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keaaluThese have lurked on my PC for ages - I forget what originally inspired them, might have been the tentative start of an RPG storyline that I decided not to use at the time. *shrugs* Anyway. This isn't about "normal" Ivy but a parallel-universe duplicate; since in "Haze" she's described as being "missing", I think it might have been an attempt to explain where she'd gone. *shrugs* Anyway.
"Ch'kreth" means "Dauntless", BTW - been calling the ship that to make it different to normal Dauntless. Ch'kreth has the same basic intelligence as Dauntless, but no self-representation like Magpie just yet. Not sure if I'll give her one, to be honest.
I might do something else with it, but I can't think of anything right now, so go figure.
lj-cutted so they don't take up so much room.
-----
"Nova"
Her name had been Ivory, some time ago, but she’d learned to hate the person she’d become. Her life had been a rocky one, full of pitfalls that took her feet out from under her, and mountains to climb, and it had very nearly beaten her. But she’d finally dragged herself from the murk, and dusted herself down, and after bidding farewell to her friends – the closest to family she’d ever had, and it had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do – she’d “gone off to find herself”.
Taking Ch’Kreth, she’d just headed off toward the galactic rim, alone with her thoughts, wondering in a halfhearted way if she’d find anyone like herself. Or someone to share her life with, maybe. Because right now, she felt… barren. Empty. When they’d left heir homeworld, she’d been so full of hope and love and energy… Now she felt dead inside – as dead as most scanners insisted she must be.
Her hope had rapidly failed her - lost in a galaxy that didn’t live up to the picture that had been painted of it. It had seemed so shiny and bright and wonderful, but there were still the old cruel prejudices, the wanton destruction, the barely-contained sexual promiscuity, and beings so ugly in their hearts it hurt to speak with them, sometimes.
Her love had been next to go. She’d been overflowing with it, as an “infant”, over-full of love and fully willing to give it to anyone that asked. But she’d never really got over her first love – tall, slim and handsome, he was a young Vul with fur that looked like frosted sunlight, and so kind, so clever… They’d shared two, three nights together, their ships both stranded on an alien world, at first sharing just words, then their hearts, and then their bodies, so at ease with each other they’d quickly begun to suspect some element of “soul mate” was going on… Then he’d found out she was not the average little alien female he may encounter on his travels but an artificial construct, and rejected her out of hand. She’d pleaded with him to reconsider, that the feelings were true and honest, she hadn’t played a trick on him, and eventually he’d come round to the idea – the tears had clinched the deal, no mere machine could replicate such utter soul-wrenching desperation.
They’d gone together to bargain for the freedom of their people, gone to plead with the creature keeping them stranded on this little dangerous world. It had refused – it liked its little playthings. The desperate measures that had been called for had almost destroyed the entire crew of both Ch’kreth and Avocet - an all-out battle, which they won only by the slimmest of margins, eventually destroying the creature holding them prisoner.
Casualties had been heavy. And he had been one of the ones that lost their lives; she had walked round in a daze for weeks. Eventually she picked herself up, determined not to lose her head like that again – and had fallen head over tail for another undesirable male mere months later. He’d had no love for her, though, and almost cost her her life and sanity, abandoning her in the clutches of the warlike Kiravai.
Finally she’d decided enough was enough. Her heart was painful, and tired, and it was with great reluctance she’d left her ‘family’ – but she had to start again. Clean the slate, so to speak. Wipe away all traces of her old life, and learn to live again in a world that might be friendlier. So away she’d gone, simply heading in as straight a line as she could, towards the depths of uncharted space where there might – just might – be something and somewhere worthwhile.
Her first tentative steps in building a new person were simple; physical changes she felt she could cope with. She had dyed the bulk of her white fur almost black – a few touches were paler, a soft charcoal grey, particularly around her eyes and the inside of her delicate ears, making her almost a tortoiseshell of black and greys – and stained her blue eyes with an ink. It had hurt like hell, surprisingly – usually only physical damage hurt, and then only if it was severe – but the final result had been rich, intense violet eyes. The mental changes, developing a new mindset, would take time to develop - her last definite touch in divorcing herself of her old, painful life had been to take a new name; that in itself had taken days of internal debate. Eventually she had settled on “Nova”; a dual name, in a way, standing both for the new things ahead, but also symbolising her “destructive brilliance” and her capability for total self-annihilation.
She’d tried the Warp – the dimensionally skewed and disconcerting domain that lay somewhere both above and below normal spacetime. She’d wanted to travel by normal time, but gradually her desire to leave the galaxy she’d grown up in had grown to such proportions the only way she’d do it would be via the Warp. She’d hit the main drive, and Jumped.
Right now, she was drifting. She’d hit the warp awkwardly and the resulting damage to the ship had taken three months to straighten, and she could feel herself slipping back into old ways. In desperation she’d partially disconnected half her emotions – it had been laborious work so not to damage important systems, but finally she’d succeeded, and had found that not having such distracting clutter occupying half her mind made things so much easier. Plus the doubts had faded; the logic was clean and good, you didn’t quibble with logic if it gave you useful opinions, useful pointers.
Still, once Ch’kreth was repaired, she’d found so little to do that life had begun to become unbearable. She’d retreated back into the ship’s computer; in the main core access room was the facility for her to dip directly into the systems, in the form of a neural cradle that meshed with the complex synthetic synaptic pathways of her own brain. It let her interface direct with the ship, root out faults at the source, clean up nonsense programs and run general diagnostics. In return it supported her while she was working thus, kept her systems stable by a billion feedback and monitoring signals via the cradle, and monitored her system effectiveness by the tiny impulses it could detect through the cocooning chair itself. Effectively, they became one artificial organism, a symbiotic relationship so close it was barely possible for the outside observer to separate her consciousness out from the ship’s systems.
It was probably her downfall that it wasn’t always necessary to have a problem to retreat into the ship – and she found herself gradually doing it more and more. Hibernating, almost. It still supported her while she ‘slept’, preserved thought patterns and neural stability, and kept watch for dangers… but that was it. She set timers for it to wake her every so often, but the interval was getting longer; a day, two days, a week, a month… And every time the time was up, it was harder to wake; after a day, she woke and was alert in seconds. After the first month stretch, it had taken a full hour to be fully alert.
And her hope was again faltering. So she set Ch’kreth a new command. Wake me in an emergency, or at radio contact, but nothing more. And so Ch’kreth had done so, gently pulling its captain into the warm, dulling embrace of the main core access room, wrapping her mind in cotton wool and her body in layers of protective cloth and electronic screens.
And they flew on, cutting gracefully through interstellar space’s inky ocean, draped in starshine, sleeping.
"Ch'kreth" means "Dauntless", BTW - been calling the ship that to make it different to normal Dauntless. Ch'kreth has the same basic intelligence as Dauntless, but no self-representation like Magpie just yet. Not sure if I'll give her one, to be honest.
I might do something else with it, but I can't think of anything right now, so go figure.
lj-cutted so they don't take up so much room.
-----
"Nova"
Her name had been Ivory, some time ago, but she’d learned to hate the person she’d become. Her life had been a rocky one, full of pitfalls that took her feet out from under her, and mountains to climb, and it had very nearly beaten her. But she’d finally dragged herself from the murk, and dusted herself down, and after bidding farewell to her friends – the closest to family she’d ever had, and it had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do – she’d “gone off to find herself”.
Taking Ch’Kreth, she’d just headed off toward the galactic rim, alone with her thoughts, wondering in a halfhearted way if she’d find anyone like herself. Or someone to share her life with, maybe. Because right now, she felt… barren. Empty. When they’d left heir homeworld, she’d been so full of hope and love and energy… Now she felt dead inside – as dead as most scanners insisted she must be.
Her hope had rapidly failed her - lost in a galaxy that didn’t live up to the picture that had been painted of it. It had seemed so shiny and bright and wonderful, but there were still the old cruel prejudices, the wanton destruction, the barely-contained sexual promiscuity, and beings so ugly in their hearts it hurt to speak with them, sometimes.
Her love had been next to go. She’d been overflowing with it, as an “infant”, over-full of love and fully willing to give it to anyone that asked. But she’d never really got over her first love – tall, slim and handsome, he was a young Vul with fur that looked like frosted sunlight, and so kind, so clever… They’d shared two, three nights together, their ships both stranded on an alien world, at first sharing just words, then their hearts, and then their bodies, so at ease with each other they’d quickly begun to suspect some element of “soul mate” was going on… Then he’d found out she was not the average little alien female he may encounter on his travels but an artificial construct, and rejected her out of hand. She’d pleaded with him to reconsider, that the feelings were true and honest, she hadn’t played a trick on him, and eventually he’d come round to the idea – the tears had clinched the deal, no mere machine could replicate such utter soul-wrenching desperation.
They’d gone together to bargain for the freedom of their people, gone to plead with the creature keeping them stranded on this little dangerous world. It had refused – it liked its little playthings. The desperate measures that had been called for had almost destroyed the entire crew of both Ch’kreth and Avocet - an all-out battle, which they won only by the slimmest of margins, eventually destroying the creature holding them prisoner.
Casualties had been heavy. And he had been one of the ones that lost their lives; she had walked round in a daze for weeks. Eventually she picked herself up, determined not to lose her head like that again – and had fallen head over tail for another undesirable male mere months later. He’d had no love for her, though, and almost cost her her life and sanity, abandoning her in the clutches of the warlike Kiravai.
Finally she’d decided enough was enough. Her heart was painful, and tired, and it was with great reluctance she’d left her ‘family’ – but she had to start again. Clean the slate, so to speak. Wipe away all traces of her old life, and learn to live again in a world that might be friendlier. So away she’d gone, simply heading in as straight a line as she could, towards the depths of uncharted space where there might – just might – be something and somewhere worthwhile.
Her first tentative steps in building a new person were simple; physical changes she felt she could cope with. She had dyed the bulk of her white fur almost black – a few touches were paler, a soft charcoal grey, particularly around her eyes and the inside of her delicate ears, making her almost a tortoiseshell of black and greys – and stained her blue eyes with an ink. It had hurt like hell, surprisingly – usually only physical damage hurt, and then only if it was severe – but the final result had been rich, intense violet eyes. The mental changes, developing a new mindset, would take time to develop - her last definite touch in divorcing herself of her old, painful life had been to take a new name; that in itself had taken days of internal debate. Eventually she had settled on “Nova”; a dual name, in a way, standing both for the new things ahead, but also symbolising her “destructive brilliance” and her capability for total self-annihilation.
She’d tried the Warp – the dimensionally skewed and disconcerting domain that lay somewhere both above and below normal spacetime. She’d wanted to travel by normal time, but gradually her desire to leave the galaxy she’d grown up in had grown to such proportions the only way she’d do it would be via the Warp. She’d hit the main drive, and Jumped.
Right now, she was drifting. She’d hit the warp awkwardly and the resulting damage to the ship had taken three months to straighten, and she could feel herself slipping back into old ways. In desperation she’d partially disconnected half her emotions – it had been laborious work so not to damage important systems, but finally she’d succeeded, and had found that not having such distracting clutter occupying half her mind made things so much easier. Plus the doubts had faded; the logic was clean and good, you didn’t quibble with logic if it gave you useful opinions, useful pointers.
Still, once Ch’kreth was repaired, she’d found so little to do that life had begun to become unbearable. She’d retreated back into the ship’s computer; in the main core access room was the facility for her to dip directly into the systems, in the form of a neural cradle that meshed with the complex synthetic synaptic pathways of her own brain. It let her interface direct with the ship, root out faults at the source, clean up nonsense programs and run general diagnostics. In return it supported her while she was working thus, kept her systems stable by a billion feedback and monitoring signals via the cradle, and monitored her system effectiveness by the tiny impulses it could detect through the cocooning chair itself. Effectively, they became one artificial organism, a symbiotic relationship so close it was barely possible for the outside observer to separate her consciousness out from the ship’s systems.
It was probably her downfall that it wasn’t always necessary to have a problem to retreat into the ship – and she found herself gradually doing it more and more. Hibernating, almost. It still supported her while she ‘slept’, preserved thought patterns and neural stability, and kept watch for dangers… but that was it. She set timers for it to wake her every so often, but the interval was getting longer; a day, two days, a week, a month… And every time the time was up, it was harder to wake; after a day, she woke and was alert in seconds. After the first month stretch, it had taken a full hour to be fully alert.
And her hope was again faltering. So she set Ch’kreth a new command. Wake me in an emergency, or at radio contact, but nothing more. And so Ch’kreth had done so, gently pulling its captain into the warm, dulling embrace of the main core access room, wrapping her mind in cotton wool and her body in layers of protective cloth and electronic screens.
And they flew on, cutting gracefully through interstellar space’s inky ocean, draped in starshine, sleeping.
