I Hope the Eldritch Horror Learns My Name (And Other Good Ideas): Lightcap as List

The only show in town.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: This had a few different lives; annotations for a playlist I’d made called “Torque and Torment,” an audio experiment that predated The Blue Guitar. A collage of moments that strike me as working somehow.

Lightcap as List

1.1

She runs through the halls, not dressed for this, never dressed for this, sprinting on heels that crack against the cement of the hallway floor in an echoing staccato, risking a fall, a broken ankle—a broken ankle that might doom a coastal city.  She plants a hand on an open doorframe, swings herself through, and staggers into the Interface Lab. “Stop that drill!”

1.2

“You aren’t what I expected.”

Who is Sergio D’Onofrio to expect anything of her? Is she supposed to be flattered?

“Aw, am I too pretty for you? Will I disrupt your nightly masturbatory rituals in some way?”

“Uh, what? No. You’re just really good at killing things.”

“Acceptable recovery.”

1.3

“You act the way you act and you do the things you do because you’re a megalomaniac who feels like she’s rotting inside.” Geiszler shouts, livid.  It’s hard not to punch him for that one, hard not to cant back on her heels and slap him across the face. But he wouldn’t hit back. He probably doesn’t know how. He’d probably break his hand if he tried. But he won’t try. He’ll just stand here like an inverted viper, trying to pull all the poison out of them both. But she doesn’t come back at people who are right with anything but the truth. “Well you would know.”

1.4

“Don’t question the routine, Geiszler. The routine will save your life.”

2.1

The interface suit is tight and conductive. It makes clusters of peripheral nerves tingle as she steps closer to the stereotactic rig. She looks up into the glowing heart of Brawler Yukon. “Hi baby,” she whispers.

2.2

“So go for it, I say.” Geiszler lies on the icy cement of the dock like a guy who’ll be dying of exposure in another universe where she’s dead and there’s no one to drag him inside. “D’Onofrio is into you. He, like, gazes at you.”

“Romance is dangerous and stupid.”

“You don’t even think so. You like him. You do reciprocal D’Onofrio-vectored gazing.  Don’t even lie.”  

The door to the deployment dock opens and she sees Serge standing there, silhouetted against the bright light of the interior hallway.

“Okay, yup. I’m gonna go,” Geiszler decides.

No, she almost says.

2.3

When Lightcap enters the lab, Mako plays the opening of Debaser. 

“Debaaaaaaserrrrrr,” Geiszler punctuates an angelic backing vocal with ironic jazz hands.

Lightcap laughs. “Grrl you so groovy.”

2.4

“No. I’m not done. It’s stupid. There are other people now. Other pilots. Other candidates. The radiation will kill you. The kaiju will kill you. An electrical short in an experimental rig will kill you. Cost/benefit-wise it makes no sense, and if you think it does you’re deluding yourself, Lightcap, because this isn’t about what’s necessary any more, it’s about what you want. It’s about the satisfaction you get from risking yourself. It’s about what you think you deserve relative to what other people deserve. It’s about the luxury of stupidity you’ve decided to gift yourself with. It isn’t about science and it isn’t about survival, and it isn’t about resource allocation; you are an idiot. You’re irresponsible, you are.”

3.1

The ocean is wide, the kaiju is coming, and Lightcap feels alive.

3.2

Blood slides down the heads-up display inside her helmet. She can’t move her leg. Someone is screaming.

“It’s okay, it’s dead, we killed it, we killed it, don’t scream, it’s okay.”

3.3

Lightcap breaks her empty bottle and her ribs light up. She drags her broom across dry cement, sweeping the glass into a small pile. The door opens and Geiszler steps onto the dock. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.” The words pull on the stitches that hold her cheek together.

“Where am I gonna go, Lightcap? This is the only show in town.” Geiszler tries to take the broom. 

Even now, she can’t let him.  

3.4

“Faster. It has to be done faster if we don’t want to turn our planet into a radioactive waste.”

4.1

Lightcap sips her beer on a Saturday afternoon, looking out across bright water. “Kiddo, you’ve gotta try not to care so much.”

“I don’t care.  I don’t care at all, actually.”

4.2

Serge’s hand is in her hand. His thoughts are in her thoughts. “This is it, baby.  This is how it ends.” Their thoughts pull in and blow out in a bright, beautiful brisance of sun and circuitry, torque and torment, the butterfly on Mako’s notebook. The slide of a shoe. The shattering of glass.

4.3

“Don’t find him. Don’t let him see.”

4.4

Iphigenia is dying for Troy, hands over mouth wishing she were a boy.

“It is time to stop this,” Gottlieb says, once he’s cleaned up the glass Geiszler has broken. “It’s raining, it’s December, and you have a grant due shortly.  This is not your ritual. It doesn’t make you feel better. There will only be more and more dead to choose from as the years pass, Newton. Try to stay alive, if only as a personal favor to me?”

Screw you, you with your biased view…