The Four Corners Hole – Women’s World (II) (1568 hits)
Category: NoneLabels: FCH
Rating: 1.67 on 23 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2005-12-28 17:43:34 EST
Intro http://www.ubersite.com/m/74452
Pfc. Weyms http://www.ubersite.com/m/75620
theholetruth.com http://www.ubersite.com/m/75708
Emergence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/76672
Women's World (I) http://www.ubersite.com/m/77102
Divulgence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/78495
Women's World (II)
Seph was reviewing data on the hole, trying to ignore the garish propaganda posters on the walls and the glances of curiosity and distaste from the others in the data center, and secretly wishing she was home, even though she knew her true home had been nothing but charred timbers and blackened stone for many years now.
She kept her head down as she studied page after page of confusing printouts, as she had done from morning until night, as she did every day since she had been summoned here. She kept her head down because this facility, like everything else, was administered by the Body. And Seph was a halfsy.
Seph was here despite her inferior status, because she was one of the best at what she did. She studied the earth. She understood what made the earth buckle and break apart. She understood the movements of the tectonic plates and volcanism and thermodynamics. She understood how earth and weather and Earth and moon and Earth and sun were connected, and how understanding those connections could help people survive and avoid the devastation of earthquakes, tsunamis, and superstorms.
If it involved rock and pressure and movement, Seph could understand any phenomena once she set her mind to it.
"Laws are made to be broken," she said softly, turning a page and seeing more nonsensical numbers, representing a phenomenon that broke almost every natural law.
For the first time in her professional career, she was stumped.
She closed her eyes, remembering big rough hands on her face. Remembering a deep voice, speaking low, sounding like the rumble of a machine.
"There will be times when you're gonna hit a wall, little girl. There will be times when you are stumped. When it happens, it won't happen because you are stupid, Persephone. Don't ever think that. It will happen because you just haven't found the answer yet. All the answers to everything are out there, waiting to be found. You just have to buckle down and dig and never give up."
I won't give up, Daddy. I won't—
"Have you found anything?"
Seph opened her eyes and sat up. She forced a smile, fought down a groan.
It was Bava. Security/Intelligence Liaison for the Four Corners Hole Science Station. She wore the skintight kevlarine uniform of the Body Armament, a sleek, gray, bulletproof one-piece uniform that covered her from head to foot and showed everything. Rigid stomach. Powerful thigh muscles. Sleek and strong biceps. Large, firm breasts, and jutting nipples that Bava always seemed to set right in front of Seph's face.
"Nothing yet," Seph said, standing up and moving away from the cluttered desk pushed into a far corner of the large room.
She headed for the exit on the far side of the room, a big dome on the edge of the hole. Monitors covered the walls, some displaying images of the hole, exterior and interior... as far down as they could go before they lost their feed. Some monitors were filled with numbers, equations, computer simulations of earthquakes and volcanoes. There were other scientists here, other geologists, but they rarely spoke to Seph.
A strong hand clamped down on Seph's arm and steered her toward a side door. She was pushed through, hearing the door close and lock. This was little more than a storage closet, filled with stacks of paper and printer supplies.
Bava stood in front of the door, arms crossed, a slight smile curling the corners of her mouth.
Seph tried not to roll her eyes. Even Bava's lips were perfect. Naturally red, plump and perfectly shaped. It was no wonder that the Parthos were in charge.
A sound filled the small room and Seph realized it was a zipper.
"It's warm in here," Bava said, the corners of her perfect mouth curling a little more. She cocked her hip, wide hips atop long strong legs, hips that faded into a miniscule waist and a slender, muscular torso bearing too-perfect breasts.
Seph knew those breasts were the result of thousands of tiny self-replicating bioengineered fat cell implants. Bava's breast had been made, just like the rest of her.
Bava's eyes were a strikingly clear blue, like antique glass created by a craftsman from long ago..
Seph looked away from the lush, engineered body in front of her, feeling drab, feeling like a girl, not a woman. Her eyes were brown. Just brown. Her hair was brown. Just brown. Her body was small and slender. There were twelve year old Parthos taller and more full-bodied than her.
Bava pulled down on the zipper at her throat, sliding back the skullcap of the suit and revealing short hair so blonde it was almost white. The tight-fitting kevlarine parted as the zipper moved, and Bava's firm breasts fought for release, perfect cleavage framed by shining gray kevlarine. She had been wearing a Goddess glyph on a chain under her uniform, and the small cross atop a circle glimmered under the fluorescent lights overhead. Bava's gray-gloved hands moved. One lingered on the gun strapped to her hip; the other stopped opening the zipper at her waist and caressed her taut stomach.
Seph heard her father's voice again, filled with irony. "For a world that has eschewed men, they sure go out of their way to look womanly."
"I am a soldier," Bava said, talking a step forward. "You are a scientist. I think we would do well together."
Bava closed in. Seph backed against a wall and raised her head to avoid having her nose buried in the soldier's cleavage. Barefoot, Bava was six feet, four inches tall, and she was wearing combat boots with titanium spikes
Bava raised Seph's face with a finger under the smaller woman's chin.
"My little brown mouse, small and clever and quick. Persephone... the daughter of the Goddess of the life-giving earth... taken by Hades, a man, and carried deep into the Earth. Careful, little brown mouse." Bava let those blue eyes open wide in mock terror. "Let me protect you from what may come out of that big scary hole."
Bava came closer, lips slightly parted for a kiss.
"Would the fact that you are kissing me in a closet and not out in the open have anything to do with the fact that I'm a halfsy?"
Bava drew back, her eyes as hard and cold as blue ice.
"This is not an offer that should be refused without consideration," Bava said. "I could protect you and care for you, and with your mind and my body our children would be—"
"No," Seph said with distaste. "No. Call me a heretic. Call me mad. Send me for more Correctional Therapy. I believe in man and woman, not the female-female perversions we create in the laboratory and call Parthos and Gynos—"
Bava lashed out, a back-handed slap that broke the skin over Seph's lip.
Seph tasted blood in the corner of her mouth and pushed by Bava, opening the door and running out into the night.
It was raining. Taking deep breaths of cool, moist air, Seph tried to calm herself. She looked over the rows of fencing to that damnable hole. She would still be teaching and studying in Rice Hall at the University of Denver, her second home, if not for the hole. They needed someone who understood the earth, and they had whisked her here before realizing she was a halfsy.
Seph looked through the glass doors, into the data center. She shook her head, looking from one poster to another, fixed to the walls between the wide monitors.
Be She
Woman is Enough
Women's World
And one of the most popular motifs, the sphere of the Earth held between a pair of feminine thighs and nestled firmly against the crotch of a graceful faceless figure, as if the world were being protected, or born.
She hated politics. She just wanted to lose herself in her books, her machines, her science. Science didn't lie, and science didn't rewrite the rules to suit itself.
Parthos. Clones born of woman, using one woman's egg fertilized by her own genetic material. They were the ruling class in America. They held power in the Body, America's single socio-political caste. Their power was transferred from mother to daughter. Bava was the seventeenth in her line, all of them serving in the military. The children of parthenogenesis were strong and reasonably smart, but sometimes they didn't live very long. Science was still working on that.
Gynos. An earlier generation, similar to Parthos, but born of eggs stimulated into fertilization by the presence of sperm even though the organism took no DNA from the male half of the equation. Gynos were small and weak, but they were brilliant and long-lived. The oldest and wisest scientific minds in the Body were Gynos. Gynogenesis was a thing of the past.
Halfsies. Children born of men and women. No laboratories. No special procedures. Just the age old coming together of mates to produce a child. Halfsies were incredibly rare, because their conception was dependant on men. And men were outlawed, and nearly extinct.
Seph thought of her father, and how she missed him. She didn't remember her mother, who died carrying her into the world. Her father had raised her alone, in their home up in the mountains, showing her the glories of the earth and sparking a desire in her to know more of what made mountains and sand and everything in between.
They hunted and fished and maintained a small garden. They followed the course of streams in day-long hikes and cracked open rocks with hammers to see what was inside.
The man had been huge and strong, smelling of sweat and his own home-grown tobacco.
His arms could fend off the world, and at night Seph slept deeply, knowing he was in the next room.
Until the Body Armament had come.
She had once retrieved her own file in an old Body database. The language had been sparse.
The man and the halfsy had been found when the girl was only six. A routine hoverjet patrol looking for renegade men had come across the house hidden by forest and rocky crags. They had landed and killed the man who had come out of his hovel with an antique shooter, bellowing like a beast, eyes blazing and mouth agape, the rest of his face hidden by coarse graying hair. They had taken the brainwashed girl away, leaving her in the care of Gynos in the university a few hundred miles and worlds away from the cabin they burned to the ground. The girl soon revealed her genius and was left with the old Gynos who exposed her to a wealth of history and science. Anything related to the development of the earth fascinated the girl. That fascination ultimately led her here.
Seph turned her head, just a little, hearing... what?
A sound. Something... different. So faint. Maybe it was her imagination? No. It was there. A faraway drone. And it seemed to be coming from the Four Corners Hole.
She ran back inside. When she got to her desk she called up data on her own monitor, ignoring the ones above her. She searched and refined... and there it was. Minute, bizarre shifts of temperature and air pressure were occurring in the hole.
An alarm sounded. The other had noticed.
All of the monitors switched to live feeds of the hole as floodlights came on outside.
As she passed by, Bava gave Seph one more look, a mix of anger and longing that made Seph uneasy, and then the tall woman was running for the door, pulling on her skullcap and shouting an alert into her capcom.
Seph ran outside with many others.
A roar filled the air, a roar that was mechanical, powerful, and somehow very old. A shape rose up out of the hole, its metallic skin slick with rain. It soared high and cut across the face of the moon.
It was an aircraft, a museum piece.
Parts the aircraft seemed to be exploding as the gathering crowd below watched in awe.
"I've seen one of those," Bava shouted, as a half dozen of her soldiers gathered around her. "It's a warship. To the humvees, now!"
The women of the Body Armament scattered to their vehicles, wide-bodied open top humvees outfitted with miniguns that could fire fifty depleted uranium slugs per second.
White puffs were falling away from the craft now, and Seph wondered what they were. She was used to seeing hoverjets streak across the sky or hover in place. The way this machine seemed to glide unsteadily through the air was very odd.
As the humvees raced down the road in the direction of the flying machine, some of the Army firing handguns at the craft, it leveled out and began to come back toward the hole, its nose angling up as it climbed higher into the night sky.
Seph ran to the far lot and got in her old truck. As she passed through the main gate of the installation she saw that the white puffs were expanding and drifting down to the ground. She turned onto a rough side road, and as the truck lurched along the uneven surface she realized that one of the white puffs was a parachute, something not seen since the advent of the jetbelt, and that one of the parachutes was dropping right into her path.
User Reviews
Submitted by haikumikoo (user info) at 2008-05-01 16:19:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: -1
Submitted by haikumikoo (user info) at 2008-05-01 13:19:21 PDT (#)
Ranking: -1
Stop linking to yourself all the time, Jesus.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-04-28 03:46:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2006-01-09 22:31:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-12-30 08:37:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2005-12-30 07:39:34 (#)
Ranking: -2
You don't take criticism well do you jack? Anything less than sycophantic admiration seems to get your panties in a bunch.
--
Wrong, J. If you pointed out a charachter inconsistancy or a continuity goof or anything like that, that's fair, and very useful info. See TheCaes reviews of my work, and others for instance. But to come in and say, 'oh, I read something like that before,' is kind of pointless.
And if I'm the one who can't take criticism, explain the sudden -2.
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2005-12-30 07:39:34 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
You don't take criticism well do you jack? Anything less than sycophantic admiration seems to get your panties in a bunch.
Submitted by Wisher (user info) at 2005-12-29 14:34:05 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
You said hole.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-12-29 14:28:48 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
plot dragging? interest waning?
Then try, LESBOFICTION!
Yes folks, LESBOFICTION is the miracle cure that can add zing and zest to any old story! Just add one dose of LESBOFICTION to your tale, and BLAMMO! Instant hits!
Why not add LESBOFICTION to your next post, today?!
Submitted by Davros (user info) at 2005-12-29 13:53:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by jack11058 (user info) at 2005-12-29 12:02:51 (#)
Ranking: 2
Uh, no shit, dude. And about a thousand other sci-fi novels and TV shows.
I've also seen World War II and big planes used in other things as well.
Fuck it. I'm quitting this story-telling biz. I'm a hack.
=-=-=
you'd better not, you cranky bastard. your shit keeps me working on my own. i once read that there are less than a dozen original plot-lines. everything else is a variation or combination. your stuff is as inventive as the best of Koontz and as well-written as the best of King, and I'm an ass-kissing tool.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-12-29 11:53:15 (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2005-12-29 07:40:23 (#)
Ranking: 1
Well written as usual, but the class structure seems to echo the V for Vendetta Alam Moore story. A totaltarian womens society is an interesting touch though.
--
Uh, no shit, dude. And about a thousand other sci-fi novels and TV shows.
I've also seen World War II and big planes used in other things as well.
Fuck it. I'm quitting this story-telling biz. I'm a hack.
-----------------
Weird how I found the 2 Jacks together.
Wondering if you guys could mail me.
Thanks.
dave.groves.at.gmail.com
-Dave
Submitted by jack11058 (user info) at 2005-12-29 12:02:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Uh, no shit, dude. And about a thousand other sci-fi novels and TV shows.
I've also seen World War II and big planes used in other things as well.
Fuck it. I'm quitting this story-telling biz. I'm a hack.
=-=-=
you'd better not, you cranky bastard. your shit keeps me working on my own. i once read that there are less than a dozen original plot-lines. everything else is a variation or combination. your stuff is as inventive as the best of Koontz and as well-written as the best of King, and I'm an ass-kissing tool.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-12-29 11:53:15 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2005-12-29 07:40:23 (#)
Ranking: 1
Well written as usual, but the class structure seems to echo the V for Vendetta Alam Moore story. A totaltarian womens society is an interesting touch though.
--
Uh, no shit, dude. And about a thousand other sci-fi novels and TV shows.
I've also seen World War II and big planes used in other things as well.
Fuck it. I'm quitting this story-telling biz. I'm a hack.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-12-29 11:41:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2005-12-29 03:58:40 (#)
Ranking: 2
jack, i really enjoy this story so, regardless of what i've said in the past,
i want you to keep that 'big bitch' in the air as long as you want...or can
--
Sorry, man.
If she's in my hands, she'd going down.
But there may be one last flight in store for her...
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2005-12-29 09:04:54 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2005-12-29 07:40:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Well written as usual, but the class structure seems to echo the V for Vendetta Alam Moore story. A totaltarian womens society is an interesting touch though.
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-12-29 07:07:18 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This is a nice set up...you cold do a big sub-series on this story line alone. You designed the world in a plausible and interesting way, addressing the replacement of men for breeding and so on...nice job, Jack.
Submitted by c1ndy (user info) at 2005-12-29 04:31:47 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This is my favourite uber series. I never normally click on anything with a number in the title but i've nejoyed these.
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2005-12-29 03:58:40 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
jack, i really enjoy this story so, regardless of what i've said in the past,
i want you to keep that 'big bitch' in the air as long as you want...or can
Submitted by Dreg (user info) at 2005-12-29 03:03:53 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Dreg (user info) at 2005-12-29 01:51:51 (#)
Ranking: 2
drunk +2
Submitted by horse87 (user info) at 2005-12-29 00:28:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Wisher (user info) at 2005-12-28 21:13:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I want to read all these now. I have my conspiracy theory books (I'm a closet nerd), and several discuss the four corners-- a very spiritual place my friends who've been there say. Although most of them were tripping at the time, so a Texaco station would have been spiritual to them.
I liked this:
And one of the most popular motifs, the sphere of the Earth held between a pair of feminine thighs and nestled firmly against the crotch of a graceful faceless figure, as if the world were being protected, or born.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2005-12-28 19:30:21 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent, as always.
Submitted by Clark_Kent (user info) at 2005-12-28 18:50:16 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I totally agree. Same thing happened here http://www.ubersite.com/m/81643
Submitted by Spuds002 (user info) at 2005-12-28 18:43:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
hos about adding more soon and not later. the time between parts is way to long of a wait.
Submitted by ahumblefool (user info) at 2005-12-28 18:22:42 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I enjoy this series quite a bit.