Sometimes I start writing things and then I forget about them. (677 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1 on 2 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by T.chow <trcose.at.wisc.edu> (View user info) at 2004-05-23 17:11:05 EDT
A great tearing rent the afternoon. Monstrous and waxing out from Zero it seemed to creep, as seen from a distance, over the huddle of quonsets crumbling away of their own accord. Their paper walls flexing in the synthesis wind, uprooted, disconnected, lifted, dragged kicking by invisible tides. Each one a flower vomiting its petals away from Zero, seeds and pods afloat. Nondescript pixels set outwardly adrift in pirouettes and curtsies.
In the thick of it, amid the fragrance of ruin, it does not creep but it sprints. It rushes immediate into your eyes, the fast sense. Hearing never catches up to the sudden picture. But if you were to survive long enough, your hammers and anvils would smash helplessly to, flurrying to keep up with the orgy of din and row. They would likely just give up and leave you to your silence, maybe just registering your own heartbeat or your own footfall.
In the long corridor of demise those around you marionette shadows on a thin backdrop, dancing the uncontrollable dance of the Kinetics Integrated Non-Nuclear Device, until Zero reaches out from its blossom-head to number them, catalog, statisfy, stop their dance, quiet the din, lay them to rest on paper tallies in a hardbound coffin labeled so-and-so incident or confrontation x.
First the big pieces land: roofs, cars, septic tanks, railroad ties, mobile homes, artillery, cracking towers, broadcast antennae. Then the smaller items, the air travel inclined: bricks, broken glass, mailboxes, bicycles. A ghost auction is struck and everything bought by the Bureau of Claims and Reparations, payment sent back in electronic funds, because there are not many mattresses left to be stuffed and hands without fingers don't stack coins.
It can be weeks sometimes before the rest falls back to earth, the stuff that's been lingering up there all along. Small particles, vaporized, mostly organics. It mixes with the clouds, dissolved in the water vapor, finally returns in the rain. The kind of rain that gives farmers erections. But as it is, that post-KINND precipitation goes to waste unless someone plants a crop. You can only reap what you sow, you know.
That's where I come in. Well, not me, but my superiors. They choose the crops and order the planting at Zero ground so that T&A (Trade and Agriculture) can negotiate the purchasing of said crops which are then in turn routed out of the grains matrix to the highest bidding parties. It's one of several methods to defray the costs of the tungsten KINND missiles. My personal responsibilities entail filing the records of wheat transaction and forwarding the profit margin to Leslie Hankbucker so that he can forward it to the correct personages.
Eventually the wheat or corn or whatever amends back into tungsten missiles that can be launched to Orbital One in space and when the decision is made to engage, they are dropped back down to Zero at 36,000 fps, in meteoric fashion.
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this could have been cool.
User Reviews
Submitted by T.chow (user info) at 2004-05-23 18:16:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
i think i was reading pynchon at the time
Submitted by conrad (user info) at 2004-05-23 17:21:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
A bit bemused by this, but I like it nonetheless.