The dream from night-before-last took place in a dystopian American south infested with lush, overblown, hallucinogenic images from its own mythical past, all idyllic Lost Cause ideas of plantation life, coal mining towns free of misery and disease, and Precious Moments figurines. Monstrous genetically-engineered unicorns and angels dotted the landscape like the water gods from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou or the fungal forests from Nausicaa
, thinking man-made artifacts clotted with some substance apparently divine, disinterested in the remnants of human civilization around them.
People stumbled blinking past these things, able to recognize their fictional past and their monsters more clearly than they could one another. Sometimes they were gathered up and killed by disinterested, clear-eyed men and women in uniform; sometimes they were able to recognize what was happening to them. A few did try to escape, but not all.
One raging, half-feral little girl whose dull-eyed parents did not care why they were being brought into the old Amtrak station attacked a startled man and escaped. She wasn't pursued; there was no reason to think she would survive alone. Something in the world had affected her mind, and she was full of hate and capable, if she had been given the tools, of destroying everything in it.
She meets a sharp-eyed woman standing alone by a fence, who looks at her in surprise, and gives her something - a weapon or a cellular phone, I think - and a set of directions to a safe place. The girl leaves. A little while later another woman comes with a car to pick her up, worried; they'd thought she might have been assassinated. The sharp-eyed woman, Cayenne, is a scientist of some kind, and also a diplomat, the kind with all the weapons; a lot of this, maybe all of it, is her fault. Talking to her, it's hard to know whether she understands or regrets it. In the sense that human beings are creatures capable of empathy, she may never have been human. Her attention has always been oddly fixed on something else.
For about ten years she's maintained a delicate peace in the city a couple of hours west of here, but something happened at a political event this morning, and she walked calmly out into the hills by herself to wait it out. Her bodyguards aren't as reliable as they should be, except for this one. She tells her bodyguard to follow that girl, that she's driving herself back to the lab. There's some stuff she wants to get done tonight.
- and at that point I woke up; but my dreams tend to keep wandering around in my head when I don't get enough sleep. I think the conclusion I came to was that something had happened to end or seriously disrupt normal human reproduction, and that the landscape was generating children, this girl somehow being Cayenne's daughter/clone/replacement/heir/natural nemesis, despite the fact that her biological parents were different. I don't know if this is going to end well, bodyguard! I don't think you want a plotline about this kid's upbringing, I think she's bad news.
This is all really probably based on Cyteen
, which I attempted to describe to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thegeekgene the other day.
, thinking man-made artifacts clotted with some substance apparently divine, disinterested in the remnants of human civilization around them.People stumbled blinking past these things, able to recognize their fictional past and their monsters more clearly than they could one another. Sometimes they were gathered up and killed by disinterested, clear-eyed men and women in uniform; sometimes they were able to recognize what was happening to them. A few did try to escape, but not all.
One raging, half-feral little girl whose dull-eyed parents did not care why they were being brought into the old Amtrak station attacked a startled man and escaped. She wasn't pursued; there was no reason to think she would survive alone. Something in the world had affected her mind, and she was full of hate and capable, if she had been given the tools, of destroying everything in it.
She meets a sharp-eyed woman standing alone by a fence, who looks at her in surprise, and gives her something - a weapon or a cellular phone, I think - and a set of directions to a safe place. The girl leaves. A little while later another woman comes with a car to pick her up, worried; they'd thought she might have been assassinated. The sharp-eyed woman, Cayenne, is a scientist of some kind, and also a diplomat, the kind with all the weapons; a lot of this, maybe all of it, is her fault. Talking to her, it's hard to know whether she understands or regrets it. In the sense that human beings are creatures capable of empathy, she may never have been human. Her attention has always been oddly fixed on something else.
For about ten years she's maintained a delicate peace in the city a couple of hours west of here, but something happened at a political event this morning, and she walked calmly out into the hills by herself to wait it out. Her bodyguards aren't as reliable as they should be, except for this one. She tells her bodyguard to follow that girl, that she's driving herself back to the lab. There's some stuff she wants to get done tonight.
- and at that point I woke up; but my dreams tend to keep wandering around in my head when I don't get enough sleep. I think the conclusion I came to was that something had happened to end or seriously disrupt normal human reproduction, and that the landscape was generating children, this girl somehow being Cayenne's daughter/clone/replacement/heir/natural nemesis, despite the fact that her biological parents were different. I don't know if this is going to end well, bodyguard! I don't think you want a plotline about this kid's upbringing, I think she's bad news.
This is all really probably based on Cyteen
, which I attempted to describe to thegeekgene the other day.
