pressure felt during all the years spent in hiding, in pain, watching the world fight a hopeless war against something we could never match shattered me. 

I couldn't remember how long had I been running from them, how close the monstrosities were getting. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard silence instead of the grinding sound of gears in the air. The ticking clocks. The constant footsteps.

The dam broke apart, my mask falling, every emotion felt and repressed through the years pouring from within. I fell to my knees. I shouted and tore my throat apart, pleading. I whispered, praying for release from the pain and the despair. I asked her to end it all. Please. Save us all.

She didn't look a day older than 8, the age she had when we...when I had put her in a coma. Had it only been five years? It seemed like...ancient history. Maybe she chose to appear that way, for my sake. Maybe my mind just couldn't cope otherwise. Maybe she just liked it.

"I had so much time to think about it all, while I was asleep."

She talked like we'd been having a conversation just a minute ago. Her voice was music in my ears. It was a thing of beauty. If I hadn't been in this line of work for most of my adult life, it would have made me believe in God, but we had killed Him back in '96. We think.

"At first I was confused. Had I angered another wizard? Had the School found out about my other, harmless spells? Had I done something wrong?" She paused, and shook her head slowly, eyes closed, a half smile in her lips "No, for there was no magic, I was no witch, and there was no School. I realized that, after a while."

I felt shamed. I remembered the reports, the containment procedures. I designed some of them. The things we told her to control her power. The makeshift magic School, the fake spell books, the make-believe stories.

How do you put a stop to a child who can remake reality at will?

You lie to her. You make it so her own mind thinks she can do no more than what you teach her, and thus, she can´t. It's paradoxical, but it worked like a charm.

The horde that had followed me there was closing in, steadily. I could hear the clocks ticking louder, the metal reflections in the horizon growing brighter. They were a few minutes away, at most. There wasn't time.

"I felt furious, too" Her face darkened, anger in her iridescent eyes. "You were afraid, and ignorant, and foolish for trying to control me. Do you know how slowly time passes in a dream? How long was I alone? How betrayed I felt? How afraid? How would you feel if you were in a nightmare for hundreds of years? Would you care to find out?"

I had drugged her into sleep, when we found her trying some other "spells" behind our backs. It had been my hand, and no other. It seemed fitting that I was the one to find her again. The air cracked around her, and thunder, real thunder, like the Earth hadn't heard in years, roared above. I saw lighting fall from the skies, skies that had rained metal since They had managed to fix their Broken God. Skies that smelled of rust and blood, and that only gave the noise of grinding cogs, suddenly broke apart with rain and wind. I was in awe. I was mad with fear. Her face was the single most terrifying thing I'd ever seen, and that is something coming from a SCP Level 4 Researcher. If she had chosen to smite me, right there, and abandon this God-forsaken planet, I couldn't have blamed her.

The clockwork sounds were deafening now in my ears, but I could still hear her clearly. There were no footsteps, and I looked around and saw Them, flesh and metal and aberration, standing around us in a circle as wide as the clearing she had made, green grass starting to grow in it.

"And then..."She whispered, turning her scowl into a smile, while the skies above cleared, the sun showing its face for the first time since I couldn't remember when. “Then I remembered what you told me, right before I fell asleep. You told me to sleep well, and to have sweet dreams. That was a kindness. A kindness from the most detached, cold man I ever met. I thought about what you had all done. You could have told me other kind of lies. You could have tried to kill me. But you didn't. You thought of magic, and wizards and witches, and spells and everything an 8-year-old girl could find amazing. And you pretended, even if it wasn't for me. You gave me the most wonderful memories, while it lasted. And you didn't know any better."

She raised her arms, framing my face with her tiny hands. She was almost the same height as me, down on my knees. She kissed my forehead slowly and kept looking at me. Into me. Through me.

"I forgive you. I did so a long time ago" She whispered quietly. "But I will not save your world."

My stomach fell to my feet, hope raised and squashed again by her words. She could have wished them out of existence. She could have scourged sky, sea and land of their kind. She could have turned their dark oil into magma, their clockwork entrails to glass and whatever passed for their brains into acid. She could have brought everyone back. She could still fix us.

She chose to do none of those things.

Her voice rang like a trumpet, and I knew, just knew, that they could all understand and hear her.

"This is not my world. It took a while for me to understand that. I do not belong here, even if I was human. Even if I once had a mother and a father. This does not concern me at all."

The hateful, steel-grey sphere in the sky turned to her. It was huge, Cogs and pipes and a molten core that looked like a big, gaping maw.  A Broken God, no longer Broken. I could hear its booming voice, grating against my ears.

"WILL YOU LEAVE, THEN? I HAVE NO QUARREL WITH YOU, AND YOU HAVE NO DESIRE FOR THIS MEASLY PIECE OF ROCK."

She looked at me, her face serious and hard. So much depth in the eyes of one that looked so young. I couldn't blame her for it. We had killed, or driven away, any anomaly that could have saved us in our darkest hour. She was the last one. Humanity had failed, the Foundation had failed, and it was on us. We had played our music and casted our hate in the face of everything that we didn't understand. We had made our bed, and it was time to lie in it.

I saw the abominations around us restlessly moving in place, the ticking sounds going faster as in anticipation. This was it. Shut up and dance, old man, I thought to myself.

"You are right." Said the little girl. "I have no need for this world, or the humans that inhabit it.” Her voice lowered, as if musing to herself. “I am beyond this time, this place, just plain Beyond."

She turned to me and embraced me with her small frame, whispering in my ear. "Goodbye, doctor. I hope you have sweet dreams."

She kissed my cheek, slowly, and I could feel a sad smile creeping into my face. She forgave me. We deserved much worse than death, but she didn't hate me. That small piece of mercy gave me a comfort I never expected to get, not in this eleventh hour.

She released me and spoke to the Broken God. "I'll leave now, monstrous thing. I'll leave you to your hunting and cleansing. You disgust me. "

She turned her face one last time to me, very slowly, a small smile in her face, and then started walking.

They pounced at me, all gaping maws, broken implements and sharp edges. I didn't close my eyes. I was going to die. Might as well let her be the last thing I saw. An innocent child, walking in the green grass.

"...that being said, though..." Said her cheerful voice.

She snapped her fingers, the vile, metallic things around us stopping in their tracks as if time had frozen for them. Maybe it had.

She beamed at me and winked.

"WHAT IS THIS? YOU SAID YOU WOULD LEAVE. YOU SAID..." The metalic abomination boomed, trembling in the sky.

"This, you mindless lump of metal, is called flair and style. If you had walked among them, like I did, you would know. A little flair is always good, even if it isn't necessary. I could think you gone, and you'd be gone. I could wish your whole timeline erased with a stray thought, and thus it would be. I could put you through suffering so great and incomprehensible that Reality would reject it out of fear."

She raised her hands, and a book appeared in front of her. And another. And another. Thousands of them, all around her, and around me, in a deafening spiral of pages and the familiar smell of old leather and paper. There were shadows among the books, moving rapidly.

"But I'm not gonna do that. I said I would not fight you, and I will not. You wanted to take on humankind? Be my guest. But I shall not have you cheated out of the full experience. This is humankind. These are their stories."

Only then I saw them, coming out of the pages.

I saw a crowned king, holding a golden sword, flanked by twelve knights and an old, bearded man, shouting in defiance. I saw a disc-shaped spaceship that looked like it could make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs burst out of a page and start shooting at the skies. I saw a red-haired woman, carrying a strange blue sword, sadly hum in place for a few seconds before disappearing, impossibly fast, breaching their lines and crashing amongst Them. I saw eagles and dragons tearing apart the clockwork aberrations, and iron-clad dwarves bringing ruin to the pulseless armies that had wasted us. I saw Greek gods, Norse deities, and Egyptian forces of creation throw their hands against the strange world Earth had turned into, and bend it to shape again. I saw every fairy tale, every story, book, and fiction, come to life and turn their hands against this metallic Hell. I saw an old, blue box dart towards that hateful God, a wheezing, groaning sound in its wake.

I saw Him Broken again.

The sky burned away, clean. The land took a deep breath, its surface free of blood and rust and iron. I heard the waves in the ocean. I looked around, every Hero and Villain looking back to me, smiling wolfishly while they faded. I thought I saw Clef, the old bastard, tipping its hat to me. 

I looked at the little girl that was sitting in the grass, all the books dancing around her. She looked happy.

SCP-239, the Witch Child, Sigurrós, looked back at me.

"You gave me all these stories, doctor. You gave me magic and dragons and knights and a million million worlds to wander, and created many, many more I could never get to. I now give them back to you. I could ask you to be wiser, and you should. To do better, this time. To be kinder. Do all those things."

She got up, smoothing her dress as if to clean the dust on it, waved her hand at me, and turned around, speaking softly while she walked away.

"Old stories saved you today, doctor. Next time, make sure you have become Heroes in your own right."

Image by Kotori, from http://kotopoto.tumblr.com/

Humankind in Science Fiction

I'm a nerd. No news there, I know, but I think sometimes it's important to demonstrate how much of a nerd I am. Hence, this post.

There are different views about humankind in science fiction. It depends in the hardness of the science fiction, how far away in the future the work is set or if its a Space Opera, cosmic horror story or anything in between. Usually, as long as there are also aliens in there, you find two types of humans:

1) Humans are average/Humans are diplomats: A staple of the far-future works, humanity is usually the baseline race for everything: smart, but not the smartest, strong, but not the strongest, etc. We are a kind of Jack-of-all-trades.

This is has a clear parallelism with fantasy stories, elves, dwarves and so on. Here you can find humanity as diplomats, creators of an empire or a republic that spans the galaxies. Most clearly seen in Star Wars and Star Trek.

2) Humans are helpless/Humans are survivors: Usually found in First Contact or Invasion stories, here humanity is clueless about everything, having gone to space just a few decades back or being set in the present day. We do not have the tech, the knowledge, hell, we have nothing. We are outmatched, outgunned and outnumbered.

We survive anyway through guile, inteligence or plain dumb luck. You can see it in War of the Worls, Independence Day, etc.

But, a few years back, a different proposal emerged. One I quite like, because it shows humanity the way I enjoy it the most: unrestrained, untamed, completely do-not-fuck-with-us:

3) Humas are monsters/Humans are warriors: Contrary to Humas are Diplomats, here humanity is badass. Humanity is a bunch of violent, warlike savages who revel in chaos and destruction.

This is not, however, a bad thing. And, most likely, it's the way it would end up. Think here for a second.

Humans breathe oxygen, one of the most poisonous materials in the universe. It's the same fucking thing that makes fire. It kills metals. We need it to BREATHE.

From a totally alien being's viewpoint that must be at least startling, if not outright scary. Also, check out the local fauna, which from a sci-fi viewpoint, was turned into wallets and clothes. Even our cows, which we eat, are fucking 500kg slab of muscle and fat, capable of crushing a man to death. We made an industry of killing , eating, and using their bodily remains.

We roll poison into little cylinders and smoke it to relax. We drink poison too, and derive enjoyment from the temporary malfunctioning it causes in our higher brain functions. The higher the toxin level the greater the beverage; diluting the toxin with water is severely frowned upon by society. Humans preferentially select foods that mimic their response to damage. For the flavor.

We expose ourselves to sunlight in order to damage our skin and make it assume a darker hue for the sake of perceived beauty. We expose ourselves to harsh environments with nothing but nylon for shelter for pleasure.

It took 50 years since the invention of a motorised vehicle for us to develop laws about where and how to drive them safely. We just didn't care til then.

Humans are constantly conditioned almost from birth to regard lethal violence as valid entertainment, Action movies, violent video games, even sports like martial arts or fencing are all derived from actions which, in the end, are intended to end the lives of sentient beings. and we enjoy them in our spare time. We even make our kids pay for them in order to play.

Rather than fight disease directly, humans deliberately inject themselves with crippled versions of deadly plagues, so that their bodies will shrug them off with minor effects. Our immune systems are so hardy that even the quickest-mutating pathogen barely affects us; we call it "just a cold" and treat our infection like a minor inconvenience. We put all sorts of chemichals in our body to cure ailments, and sometimes we don't even know how any of it works. We know it doesn't kill us, and that's enough.

A single inescapable fact is that humanity unites with infinitely greater purpose in pursuit of war, than we ever do in pursuit of peace. I mean, we're able to fly into space now and have been killing each other for thousands of years. What makes anyone think we would drop that habit once we can fly out a bit further?

We poison our air and water to weed out the weak.

We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere.

We nailed our god to a stick.

Don't fuck with the human race.