echoes²

[OneClassyBanana]

echoes²
This thread is a thematic rehash of a post I made years ago.

Then, it was a short story based around Dr. Wallace Breen
and an extradimensional bureaucrat. Now, I intend to use
it as a repository for ideas, stories, and other mediums of
exploring concepts inherent to a world where someday a
theoretical physicist might just save us all. Or perhaps he
fails and the regime moves on and in time his name is all
that remains. Such is the fickle nature of superpositions.

Save for the video linked at the very top, all content that
follows was written, edited, or otherwise created by me.
​

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

1. You are not a superman.
2. If it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid.
3. Don't look conspicuous - it draws fire.
4. When in doubt, empty your magazine.
5. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.
6. Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.
7. If your attack is going really well, it's an ambush.
8. No plan survives the first contact intact.
9. All 5 second grenade fuses burn down in 3 seconds.
10. Try to look unimportant because the bad guys may be low on ammo.
11. If you are forward of your position, the artillery will fall short.
12. The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack.
13. The important things are always simple.
14. The simple things are always hard.
15. The easy way is always mined.
16. If you are short of everything except enemy, you are in combat.
17. When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the enemy.
18. Incoming fire has right of way.
19. Friendly fire isn't.
20. If the enemy is in range - SO ARE YOU!
21. No combat ready unit has ever passed inspection.
22. Things that must be together to work, usually can't be shipped together.
23. Radios will fail as soon as you need fire support desperately.
24. Anything you do can get you shot - including doing nothing.
25. Tracers work both ways.
26. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.
27. Make it tough for the enemy to get in and you can't get out.
28. If you take more than your fair share of objectives, you will have more than your fair share of objectives to take.
29. When both sides are convinced that they are about to lose, they are both right.
30. Professional soldiers are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs.
31. MURPHY WAS A GRUNT.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯​

Spoiler: trauma alert

The sun is setting. I can see it even through the rain and haze. Visibility is low.

Beneath my feet, damp soil and rotting detritus are flattened, tamped into a silent totem of my passing. Sound is minimal.

A chilling wind sweeps through the corpse of my planet, and things beyond naming writhe and change to other kinds of things at its touch. I do not feel any of it.

The only things I feel are what I need to feel. Some of this is by the touch of something greater than the singular and functionary me. A calling, imparted, and form made in the image of function. Cohesion foresees reward. But the emptiness that wells in the void where once part of me had been? This was not imparted.

This is an inflicted thing.

We move silently past the gate. An unremarkable thing sprawls at its mouth. We’ve seen it before. It is beneath acknowledging. Still extremities and a red leak stained onto its face. Flatline.

Shots screamed overhead. The sun beat down on us. The desert was vast and lifeless and beautiful and was once an ocean. It isn’t, now. Our team leader calmly pointed us towards our objective. The way there was lined with our dead. Sacrifice code, she said.

The three of us stalk through the damp night. The flickers of my visor supersede the very moisture hanging before us as we enter the cover of the tree line. Mere minutes away, tenuous attempts at diplomacy fall unheard, a mercy turned away, and countless damned for it. I do not feel the water as we submerge, unfettered by the cloying contaminants and essence of rot.

This rage is an inflicted thing. Repress. Refresh. Resolve.

The sand came up to our chins as the passageway erupted into a cascade of grit and surging bodies. Clawing, clutching blades and bludgeons, some held guns. She went down second. Flatline. We swam and slaughtered through the sea of sand turned mud by the spray of crimson mess. Where did our dead end and theirs begin?

This pain is an inflicted thing. Repress. Refresh. Resolve.

The river is not like the sand and stone. Each movement as scalpels through still veins. But still I feel the dead around me.

Repress. Refresh. Resolve. I cannot.

This is an inflicted thing.

There are no words for this thing I feel as eight lives are unknowingly chosen to end by the arrogance of a few. There are no words for this thing I feel as more dead join the tally, claimed by the indiscriminate self-destruction of a sickness they did not choose. There are no words.

The only things I feel are what I need to feel. The bombardment begins. Each impact rends metal. The payload, a phage unto a plague, begins its own its grim work. By the time the first body falls, drowning in its own way in its own choked bile, my feet have already rejoined with damp soil and rotting detritus.

The sun sets, and dusk claims the dead. A chilling wind whisks away the last semblances of life. They have become as unremarkable as the desert or the rain,

I do not feel any of it.

A short snippet of a story done in about 30 minutes on my phone.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯​

 

[OneClassyBanana]

updated with a short conceptual experiment i did re: the shantytown standoff the other day.