It was at a hardly-morning time on a seashore-greyish morning that I was kicked off my home planet forever. I know, I hear you thinking: in such a case I could just you live in a wearing little house on some wayward floating rock light-seconds from home. But you'd be wrong.
In space for the last time, I was only a cadet. "In-training" was my dying status, and that's how I'll be in a computer system in my planet system until the wires fray and the network rots and every home and crater is abandoned--till the end of time. These are the kinds of thoughts that whirlpooled around my nervous system as I sat in concrete dust outside a defunct spacecraft. I thought being human would be more difficult than this.
My mind wandered into the air where I flew in orbit only 20-odd minutes prior. It was only a simple abduction. My first. Under the careless supervision of my superior I zeroed into a human girl. She had wires in her ears--headphones--and she was approaching an abandoned building all alone. It was textbook. All alone, no one would disturb us, or see, and in instants she'd be gone. She stepped into the hall and all I had to do was press a button. Abductions always start with the eyes to tether the head and secure soft tissue, and from the eyes the body is suffused with rays until there's nothing left. Her eyes glowed red and she was frozen. I was told it didn't hurt. First a crack, then a thud, and just like that, it all went wrong. Stone crumbled and the ground beneath her opened up. She hung for a moment, suspended by the eyes, still fixed into place by the abductions rays. But soon her ligaments couldn't bear the pressure and her eyes ripped right out of her skull and deposited the rest of her body down, down, down into the gaping void.
My work on xenoanthropology (the study of humans, who are to us, extraplanetary) will be destroyed or re-attributed.
Sunlight doesn't bother trying to penetrate the canopy. story about eyes. about how they wake up and the sun while making eye contact.
female pilot crashes plane due to incompetence
deeper past the canopy into a cloaked void
even the sun refuses to travel here
i move a step closer
On the edge of desolation the forest beckons. a cartographic lacuna filled with moss and dirt. A front of trees whose leaves evaporate into the fog promise up from down. Nothing could be worse than this I last remember thinking before I hold my breath and plunge into the dark. The smell of dirt and the comfort of spoliation satisfy concrete dust. another step and i begin to feel, a complex rhythm lightly shakes the ground. I'm light and dancing brings me closer to the heart of the forest. The ritual epicenter comes into scent with a coming thunderstorm, a clearing emerges and figures. Countless tiny men bold the rim and block my view. Nearly there, I push my way into the crowd. Facing my a gaping hole in dirt with hundreds of little holes descending down down down further than the eye can see. Smaller and smaller men with tools, some familiar and some instruments I didn't recognize and can't describe. But lute and flute and metal slabs alike they played in time, a rhythm too complex to recount or fully hear, so disorienting my surroundings became secondary and my body an abandoned shell. The other men, as many hundreds of them were there, I could be confident felt the same as me, as they were part of me and I a part of them, floating somewhere in the pit where the cacophany congregated and hypnotized us all. The vertigo lulled me in and as I gazed at my neighbor he did exactly as I wished, I knew. He stepped off and the music got faster, then another, then another. With each concession the music grew louder, faster, pulling us into a frenzy as the circle got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Soon twenty left, then ten, then two. Finally, me. The final sacrifice. I don't hesitate. Moments of free fall feel like hours. The dirt disappears and glossy windows reflect my image as I fly past them. Concrete in all directions and a glaring sky, the roof of my apartment where I stood just moments prior plumetted further into the blinding void, consumed by an unnatural sun. The people on the streets below grow closer but no more human. A man with a briefcase and a woman in a dress, all cold and far apart. No ritual here or on the roof or anywhere in a city like this. The ground now inches away I know my fate and I know I will not feel it. I know I harbor no resentment or regret, and I know the sound I'll make when I finally reach the ground.
it's the desert, it blows people away. imagine diffusing into sand, something like that, where every grain's a prism refracting light and scattering it like into the wind. but the light is grey because the sun is illusory there and it could never be so bright. the heat comes from the earth and youre drowning in a mirage.