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Cellulose & Steel	By : Not-Taylor Category: Misc Books > FemmeSlash Views: 1028 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own HDG or its characters and I don't make money from this work.

Chapter List
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The pain doesn’t come. Several minutes later, it opens its eyes to see what’s going to happen to it. Somehow, the weed is gone. It senses her close by, unfortunately. Leaning over, it can see her in the bedroom with her head buried in a pillow. Is she crying? Even if it knows it should be ecstatic to have hurt one of those abominations back, it can’t feel good about it. She was far too genuine for it to enjoy torturing. She… did seem to be trying, a lot of the time. She wasn’t obligated to let it talk to Evlen after they left, or to let it go on an adventure with him. Maybe that’s just because she knew she was still in control, but how could she let it go when she knew it wanted to run away? Then too, it must be her fault for it wanting to leave. Other prisoners don’t.
It cautiously moves to the door and finds that the enormous bundle of vines really is crying. Not only that, she’s sobbing violently into her equally enormous pillows. It has to be a trap. She isn’t really crying. It’s too quiet, and if it were real, plants don’t cry. She’s tricking it to play on its sympathies, the things that make it Terran. She can’t possibly be that upset after gloating over her “property.”
If she’d taught it how to work the compiler, it would compile matches or something and burn her to a crisp, just to end it. That would be a fitting conclusion to its autobiography, A Life in Thermodynamics. It should remember that one in case they lock it away long enough and consciously enough to write it out.
…
She isn’t moving, except to fake crying some more. It waves an arm. She doesn’t even seem to be aware of its presence. Plan carefully sneaks to the outside door, only to find it locked. It looks around for something to do and finds nothing beyond what it’s already sick of. Rigging the compiler for a quick exit (only if needed) doesn’t take long, and after finishing that it’s back on the couch, counting striations in the roof. That gets boring very quickly.
All things considered, Plan should be admired for its patience. It must’ve been waiting for hours for Verda to get up. She doesn’t. By now she isn’t crying any more, she’s just lying there with her cultivated face down. Is she going to stay that way forever? It hopes so.
Plugging the compiler back in doesn’t make it willing to feed Plan. Not that it’s holding a grudge, but no combinations of buttons seem effective. It’s a shame. But that’s a problem, because there’s nothing to eat. There are bottles of water in the cooling box, but that’s it. There aren’t even leftovers. It can still call Evlen’s mistress with the weird name, can’t it? It won’t starve. Maybe starving is the better option, given how she spoke to it. It shudders.
Is Verda dead? Not that it would mind, but… Is she dead? Is it locked in a small building with a dead weed? That would be obnoxious. Plan walks over, not trying to be quiet any more. It doesn’t have a stick to poke her with, so it settles for a bottle. She doesn’t move. That’s unsettling. Oops. If it had something to cut notches in for every weed it’d killed, it’d be notching it right now… with the sharp object that florets aren’t allowed to have, because it isn’t a floret.
Oh, right. The thing. It remembers that bottles become sharp if you break them, which is what it does. Plan smashes the bottle over the “head” of the inert plant matter.
Vines leap out and grab its arm on the way up. Verda spins and glares at her prisoner through eyes that have very clearly been crying. She looks furious. Her voice is a roar.
“I didn’t want to believe you would stoop so low. I am far more durable than you believe. Did you really think that would work, tdaiyn?”
“I thought you were already dead.” It wishes it had been right.
“Then…” She looks just as deflated as she had been before the exchange. “I’m… sorry. From the depths of my core, I’m sorry, darling. I failed you. I wasn’t good enough, no matter how hard I tried… It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t give you the life you deserve. I should’ve been a better rapchik. I’m so sorry…” She sinks back into herself, the lack of rigid structure in her body becoming more evident than ever.
“You did fail. I told you that you’d never break me.”
“I never tried to break you. That’s the point. I should’ve been able to make you understand the benefits of domestication. I know you’re better than this…” Tears fill her eyes reluctantly. “I could’ve… But you were right. They all were right.”
“Who?”
“Everyone who said you were a lost cause. I’m a rotten failure at domestication. Go call the emergency branch and tell them you’re a stray. They’ll send somebody to come for you quickly. Leave me alone.”
Plan is overwhelmed by Verda’s defeated tone. All her smug confidence is gone. There’s nothing left to indicate she’s a conquering warlord. Now she’s just… a sad collection of things that sort of look like plants but worse.
“You deserve worse than this.”
“You’re right.” It’s right? “It wasn’t enough. My best wasn’t enough for you. I shouldn’t have been so proud. If I’d just used the xenodrugs from the start, you’d be a content floret by now, nuzzling your head against me while I worked. It’s too late for that. I couldn’t live with knowing what I’d destroyed to create that. Why are you still here? Just let me decay in peace.”
“You never gave me peace.”
“Do not test me, human.”
It chooses to heed the warning and leaves.
Plan can’t sleep and doesn’t even try. When morning comes, it checks on Verda again. She hasn’t moved. Can she really lie there forever, crying? Maybe she didn’t mean what she said about taking care of it. She’s always going back on her word, as xenos do.
Plan throws a bottle in Verda’s direction, intentionally missing. It doesn’t shatter the way the other did. It can still see shards of broken glass on Verda’s back. She really has been lying there feeling bad for herself the entire time. Pathetic. She deserves her fate. However, Plan doesn’t deserve to starve to death.
She literally doesn’t react to the bottle. That’s a little worrying. Plan tosses another. This time it hits her vines somewhere. She looks at it angrily and goes back to trying to permanently indent the pillow with her face’s shape. She doesn’t seem to care.
Now what? If she’s going to be that way forever, Plan needs to get out of here. It’s certainly not going to refer to itself as a stray. That’s how one gets taken to the pound and- Well that part isn’t the end of the world, but being at the Affini pound doesn’t sound very good. They’d probably pump it too full of xenodrugs to ever care about anything again. The people in its contacts don’t know where it is and even then couldn’t rescue it if they did. There’s an emergency service, didn’t Verda say? That’s good to remember.
For now, at least there’s time to think. It’s been a while since Plan felt this free. The pressure is gone, now that its captor is out of commission. The feeling is nice, but… something about it doesn’t feel as good as Plan expected. That’s a sign of weed subversion in its subsystems. The defect needs to be taken care of, but not now.
It’s time to think about how it’s going to deal with the name problem. It’s not sure why, but since returning to Ruby Trunk its old name hasn’t made it happy. It’s as though the name has been tainted somehow, or maybe there’s something else going on. Even Verda noticed that much. She hasn’t been calling it anything but her “floret.” Perverse. That topic ties up Plan’s attention until it’s interrupted by warning signals.
Not having eaten since yesterday is starting to take a toll. If needed, it can go much longer without eating. It doesn’t actually need so much, and it’s been overeating lately, just in case the weeds tried something or sent it to the mines. Though to mine what… Maybe the compilers have weaknesses, or are blocked from making radioactive substances for safety reasons. Maybe there’s a black market. Every communist dictatorship has one. It can’t shake the feeling that the weeds mean it for manual labor, even if Verda’s assured it otherwise repeatedly. She’s weak.
That raises the weird question of how and why she’s so weak. How could she just… apologize? Hadn’t she been doing everything according to her code of domination? She even said that she was acting in accord with the Treaty her people had forced on Plan’s. No, she’s sorry she failed to corrupt its mind, which happened because of Terran fortitude. That must be it. Does she actually believe she’s making lives better by conquering everyone? She couldn’t possibly… Could she?
As it pores over their interactions, Plan starts to realize just how deeply Verda had been deluded by her people’s lies. She genuinely believes she’s helping people by turning them into things, and she thinks that she’s failed in her duty because one refused to bow to her. It’s disgusting, but admirable in a way. In fact… the last thing it had said to her before she ran away in tears was that it was fighting to ensure that others would have better lives, or lives at all. That was true, obviously, but it was a response to her false claims that the Affini were doing the same. If she believes it… maybe she had a change of heart as she came to understand how wicked her ways have been, and how much damage she’s been doing.
No, that weed led the project to enslave humanity. She knows what she’s doing. She even expressed feelings of personal responsibility for every human who died, even if it’s still war. If she, being in charge, is a true believer… Stars… Really? That means… Verda literally believes she’s helping humanity, and the Affini warbands are actually trying to improve Terra’s circumstances. That can’t be possible. That’s insane! The logic has no fallacies, so Plan has no choice but to believe it.
Memories of all the times Verda expressed dissatisfaction with the enslavement process rush through Plan’s mind. She was aware that they were baiting innocent Terrans into rebellion, and she didn’t like it. Even if she believes she’s doing what’s right, she’s in the wrong and responsible for a lot of suffering. Then again, are the slaves suffering? Every single one looks more content than anyone Plan knew on Terra. The closest it remembers seeing in person would have been Ginger- Oh. That’s why she was so happy, despite everything crumbling around them. She knew she was going to become a conquering xeno’s trophy. And she didn’t mind? The biorhythms corrupted her, that’s why. But still, she was happy…
That’s a terrible thing to think. Plan shouldn’t belittle itself by believing it had no impact on Ginger’s happiness. Why did she keep it around… other than as a way of taking down Song of Destruction? That’s all it was to her. It thought she was one of the good ones! In reality, she was dancing to a drummer who saw Song as a threat to her power. Disgraceful! Shame on Ginger for giving in so easily, and shame on Song for being tricked by her feminine wiles. Of course she was faking it. How could anyone love a monster? That’s why the weeds need to drug their prisoners senseless to get any affection at all.
But what if they’re right? What if they really are making lives better? No matter how much respect it has for the free market, claiming that’s useful in any meaningful way when stuff can be conjured out of nothing feels… a little delusional. Why would anyone need to sell anything, and why would there be stock? People like Evlen could keep making stuff and selling it, but evidently he doesn’t feel like doing that. He’s giving away his hard work because he wants people to eat his food. He could’ve been a decent chef somewhere on Terra, if he weren’t a xeno. So… what’s the point? In that one thing, they really did improve society. Just that, nothing else. Maybe somebody less intelligent would conflate the consequences of readily available resources with the rest of the Compact’s organization, but that’s not reality.
So… maybe… hypothetically, of course… the weeds… might… not be… that bad. In theory. In practice, they’re everything wrong with the selfish Communists who’ve been trying to destroy Terra for centuries. But theoretically… they aren’t sadistic horrors from beyond the void. They could be worse. And that’s just projecting Verda onto all the rest. She’s clearly trying to be better than her xeno birth. Are affini even born? That’s a disgusting thing to think about.
What matters is that she wants to be better than the rest… which is probably why she’s so mad at herself for failing to talk Plan into being domesticated! If she can’t get somebody to agree to it willingly, without tons of xenodrugs, that means they’ve been doing something horrible to thousands of species! That’s it! She thinks she can wash away her guilt if she can get a single Free Terran to accept their plans, which would mean they weren’t the villains of history. In a way, that’s admirable. How many leaders in Terra’s history had the humility to question what they’d grown up being taught? Not Song’s captain. Even if he’d rethought his position on the Affini, it’s because he was a coward, not because of some introspection.
And that must be the foundation of her present issues. She failed. Now she knows she and her people are the bad guy. They’re the enemy of progress and harmony. Where would the Accord have gotten if it were as old and big as the Compact? Probably somewhere very different, if the memory of colonialism didn’t fade by then. Unlike the Affini, they’d have gotten that sort of thing out of the way in the youth of their civilization. With all their power, the weeds could be a true force of good in the cosmos if they set down the Green Woman’s Burden. What’s it thinking!?
The Affini Compact can never do as well as Terra. Their entire enterprise relies on the exploitation of others. The Accord would never betray its alien allies that way. It couldn’t… That would be terrible. Just because the Rinans lack the abilities of Terrans and thus aren’t suited for the same sorts of things… No. The weeds are trying to take over its mind. It must still be hooked up to that machine! They’re beaming lies into its brain!
If that’s true, there’s nothing to be done about it. Plan had gone through this thought experiment many times before its capture. If they’re able to project things this clearly into its mind, it’s not going to be able to defend itself. Malignant solipsism is useless intellectually, even if it could be true. Plan has no choice but assuming that the ship around it is real. That doesn’t make it happy, but that’s how it has to be. Better this than… whichever insanity would come to it if it accepted the paranoia.
Still… blaming Verda for her misguided if sincere views is hard. She really thinks she’s helping people, even though she isn’t. If her opinions could be corrected, maybe she could make a difference. No, she’s already trying to make a difference and change the Compact, to minimal support from those around her. She’s an admiral and people are so averse to the idea of not tormenting their florets that they disrespect her to her face. That’s kind of disgusting. But most of her attacks had been consequences of Plan doing outright violent or blatant things. She hadn’t actually… Stars, really? She was trying to act on her unpopular beliefs? Even though the rest of Affini society wanted Plan drugged into a stupor, Verda was resisting. She dealt with the derision and Plan’s protests, because she thought that her treatment of it was part of good domestication… and… the reward of her efforts was… this. That’s why she was so fixated on stopping it from hurting others. Right…
That’s almost enough to make it regret its treatment of her. Not quite, but it’s starting to sympathize with the enemy for real reasons, which is very concerning. She’d been almost sympathizing with Plan, as well. She even let it do things without her, despite not actually swearing fealty. So… she’s different from the rest. Maybe, out of all of them… she could be preserved as a pet, when Plan fixed the universe and made Terra rule over all? Seeing her kneel isn’t so bad to contemplate. “Ua tehe.” “Noo, Verda.” Or something.
It probably ought to do something about her. It’s fully day outside and it’s getting really hungry. Dinner hadn’t been big, so it could use a proper meal. She’s not going to be in a condition to feed it any time soon. What to do… Right, the emergency contact. They’ll be able to help. They’ll feed it or something. Now it just needs to find a way to get them over here without giving it an implant or charging it with attempted murder, or something.
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Cellulose & Steel