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I probably should give Orwell some credit for this.
Damn the little images that wont let you sleep.
This takes place toward the end of 'Fallen Angel'
after our hero has been captured by Desty Nova and
put into his program. Since this whole series was
translated into english by a single individual (I
assume), the nuances of the language in the graphic
novels could have been interpreted in many ways.
I did what I imagine the ever-concise Yukito Kishiro
might have done in this situation. I hope you enjoy.
In the Jap Manga:
Tiphares is called Jeru
Ketheres is called Zolem
Parens () denote thoughts.
1 9 8 5
(Nevermind, Jashugan) Desty Nova said, as Alita unconsciously
tried to open her heavy, heavy eyelids.
As night turned toward morning up on the next week-long
cycle of days, one that ended a week, a month, a year, and
a century, to much subdued awe, there was a brand new voice
inside her head.
-----------
"Jeru and Zolem, Yoko" he said. "Come on, Jeru and Zolem."
"Don't call me Yoko."
"It's easy, Yoko. Just Jeru and Zolem. Add the Jeru to the Zolem and
what do you get?"
"I said, don't call me Yoko!"
"That's just irrelevant, Yoko. Alita. Do you know the
answer? Has your brain been able retain that sort of information?
What is Jeru and Zolem? What does it make and where is it out there?
Please tell me."
No. She wouldn't tell him. To hell with him; maybe she knew, maybe she
didn't. But no, Alita wasn't talking. Not for all the tea in china.
"Tell me."
She didn't respond.
"Tell me."
(As if.)
"Tell me now."
(I don't think so.)
"Tell me."
(No way.)
"Tell me."
(No.)
"Tell me, Yoko. Tell me."
(I said I'm not telling. I don't even know if I know.)
"Tell me."
(Listen, Desty, it is so pointless for you to sit there and ask me
something you have no right to ask. That's not what you're here
for, you understand? I pay slight attention to you because your facial
expressions amuse me down here, that's all. You are nothing but my
television screen.)
"Tell me, Yoko, tell me, Alita. Do you want me to sing it for
you?"
(No, No, I'll never tell you.)
"Tell me."
(Never.)
"Tell me."
(No.)
"Tell me."
(No.)
"Tell me."
(No.)
"Tell me, Yoko."
(I just can't.)
"Sure you can, Yoko. Jeru and Zolem make Jerusalem. The lovely city
in your sky. You can still see it clearly from here, in the twilight,
where nothing else should have ever been visible.
"Yet there it is."
(Jerusalem. In my empty sky. Of course.)
-------------
Alita woke up again, like the day just past, afraid for her life.
Would the...-no no! Would *anything* that wasn't supposed
to be there show its face? It wouldn't, right? Because that's what
normal is, right? When you have released yourself into your
environment with no reservations? Whatever that environment could be?
Which kind of morning was it, on the boat or in the water??
(Which?!)
(God, I'd have to look!!)
(I did!!)
(The water!!!)
----------
As Alita breathed heavily and willed her tired eyes slowly open,
suddenly given the chance, Desty Nova blurred quickly into view on
a stool next to her. They were back in one of his large palacial
laboratories, a coliseum of instruments too great and expansive to
reveal anything of the other side. Somewhere close, his assistants
moved around. Above her, two massive gold rings hovered, linked to
one another, and suspended by the lubricated gears and elastic
guide wires that hung down from Nova's high domed ceiling. In the
man's hand was the antenna which had previously tuned Alita's brain
to the changing frequencies of one of his greatest creations,
the deadly Ouroboros Program. But even before she arched back an
inch and tested the painful restraints holding her to the table,
she knew that this time it was real. No more fake awakenings. The
program was over and the radio signals in her head had ceased. Finis.
Something else was being picked by her senses at the moment.
"I need you, Alita." Something new. Nova was smiling.
"I know."
"I need you to stay with me here, this time. And stay whole. No more
lies, this time I will tell you everything. The decision will be yours
to make. And I will care for you and respect your wish. I'm serious."
There was a strange high note in his voice that was so unlike him.
Alita could tell its infinitesimal warble spoke sad things about the
man's state of mind. There also rang a note of fear. But now outside the
dream, these were things he could not have known she would interpret. She
had learned of them only recently.
"I'm alright," she replied calmly. She figured it was important to be
calm at the moment.
Pointing the antennae at her with its burnt-out wires dangling from the
back end, he grinned and said, "I knew you could do it; destroy the
program like this. Believe me, all I did was say the right word and
stand back, Alita. Your technique is ruddy but flawless."
"It's Alita." She turned her head and slightly raised her heavy lids
to regard him more clearly. "Why aren't you hiding behind that old face
anymore?"
"This is my new one. It looks a million times better, I've gotten
so many compliments. It's been years since I was sixteen again." Nova
brushed the cheek of his young new body.
"You were never sixteen."
"Nonsense, Alita, we both were." He mused, smiling at some thought.
Alita could not come up with one of her own. Sixteen had been so long
ago. Her childhood on Mars, before she joined the invaders, learned
Panzer Kunst, met Beltram, or first lost her--
"Don't you remember when you and I were in grade school and I
came home one day from the park blinded?" Nova lied, quickly, like
he had been waiting to ask this question.
"No, I do not remember that."
"My eyes had been burned out in a small fire. A freak
accident no one could have expected. I remember not even being in
that great of a state of shock. I recently asked Jerusalem's central
computer 'Melchizadek' if it had learned anything new about my
blinding so many years ago. Do you want to hear why she claims the
fire started?
"No."
He let one hand fall from the aluminum item and looked around
himself as if he were outside. Licking his lips and taking in a
breath he said, "I was burned simply because living eyes are only
capable of seeing one side of a geometric sphere at a time. All
eyes work this way, you see. Even by training your eyes to leave
lasting impressions on your optic nerve such that a small segment
of time can be perceived all at once, viewing all six of a sphere's
polar vertices resets the optical sensation one step up or down
a clock's second hand. You are able to somewhat clearly see one
frame into the future or past. But knowing all of a sphere's
vertical coordinates, or say, an atom's quantum numbers, blocks
you from seeing and confirming the sphere's concurrent situation
by that very non-empirical, additional frame. The effect of
solving the bumbling question obscures the answer. Due to this,
Melchizadek posited my mental uncertainty and eventual full doubt.
"The brain is to blame for this confusion and poor prioritizing
of its life functions," he finished, dejected. "But I do not blame
it, not really."
Alita could not register this thing she had just been told.
"Why would it tell you something like that? Why would you ask a
computer to tell you about your fate? Do you actually think it
could know anything about the past?" she demanded.
"She then told me it was therefore necessary for the set of
electric life functions that is me to find a better pair of eyes.
Completing myself would allow me to qualify for a full part of
the greater being out there that she somehow protects. Such willful
evolution is the way the universe works and has always worked, as
anyone can observe. And she showed me that it has always been
my greatest desire to do so.
"You know of my early hospital and lab. The new pair of eyes
I created still did not work correctly, and I have been given many
more chances to do it right. Each time losing more than just my
simple pair of eyes and usually more painfully than before. But that
is what it is like to be *forced* to evolve.
"You see that by studying you, Alita, in your dreams, I have
found out something special. The skin, the epidermis, is capable of
surrounding a sphere and resending information back to individual
nerve cells in the brain at a roughly constant speed. Skin is the
key to the inner eye. A perfect instrument for my role in
Melchizadek's song, and my chance to once again join the chain
of beings like me that is the Ladder." He jestured up into the air
like she could see it above her. "The spine of holy Jerusalem, second
only to its brain, on far away Mars."
He flexed his fingers for a second. "The only step that's left
is to grow into a fleshling like you once were, Alita, and have
the thin smooth skin needed for total immersion and cogniscience
in the stream of life."
Alita's eyebrows had lowered during this speech and she was holding
back a grimace. "Down at my core, you mean. *That* sphere and *that*
stream of life. Where you want me to go."
"Yes. That is where I want you to go and where I tried to let you
take me before. I have found that such things cannot be forced upon
a person. It is inhuman and unnatural. Defensively, you denied me."
Nova took a bite of his flan.
So. That had been the purpose of the neverending Ouroboros
program. To take her as close to her own core and identity as
she could get and leave him there with it.
The pain in her nervous system rising, Alita kept her breathing
regular and undisturbed. She had begun in the worst of her dreams
to concentrate on not letting these things affect her. And now, of
course, in reality he would be studying any display of emotion very
carefully, watching her to see what reactions remained. If in truth,
like he promised earlier, the final decision here could only come
from what was left of her own volition, it was clear he would be
forced to play to that in his speech.
She could not let him decipher any more of her.
After so many dreams and so many tricks, her instincts had been
all but polished away. A few of her strongest roots would always
remain, no matter what scenarios he concocted, but it was dangerous
relying to heavily on her last life lines. At the thought of them,
the most protected personal images of her loved ones faces flashed
briefly for her and she expelled them. This was not the time to care.
Not yet.
He leaned forward and layed his palms down on the examining table.
"I need you, Alita. I now know that I need your permission
to allow me to take you down to that core sphere of infinitely
valuable human feeling you still possess," and again he raised
the antenna of Ouroboros, implying its role in that statement.
"All the while leaving your impressionables behind, you will
feed from this mental excess for one hour. When you are finished
I will transform myself into a fleshy animal and have you do
the same for two hours. Then you will consume my flesh and
take my place, surrounding your own core being with those
beautiful skin layers and sensitive nerves," here he ran his
hand along her temporarily cybernetic arm, "which will become
my long awaited inner sight. I will live within you and your
flesh forever. You will remain to sit hovering in the spaces
above my fingertips and guard me for ages until your floating,
outer cyborg body breaks apart and the core is sent drifting
up the lifestream into the depths of free space. Your final
job will be to awaken me and serve me in my newfound glory."
"Glory I was proud to help achieve."
"That is exactly right."
"As we join the Ladder in the sky. Permanently tying our memories
to theirs."
"What do you mean? You must of course want this also, little Alita,
the alternatives don't add up. Think of Mars and the great whirling
machine and then imagine a small lame homo sapien, when you consider
what you want to be tied to."
"And freedom is beyond us," she choked out.
"Well, pure freedom anyway. But pure freedom makes you
to subject to inevitable death by the wild, uninhibited advance of
the ego, from any distance and through any barrier. And no man can
stand the sting of that soulless entropy for more than a minute or
two."
"Ido..."
Nova smiled. "Yes, Ido. Ido though, stayed with it to
within a few seconds before he died."
(Oh no.)
As Alita paused as the pain caught up with her, suddenly Ido's face
returned and this time she did not push it away. Realization hit at the
same time she yanked her arms and legs toward her in an attempt to break
her metal bonds. She failed, and then cursed herself for trying.
Looking up at the strange glasses he wore as he stared at her body,
she wondered what he was truly watching, from beyond the biological
simplicities of the rest of world. Having unfairly lost his humanity
to a computer chip, what else could a big man like Nova do but
separate himself the rest of the way, and deny his losses? Somewhere
along the line his ego had refused to let him be a victim. And that
must have been when he had committed himself to joining a more
reachable, tangible god.
"He was still a coward."
The thing was that this final dream was so different than it should
have been, and yet had snuck up on her so completely. (She couldn't
really have expected any less from someone who pushed fate and morality
to the extent of their working limits.) Once again she had been wrong
about this place, and about its strangly telling, final Desty Nova.
She hadn't woken up yet. This was just the last equation, the most
tenacious of all his made up fantasies.
"Hmm?" came the reply.
Ido would not be the last victim, nor would it be the great Jashugan.
It would be the one that was *uncertain*, the one she had yet to
question and discover answers for herself. The one on which her most
recent and tenuous holds remained untested, and which would be the perfect
hair to pull. It was simple psychological arithmetic. Nova must have
already known that she would figure it out beforehand and prepare
herself. Hence the restraints and the openness of his dialogue.
The worst is yet to come, she felt.
Desty Nova raised his eyebrows at her while putting down his flan.
"Was that a judgment, my dear?"
"On some level, maybe."
He turned and shifted a knob on the wide control panel behind
his seat, and the great gold rings above her prone form began to shift;
the smaller, four-from-twelve spots, the larger, fully three-from-twelve.
"I thought those kinks had been worked out of your system already.
Please be patient. I do not want to cause you any undue pain,
because your mind and body must always be as healthy and relaxed
as possible, you know. Every second counts in the long run."
And there it was again. That things she could barely sense with her
nose, on the fringe of consciousness and continuing to intrude from
its far away station. It was like Doom was out there, mechanically
enforced and conforming her outlying senses into helpless lambs.
That meant she would have to take a stand against it soon.
Meanwhile, Nova looked again at the antenna in his hand, and for
an instant she heard him say to himself in a small voice, "Then again...
maybe Ouroborus was not the easiest way....." His doubts somehow
parralleling hers.
But this he interupted by blurting out the question "--Or maybe
you should tell me something, Alita. How do you feel right
now?"
"Fine."
"How is the temperature?"
"Fine for this season and place."
"How do I look to you?"
"The same way you always do," and her lip wrinkled in disgust
at the sight of that adolescent body he had supposedly made from
recycled living parts, like that of his assistant, as she had been
told.
Above, in her waning vision, the contact point between the two
linked gold rings was a small square that became brighter
and brighter in the center. It was blinking in and out of focus
with her own desire to blink, causing her to believe Nova had
connected it to her optical circuit somehow. It was slowly
coalescing even further to where an image could be discerned.
Thus Figure Four entered the picture.
She stared at him lengthily. Nova caught this contact and a
thin smile formed on his mouth. He nodded appreciatively. "Tell me
Yoko, and please answer as truthfully as I request, what do you
perceive your feelings toward that man to be?"
She could not deny that she held some sort of answer in her that
he might possibly intend his question toward. He could not force
anything out of her, but it was dream after all, and he had
already proven that he could cause her unbearable pain. With enough
pain, and no natural end to look forward to, even Alita knew she
would ultimately fail herself. So thinking fast, she gritted
her teeth, spasmed once, and concentrated on Figure's face.
It was a face full of something she wasn't. (In this frame he was
walking somewhere casually.) His large eyes, untrimmed facial hair,
his arrogant smile that had actually raised real anger in her
during a long past fist fight; those characteristics came from
some source she felt she no longer shared. Nova's earlier dialogue
had prompted her to notice his skin, browned after long evenings
in the elements. Those full-flesh natural humans. He was made of
the same gray dirt that coated every inch of the Scrapyard. He was
imperfect, he could never beat her or the lowest of her
extraterrestrial kind. And as he had not deigned to use
even a simple cyborg body, he was still an animal in the
most primordial way: never having the sense to use his mind,
his spark of God's touch, to finish his body and thus connect the
two more perfectly. He had never picked up where nature left off.
Yet, despite the manner of it, he was was as full of life
as she had been back when they first met. More so, she
admitted to herself. He had instantly seen past not only her
metal machine, but her mind's systems and orders that she and
all conscious beings use to convert knowledge into power.
Quickly and not without some small measure of pain, her whole
cosmos had been wiped away with a look. Her defenses
had been nonexistent when he had taken her hand forcefully
and carried her on his back in the desert. Looking in his eyes
took away from her even the dignity she had earned through
long hard years of serving Jerusalem with her tuned abilities.
He took all her graces and faults alike and dissolved them.
He made her life amount to *nothing,* nothing but that which could
meekly survive by floating on its back in the greater stare
of his own living, beaming humanity. So bright and orange. And
all that was left was simply her own as it had been from the
very beginning. A long forgotten, misused and tortured life
stream; asking in its incoherent whisper a final time to be
entwined with his and saved.
Her heart ached unbearably at the sound of that plea, and the
fact that she had guiltily been its cause. But she couldn't
stop now. Doom was coming. When she tried now to see
those faintest pulses of giddy life displayed across his visage,
she now only perceived a mirror of herself, and her own
imperfection, finally removed from her hands and complete.
Then she had her one thought. (Maybe this heartache could be
used to save Figure. Maybe, after all this time, that was
what this aching was actually there for.)
The only root that had been left to draw upon in this place
of misery had at last given her its one sustaining gift and then
died. She now floated helplessly. Sensing this, Nova smiled
broadly above.
Alita took two deep breaths and let her heart and stomach hurt
like they wanted to. It was a spiderweb of painful blindness through
which she was not permitted to keep any kind of faith in herself.
So she must be very calm. This kind of pain was sometimes actually
tolerable if you went far enough back in time. Memories themselves
contained somewhat of a useful stream of their own.
She struggled and got out, "I feel...that...my heart...
my stomach...and my feet ... connect to him in an energy rich
environment."
"Does that feel like love to you, little Yoko?" asked Nova.
Her eyeballs flashed yellow as the pain became so intense she
began a series of micro blackouts that scattered those memories.
Desty Nova was calm enough to ask again. "Have you ever felt
love? Is your feeling toward that man a feeling of true love?"
"I--I'm not sure, really..." Wheezing, panting, gasping,
choking. But hell, she was _made_ to take this. Cake.
"Give me your best guess, Yoko."
"No...I-"
"Yoko?"
"No...oh...no...I...did it-" she said more to herself.
"What is your guess, Yoko?"
"Oh!" she cried out, and then settled, wanting to
make tears. "Yes, I find it likely that it might be love."
"True love?"
Alita strained a bound arm to reach for his face. He had a patient
grin, and seemed to have been laughing at his own secret view of
life like always. Anger was somehow surfacing even as she drowned in
the sensation inhibitors, but her face showed only strain. She knew
now what he wanted from her, something she couldn't and wouldn't
ever give.
"True?... To me or to Figure?"
"To you, of course."
She groaned and said, "I'm afraid not."
His face slowly lost its firmness and settled into a frown.
"No. Look deeper. It's there, it's true."
"No it isn't," she replied, her mechanical spinal column, still
apparently working, expertly calculating out the numbers for her.
"It only holds a ruling thirty percent minority contact between
subject and object and is susceptible to nine out of ten of the
Ouroborial virus's. It is not even a Class 2 bond."
"That's a lie!" he screamed. "Feel, damn you! Feel that
heat and energy coming off of your core and up through your stream!
It's blazing. You love him. You can feel it scorching across your
metal skin and burning up your every coherent thought. Look at his
face and think back! It is unquenchable! Attempts eternally end
in vain!"
"No," she sent back at him, somehow, though her lips shut
immediately afterward and her expression twisted, fell blank,
until she said, "That is backward extrapolation. A blind move.
Not reasonable."
"But your senses do not lie! I have them here on my screens!
No mere bit of reason could touch this eternal flame! You know it,
damn you! Just open your eyes and see!"
"I have no inner eyes, Nova, you freak! You know this! I am
a blind mechanical creature like you! We are both forbidden
to know those childish things!"
Frenzied and salivating, he cried out, "No! Your skin! Ask
it to tell you what it cannot deny! That you have always rested
in the cradled arms of life's freely-given, freely-chosen,
one-sided and oh-so-precious true love!!"
Alita eyes glowed red and within a second the machine holding
her was destroyed. The great, mammoth curtains that were her eyelids
slid upward and filling their space, she saw Desty Nova's pupils
staring down into hers while he screamed violently into a cordless
microphone in his hand. The room of seven thousand, seven
hundred, and seventy-seven long metal antennae exploded in flame
and instantly burned away to ash, and Alita stood at full height
before a now quivering, shaking boy Desty Nova with his tragic
computer-chip brain.
The awakening was nothing but divine and she was far too upset
to thank any of her individual faculties. Her hot temper flaring,
Alita bellowed the last words that had entered her head.
"AND *I* CHOSE IT BACK!!"
-----------
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replies, please?!
Thanks!!
ae
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