Blood

Time had ceased to have meaning for Ariana. She had woken in the middle of the night and decided she needed to get out of the house. As much as she loved it, it was the place where she had discovered her body was infected by tiny machines. And as much as she loved Dorian, he would never understand how repellent that discovery was to her. She needed to get away from both of them for a while.

The summer air was still thick, but the darkness was soothing. Hard, smooth stone passed under her feet, making her feel powerful again.

Night can completely transform one’s world, if one is receptive to the transformation. Ariana’s eyes widened to take in the street lights, and she saw hopes and dreams. She stood on the very edge of a bridge. The dark water made her feel like she was suspended over nothing, with only little void-ducks paddling beneath her. She descended to the river’s edge and danced with ghosts in the gathering fog.

At first she reveled in the new world all around her, but soon she remembered why she hadn’t wandered like that since her illness. An entirely different transformation took over. Her vitality waned. Her limbs moved like a poorly-aligned machine - mechanical yet clumsy. She was no longer thinking about her infection, or indeed much of anything at all. All that remained in her clouded mind was the strong feeling that she didn’t want to go home yet, so she placed one foot in front of the other again and again.

Light from a nearby window halted her pace. She immediately shielded her eyes from the brightness, but after peeking around her raised hand she realized that the window was familiar to her. Her barely-conscious body had brought her to Dr. Lane’s practice.

“Well, it makes sense,” she said to herself. “My doctor should know what I found out about the machines. Maybe my instincts knew that. But he shouldn’t be at his office now. It’s much too late.”

No one answered her feeble knock, but the solid, wooden door was unlocked. Before she noticed anything with her eyes, she smelled protein and electrolytes. The odor washed over her brain. She fell to her knees from the intensity of it, not even questioning how she knew what electrolytes smelled like.

The source of the smell was lying in red puddles on the floor. She dipped her finger in a puddle and tasted it. Her jaw muscles tightened, and her salivary glands squirted. She swallowed and savored the metallic tang; she wanted more.

Losing all sense of restraint or propriety, she buried her face in a puddle, lapping and gulping. She sank her taste buds gratefully into the grain of the floorboards, tasting blood, wax, and wood all at once. She licked cold, limp fingers clean and sucked at the gash in the throat where all the blood had come from in the first place. For the first time since her illness, Ariana had an appetite.

A warm, contented feeling filled her body, as if she had been taking morphine. The lights, which had seemed harsh a minute ago, melted until they were soft and comforting. She lay down next to the body of Dr. Lane and slept.

Inspiration

#Saturdayscenes

“How long have you been lying there listening to phonograph records?” Dorian had come home from work in the evening to find Ariana on her couch. That was nothing new; with her constitution destroyed, the couch was where she spent most of her time. However, it was usually her habit to dress and groom herself in the morning. She always said that being able to accomplish at least that much in a day made her feel better about her life. Today was different. Her hair was still pillow-rumpled, and her loose, peach-colored nightgown still draped sensuously over her pale shoulders. He gathered her chilled hands up in his warm ones. It was cool for a day in late spring, but she hadn’t bothered to get a robe or an extra blanket.

She smiled weakly and kissed his hands. “It seemed like the thing to do.” They held onto each other while the strange, forceful music of Rupture Effect filled the room. On its face the song was about natural enemies locked in an eternal struggle, but there were always multiple layers to the meanings of their songs. “I just need to be able to think,” she finally said. “I’ve been trying to think all day, but every time I try to approach this logically, all I can think is that I’m tainted. My blood is poisoned. That thought takes over my mind, and I can’t think about anything else.” She laughed bitterly. “The worst part is, I don’t even know for sure if that black slime is what ruined my health. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that. So far there’s nothing conclusively pointing to it as the cause. All I know is that it isn’t supposed to be there. That’s as far as I can think.”

Dorian gently covered her in another blanket. “You had the opportunity to meet someone you admire very much, and not under the best of circumstances. He asked you to take on a project that he hinted could be very important, maybe even world-changing. As a result of that project, you discovered something very abnormal about your body. That would be a lot for one person to cope with in only a few weeks, even if that person had the constitution of an ox. Which you don’t.”

She nodded, then glanced at the phonograph. “Well, since I can’t think, I decided I would just feel. Let the music wash over me and bathe in the emotion.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Emotions about predator-prey relationships?”

Another weak smile. “Sometimes.”

He held her face close to his and kissed her temple. “Did it help?”

“I don’t know. It felt nice for a while. I felt strong for a …” Her voice trailed off. Her gray-blue eyes, which had been soft and tired, suddenly looked like they were trying to pierce the space between her and the phonograph. She spoke quietly, but her lips clipped the words like a pair of wire-cutters. “I have it!” Her eyes locked on Dorian. “I will look those little devils in the face and see exactly what they are!”

Dorian looked at the phonograph, puzzled. “How?”

“A phonograph needle drags over grooves in a record. Bumps in the grooves create fluctuations in a proteoid channel running from the needle - ”

“Yes, I know how a phonograph works.” Dorian reminded her.

“We can do the same thing with a sample. We can immobilize the sample on a plate, then draw a needle across it. If the needle is fine enough and our entropic channel is sensitive enough, it should be able to detect variations in the depth of the sample! Tinier variations than we can see with a microscope!”

Dorian nodded tentatively. “I’ll see if I can get the entropics to do what you want, but I don’t know anything about preparing samples. If you want samples immobilized on a plate, you need to figure that part out.”

Ariana nodded. “Fair enough. I should also see if there’s anything I can do to analyze what it’s made of.”

Science, one step at a time

#Saturdayscenes

“Did you know that ‘centrifugal force’ is something of a misnomer?” Ariana queried languidly from her hammock. The stylish, raised heels of her boots jutted into the air, and her chestnut hair spilled luxuriously over a bed of pillows. She mostly stared at the dark, stormy, spring weather outside, but every so often she glanced at a large, barrel-shaped object that vibrated ominously.

Dorian jotted some notes in a notebook. It was the first run of the centrifuge, and he wanted to try to improve its operation in the future. If he could just get it running more smoothly, maybe the sounds it made wouldn’t give him visions of his wife with a stray bolt lodged in her head. The centrifuge was by far the most dangerous piece of equipment in the lab, and he was acutely aware of that fact. He raised a sandy eyebrow at Ariana. “Oh? Did you not recruit me to help you construct a centrifuge? Isn’t the idea that centrifugal force is moving the different particles toward the outside of our wheel at different rates, allowing us to separate them? What are we doing, then?”

“We’re making use of inertia - the tendency of objects not to change their motion. We apply torque to the wheel to get it moving. Then the tendency of the samples is to keep moving in a straight line. That’s just a consequence of an object having mass; there’s no force involved. It’s almost like the opposite of a force - what a force has to work against to get anything done. But the framework of the wheel keeps pulling the samples into a circular path - applying a centripetal force. That’s where forces come into this, and different objects resist the change in their motion to different extents.”

The centrifuge quieted down enough that Dorian felt safe gently pulling a lever and gradually applying the brakes. He smirked at Ariana. “ ‘Entropics’ is a misnomer. ‘Centrifugal force’ is a misnomer. Don’t you scientists get anything right?”

Ariana swung her legs over the hammock, stood up, put on a long, white apron, and stuck her tongue out at Dorian. “Well, we call things what they look like at first. Then we find out what they really are. Or at least we come closer.” She lifted the lid of the now-quiet drum, collected two glass test tubes, and held them up to the entropic lamp in the middle of the room. One of them contained three bands: a dark red band at the bottom, a white band in the middle, and a yellow band at the top. The other contained those three bands plus a small, dark band below them all.

Her lips parted in surprise, and the blood drained out of them. “There’s heavy, black sludge in my blood,” she whispered, “but not in yours.” Their eyes met and widened. She licked her lips and took a deep breath. “Better find out what it is.” She set the test tubes on a rack, attached a thin glass pipette to a rubber suction bulb, then positioned the tip above the abnormal sample. Her breathing was shallow, and her hand shook a little.

Dorian gently rested a hand on her shoulder. “Are you being stubborn? Take a rest if you need to.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t know how stable this fraction is. I want to get a look at it before it has a chance to break down. Just a look, then I’ll rest.” She took another deep breath to steady herself, dipped the pipette tip into the top layer of liquid, and carefully drew it out. As she transferred it to another test tube, she chatted with Dorian. “Using these things always makes me feel like a hummingbird - dipping my little proboscis into a flower full of nectar.” She laughed as she worked, but it was a thin, tense laugh. Eventually each layer had its own test tube; she took the unknown, dark layer to the microscope.

Dorian tried to occupy himself by making adjustments to the centrifuge, but his eyes kept wandering back to Ariana. He tried to detect some clue about what she saw, but her face was as impassive as it was intent. Finally she grimaced, reached into a drawer, pulled out a device that looked like a crossbow, and used it to fire a bean bag at Dorian. It hit him on the shoulder, but he was too busy protecting the more sensitive region between his legs to worry about that. “What was that for?” he demanded.

“I’m disappointed and frustrated.” She held his gaze for a few seconds, then let out a much more genuine laugh. She glanced at the area shielded by Dorian’s hands and grinned. “I see what your priorities are.”

He straightened up and dropped his hands. “I remember last time.”

“Well, I’m not going to accomplish anything else here today. It’s time to put my feet up and have some tea.”

Dorian brought some tea to her couch and delivered it with a kiss; they drank it together. Once Ariana had had a chance to relax, he asked, “What did you see in the microscope?”

She shook her head dismissively. “Nothing. Whatever that black slime is made of, it’s too small to show up as anything more than tiny black specks. Which I didn’t expect at all.”

“Why is that?” he asked. “The world is full of things that are too small to see with a microscope.”

“Yes, but whatever it is, its fraction was at the very bottom of the sample. For something so small to deposit there, it needs to be much more dense than the normal components of blood.” She looked pleadingly at Dorian. “Those things are inside me, and I don’t know what they are.” Her eyes twitched downward, and her fingers fidgeted with the lip of her teacup in agitation. “Somehow, I need to get a look at it!”

The concert

(Sorry to those of you who have seen this elsewhere. I'm mostly just putting this here as a kind of archive.)

Ariana’s first entropic concert was unlike anything she had ever experienced. The sounds they could summon from their devices were nearly other-worldly. There were rhythms that made her heart feel like it might stop beating. Soaring strains that made her breath catch in her throat. And then there were the lights and colors. Black like death. Vivid hues like inescapable choices to be what you are and nothing else. White that seemed to embrace the life of everything in the room - even the cockroaches that were surely lurking somewhere.

While Ariana reveled in the sensory experience, oblivious to any cockroaches, Dorian examined the technical setup. “I think that’s an X-4 they have the keyboard hooked up to there.” Ariana nodded; the statement made as much sense to her as it does to you. Sometimes she was inquisitive enough to ask Dorian about the unfamiliar things he said, but this was not one of those times. “Why does the drummer wear goggles?” he wondered, “They look like they have some entropic components.” She shrugged. “Aren’t you supposed to be the expert? Aren’t you the one who insisted that we come here despite the strain on your constitution? Aren’t you the one who was squealing like a schoolgirl every time we got a glimpse of their caravan?”

Without missing a beat she shot him a mischievous grin. “His name is Jules Brook. And I’m not the one checking out his equipment.”

As delightful as the entropic artistry was, however, what made the concert truly amazing for Ariana was the use of two of the oldest devices known to civilization: the human voice and human language. Kieran Hathaway’s words had a way of describing everything about the world that thrilled and disgusted her, as well as everything she hoped for it. His expressive voice could grind her heart into the dirt with its bitterness, then lift it - dust still falling from it like rain - with a call to stand up, endure, and help create a world worth living in.

The crowd certainly found the world to be worth living in that night. They chanted the refrains to the songs and threw themselves into a strange dance that you could only dance to entropic music. It was rhythmic and mechanical, but at the same time vibrant and passionate. Even Ariana danced, though she could only remain in motion for a few seconds at a time.

“When we play this song, I want you to do one of three things!” Kieran Hathaway announced near the end of the concert. “Sing, dance, or move. But please do something!” Inspired into motion, Ariana danced for all she was worth, and amazingly she lasted a few minutes into the song before it became difficult to lift her arms. Her feet felt like they had been bolted to the floor, and the lights began to feel hypnotic.

As Ariana’s body neared exhaustion, so did her spirit. Suddenly, she hated all of it. She hated the performers for the energy she lacked and the dancers for the strength she lacked. She hated the music for the beauty she felt powerless to create. Finally, the hatred turned to its true object: herself. “If only this world could just absorb me,” she thought, proto-tears in her eyes. “Suck out what little vital force I have left. I’m sure any living thing in this room - even the cockroaches - would make better use of it than I can.” With her mind crashing back to earth, she became aware again of things like the vermin that were surely lurking somewhere. “So take it. Please, someone, take it.” And as if her wish were being granted, she felt herself being swallowed by darkness.

It is important to remember at this point that a performance space is designed to make the performers as visible as possible, but with no interest whatsoever in making the audience visible to the performers. When they can see the audience at all, it often appears as a sea of vague, dehumanized body parts. If you understand this, you can understand how extraordinary it was that Jules Brook reacted to Ariana’s collapse by vaulting off the stage.