dolls have no need for suits on their excursions. no need for oxygen, or human pressures. they walk into the airlock bare, only their tools accompanying them, and let the deep's inky brine suffuse their shells.
it's best to avoid partnering with a doll. shifts are traded and forced between submariners in the mess, men going sleepless against regulation, or foisted upon the misfits and losers too scared to fight back. no one wants to turn around on the rail and have his heart leap into his throat when he sees that stiff corpse floating in his lampbeam, swimming through space like it's too good for a tether, dead eyes gleaming out of a face mocking all life. no one wants to partner with a doll. he'd be insane.
they're sealed on the other side of the boat from us. to protect them from us, or perhaps us from them. every time we pass one or three in the hall we avert our eyes, sweating. every time that bulkhead opens we can hear their infernal chattering and song. with each excursion the noise seems to grow only more erratic.
the captain has admitted they've killed before, though not in those words. "assigned to a different position," she says, her grim expression revealing exactly what she thinks of that particular euphemism. we don't know how we could defend ourselves. attacking them bodily only disassembles them at the joints, and they pop right back in as if nothing had happened. one man might handle one or two this way but i've an eerie feeling that if they do decide to come for us, they'll come as a swarm.
no one wants to partner with a doll. no one wants to look one in the eye, and see the dead man staring back.
Sheer cotton chemise, lace-hemmed drawers, gently pressed against your skin. Silk stockings, of course, pinned up by the corset I'll draw about your waist- not too tightly, I promise!- then petticoat layers in sumptous lace, a bodice to be sure that we mind your modesty. Oh, stop fussing about your figure! We can shape that however you like. Most women do, you know. We've ruffles and gathers to fill out wherever appropriate.
Now, you may choose your favourite colour (within reason). Oh, is that so? Well I've several to match, but this one suits best, don't you think? No, I don't think it's a little much. Rather, layers of satin and crepe-de-chine suit you perfectly. Oh you look simply darling, you do, we're almost done. Silk gloves, for the season, and let me set off your eyes with ribbons in your hair. And perhaps... well, some might consider it a little gauche, but let me tie another around your neck. Perfect. You are simply perfect.
Now, come along, no shyness- I simply must show everyone my work.
The other girl in the basement has more chain, and never talks to you. You tried, of course, when you first woke up shackled to the wall. Screamed at her until you went hoarse. You didn't have enough leash to get anywhere near her, or do anything besides lay down. She went about her day, cycling between calisthenics and reading a stack of books next to her nest of cushions. She was probably in her late thirties, and must have been a fitness nut before this.
The captor, because she never gave you any other name, never interacts with her in front of you. She's younger, and talks absentmindedly, but rarely seems to expect or want an answer.
Once every day, she comes downstairs with cattle prod and hood in hand, and takes you from the claustrophobic basement up the stairs, right turn, five paces, into another windowless room. It has only a treadmill and a chair. You refused, at first, and learned exactly how badly a cattle prod hurt. You swore to never eat meat again after your escape.
The captor demands nothing else of you, and answers no questions. She takes the other girl at different times, for far longer, and she returns with deep bruises, sometimes bloodied. You try to be grateful.
Each day you run, as fast as you can, for however long she makes you. The pace ticks up, day over day, and your heart rate settles into a comfortable spot. What had once left you gasping and pleading to stop, spurred on only by violent threats, is now an easy jog.
You couldn't say how long it had been, the day the routine changed. The captor took the other girl, and then came down again for you. Up the stairs, left turn, ten paces, down two short steps and… a breeze?
The hood comes off, and you're outside. It is late afternoon, and you furiously blink away tears. Your prison sits in a small clearing, a cabin with woods sprawling on every side of it. The air, fresh after so long, is thick with pine and so delightfully green.
The other girl is there too - without restraints. Standing, tight as a whip, staring into the woods.
The captor gestures to the treeline.
"Run. You get a five minute head start."
The words take a moment to register. You're weightless, giddy. You have no bearing, but you loved the woods as a child, and the captor does not seem dressed for the chase at all, in a long dressing gown and slippers. You bolt into the trees, the taste of freedom on your lips.
At a hundred yards, you realize the other girl did not start running with you. She had not been staring at the trees. She was waiting, impatiently. The realization sinks like a stone in your stomach, but you press on. Brush whips at your legs, leaving stinging cuts.
You hear her start. The first sound you've ever heard her make, an awful, baying howling. And then deathly silence, in comparison to your clumsy fleeing.
That's the problem with an exotic pet, you know. It needs live prey.
Moorland stretches to the horizon, boundless, pitiless. It is a beautiful place to die, and though she'd not have chosen it, this death will be beautiful too.
"My name will be remembered," she says aloud. One of the trannies - the little ratlike thing, the one carrying the shovels - starts humming. "By my people, yes, as leader, theoretician, hero. But most of all by yours." She permits herself a smile, tight and drawn, grim as fate. Wind stirs her hair. "I will," she begins again, and is shot in the back of the head.
The sound of the gunshot wanders away across the moor, more pop than bang. The bigger of the two women puts away her gun, and her wife, shifting her ditty from hum to whistle, starts to dig.
girls love the overgrown megastructure. girls want to live in the overgrown megastructure. girls want to build communities and societies in the overgrown megastructure
excitedly running up to you and getting in your face going "notice anything... different? :D" and my eye colour has changed because i replaced my last set with some i ripped out of a poor girl i found on the side of the road
robot friend does not agree. 'failure' is inability to fulfill directive. human has no programmed directive. human evolutionary directive is to live. you are alive. everything else is bonus.
I’ve been saving this message in my inbox for a long time because it always makes me feel better. I needed it today. Thank you
I think Makima is notionally TME but she's a female Devil so she'd be cool with the dolls if she weren't so bad with us
woman concealing a secret that marks her as a nonhuman to be controlled and used and/or an existential threat to civilization to be eliminated. has weird non-blood-related found kinship sisters but no biological parents in the picture, congenitally infertile, completely severed from the nuclear family. treats her body like a disposable receptacle for violence and a disposable lure to receive the lusts of others. thousand yard stare
Local artist, hungry, desperate, sells her soul to "bring about the better world." Shrewdly insists on a guarantee of satisfaction in the contract.
Devil agrees, gives her the reins of a bloody uprising, to her outrage. Months of campaign follow, in moments of stress she fondles the amulet that holds the contract: if dissatisfied, snap the chain to return herself and the whole world to the moment before the signing.
In the better world, she is a carpenter. Much must be rebuilt.
When she is old, the devil steps over her threshold, and remarks on the children at play. Don't congratulate me, she says, I'm no mother. Those are my neighbors' children. We share the load around here.
Satisfied? he asks; yes, she says. Then it's time to give the amulet back: contract fulfilled. She leaves an older child in charge of things, goes to her room, to the back of her closet, for her old uniform.
The jacket ill fits now. The radio earpiece is just for show.
Do you have it? he asks; no, she says, and hands the devil a shovel. Come with me. Out to the graveyard. Dig, boy.
I wanted out so many times, she says, to snap that chain and go back to the negotiating table and say not like that, you lying son-of-a-bitch, I wanted peace. But everyone all around me really believed. That red-black flag meant everything to those poor saps.
The shovel hits wood.
So, she says, when my love took one in the chest, I didn't go back. I knelt with her in the rubble and I pressed that damned charm into her hands, and I asked her if she'd go back if she could.
The devil looks up from the digging and finds her staring him down. So, she says, guess who's still got it? Go fetch, boy, then you fix up this grave when you're done and you go back to hell until I'm dead and it's time for you to collect. We have no further business.
And the devil thinks, maybe the jacket does fit her after all.
another of my perfect pprecious daughters crawls out of it and paralyzes a pedestrian with a trained, well-aimed bite through the spinal cord before turning around and dragging the warm body back through the nearest entrance on her way to the nurseries
vaporwave
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