Just Another One Of Those "Story" Things...

[FairGamer9215]

Blue Cadet 3, Do You Connect?

Let me explain a little: This story was inspired by a little songwriting I did some time ago. It was all just meaningless brain vomit at the time, but when I looked back, they all sort of connected.
The title I used is from a Modest Mouse song, which gave me a huge amount of inspiration as I wrote the songs. Let me make it clear that the title is the only thing from that song that I took.
There is brief, strong language used in this story.

Prologue

I'm not a murderer.

Sure, they died. Sure, I could've helped. I could've done more. But that's my own fault, I guess. That doesn't make me evil, right? Just because you could've done something, but you didn't, that doesn't make you a criminal. You're only judged on what you do, not what you don't do. That's what I've learned, anyway.

No, I'm not a murderer. Am I?

I watched it all from my window in space. It all just sort of...folded inwards. And I just watched as they folded in with it. I knew it was going to happen. And yet I said nothing.

I'm a murderer, aren't I?

I built those people just to watch them die. I'm just a factory worker, a simple soul factory worker that never hurt anyone. I never killed anybody. I never stabbed a man or shot a woman for her purse. No, I'm a good person!

Right?

All I did was revive people. I mended their wounds. I reattached limbs and supplied spare organs. Sure, corporations got greedy. Sure, the businiessmen and their fancy suits came in and bought out all of the spare hearts and kidneys.

Sure, we built people. Why does that make me the bad guy? Why do I have to wade through the fires of h ell? Why did they get to die while I get to suffer up here in space?

Project Re-Colonization. A bunch of bullsh it if I've ever seen it. Haven't we taken enough?

Do I really have to suffer like this?

Yes. I'm A Murderer. And I will suffer.

I guess this is what I get for playing God.

 

[Dragonfree]

Sensibly enough, stuff that doesn't pertain to Pokémon goes in the "Non-Pokémon Fics" forum. Even if it didn't go there, it certainly wouldn't go here; this is the forum for discussing writing.

As a tip, because you can't indent on the forums, it is recommended that you double-space paragraphs instead - it makes things much neater and easier to read.

This is also rather short - I hope that's just because it's a prologue and that the actual chapters will be longer (have you read the fanfiction forum rules?). It sounds potentially intriguing, but there isn't much to go on.

 

[FairGamer9215]

Sensibly enough, stuff that doesn't pertain to Pokémon goes in the "Non-Pokémon Fics" forum. Even if it didn't go there, it certainly wouldn't go here; this is the forum for discussing writing.

As a tip, because you can't indent on the forums, it is recommended that you double-space paragraphs instead - it makes things much neater and easier to read.

This is also rather short - I hope that's just because it's a prologue and that the actual chapters will be longer (have you read the fanfiction forum rules?). It sounds potentially intriguing, but there isn't much to go on.

Thank you dragonfree. I will be editing and extending the prologue, don't worry. I just didn't want to write some long awesome story just to have it locked up, y'know? Also, I'm not sure if I can meet the 2 page Word Document rule. I'm using an odd sort of source to write this (DSi), and it'll only let me write so much at a time (spatial issues). I hope this won't be too large of an issue. I really want to share a story here!

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 1

Transport. Go in here, end up there. Planes flying over all those places you wouldn't be caught dead in. Standards and practices. No home like yours, like this one, utopia of smog, litter and monsters. This was my home. Transported against his will. Anything to get a job.

I start my day like any other. Get dressed, eat, shower, routine, et cetera, et cetera. I was living the dream, the American dream. Get a job, earn your living, make your life the way YOU want it. Such a hilarious joke, this dream. I ended up in a studio apartment overlooking my job. That's what everyone wants to see in the morning. A giant factory billowing smoke, giving mother nature a big ol' middle finger.

Welcome to the American Dream.

I go out the door, expecting the daily routine of mediochrity and the mundane. I work in a place where you put gadgets together. You know, the type of gadgets that flash colors and make noise. They keep everyone distracted and content, so no one asks questions. Why was half our country bought out by foreign industries? Shush now, here's a new laptop. This one is thinner and brighter! Yay consumerism! Its the perfect antibiotic. Its the new prozac or vikaden. Go to sleep with your new cell phone wrapped in your arms. This was my job. I helped make these things. I was the contaigen, a piece of the great virus. I helped create the distraction of the rest of the world.Hey, but that's not my fault. Its all I could do for money. If anything, the Dream made me this way.

All hail the American Dream.

So as I make my products, putting the screens on and tightening the bolts, I look around at all the other faces. They're all sagged and gray, scarred an bored. We aren't people anymore. We've become the automatons that were slowly replacing us. Timmy comes up to me, eyes sunken in and hands worked to the bone.

"Hey Blue." He said in his tiny voice.

"Hey Timmy." I patted his head. "How's work?" I asked. He shrugged, then went back to work.

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 1 con't

As I mentioned before, my writing is limited. I can only write entire chapters in a broken sort of way. Please be patient with me here, because there's really nothing I can do to help this. Now then, on with the story:

As Timmy continued to piece together the useless tinkertoys and playthings, I noticed the wrapping around his...well, what was left of his pinky.

"Aw, Timmy." He slightly turned to me. I put my work down for a second and approached him. "Not another finger. You've gotta be more careful." He looked at the remaining six fingers he had. On his left hand, his ring finger, pinky, and middle finger were merely stubs. On his right, was the bandaged, fresh nub of a pinky. He nodded.

"I know, Blue. I can't help it sometimes, y'know? Those gears back there move so fast, its hard to keep track." He laughed weakly.

"Jesus, I don't know why they let you kids in the back. Its criminal." I shook my head, only to catch the bossman looking over at me through the plated glass above. He, so smug and judgemental, peering as if a God down upon us lowly workers. He, who knows nothing of hard work, all his success inherited, this I knew. Without another word, I returned to work, and his eyes continued to scan the room.

Here we were, like leppers and cowards, subjected to the same torture of the almighty eye. As our bodies were scarred, bruised, and broken. As our reward dwindled and diminished, all funneling upwards. Punished for reasons we didn't know.

Why did I come to such a torturous place? One where children slaved and the minimum wage shrunk by the hour? Why did I toil on, day by day, working my fingers literally to the bone, watching my coworkers mysteriously vanish? Why did I stay here? Why didn't I escape?

The answer is simple: I had nowhere to escape to. All that was out there, aside from the gated communities, of course, was a caustic wasteland in a perpetual pollution shadow. To suffer in here seemed like a much better fate.

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 1 con't

What happened? How did it get this bad? Why did we let it get this far? You may not have noticed, but this is how America always reacts. When something scares us, threatens us, looms over us, the government takes it out on the citizens. It started with the Patriot Act. It happened a little while back with the Division Act, seperating the wealthy from the lower classes in order to "protect the job makers". All it did was seclude all the lesser-privileged into a dank wasteland, unobserved by most of the government. How did all this happen? Scare campaigns. Rigged elections. Abuse of power.

Sure, they revolted. Sure, they banded together to take down the government. Sure, they tried for their freedom. But guess what the government had?

A robotic army.

They debuted it on hundreds of millions of people, and from there, nobody has said anything.

I was born after the attempted revolution. I cried my first cries into a crowded, low-tech, unwanted hospital for those with no health insurance. Unsterilization was a common theme among all those in it. I was lucky I survived. My mother wasn't as lucky. She died in child birth. That left me with my father, a caring man with a bleak frame of mind. But when you live in a world like this, its hard to be anything, let alone optimistic. Needless to say, that rubbed off on me.

So I work in a toxic and deadly factory, watching kids screw gears to machines as their fingers fall off, and all I can do is watch as my life slowly dwindled away...

Little did I know, this day was different.

That's all for the first chapter. Please, give me some of your feedback! I'd love to hear some opinions!

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 2

"Can you expect a...a sort of...improvement in these actions? Do you see benefits to this act?"

"Well, of course. We wouldn't put through anything that we didn't see as benefitial to the community. You can't expect-"

"Yes, but how-"

"Think of it like this: For every citizen of the community that is...let's say 'less fortunate' than the top earners of the country, then they will ultimately benefit as well from the Act. See it like a fountain. As the lower classes are kept away, the upper class is given a better oppurtunity to flourish. The opportunities will shoot up, but will eventually flow back downwards. They get a seperate economy-"

"You can't expect any of those who are poor to accept this."

"They have to understand that this is merely a step in the direction of fixing our economy. Its the only way things can regulate and return to normal. As soon as everything balances out, we'll take down all the gates and allow society to re-assimalate. We need a way to create jobs and contain our assets."

"And you believe the Division Act will do such a thing?"

"Let's put it like this. I don't just believe it will; I know it will."

"Well, thanks for j...in...Jacks...Delef.....from the...Est....Rev....."

From there, the T.V. was static. The political pundent nonsense that constantly dribbled out of the television set plugged into the back of my head gave me a headache. So I did something no one else had done before.

I pulled the plug.

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 2 con't

"Sir?" No, I don't want anymore, thank you.

"Hey! Sir!" Really, I've gotten my fill of the propoganda of ancient times. I have nothing more to learn, just please, let me go.

"Security! We've got a runner!" Let me go.

"Security, #004 has removed the cable! I repeat, he has removed the cable!" Yes, I cut your umbilcal chord of conceit. Please, just let me go.

"Hey!" Just let me go.

"Stop right there! Hey! HEY! Don't move another step!" I can use my legs, they're my legs.

"Blue, get back to your Media Station!" I can use my brain, its my brain.

"Blue!" I can live this life. Its my life. It isn't yours. It was never yours. I want it back, just let me go.

"Blue,if you don't return to your Station,you are fired!" Let me go.

"Blue! Don't do this!" Let me go!

"...take him down. Activate assault code #314. Don't kill him."

All I could see was this quick, almost invisible streak of light. It shot out from the black, lustrous attatchment that protruded from the wall. It came right at me, hitting me square in the face, and knocking me back. I was dazed,the world just like the fuzz in the television.

They put these metal plates and software into our skulls at birth, and they just grew in there. It made me the perfect lightning rod. And just like that, the security drones, with their short bodies, spherical heads with a single, glowing red eye, rolled over to me and held me down.

And me, with all these thoughts and ideas, these controversies and lunatic feelings buzzing in my head, I couldn't help but mentally immolate myself.

But this was my choice, not theirs.

They made me like this.

The Dream made me hate all this.

"LET ME GO!"

But shouting was a futile effort. This was merely the start. Media Stations, blaring the political chats of years past, keeping us in line, reminding me how it got to this point, it only fueled my anger and hatred. I don't care about the robotic army. I don't care about weaknesses.

I want out.

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 2 con't

They dragged me to the top. They took me by the edges of my fingertips. The skin of my teeth. These robots, these fake people made by even more fake people, they delivered me straight to the Boss. Up the stainless steel stairs, through the deadbolt door, and into the plexiglass window room. He stood there, thick arms crossed, back tall and straight. Hair shaved. Glasses covering his black eyes. He stood there, silent and menacing, until the robots bolted the door shut. I sat on the ground, looking straight up at him. It was funny; even though I was at the same level of this man, he still towered above me.

"Get up." He said it so coldly, the window fogged. I stood, looking directly in his thick-lensed glasses. He started to pace the room a bit, then he waved one of his bulky arms at me. "What the hell were you thinking?" I didn't respond because I couldn't. Not yet. "You were on the clock. You can't just...run out the door! You have a responsibility to this company. That involves taking in any Media mandated by the government. You got that?"

I didn't move.

"Blue. Are we clear?"

Still silent. Still motionless.

"Blue?"

"I'm not your machine, Mr. Davis. I'm not a piece of metal. Not anymore." He just smirked after I said this. He approached me, arms crossed once more, in his sick, demented fashion.

"Listen, Blue. I don't care whether you think you're human or not. I don't care if you think you're different or special. You're a face. You're expendable. This company doesn't need the likes of you. A free thinker. That's all we need." He laughed a bit. His scorn was thick and sickening.

But I didn't care anymore.

"Listen, Davis, I can't take this anymore. This place is making me insane. I know you don't care about any of us. I know everyone down there, human or not, is just another robot to you, but I'm telling you..." I thought for a second. "I am a person. They...are people. They'll start thinking..." He laughed.

"Not for long."

 

[FairGamer9215]

Chapter 2 con't

"What do you mean?" I asked as he paced back to the plexiglass window. He stared out of it for a bit, overlooking all of the busy humans, working like robots fixing a dying machine, but with little success.

"Blue, you've been with us for how long now?" I hesitated, thinking as far back as I could.

"Since I was a kid, sir. Six...maybe?"

"Yes, that sounds about right. Now, in the...15 odd years you've been working here, did you ever suspect a robotic uprising? Maybe a...a redcoat moment, so to speak, where we could possibly be overthrown by these mindless metal slaves?" I nodded.

"Yes, sir. I had thought about it sometime before. When I was a kid, when I could still dream-"

"Did you ever think such a risk could be avoided?" I didn't know how to respond to that.

"...how do you mean?"

"This company has invested many years into research. Years, and dollars. We needed an alternative to robotic servants. Then we had an idea. How about humans that could never break down? They would never rust or glitch-"

"Sir, that's impossible-"

"Is it?" His eyes were wild and full of wonder. "Blue, could you imagine? An army...a vast collection of humans that can never die, never grow old-"

"What you're proposing here is inhuman-"

"Man creating man? That is inhuman? What you fail to understand, Blue, is that we do it every day. All the time. We just got used to it, so much so that the beauty of it was meaningless. But now, this company has harnessed that beauty. Producing souls, that's what this factory shall do!" And with that sentence, my heart sank.

"Producing...souls, sir?"

"Think, Blue. What is the difference between a robot and a human? To this day, that line is blurred. Yet, the one thing a human has that a robot will never possess...is a soul." He clenched his hand into a fist. "We will be the most productive company this country has ever known!"

Souls weren't special to Mr. Davis. To him, they were just more numbers in his checkbook.