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Lammas Eve Ficathon
Title: People Are Strange
Author Name: Michelle Taylor
Fandom/Original: Original Fiction
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Vaguely disturbing. No dialogue. Cruelty to animals.
Abigail sat on a rock and attempted to work out where it had all gone wrong.
The place was idyllic, just as advertised. There was no mistaking that. The beautiful white-sand beaches, smooth and luxurious, gleamed in the morning sun. The water was sweet and refreshing from the lagoon and the babbling streams, transparent over glistening rocks, that fed it. There was abundant fruit, crisp and delicious, somehow always in season and never carpeting the ground in a sticky, rotten mess. Small, curious woodland creatures seemed all too eager to part with their succulent flesh. Plentiful fallen wood lay dry and almost dangerously flammable on the ground.
It had even been quite exciting for the first week or so: tripping over and finding her first flint 'knife' by embedding it in her leg. Packing the local herbs – even the undergrowth was useful – into the clean and not particularly painful wound. Working out which of the green wobbly bits tasted the best.
Three months later, she just wanted to go home.
She had tried all of the obvious things.
Picking a direction and walking in it, she had ascertained that there was a line of half-wooded hills from which the streams emerged, a little patchy scrubland the other side, and then there was the lagoon again. The world was round and very, very small. She'd drawn a map in the sand, and then when it washed away she drew another one on the side of a big, old tree, cutting lightly into its bark.
Arranging a message in the scrublands was very unlikely to help, but made her feel better for a few weeks while she made the tools and scratched out the message down to the rich brown earth. It was already growing over. If anyone had been looking for her, they would have found her much more easily than her message, anyhow. All other living things on the planet – not that it could really be a planet, not at this size – were no longer than her forearm.
Trying to kill herself might have worked if she hadn't been so half-hearted about it, but she quite liked breathing (so her attempt at drowning herself didn't work) and didn't like bleeding much (that undergrowth provided quite exceptional bandaging material), there was nothing poisonous on the entire planet, and she didn't have the willpower to give up eating and drinking for any appreciable length of time. She just wasn't sure enough that this was all some kind of sick joke; not convinced enough that someone must be watching.
Abigail wasn't much to watch, really. Particularly deprived teenage boys might be interested in the way her clothes had pretty much disintegrated over the past three months with no obvious need for replacements, but the more discerning variety had much better pornography on tap already. Her straw-blonde hair fell limply around her face, ragged with her latest half-hearted attempt to slice most of it off and straggly with the lack of soap products available to strip its natural oils. Her watery blue eyes glared at the world as if it was a personal insult to her, or possibly to her mother.
If you had told Abigail three years ago that she would be sitting out in the countryside, breathing fresh air, eating good food and not having to share it with ten million other people, she would have given you a contemptuous look and crossed you off the list of people who were worth her time. If you'd told her that she'd be regretting it, she'd probably have slapped you.
The city that Abigail inhabited wasn't even overcrowded by the standards of the day. You could go for whole metres without colliding with anybody, and it was even possible to get a spot on the rooftops if you didn't mind doing something useful in a dangerous maintenance area. Abigail often spent her obligatory work hours pushing buttons and babysitting incomprehensible machinery up in the sunlight with nary a soul in the vicinity, and she liked it that way.
She didn't like the off hours, the leisure time, the crowds, the sea of meaningless faces that demanded her attention and then spurned it time and time again. Occasionally she would have appointments with well-meaning people in tastefully decorated cubbyholes about her 'lack of social inclusion'. She smiled at them blankly and made the appropriate noises, and they set up meetings and assignations, none of which she planned to attend.
If she didn't keep them happy, they'd assign her time off work. Which just made everything worse.
They spoke about her parents, sometimes. Abigail hadn't really known her parents either, which was just fine as far as she was concerned. She wouldn't want to be bothered by some kind of sticky, retarded creature, half-grown and needy, and she didn't see why they should be any different.
She had been raised by a selection of random nursemaids, child-minders, babysitters, and other enthusiastic child-loving freaks, all of which she had swiftly demoralised by being stolidly unresponsive and undemanding. Obviously she couldn't feed herself right out of the gate, but it only took a couple of years before she'd got the hang of the apartment's automated systems and the concerned, mugging, overexcited faces had been entirely unnecessary.
Apparently it was all her parents' fault. She silently wished them well.
Various people misguidedly believed they were Abigail's friends, with differing levels of success. She was actually quite fond of some of them. They brought her interesting food and suggested things that she might want to read. They gave her leads on job opportunities and on quiet places to go and be alone. Sometimes they tried ineptly to copulate with her. At least when they were having sex they usually weren't talking.
Rachel had shown her the picture of the lagoon. Apparently it was some kind of scientific experiment, although as usual Abigail couldn't even begin to follow the details. Now that she'd been here three months, Abigail was just beginning to conclude that Rachel probably wasn't really her friend at all, but instead some kind of ringer for the agency who was setting up the experiment, sent out to befriend loners, people who wouldn't be missed. Looking for vulnerable targets to prey upon.
Not that she was any closer to discerning the purpose of this place. She had never suffered from the illusion that she was intelligent, although her memory was good and her ability to follow simple instructions seemed to be hugely well-developed compared to the rest of the teeming mass of humanity, or at least that's what the glowing reports from her various stints of employment suggested. Maybe she was just meant to go messily crazy, to prove some kind of point about how people needed other people.
She had never liked other people much, but now she was coming to the conclusion that maybe she did need them, after all.
Or maybe it was just variety she was missing.
To a casual observer, three years later, it would appear that Abigail had indeed gone messily crazy, as predicted. She hadn't exactly made herself new clothes. It was more some kind of artist's rendition of primitive body-painting, combined with occasional totems of bloodied feathers or hard, shrunken eyeballs. She occasionally had these creative phases, and it appeared they had done something to her so that she didn't catch any kind of terrible disease from her abuse of the local wildlife.
She had spent quite some time fashioning implements of death and torture for the poor unfortunate creatures who shared the place with her. Half-remembered encyclopedia articles combined with first-principles reasoning and infinite amounts of leisure to give her something like a spear-thrower, a total failure of a bow and arrows, and what looked like a respectable trebuchet but failed to actually propel objects in any useful fashion.
Scattered around, abandoned or carefully cached by some unknown filing scheme, were the remains of her other projects. There was quite a bit of leatherwork, a wood-lined cave in the dry side of the hills housing many sheets of hand-made parchment onto which had been inscribed (in blood) poetry and diagrams and maps of here and elsewhere, some craft projects consisting mostly of fish scales tied together with gut. She had kept herself busy.
When they came for her, landing their shuttle on the dry side of the hills and walking over with a plastic smile and outstretched arms, she threw things and she screamed and she bit them. Which is why they'd sent a robotic scout, of course. The hard plastic beneath the skin hurt her teeth. She looked up at the robot once more and didn't need to be sedated.
The inside of the shuttle was white and beige and plain and infinitely fascinating. She ran her fingers across the smooth modern surface with a voracious hunger she hadn't felt before, trying to reassure herself that they were real, that she wasn't dreaming. She clutched a bunch of bloodied feathers and imagined driving them through Rachel's heart, right through her clothes and into her chest and between the bones.
She smiled and she nodded and she realised that she'd forgotten how to speak, but that didn't stop an endless procession of lab-coated faces yammering in her general direction, giving her probing looks. She went in and out of machines and wrote pages and pages of answers to the scientists' questions. The food was bland and the air tasted metallic, like blood.
They took away her skins and her talismans and gave her fresh clothing, which itched and clung to her, and then when they noticed her discomfort they gave her better clothing which draped in cool cotton and made the technicians less embarrassed. Sometimes she would just take it off to see what their reaction would be. Once upon a time she would have been afraid to do that, afraid of some nameless danger – rejection, abuse. But now she had sat by a lagoon and killed her own food and was not afraid of anything.
There were hushed conversations which at first she thought that she was not meant to hear, but as time went on she decided that they were not so stupid as to believe she wasn't listening. Just because she had not deigned to give voice to words once more didn't mean she couldn't understand what they were saying. They spoke of 're-integration', of concerns about her future, of what they could do with her when the experiment was over.
Abigail doesn't tell anyone about the countryside, about the fresh air and the good food and the blood and feathers and eyeballs. She just sometimes gets this faraway look in her eyes, as if she's seen something they never will, understands something they never could, but she won't tell them because they wouldn't believe her anyway. Whenever she can, she gets something to do topside, and she usually can because she's a good worker with a fine record.
She met Rachel, once, afterwards. It was very awkward. Neither of them would meet the other's eyes. It must have been manufactured by someone, that meeting, perhaps someone who wanted to apologise. Abigail told her that it had been very interesting. Rachel said that she'd thought Abigail would appreciate the opportunity. Abigail decided that, on balance, she did not want to shove Rachel into the trash compactor.
Many people think that they are Abigail's friends. She's been much better since she came back from her excursion, apparently. She smiles and laughs and jokes with them. It's just another simple problem. Something that can be worked out with a few half-remembered encyclopedia entries and a bit of work from first principles.
The poems that Abigail wrote on the island are very popular. Sometimes she leafs through the messages that people try to send her about them. If she never wanted to work again, she could just take up a position as an artist. The thought fills her with dizzying vertigo. Some day she'll do it.
After all, she's not afraid of anything.
Title: People Are Strange
Author Name: Michelle Taylor
Fandom/Original: Original Fiction
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Vaguely disturbing. No dialogue. Cruelty to animals.
Abigail sat on a rock and attempted to work out where it had all gone wrong.
The place was idyllic, just as advertised. There was no mistaking that. The beautiful white-sand beaches, smooth and luxurious, gleamed in the morning sun. The water was sweet and refreshing from the lagoon and the babbling streams, transparent over glistening rocks, that fed it. There was abundant fruit, crisp and delicious, somehow always in season and never carpeting the ground in a sticky, rotten mess. Small, curious woodland creatures seemed all too eager to part with their succulent flesh. Plentiful fallen wood lay dry and almost dangerously flammable on the ground.
It had even been quite exciting for the first week or so: tripping over and finding her first flint 'knife' by embedding it in her leg. Packing the local herbs – even the undergrowth was useful – into the clean and not particularly painful wound. Working out which of the green wobbly bits tasted the best.
Three months later, she just wanted to go home.
She had tried all of the obvious things.
Picking a direction and walking in it, she had ascertained that there was a line of half-wooded hills from which the streams emerged, a little patchy scrubland the other side, and then there was the lagoon again. The world was round and very, very small. She'd drawn a map in the sand, and then when it washed away she drew another one on the side of a big, old tree, cutting lightly into its bark.
Arranging a message in the scrublands was very unlikely to help, but made her feel better for a few weeks while she made the tools and scratched out the message down to the rich brown earth. It was already growing over. If anyone had been looking for her, they would have found her much more easily than her message, anyhow. All other living things on the planet – not that it could really be a planet, not at this size – were no longer than her forearm.
Trying to kill herself might have worked if she hadn't been so half-hearted about it, but she quite liked breathing (so her attempt at drowning herself didn't work) and didn't like bleeding much (that undergrowth provided quite exceptional bandaging material), there was nothing poisonous on the entire planet, and she didn't have the willpower to give up eating and drinking for any appreciable length of time. She just wasn't sure enough that this was all some kind of sick joke; not convinced enough that someone must be watching.
Abigail wasn't much to watch, really. Particularly deprived teenage boys might be interested in the way her clothes had pretty much disintegrated over the past three months with no obvious need for replacements, but the more discerning variety had much better pornography on tap already. Her straw-blonde hair fell limply around her face, ragged with her latest half-hearted attempt to slice most of it off and straggly with the lack of soap products available to strip its natural oils. Her watery blue eyes glared at the world as if it was a personal insult to her, or possibly to her mother.
If you had told Abigail three years ago that she would be sitting out in the countryside, breathing fresh air, eating good food and not having to share it with ten million other people, she would have given you a contemptuous look and crossed you off the list of people who were worth her time. If you'd told her that she'd be regretting it, she'd probably have slapped you.
The city that Abigail inhabited wasn't even overcrowded by the standards of the day. You could go for whole metres without colliding with anybody, and it was even possible to get a spot on the rooftops if you didn't mind doing something useful in a dangerous maintenance area. Abigail often spent her obligatory work hours pushing buttons and babysitting incomprehensible machinery up in the sunlight with nary a soul in the vicinity, and she liked it that way.
She didn't like the off hours, the leisure time, the crowds, the sea of meaningless faces that demanded her attention and then spurned it time and time again. Occasionally she would have appointments with well-meaning people in tastefully decorated cubbyholes about her 'lack of social inclusion'. She smiled at them blankly and made the appropriate noises, and they set up meetings and assignations, none of which she planned to attend.
If she didn't keep them happy, they'd assign her time off work. Which just made everything worse.
They spoke about her parents, sometimes. Abigail hadn't really known her parents either, which was just fine as far as she was concerned. She wouldn't want to be bothered by some kind of sticky, retarded creature, half-grown and needy, and she didn't see why they should be any different.
She had been raised by a selection of random nursemaids, child-minders, babysitters, and other enthusiastic child-loving freaks, all of which she had swiftly demoralised by being stolidly unresponsive and undemanding. Obviously she couldn't feed herself right out of the gate, but it only took a couple of years before she'd got the hang of the apartment's automated systems and the concerned, mugging, overexcited faces had been entirely unnecessary.
Apparently it was all her parents' fault. She silently wished them well.
Various people misguidedly believed they were Abigail's friends, with differing levels of success. She was actually quite fond of some of them. They brought her interesting food and suggested things that she might want to read. They gave her leads on job opportunities and on quiet places to go and be alone. Sometimes they tried ineptly to copulate with her. At least when they were having sex they usually weren't talking.
Rachel had shown her the picture of the lagoon. Apparently it was some kind of scientific experiment, although as usual Abigail couldn't even begin to follow the details. Now that she'd been here three months, Abigail was just beginning to conclude that Rachel probably wasn't really her friend at all, but instead some kind of ringer for the agency who was setting up the experiment, sent out to befriend loners, people who wouldn't be missed. Looking for vulnerable targets to prey upon.
Not that she was any closer to discerning the purpose of this place. She had never suffered from the illusion that she was intelligent, although her memory was good and her ability to follow simple instructions seemed to be hugely well-developed compared to the rest of the teeming mass of humanity, or at least that's what the glowing reports from her various stints of employment suggested. Maybe she was just meant to go messily crazy, to prove some kind of point about how people needed other people.
She had never liked other people much, but now she was coming to the conclusion that maybe she did need them, after all.
Or maybe it was just variety she was missing.
To a casual observer, three years later, it would appear that Abigail had indeed gone messily crazy, as predicted. She hadn't exactly made herself new clothes. It was more some kind of artist's rendition of primitive body-painting, combined with occasional totems of bloodied feathers or hard, shrunken eyeballs. She occasionally had these creative phases, and it appeared they had done something to her so that she didn't catch any kind of terrible disease from her abuse of the local wildlife.
She had spent quite some time fashioning implements of death and torture for the poor unfortunate creatures who shared the place with her. Half-remembered encyclopedia articles combined with first-principles reasoning and infinite amounts of leisure to give her something like a spear-thrower, a total failure of a bow and arrows, and what looked like a respectable trebuchet but failed to actually propel objects in any useful fashion.
Scattered around, abandoned or carefully cached by some unknown filing scheme, were the remains of her other projects. There was quite a bit of leatherwork, a wood-lined cave in the dry side of the hills housing many sheets of hand-made parchment onto which had been inscribed (in blood) poetry and diagrams and maps of here and elsewhere, some craft projects consisting mostly of fish scales tied together with gut. She had kept herself busy.
When they came for her, landing their shuttle on the dry side of the hills and walking over with a plastic smile and outstretched arms, she threw things and she screamed and she bit them. Which is why they'd sent a robotic scout, of course. The hard plastic beneath the skin hurt her teeth. She looked up at the robot once more and didn't need to be sedated.
The inside of the shuttle was white and beige and plain and infinitely fascinating. She ran her fingers across the smooth modern surface with a voracious hunger she hadn't felt before, trying to reassure herself that they were real, that she wasn't dreaming. She clutched a bunch of bloodied feathers and imagined driving them through Rachel's heart, right through her clothes and into her chest and between the bones.
She smiled and she nodded and she realised that she'd forgotten how to speak, but that didn't stop an endless procession of lab-coated faces yammering in her general direction, giving her probing looks. She went in and out of machines and wrote pages and pages of answers to the scientists' questions. The food was bland and the air tasted metallic, like blood.
They took away her skins and her talismans and gave her fresh clothing, which itched and clung to her, and then when they noticed her discomfort they gave her better clothing which draped in cool cotton and made the technicians less embarrassed. Sometimes she would just take it off to see what their reaction would be. Once upon a time she would have been afraid to do that, afraid of some nameless danger – rejection, abuse. But now she had sat by a lagoon and killed her own food and was not afraid of anything.
There were hushed conversations which at first she thought that she was not meant to hear, but as time went on she decided that they were not so stupid as to believe she wasn't listening. Just because she had not deigned to give voice to words once more didn't mean she couldn't understand what they were saying. They spoke of 're-integration', of concerns about her future, of what they could do with her when the experiment was over.
Abigail doesn't tell anyone about the countryside, about the fresh air and the good food and the blood and feathers and eyeballs. She just sometimes gets this faraway look in her eyes, as if she's seen something they never will, understands something they never could, but she won't tell them because they wouldn't believe her anyway. Whenever she can, she gets something to do topside, and she usually can because she's a good worker with a fine record.
She met Rachel, once, afterwards. It was very awkward. Neither of them would meet the other's eyes. It must have been manufactured by someone, that meeting, perhaps someone who wanted to apologise. Abigail told her that it had been very interesting. Rachel said that she'd thought Abigail would appreciate the opportunity. Abigail decided that, on balance, she did not want to shove Rachel into the trash compactor.
Many people think that they are Abigail's friends. She's been much better since she came back from her excursion, apparently. She smiles and laughs and jokes with them. It's just another simple problem. Something that can be worked out with a few half-remembered encyclopedia entries and a bit of work from first principles.
The poems that Abigail wrote on the island are very popular. Sometimes she leafs through the messages that people try to send her about them. If she never wanted to work again, she could just take up a position as an artist. The thought fills her with dizzying vertigo. Some day she'll do it.
After all, she's not afraid of anything.
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Date: 2008-08-01 01:02 pm (UTC)From:Abigail decided that, on balance, she did not want to shove Rachel into the trash compactor.
This line made me especially happy.
(Do you want stylistic feedback? I don't know how to do that well rather than saying "I wouldn't have written this line this way because this and this", but that's just a matter of individual style.)