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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: Thanks
to all who came out to the show last night. Peace!
"Luskin is a stalker" "Starfire ass" "worst marketed beverages" "disco fever costume" "Brother Power the Geek" "Joss Whedon nice ass" "nude photos of Georgia O'Keefe" "black cat suck sausage" |
01.26.2005
The eerie blue-green planet of Aquilae slowly drifts into view. A small speck, orbiting the planet, glints in the light of a near-by star. Suddenly a sleek fighter-type spacecraft settles ominously into the foreground, moving ponderously slowly towards the orbiting speck. In fact, the fighter is moving at the speed of light, but at such vast distances they hardly seem to be moving at all. Two more fighters silently maneuver into battle formation behind the first; they have been flying for well over six thousand years, and all their piloting is done by ancient machines. One of the crews has died in suspended animation, and the other have completely forgotten the point of the mission due to faulty programming, but the lead ship is unaware of this due to a short-circuit in the internal communications sytems nearly four centuries ago. The orbiting speck is actually a gargantuan space fortress which dwarfs the approching fighters; it is so huge that it has required all the natural resources of Aquilae to keep it running. The men who guard the fortress have long since forgotten the purpose of their mission as well, but it scarcely matters to the impoverished people of the planet below, most of whom have cancer from the environmental disasters precipitated by launching the enormous craft. Fuel pods, horribly inefficient and entirely inadequate to the purpose of propelling a fighter ship through the infinite blackness of space, are jettisoned; each cost the ransom of a continent to construct, and those who still live on the unimaginably distant planets that spawned the fighters recall with shame and embarrassment the foolhardy attempt so long since past to actually conduct a war in space. It has become a truism, coined by the very man who designed the terrifyingly beweaponed attack craft, that it is more cost-effective and practical to have a single footsoldier carry a battle tank on his back than it is to carry an armed conflict outside one's solar system. Still and all, the computers do what they're told to do, since, like all computers before and since, that is all they are capable of. The fighters break off into a power dive attach against the huge fortress. Laser bolts from the fighters create huge scars in the complex surface of the mammoth orbiting encampment. Were anyone on the surface of the planet aware of the conflict (none of them are, of course, since they are sick unto dying and have long ago lost the arts of technology and astronomy), they might laugh a bitter laugh at the irony of a ship full of dead men and men without memory screaming death down upon another ship full of traitors and followers, defending a homeland they exploit and despise. Return fire catches one of the fighters and it bursts into a million pieces, destroying in half an instant the work of thousands of men, millions of hours, billions of dollars, an infinity of effort. Another craft plows into a gun emplacement jutting from the fortress, causing a hideous series of chain-reaction explosions. An unspeakable number of miles away, other planets live and thrive; they have given up space travel as an unproductive consumer of resources, and save their wars for when they make a difference. For them there are the stars, and for them there is the war, but here there is nothing but pointless death and waste. More explosions follow, a chaos of battle that those near it see as a searing awful hell but which cannot be seen from any vantage point that is recognizably human. It is silent, like all of space, and no one hears. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to Heaven if you die dumb." (Hyman Rickover) |