Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Luc was watching Nila breathing. Dr Daytime stroked back her hair. It was loose and hung past her shoulders. She was maskless. The UV filters of the room, made her white smock glow, along with her perfect teeth, in contrast to her her skin which it darkened. Luc’s otherwise unseen tats were faintly visible: a striped magpie of all things, perched on his shoulder blade. A few scars. Unnamed implants….
“She’ll recover, I think.” her accent was more Sind than Pars at the moment. You said there were rings that were on her hand when it was …blown off? That is interesting. The introspectral found contamination from gold particles…we couldn’t remove them.” Daytime shifted from looking at Nila to looking Luc in the eyes. “I don’t thing it will be a problem, but if I am to be honest, my friend, I think those rings were embedded in her physiology.”
“I thought as much,” Luc smiled reassuringly back at her. He actually had not thought that at all.
The Doctor was comforted. “Do you know if these rings were different–I mean different from typical gold jewelry? The introspectral gave readings as if it was not pure gold, but some sort of gold-alloy or gold with a contaminant.”
“They were peculiar things,” he responded. “I have no idea what kind of contamination they might have had, but do know that they were both alien and able to connect with her internal systems.”
“What do you mean alien?”
“Extraterrestrial.” Luc watched Daylight’s eyes as she tried to catch him bullshitting her. Then as she realized he wasn’t joking her mouth dropped and she looked back to Nila.
“Luuuc,” she said, elongating his name in astonishment, “how could they be alien?”
“You know the tiger myth?” He asked rhetorically, referring to the archaic myth (by this time) of tiger-demons from space that came and burnt the world during the dark ages and then after civilization was nearly completely destroyed, were driven off by the dragons, who had been sleeping in the earth. He reminded her. People in the 23rd century weren’t always versed in ancient history, everything prior to year zero, the beginning of the World Congress calender (1970 by the reconning of Etelka and the Constable)…everything prior to that might as well be the dark ages.
After listening to him–as if Luc were an expert, though he had only learned it himself from Etelka over the last several years, she said, “Seriously, Luc, the rakshasa are real?” She was still in disbelief.
“If I hadn’t seen one myself, I would have trouble believing it also.”
“And the rings? They were made by the rakshasa?”
Luc nodded. “There also had…abilities. I don’t know what to call it, but I have never seen technology like that, or at least what Nila described to me. She seemed to have the only compatible interface with them among us.”
“Etelka is…very scientific, despite being from three hundred years ago. Not at all the kind of person that would jump to folklore to explain things she didn’t understand, but when she was explaining the rings to me, she kept coming back to the word ‘magic’, then correcting herself, because she didn’t like the word.”
“What of Mr Pool?”
They were alone in the theater. There wasn’t a recovery room, or anything like that.
“Pool?”
“Is he ‘magic’ too?”
“I don’t think so. He’s kind of a dork,” Luc chuckled to himself. “Not that being a dork precludes being magical, but I don’t think so.”
“But he is mechanical?” Her eyebrows were raised. She faced him now. Dr Daytime was more than a head shorter than him. “Built in that century with that technology…they barely had electricity!” she said with emphasis and with a singsong Sinti accent.
“Yes. He is, as far as I can tell, of course just by observation, mechanical…but not in our way. He is not an anthromorph at all. He looks human. His flesh..I touched his arm….is warm and soft, and has only the slightest metallic tinge under certain light. Under sunlight and incandescent, he looks human.”
“I want to put him under the introspectral scanner as soon I we have that chance. Can you convince him to do it…make him?” She was beginning to get that look of obsession that he remembered from the old days. He wondered why the women in his life tended toward obsessiveness.
“Not a problem.”
Ion Fyr 