*shivershivershiver*
Nov. 9th, 2004 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maderrI am cold and cranky from being cold. I'm so tired my eyes burn. And I'm sick of being cold.
But god damn, I finished chapter nine. And now I am going to bed, where it's soft and warm and I can go sleepy.
Chapter Nine
unknown location, private Research facility
“I don’t understand it,” a fair-haired human with light red skin all but through his In-specs down on the table as he took a seat. He picked up his fork and proceeded to stab viciously at his food. “We’ve checked and checked and checked.”
“We’re just not looking in the right places, is all.” Spoke a scientist seated opposite him. She smoothed a stray piece of blonde hair back into the tight knot at the back of her head.
“And what is the right place, Clara? Do tell me.”
Clara’s mouth pinched in disapproval, “There’s no need to snap at me, Ferman. We keep concentrating on the Draconis. What we should be doing is focusing our efforts on the mates.”
A third scientist, a man slightly older than his middle-aged compartriots, waved her words away. “Don’t be stupid. It’s perfectly obvious that the mating aspect lies with the Draconis. How else could they mate with any magics capable being?”
“Maybe there’s some universal quality we’re missing, that all magic capable share.”
“Forget it,” Ferman said. “That’s impossible.”
“Why do you say that? You both are being remarkably close minded about this.” Clara abandoned her own food, too annoyed to eat it.
“Because if there is some ‘universal quality,’ science would have found it a long time ago. Don’t you think that as hard as humans have worked to figure out why we aren’t magics capable, that we would have found such a thing long before now?”
“Coulter, I think you’re being short sighted. Anyway, I don’t see why everyone wants magic so badly anyway. Aren’t we humans in control because we aren’t magics capable?”
Coulter took a sip of his wine and glared gently at her over the rim of the glass, “They don’t want magics, you idiot. Haven’t you been paying attention in all your research? They want weapons, bodyguards, slaves and the like. The Laws set down by the original Chancellors of the Infinitum Government specified only that those with magics capability are not permitted to hold government offices, because the risk of magical tampering was simply too high. After all, we all remember what happened when magics capable did run the government…But moving – there is no law saying that officials cannot own servants, or employ bodyguards with magics, so long as they’re approved by the Board. And how do you disapprove of a creature that is bound body, soul and mind to his master?”
“One would think,” Clara replied, “That would be reason enough. All sorts of problems could arrive from such a thing.”
”Hardly. So long as the Chancellors and their people can’t use magics, there isn’t much a fancy bodyguard or servant can do. And if we code things properly, they won’t be able to so much as think about disobeying – which negates any potential problems from something like mind magics.”
“Mmm,” was all Clara said in reply, unconvinced. “That aside, they’re still asking us to create a race of slaves. History has proven over and over again that such a thing never goes well. And it always ends in violence. Or are we forgetting the Last Revolution of Earth? There are very good reasons the anti-slave laws in that galaxy are so rigid.
Ferman shrugged, “Who cares? We’re just paid to do the research. Let someone else worry about the morals and ethics. That’s not part of what we do.”
“Anyway,” Coulter said. “Earth was different. These slaves will be perfectly and completely bound, with no chance to protest, rebel, or even think about it."
"Mmm…." Clara remained unconvinced. "Doesn't it work both ways?"
"Not once we're done," Coulter replied confidently. "If we can just isolate what controls the mating process, we can begin to alter it to our specifications." He paused to slurp his soup for a moment, "I wish we were closer to isolating it. I've already confirmed that Draconis could indeed be used to supplement the Devestators, and if we could bond them to the magics soldiers, there's not a force in the world that could match the Infinitum Army. If only we could pinpoint what drives the mating!"
"At least that's your only problem," Ferman said irritably. "We've got to reconfigure the whole damn thing, once we find it, to force a compatibility with humans."
Coulter snorted, "I'm sure you once they bring us that Draconis mated to a magics capable human they keep telling us about, you'll be on your way to figuring things out there."
"Which is why I keep saying we should be focusing on the mates, not the Draconis," Clara said tartly. "Especially if we can examine a magics capable human. Once we compare it to a normal human, we'll have our answer. And I bet you my entire month's salary that we'll find that universal quality I've been theorizing about. Just wait and see."
"We'll see."
"Indeed we will," Clara rose to her feet, followed almost immediately by the two men. Their white lab coats flapped behind them as they left the cafeteria.
A few table beyond where the scientists had been sitting, four lab assistants rose to take care of their own dishes and those left sitting by the scientists. One woman, red-skinned and copper haired, had to be nudged by a companion. "Lorraine!"
"Huh? Oh. Sorry. Guess I spaced out."
"I'll say. You were way far away. Hurry up, come on. We've got to get all this cleaned up and then get to lab."
Lorraine grumbled and rose to her feet, helping the others to clean up the small cafeteria. "Coming, coming. I don't see why the good doctors can't clean up their own damn dishes."
Her companion, a mocha-skinned female, laughed. "Don't be silly, Lorra. You know the Project Leaders are too smart to know how to use a sink properly. And they might get their hands dirty!"
"That's enough," a young man looked at them reprovingly. "Just get the chores done so we're not late back to lab."
"Yeah, yeah. Don't worry; we won't keep you from kissing ass." The last assistant, a white-skinned, red haired female, poked him playfully in the back with a broom. "You'll still be in the good graces of her Ladyship, never fear."
"Hey, just because I want to make sure someone else is washing my dishes someday…"
"It's a good thing too," Lorra said with a grin. "Because you couldn't wash a dish properly to save your life."
"Hey!" The four continued to bicker and play as they made short work of the small space, washing the dishes and cleaning off the tables.
"All right," the young man crowed. "Lab time."
"Have fun," Lorraine waved at them, grinning impishly.
The darker skinned woman looked at her, "You don't have lab?"
Lorraine winked as she palmed the switch to open the door, "Nope. Dr. Coulter is done for the day, and he said I was free to do as I liked for the rest of the day."
"Che," the red haired woman snorted. "Day. When was the last time we saw anything resembling day or night?"
"Mmm, true." Lorraine agreed with a grimace. "He said I had the next ten hours free. So I'll see you guys for dinner."
"Okay. Enjoy the time off. Lazy bum." The man called after her teasingly as she stepped into the hallway and made her way cheerfully back to her small cubicle of a room. But once inside, the cheerful façade crumbled into worry.
It had been too damn easy.
They'd laid it all for her to take, like some mouth watering meal.
Or a well-baited trap.
Well, she wasn't as stupid as they obviously thought she was.
Stretching and yawning, Lorraine took her time changing out of her lab clothes and into her comfortable lounging ones. She brushed her hair and hummed, tidied up the few bits of clothing and books she'd left lying around. Turning on her personal computer, she sat down to write out a letter.
She was almost one hundred percent positive they didn't know who their lab rat was. Oh, they knew it was one of the four Lab assistants and not one of the miscellaneous personal around the facility. But they didn't know which of the four it was. That, she was confident about.
They also thought she was an amateur, to fall for such an obvious trap.
Clearly they still hadn't figured out that they'd fallen for her trap when they'd hired her. She hadn't been a scientist all her life, the fools.
And obvious was exactly what the trap was, because the good doctors never discussed their experiments where the lowly assistants might hear them. Of course, the other three probably hadn't been paying any attention to what the scientists said, so certain that the doctors were listening to their students' attempts to sound brilliant and clever.
No, she was probably the only one who had listened to the conversation that had been pitched just loud enough to hear, if you were interested in listening.
So they knew there was a rat. Well, it had only been a matter of time. Some of the information put to use by Spring could only have come from the lab. And while she'd been careful about what got sent to HQ, it had been inevitable that at some point they would narrow the list of suspects down.
Of course, she had hoped to have gleaned their location by the time that happened. A minor kink in the plans, but as her mother had always said - if the food was spoiled, throw it out and make do with whatever you had left.
Unfortunately there wasn't much left. But it would suffice. She looked over the letter she'd written.
Karmikel,
Miss you something awful, baby. I'm bored out of my mind buried in this rock. Every day it's the same faces, the same experiments, the same problems - I'm about to go out of my mind. I'm starting to wish I'd never taken this damned job - the extra course credits aren't worth my sanity.
I would match rather be earning personal credits, both of us naked in your bed and acting out every last little thing you described in your last letter. Some of them more than once, I think. I keep that letter on my nightstand you know. And read it every night…
Think about that, why don't you, until I get out of here.
All my Love,
Lorraine.
Despite the gravity of her situation, reading the letter tried every last bit of her will power. It was so hard not to laugh, thinking about Karmikel reading such an absurd letter. They'd been exchanging them ever since she first started working towards getting hired for the facility - nearly two and a half years now - and she couldn't help but wonder how Karmikel lookd every time he was forced to read them. Because read them he must, in case she encoded some message in them.
This was the first time she'd had too, and the code was so obvious it would be overlooked by machine and human checkers alike. The 'love letters' exchanged between Lorraine and her much-discussed 'sweetheart' were so regular, she doubted they checked them more than half-heartedly. And she blathered about her 'beloved' so often at night, none doubted the authenticity of it. Perhaps she was a scientist now, but she'd grown up on the stage and damned if she didn't still have a knack for it.
It was all in the last line. Always she ended her letters "until I see you again," or "until I'm back." This time it said "until I get out of here."
To her comrades, that last little bit meant only one thing.
Trouble.
But god damn, I finished chapter nine. And now I am going to bed, where it's soft and warm and I can go sleepy.
Chapter Nine
unknown location, private Research facility
“I don’t understand it,” a fair-haired human with light red skin all but through his In-specs down on the table as he took a seat. He picked up his fork and proceeded to stab viciously at his food. “We’ve checked and checked and checked.”
“We’re just not looking in the right places, is all.” Spoke a scientist seated opposite him. She smoothed a stray piece of blonde hair back into the tight knot at the back of her head.
“And what is the right place, Clara? Do tell me.”
Clara’s mouth pinched in disapproval, “There’s no need to snap at me, Ferman. We keep concentrating on the Draconis. What we should be doing is focusing our efforts on the mates.”
A third scientist, a man slightly older than his middle-aged compartriots, waved her words away. “Don’t be stupid. It’s perfectly obvious that the mating aspect lies with the Draconis. How else could they mate with any magics capable being?”
“Maybe there’s some universal quality we’re missing, that all magic capable share.”
“Forget it,” Ferman said. “That’s impossible.”
“Why do you say that? You both are being remarkably close minded about this.” Clara abandoned her own food, too annoyed to eat it.
“Because if there is some ‘universal quality,’ science would have found it a long time ago. Don’t you think that as hard as humans have worked to figure out why we aren’t magics capable, that we would have found such a thing long before now?”
“Coulter, I think you’re being short sighted. Anyway, I don’t see why everyone wants magic so badly anyway. Aren’t we humans in control because we aren’t magics capable?”
Coulter took a sip of his wine and glared gently at her over the rim of the glass, “They don’t want magics, you idiot. Haven’t you been paying attention in all your research? They want weapons, bodyguards, slaves and the like. The Laws set down by the original Chancellors of the Infinitum Government specified only that those with magics capability are not permitted to hold government offices, because the risk of magical tampering was simply too high. After all, we all remember what happened when magics capable did run the government…But moving – there is no law saying that officials cannot own servants, or employ bodyguards with magics, so long as they’re approved by the Board. And how do you disapprove of a creature that is bound body, soul and mind to his master?”
“One would think,” Clara replied, “That would be reason enough. All sorts of problems could arrive from such a thing.”
”Hardly. So long as the Chancellors and their people can’t use magics, there isn’t much a fancy bodyguard or servant can do. And if we code things properly, they won’t be able to so much as think about disobeying – which negates any potential problems from something like mind magics.”
“Mmm,” was all Clara said in reply, unconvinced. “That aside, they’re still asking us to create a race of slaves. History has proven over and over again that such a thing never goes well. And it always ends in violence. Or are we forgetting the Last Revolution of Earth? There are very good reasons the anti-slave laws in that galaxy are so rigid.
Ferman shrugged, “Who cares? We’re just paid to do the research. Let someone else worry about the morals and ethics. That’s not part of what we do.”
“Anyway,” Coulter said. “Earth was different. These slaves will be perfectly and completely bound, with no chance to protest, rebel, or even think about it."
"Mmm…." Clara remained unconvinced. "Doesn't it work both ways?"
"Not once we're done," Coulter replied confidently. "If we can just isolate what controls the mating process, we can begin to alter it to our specifications." He paused to slurp his soup for a moment, "I wish we were closer to isolating it. I've already confirmed that Draconis could indeed be used to supplement the Devestators, and if we could bond them to the magics soldiers, there's not a force in the world that could match the Infinitum Army. If only we could pinpoint what drives the mating!"
"At least that's your only problem," Ferman said irritably. "We've got to reconfigure the whole damn thing, once we find it, to force a compatibility with humans."
Coulter snorted, "I'm sure you once they bring us that Draconis mated to a magics capable human they keep telling us about, you'll be on your way to figuring things out there."
"Which is why I keep saying we should be focusing on the mates, not the Draconis," Clara said tartly. "Especially if we can examine a magics capable human. Once we compare it to a normal human, we'll have our answer. And I bet you my entire month's salary that we'll find that universal quality I've been theorizing about. Just wait and see."
"We'll see."
"Indeed we will," Clara rose to her feet, followed almost immediately by the two men. Their white lab coats flapped behind them as they left the cafeteria.
A few table beyond where the scientists had been sitting, four lab assistants rose to take care of their own dishes and those left sitting by the scientists. One woman, red-skinned and copper haired, had to be nudged by a companion. "Lorraine!"
"Huh? Oh. Sorry. Guess I spaced out."
"I'll say. You were way far away. Hurry up, come on. We've got to get all this cleaned up and then get to lab."
Lorraine grumbled and rose to her feet, helping the others to clean up the small cafeteria. "Coming, coming. I don't see why the good doctors can't clean up their own damn dishes."
Her companion, a mocha-skinned female, laughed. "Don't be silly, Lorra. You know the Project Leaders are too smart to know how to use a sink properly. And they might get their hands dirty!"
"That's enough," a young man looked at them reprovingly. "Just get the chores done so we're not late back to lab."
"Yeah, yeah. Don't worry; we won't keep you from kissing ass." The last assistant, a white-skinned, red haired female, poked him playfully in the back with a broom. "You'll still be in the good graces of her Ladyship, never fear."
"Hey, just because I want to make sure someone else is washing my dishes someday…"
"It's a good thing too," Lorra said with a grin. "Because you couldn't wash a dish properly to save your life."
"Hey!" The four continued to bicker and play as they made short work of the small space, washing the dishes and cleaning off the tables.
"All right," the young man crowed. "Lab time."
"Have fun," Lorraine waved at them, grinning impishly.
The darker skinned woman looked at her, "You don't have lab?"
Lorraine winked as she palmed the switch to open the door, "Nope. Dr. Coulter is done for the day, and he said I was free to do as I liked for the rest of the day."
"Che," the red haired woman snorted. "Day. When was the last time we saw anything resembling day or night?"
"Mmm, true." Lorraine agreed with a grimace. "He said I had the next ten hours free. So I'll see you guys for dinner."
"Okay. Enjoy the time off. Lazy bum." The man called after her teasingly as she stepped into the hallway and made her way cheerfully back to her small cubicle of a room. But once inside, the cheerful façade crumbled into worry.
It had been too damn easy.
They'd laid it all for her to take, like some mouth watering meal.
Or a well-baited trap.
Well, she wasn't as stupid as they obviously thought she was.
Stretching and yawning, Lorraine took her time changing out of her lab clothes and into her comfortable lounging ones. She brushed her hair and hummed, tidied up the few bits of clothing and books she'd left lying around. Turning on her personal computer, she sat down to write out a letter.
She was almost one hundred percent positive they didn't know who their lab rat was. Oh, they knew it was one of the four Lab assistants and not one of the miscellaneous personal around the facility. But they didn't know which of the four it was. That, she was confident about.
They also thought she was an amateur, to fall for such an obvious trap.
Clearly they still hadn't figured out that they'd fallen for her trap when they'd hired her. She hadn't been a scientist all her life, the fools.
And obvious was exactly what the trap was, because the good doctors never discussed their experiments where the lowly assistants might hear them. Of course, the other three probably hadn't been paying any attention to what the scientists said, so certain that the doctors were listening to their students' attempts to sound brilliant and clever.
No, she was probably the only one who had listened to the conversation that had been pitched just loud enough to hear, if you were interested in listening.
So they knew there was a rat. Well, it had only been a matter of time. Some of the information put to use by Spring could only have come from the lab. And while she'd been careful about what got sent to HQ, it had been inevitable that at some point they would narrow the list of suspects down.
Of course, she had hoped to have gleaned their location by the time that happened. A minor kink in the plans, but as her mother had always said - if the food was spoiled, throw it out and make do with whatever you had left.
Unfortunately there wasn't much left. But it would suffice. She looked over the letter she'd written.
Karmikel,
Miss you something awful, baby. I'm bored out of my mind buried in this rock. Every day it's the same faces, the same experiments, the same problems - I'm about to go out of my mind. I'm starting to wish I'd never taken this damned job - the extra course credits aren't worth my sanity.
I would match rather be earning personal credits, both of us naked in your bed and acting out every last little thing you described in your last letter. Some of them more than once, I think. I keep that letter on my nightstand you know. And read it every night…
Think about that, why don't you, until I get out of here.
All my Love,
Lorraine.
Despite the gravity of her situation, reading the letter tried every last bit of her will power. It was so hard not to laugh, thinking about Karmikel reading such an absurd letter. They'd been exchanging them ever since she first started working towards getting hired for the facility - nearly two and a half years now - and she couldn't help but wonder how Karmikel lookd every time he was forced to read them. Because read them he must, in case she encoded some message in them.
This was the first time she'd had too, and the code was so obvious it would be overlooked by machine and human checkers alike. The 'love letters' exchanged between Lorraine and her much-discussed 'sweetheart' were so regular, she doubted they checked them more than half-heartedly. And she blathered about her 'beloved' so often at night, none doubted the authenticity of it. Perhaps she was a scientist now, but she'd grown up on the stage and damned if she didn't still have a knack for it.
It was all in the last line. Always she ended her letters "until I see you again," or "until I'm back." This time it said "until I get out of here."
To her comrades, that last little bit meant only one thing.
Trouble.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 05:52 pm (UTC)Let's hope the intrigue unfolds like it's supposed to.
There'll be more Einn/Cyan, never fear.