Rolling Roids Clan
Tally peered through the antique quartz port, just a hand’s width of physicality between her and frosty vacuum. Even with her huge horror show in full bloom, she passed on the panoramic and data rich outlooks, preferring this slightly pointless and romantic perspective of the deep dark that had just eaten her one and only father.
She thought again as she had so often, here the thick hull is breached, pierced with a rod of transparency, her parents staging gift to each other. The port was a flourish of family aesthetic. She imagined star boosted photons cascading through the molecular matrix of the quartz, eventually jumping off right into her very own retinas. Unlike the mediated displays and direct feeds, this felt more connected to what was out there, even if it was really just peering down a narrow pipe.
In a whisper, she flicked the com and boosted to the hiding clan, “I mourn my mixed up needs – wanting both to be fully me and have my family thriving. Obviously incompatible, these. Now, I can only soothe myself. Uncle Jasmine, Daddydee, holy unknowing and oh my sweet and suffering. Wrecked and wretched, despair. This mouse now frozen, still as a stone. My broken heart has to keep beating though, slow and steady. No crying, no thrashing, just waiting until the god goes.. Wait, shush now, shush.”
She noticed her fingers were still fretting the last chord. She willed her hand to unwrap the guitar’s neck, and allowed the instrument to drift and tumble slightly, in a bizarre and deeply uncomfortable disregard.
“I’ll flashback, take some breath to remember all, a little squeak in the vasty cosmos, like Jasmine, I will be my foolish self to a fault and perhaps, sloppy luck.”
She set up a delayed boost with a dead girl switch.
“If my little staging and I are ripped into our constituent atoms, then here’s my last speaking. Sick with this mourning, there isn’t a song, somehow.
“Our Grand Uncle Jasmine was the clan’s boon, our big break. We’ve been building slow so as to make the most of his return from the dead, or worse.
Here’s our most potent family trope. He was in love and song making, young with a scrappy little barely teched staging, a nere-do-well with nothing much to loose except his nothing, nowhere life. Song making, in love and stupid, broadcasting from the heart, utterly non standard and just like in the scary stories they tell us kids, poof! A god came and ate him up.
And that’s that, lesson learned. He varied from the safe canon and attracted a big bright unfathomable entity from the inky alternate understandings and was unmade, absorbed, annhilated – whatever happens to foolish young lovers who make new music from the depths of passion. Dead. Gone. Forgotten.”
The reddish blob of god presence undulated on her outlook. She caught the movement and instinctively shushed down. Seemed to be infusing one off the big hulks on the periphery of the battle array. Not looking her way just yet. She took a shallow, shuddering breath and continued.
“Except, except… he came back. Hundreds of years later, he docked up with an elder of the clan, either his grand niece or grand step niece, I forget, but definitely my grandma. He showed her the impossible. He hadn’t been unmade by the god, but instead zapped farther than song, dance or any performance had ever gotten anyone in fact or legend. Zapped not only in space but in time too, some kind of old school relativity quirk. Not only did he survive a god encounter, drink more inky blacks than any drunken virtuosic ever dared to brag on, he hit the jackpot too. Wealth beyond avarice, like they used to say in jackal times.
That’s the sad bit, honestly. He might have been king of woofie in every extant reputation economy just for resurrecting. Add on the vast jump and easily emperor, but he was canny and shut the fuck up. Stayed decisively dead and forgotten to the rest of the universe. Only his clan knows that a god encounter might not always be a death sentence. Again, just knowing that is a treasure.
Anyway, an emperor would have to squander wild woofie on just staying alive. There’d be no end to the slavers and hierarchists who’d try and nap him, maybe render him down to slippery soap of genetic ooze and then suck out every drop of juice re surviving gods and big jumps. He’d be the prize with a awful big bounty on his head.
To truly come back, living fully and beyond fear, he needed us, his clan. The third boon was too big for him to exploit solo, especially since he had only half a life left. That brings us up to the now almost, to our sublime battle array.
I can just see the edge of a honking monster hanging in my parents port. Hundreds of these twisted war makers, god tech of a flavor we can almost taste, hanging overripe. Thanks and blessings be upon him, Uncle Jasmine gave this to us, the only clan to salvage, analyze, repurpose, the stewards of an unprecedented heap of divinity scat. Perhaps here is immunity to slavery and hierarchy. Perhaps we might become the first super mice.