video | un: Priorly (old man yells at clouds)

[priorly]

[After a cluster of days spent surfing park benches, with sleep only a brief and unwelcome interruption, Prior has finally made it to the space station. He comes onto the screen, a black shadow in a gleaming hallway: if he looks like death on a mission to avenge itself, that is the intended effect. It may be more Norma Desmond descending a staircase, but that's not far off, either. He's still clutching a cane just to hold himself upright. His voice is raspy but loud, and just a few notes higher pitched than it should be.]

Is everyone back from the dead now? Good. Wouldn't want our new arrivals seeing the aftereffects of that little mess, would we. How good that our merciful overseers can let us go through days of torture, days of agony, let our skin slough off and our eyes burn out, let us choke on gas until we suffocate from it, then kindly bring us back so we can all do it again next time someone in this sadistic little shithole gets a fresh bee in their bonnet.

You know - on earth - I always had trouble with the idea of a non-interventionist God. But non-interventionist omnipotent aliens? Well goddamn. Fuck that. Fuck them.

Oh, they can play with the native's minds so a talking racoon looks like business as usual, but they can't stop them wanting to kidnap us?

They can see everything we do and they can't tell our fucking friends where we are?

What is the point of them, then? What's the point of any of this? They haven't rescued us from any storm, they've just left us stranded on a tiny, hostile island, wondering whether our little bit of sand is going to wash away before or after the natives get around to eating us.

Well I am tired and I am sick and I am through with this bullshit. Was anyone else told they'd look after our loved ones for us? Because I have loved ones down there now, and they were not looked after well. Maybe I should let a few of the next-to-wake know exactly how reassuring all those promises look now.

I don't know what to do, but it seems to me that we're being hung out to dry down there, and someone needs to do something. So I'm going to start by finding one of these assholes and seeing what happens.

Comments

[priorly]

[He's already done the 'where does it look like' routine so.]

The bowels of the station. Near the engines, I think, it sounds like the whole place is breathing from down here.

[summertimeblues]

Playing Jonah and the Whale, are we? that's cute.

[But he's on his way, jokes aside. When the footsteps of clean loafers make dull tangs on the steel steps, Prior might find that the ghost he's been speaking to looks the part a shade too closely. Oh, sure, they stitched up his skin so that the seams disappeared, they tacked on some fresh nails to replace the ones he's dropped off like Easter eggs all around the Institute storage. But he's wan. Thinned out from lack of rest and food, black bags hanging under his blue eyes, and always with a bottle of something-something in hand. Today it's scotch again. Can't put the stuff down.

He pads down into the bowels with ginger feet, but skips the last step with a jump. Childish. But hey, he's still got some life in him. He doesn't like the idea of coming around looking beat to hell when Prior's still putting up with the worst of it.

And is he ever. Richie didn't think it was possible for the guy to lose more weight, he was already twiggy enough on the first meet and greet. What's the prognosis now, Doc? How close are we getting?

He fights the cotton-dry feel of his mouth. And of course, his constant refuge in uncertainty remains the same.]

Jaysus tangled in joo-niper twigs, yer a soight for sahre eyes, ye are! Oh aye, Oi've seen the ends of asses snarled in brambles that looked fitter'n you sir, sure an' begorah!

[priorly]

[Sometimes, the last few days particularly, Prior thinks that anger is what keeps him alive. Oh, screw the medication, decent rest and respite, forget food, he's too pissed to die. There is a certain driven intensity to him that looks like crazy to the untrained eye. And maybe getting dragged up in black like a divorcee at her ex's wedding doesn't allay that image but it's keeping him standing when every individual part of him feels ready to break.

There's also, at the back of his mind, a little suspicion that he can't go with work undone. The angel and this disease are tangled up somehow and until one lets him go the other can only do so much to unravel him.

All in all, it adds up to a curious lack of fear. Which leads to recklessly marching into alien territory, literally enough, and demanding - something. He doesn't know exactly what he's demanding yet. Figures it will come out at the right time. As long as he's still standing, he'll work things out.

And then Richie rounds the corner and almost knocks him sideways with nothing more than a fresh new face already worn down round the edges. Prior's focus skips down to the scotch and then back to his face as he starts in with.... utter nonsense but the kind you can't help exhaling a laugh about, it's so out of step with everything else.

I saw you dead. It flickers at the edge of conscious thought, trying to push its way into words. Only for a moment, and when he was barely able to tell ground from sky, but some images sear themselves in seconds.

I saw you dead.

He sniffs, and lowers his sunglasses to the tip of his nose, peering brown-eyes and dismissive over them.]

Well. I never took the irish for being such brutes. When a girl's past her best it's considered uncouth to mention it. Instead one suggests soft lighting and clothes that drape rather than cling.

[He flaps one side of his coat. Voila, drapery.]

I may not be at my best. But I'll have you know I'm not at my worst either.

[summertimeblues]

[That look, that hesitation. Even behind the sunglasses and the Morticia Adams wrappings its unmistakable. He was fine shooting messages but when it came to gazing upon his bones and sad sack eyes in the flesh, Prior was balking. Word probably did spread some, then. It wasn't like they had a paper with a steady stream of Obits to hit up, but gossip spread. They had to have done some kind of body count in the aftermath. Or maybe he'd laid there outside the front of the institute for a while. Some kind of fetid, seeping omen. Tread carefully all ye who enter here. Prior could have spotted him on the way out.

He's sure he made it out. He remembers it, the parting of the fog. Doesn't remember much, but he remembers the steady dig of Yusuke's shoulder under his arm. Feeling high as a kite with the gifts from that gas mask. Something placid, something frightening, and then came the light. He can't say who or what was kicking around him at that point. Pigs could have flew overhead and shit in his mouth, and he would've missed it.]

Sitting somewhere in the middle, then, that's a-okay. I can work with that. [Richie purses his lips. Truth be told, he's more than a little concerned. He can afford to go off the rails. Still got enough spring in him to bounce between bottles and powdered salves and nights on the town, skipping meals, smoking up, skipping sleep. Prior shouldn't have that luxury. And if he's been dealing half as shittily as Richie estimates, maybe it's worth trying to talk him back.

Like you'd know how, you goddamn hypocrite.

His grip tightens on the bottle. Then he tentatively closes some of the space between them, looking back over his shoulder as if he'd been shaking a tailing busybody.]

I take it none of our benefactors are taking you up on the offer for peace talks, huh?

[priorly]

Everyone thinks they'll put me back in stasis. [Prior smiles, something stretched and wan with the weight of all the worries put on him. His mistake, really, was to announce the whole plan. Should've swept up here unannounced and let people shake him for it after. There would, at least, be less guilt involved.

He tosses his head, less dismissive than it looks.] For making a nuisance of myself, or something. Being a bug on their windshield. Well, if we're insects to them I think we should know. But I think they put too much work into this little project for that.

[Richie's hesitant forward motion's met by an upward tilt to Prior's head, no greater invitation than that, but no recoil either. He hates when people opt for open-coffin affairs and the whole city down below's a walking mass of them, and now here – but right now his focus is on keeping his vision to the present. It's been skipping, lately. Since the Angel picked up her chorus in his head, since his blood started singing with scripture again, he sees past-present-future- a thousand possible futures in a jerky stop-frame and it's getting harder to tell them apart.

I saw you dead - can see - will see and every death's a different one. One's choking out over someone's shoulder. One's earthy, cold and dark, buried already somehow.

And then there's Richie, here and now, coming toward him with the bottle. Lets pull those threads together and settle on this one, it's enough to be getting on with.]

Besides, they woke me up sick already. If seeing us suffer's really what they like there would be no point sending me back for a nap. [A quick jerk of his head.] No, they'll talk to me. Even if it's just to tell me they have nothing to say. That server in the dining hall's one of them, you know, I'll make placards and stand on tables if I have to.

[summertimeblues]

As good as the nap might be for you, I think I speak for us all when I say I'd rather you not go under the glass again. [Not that it had to be a permanent state. Just look at him!

Quite abruptly, he remembers Diana's disappearing act. She'd been gone three days too. Had woken up with a lifetime of new memories (and yet was still waltzing about in that bodacious bod, must be glamorous to live eternity as an Amazon). Hadn't the same happened to some woman on the network? She'd aged, if he's recalling the details correctly, but she woke up and remembered more than she came in with.

If Prior pissed the aliens off good enough, would they stick him in the pod and turn back the clock? Richie wouldn't put it past them. They were capable of so much, and their motives murky.

He clucks his tongue disdainfully.] But I think — and this is just me old imagination running, so take my words lightly — that if they were gonna lock someone away for mouthing off, it would be someone that had a bit more dirt. You're barking up a storm but it's not anything more than what the rest of us had been thinking. Now, say you found out they were behind the Storm, or that this was all the follow up to that old "To Serve Man" baloney, well. Then we might have a problem.

[He's hardly wrong, though. Insects, perhaps not, unless it was bugs in a lab. Test subjects. Or just...what?

Soldiers?

Richie's lips thin. He hates to say it, hates to think it, but if there ever was a crowd more capable, they'd be rounded up in the Pentagon. Or shit, running hurdles and throwing shot put at the Olympics. It may not always be in a warrior's sense, but there wasn't a soul he met here that could be counted as ordinary. Prior looks like an exception.

Can't be. Not if they woke him up. Their selections were far, far too pointed to believe anything was innocent.]

Then you're likely to get Martian pubes in your hashbrowns. Why would the kitchen staff be in on the conspiracy? [Richie grits his teeth. They might be here a bit. He wouldn't mind a slow down, change of pace. Not dodging, drifting, racing bigger men than he to the bottom of pints and hunting for the next numbing high.

Richie folds up at the base of a boiler and pats the space next to him. He does play hypocrite, however, popping the cap on the scotch the moment his ass touches ground. He's feeling too nervous to do without, and so takes a bracing swig before carrying on.]

I don't believe they aren't invested. They are pouring phenomenal resources into us sadsacks, but the lack of help on the ground is suspicious. I'm getting real tired of being swept along in a war that none of came to start or finish. It's almost like... [He looks to the ceiling. His frown is small and tight.] ...test runs. Making sure things are ready for the market.

[priorly]

[Prior hacks up a laugh of sorts over the (wise enough) suggestion that it's best not to eat somewhere the chef might have cause to piss in your soup. Or the sci-fi alternative: martian pubes. It's certainly a notion, perhaps even a welcome one, that the species that's marked itself as their superior might just be petty enough to do it. Well, he'd play restaurant roulette for the right odds, but even he's aware the route to power may not be swiftest via the butler.

The back of his mind's dwelling on a different remark, say you found out they were behind the storm and the new and unexplored avenues of outrage that opens up. How convenient it is, how neat that their worlds are gone while this one needs fresh blood to prosper.

So maybe it's not an ant farm, maybe it's an organ donation clinic with a sideline in serial killing. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Too many of them, they're crowding each other out and he wants to go in there with a simple why.]

Then I'm here to let them know that research panels have been assessing the situation, and we have feedback to give. [Not that they're going to reshoot the ending, no matter the panning the narrative gets, but next time. Next time's what he's clinging to. He runs his thumb over the boiler surface, ringing out as it flicks across metal indents, and leans against it but doesn't stoop to join Richie.]

I can't sit on the floor, I won't get back up. [It's a life of constant humiliations and here's another. Get too far down and just the mountain of getting back on his feet becomes insurmountable. They went hard on his leg in their little hotel of horrors, it's worse than useless now. He'd have to have help, and even then, with tiredness fogging the back of every thought there's a risk he'd just sleep there. He watches that scotch bottle tilt with a shiver of envy, watches Richie's hand around it more jealously still.

He is a tactile creature, all needs and nerve endings, and words are a charm but they're not going to bring him down from this. A hand wrapping his wrist might get closer, some kind of anchor under his raring pulse. If someone had been able to hold him in any physical sense maybe he'd never have run this far. But he's guarding himself for the same reason, to keep from being swayed.] But I'm tired too. I'm tired of being fucked up, fucked over, done unto, and seeing other people fucked up too. I want to do something now. Even if it's nothing in the end. I've got to keep going and find out.

[And yet he puffs himself up but doesn't leave, not yet. He runs a finger along the back collar of his coat, a poor choice for engine-warmed hallways.]

I don't think they understand death, for one thing. And I don't know about you, but I think they should.

[summertimeblues]

[Richie snorts.] Somehow I don't think they're looking for input from the product itself. Can you imagine if Charmin could speak? How about Tide? Society would be uprooted. Civilizations lost.

[That easy grin fades when Prior points out what should be obvious. Hell, his leg. That had been gimpy during the hundred yard dash they'd done from the brick tossers, and it hasn't gotten any better since. Richie looks to the bottle, somewhat abashed, and hikes himself back up into a cool lean on the boiler. Just a pair of loitering hoodlums, these two, a regular coming of age poster, pair of misfits with nothing but middle fingers and the flash of sunglasses to show the world.

He catches some of Prior's envious stare, tracks it to the bottle. Richie debates handing it over. A show of camaraderie, but hadn't his aim been to come down here and clam up some of that raging storm?

And as ugly a notion as it is, that's only coming in second to the real reason he's reluctant to share. Backwash and sharing bottles seems like a big enough risk to avoid. Maybe he'd gotten infected before, during the riots. He'd died before anything came of it, it looks like they wiped his slate pretty clean. He's only got the scars he came out of Earth with. The long slash along his palm that marks their childhood promise, cut with Stan's broken glass. None of the scabbing he'd worked up as a hostage, not that rainbow bloom where the liln had sifted into his skin. He's none too keen to regain what was lost, and that includes the cosmic injustice that's eating Prior up from the inside out.

He hates this. He really does. If there were any justice in this world after worlds, it would have been Prior getting the do over. Restarting with a fresh slate and newfound health. Not his own sorry ass. Why did they need him so fucking badly that they had to jumpstart his heart and get him back on the race track?

His fist tightens around the bottle neck as he listens to the manifesto, spackled with enough French to make your momma reach for the soap bar. And then he goes into their lackadaisical approach to mortality. Richie goes stiff, staring into the stairwell opposite. He speaks slowly, judiciously.]

It's a noble cause, Prior. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not sure if it's better to save your breath. I'm no...haha, no expert on matters like these. I've never had to deal with conspiracy shit on this scale. But there's lots of folks here who have. Maybe it's worth putting your heads together with them. They've woken up a lot of very...very specific types. Skill sets useful in times of uprisings. And there's a good chance one or two of them might have a better idea of how to bargain with these motherfuckers than spitting your bile out and praying for a merciful ear to hear it.

They don't seem to have much sympathy, if you don't mind my saying so. Even before all this. It's always crash bang boom, oh dear I'm so sorry, we can't help with that, our bad. And if they don't get death...

[His mouth goes dry. Richie clears his throat inelegantly.]

Well...at least they're more keen on keeping us out of the body bags than in them. We must be useful enough to invest in. Why is beyond me, but there you have it.