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shadow_vector2011-10-08 11:46 am
niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in shadow_vector2011-10-08 11:46 am
Entry tags:
Slouches Toward Entropy
Title: Slouches Toward Entropy
Rating: PG
Verse: Dreamwave
Genre: Gen
Characters: Jetfire/The Fallen
Warnings: none
Other Notes: Based on Dreamwave apocrypha here
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
No. Please. Illogical, but Jetfire pleaded with reality, trying to deny the vibration of his body, the sight, the sound, of the ice cutter drilling closer, ever closer.
Jetfire clung to the icy bite of cold around him as though trying to sink himself further into the glacier, to press himself back, away from the ‘rescue’. Snow had vaporized upon his heated landing, falling from the sky like some ancient omen, and frozen around him, a hard, crystalline shell, a cocoon from which he never wanted to be released.
Mere ice will not hold us forever. All things change. All decay. Even torment has an end.
Not that it was pleasant here—the cold bit into his joints, eating into his cortex. And then…the vision. Memory. He couldn’t classify it, and that fact alone had devoured him for cycles, but he could no longer deny the kernel of heat over his spark. The Fallen had captured him again, and more thoroughly this time. One of the Angles of Dissolution, his again.
If Jetfire allowed himself to stop thinking, if he let his processor spin down, such as in the small span between online and recharge, he could hear him, as well, the Fallen. At first just a torrent of sound, grandiloquent syllables in an endless cascade, that lulled in their own right, soothing rhythms. Too soothing.
But they’d resolve into words, long strings of data, that Jetfire’s cortex struggled to decode, trying to claim it was auditory matrixing. It was madness, it had to be. His own, or the echoing remnant of Sunstorm. Otherwise….
Think upon what I have seen, what I have known. Empires, universes, vast and hollow, teeming with life, empty of substance. Splendor beyond imagining. Can you conceive it, mere mortal? Can your limited intellect, your feeble, pitiful faith in the tangible even allow for the existence of time beyond time, space outside of space?
Divinity couldn’t be like this. If there must be things beyond science, they could not, should not, be so easily confused with processor errors. Sunstorm had had Vector Sigma partially downloaded into his cortex—that had started it. Or that had saved him from the fast, ugly death of his clone comrades, granting him an end, slow, arrogant, and hopefully too lost in madness to feel.
Was that what this was? Simple cortical overclocking. Or the Fallen. It seemed so petty, such a small, narrow doorway through which what claimed to be omnipotence could enter.
Angle, and by your very name you are limited, Jetfire. Angle of Dissolution. An incomplete shape, a vector center without bound. My creature, a key to unlock the gates of ending, termination. Entropy, do you understand? Matter is an illusion, a vibration we tell ourselves has color, texture, shape. The closer we look and the real unknits, doesn’t it? And what’s left, Jetfire? What becomes of your science? What becomes of your reality?
And he’d argued, those first megacycles, with himself, claiming that it was nothing but that: overclocking, or damage to his processors from the heat, from the fall. He’d clung to his science until he’d realized that it was just that—clinging, a desperate clutch after a pet theory.
Science itself was nothing more than one grand hypothesis, though, based on unreliable assumptions: that the world could be understood, that the laws of nature were uniform, that experiences were repeatable. Reason itself was nothing more than a carefully crafted illusion.
What moves the quarks? What gives leptons their spin? The space between elementary particles is mine to wield. Pure, massive entropy. The largest thing in the universe: Nothing. And it is mine. It is me. I inhabit the space between your spaces, Jetfire. I am entropy. I am entirety.
What did letting all that go mean, then? What did it do, in the end, to let go of logic. And fear. And reason. And the whole art of knowing called science. What did it feel like to give that up?
It felt like dissolution, annihilation.
Annihilation. End. Eternity. My charge among the Thirteen. Unmaking. Unbinding. The ultimate, intimate freedom. Yes.
A crack, sharp enough to startle him out of the swathed cavern his mind had become. The ice split, shattering like a last hope. Charge filled the capacitors of his limbs, burning with the desire—his?—to move. And what could he do: Cliffjumper’s face, a rare smile, welcoming him back, all innocent, all blind, despite his aeons at war.
“Get you out of there soon,” the red mech said. As if the words would be welcome. As if freeing him was salvation.
Salvation. The word thrummed through his cortex, plucked from his own interior thoughts, singing through his body, sending a thermal surge through his frame. Jetfire could feel the ice around him start to liquefy, slide through his joints, melting around him.
Salvation. From what? Materiality? Existence? That festering mass the weak cling to, called mortality? That dread burden of conscience? I know the universe from the beginning. I contain vastnesses, the entire span of history itself. I am beyond restriction. Beyond limitation. I am life in death. Death in life. I am the simplicity of paradox, the impossibility of negating that which never has been real.
Salvation. Life. The alien presence inside him hungered for it, pushing toward the blinding light of the heat-torch, the Fallen clambering over him toward existence, movement, power. Jetfire struggled to control it, feeling the heat surge along his circuits, the weighty, ponderous intellect lolling against his own, the sussurus voice chortling, crackling in the shattering ice.
Nothing exists except entropy. Nothing is real except unreality. Nothing matters, nothing lasts, beyond chaos. Beyond me.
Be grateful, Jetfire, for I have saved you. And the wonders/horrors I shall show you….? Paradox resolves itself in chaos’s embrace. You shall see. You shall know.
Rating: PG
Verse: Dreamwave
Genre: Gen
Characters: Jetfire/The Fallen
Warnings: none
Other Notes: Based on Dreamwave apocrypha here
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
No. Please. Illogical, but Jetfire pleaded with reality, trying to deny the vibration of his body, the sight, the sound, of the ice cutter drilling closer, ever closer.
Jetfire clung to the icy bite of cold around him as though trying to sink himself further into the glacier, to press himself back, away from the ‘rescue’. Snow had vaporized upon his heated landing, falling from the sky like some ancient omen, and frozen around him, a hard, crystalline shell, a cocoon from which he never wanted to be released.
Mere ice will not hold us forever. All things change. All decay. Even torment has an end.
Not that it was pleasant here—the cold bit into his joints, eating into his cortex. And then…the vision. Memory. He couldn’t classify it, and that fact alone had devoured him for cycles, but he could no longer deny the kernel of heat over his spark. The Fallen had captured him again, and more thoroughly this time. One of the Angles of Dissolution, his again.
If Jetfire allowed himself to stop thinking, if he let his processor spin down, such as in the small span between online and recharge, he could hear him, as well, the Fallen. At first just a torrent of sound, grandiloquent syllables in an endless cascade, that lulled in their own right, soothing rhythms. Too soothing.
But they’d resolve into words, long strings of data, that Jetfire’s cortex struggled to decode, trying to claim it was auditory matrixing. It was madness, it had to be. His own, or the echoing remnant of Sunstorm. Otherwise….
Think upon what I have seen, what I have known. Empires, universes, vast and hollow, teeming with life, empty of substance. Splendor beyond imagining. Can you conceive it, mere mortal? Can your limited intellect, your feeble, pitiful faith in the tangible even allow for the existence of time beyond time, space outside of space?
Divinity couldn’t be like this. If there must be things beyond science, they could not, should not, be so easily confused with processor errors. Sunstorm had had Vector Sigma partially downloaded into his cortex—that had started it. Or that had saved him from the fast, ugly death of his clone comrades, granting him an end, slow, arrogant, and hopefully too lost in madness to feel.
Was that what this was? Simple cortical overclocking. Or the Fallen. It seemed so petty, such a small, narrow doorway through which what claimed to be omnipotence could enter.
Angle, and by your very name you are limited, Jetfire. Angle of Dissolution. An incomplete shape, a vector center without bound. My creature, a key to unlock the gates of ending, termination. Entropy, do you understand? Matter is an illusion, a vibration we tell ourselves has color, texture, shape. The closer we look and the real unknits, doesn’t it? And what’s left, Jetfire? What becomes of your science? What becomes of your reality?
And he’d argued, those first megacycles, with himself, claiming that it was nothing but that: overclocking, or damage to his processors from the heat, from the fall. He’d clung to his science until he’d realized that it was just that—clinging, a desperate clutch after a pet theory.
Science itself was nothing more than one grand hypothesis, though, based on unreliable assumptions: that the world could be understood, that the laws of nature were uniform, that experiences were repeatable. Reason itself was nothing more than a carefully crafted illusion.
What moves the quarks? What gives leptons their spin? The space between elementary particles is mine to wield. Pure, massive entropy. The largest thing in the universe: Nothing. And it is mine. It is me. I inhabit the space between your spaces, Jetfire. I am entropy. I am entirety.
What did letting all that go mean, then? What did it do, in the end, to let go of logic. And fear. And reason. And the whole art of knowing called science. What did it feel like to give that up?
It felt like dissolution, annihilation.
Annihilation. End. Eternity. My charge among the Thirteen. Unmaking. Unbinding. The ultimate, intimate freedom. Yes.
A crack, sharp enough to startle him out of the swathed cavern his mind had become. The ice split, shattering like a last hope. Charge filled the capacitors of his limbs, burning with the desire—his?—to move. And what could he do: Cliffjumper’s face, a rare smile, welcoming him back, all innocent, all blind, despite his aeons at war.
“Get you out of there soon,” the red mech said. As if the words would be welcome. As if freeing him was salvation.
Salvation. The word thrummed through his cortex, plucked from his own interior thoughts, singing through his body, sending a thermal surge through his frame. Jetfire could feel the ice around him start to liquefy, slide through his joints, melting around him.
Salvation. From what? Materiality? Existence? That festering mass the weak cling to, called mortality? That dread burden of conscience? I know the universe from the beginning. I contain vastnesses, the entire span of history itself. I am beyond restriction. Beyond limitation. I am life in death. Death in life. I am the simplicity of paradox, the impossibility of negating that which never has been real.
Salvation. Life. The alien presence inside him hungered for it, pushing toward the blinding light of the heat-torch, the Fallen clambering over him toward existence, movement, power. Jetfire struggled to control it, feeling the heat surge along his circuits, the weighty, ponderous intellect lolling against his own, the sussurus voice chortling, crackling in the shattering ice.
Nothing exists except entropy. Nothing is real except unreality. Nothing matters, nothing lasts, beyond chaos. Beyond me.
Be grateful, Jetfire, for I have saved you. And the wonders/horrors I shall show you….? Paradox resolves itself in chaos’s embrace. You shall see. You shall know.
no subject
the contrasts between The Fallen's words and Jetfire's thoughts/resistance are just lovely. you can hear how crazypants arrogant The Fallen is, but he makes a scary kind of sense too and that sent shivers down my arms. and Jetfire! he knows he's screwed, and possibly a bit crazypants himself, but he also knows that he doesn't want to just give in to The Fallen--or to anything else anymore. the world around poor Jetfire has gone mad, and he's ready to check out now.
it's beautiful, even as it's tragic. loved it. <3
no subject
I particularly like the poetic notes in this. I love how you write Fallen's Oh-so-proper diction. I love particularly how it speaks to Jetfire, while also clashing with his own metre of thinking.
Its delightful.
no subject