Mimesis
Jul. 13th, 2025 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Author's note: This story is presented in two parts, Ascent and Descent. Although the form of the written word requires that one section follow another, they can be read in any order.
Ascent
Emil arrived on Venus under a storm of human misfortune. The looming threat of famine sent prayers crashing out the windows; consternation grew so thick in the air that the rats not felled by starvation could have swam at eye level through Kansai's tunnels.
Seven days of chemically induced somnolence bled out of Emil's mind while she sat in her cockpit. Her body pulled her consciousness from the mire of a nightmare, wrapped under the delicate kudzu of IV lines, data cables, defibrillators, and fiber optics; if she dared weave herself any further into the cloister of the ship's control system, Athena might have struck her atop the head with a shuttle. Her ears popped as the cabin altitude equalized with Kansai's fetid ambient air.
When he was still alive, Cultri told Emil to always note her nightmares, for terror is a second pair of eyes. The needling dread of that nightmare remained in her extremities while she reached a finger behind her head and unlatched the network connector in her skull, inner ear jostled by the grinding of metal on bone. The wetware status system on her laptop chirped unhappily.
The Kaghan's wife cornered Emil before she even left the airport. The ease of Marta's youth sloughed from her skin like leprosy, leaving behind a landscape of rib bones and desperation. Rationing had its hands around their throats until they had started to suffer like ascetic monks for want of a meal, she explained, they had nothing to eat but the dust of the planet, she could feel her stomach growling in her teeth; if their prayers were too quiet for Aphrodite or Ištar it was due to the hunger pangs stealing the air from their lungs. Marta had to grab fistfuls of her silk dress in her hands and hike up the hem while she led Emil to the datacenter. The engineering teams were striking over the rations, and with no one to battle the ferocious appetite of Venus's rust, a dozen rotting pipes across the settlement had started to belch their contents onto the concrete floors. Men shuffled beside them in the narrow halls, the wet linen of their expressions stretched thin over battered cheekbones. Stinking water sloshed at their feet.