Assorted Objects

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

@gothgaymoth

Kristen Dimercurio (curly hair) has been in several excellent fiction podcasts, probably best known for playing Dr. Sally Grissom, the lead of time-travel fiction podcast ars PARADOXICA, and Christine Anderson, one of the season 3 leads of horror podcast Archive 81. I've most recently heard her in The Harbingers, but she has a pretty extensive resume.

[OC] A swallow song 🎵 (aka my butch lovergirl yearning)

morgan, one of the siblings, makes herself a robot boyfriend, and then can’t deal with him evolving into his own person. a woman who makes a robot boyfriend is necessarily a different dynamic from a man who makes a robot girlfriend and it was skillfully handled here. the robot boyfriend struggles with his relationship to masculinity and navigating the male role of an active pursuer with the robot role of an object of desire. and I had more sympathy for her inability to see him as a complex individual than I would a man with a robot girlfriend

I thought the take on vr addiction was interesting. when you see that come up in fiction there’s two flavors. one is that people are addicted to having sex with virtual anime women - similar concept to porn addiction, which is not real. another is that people are addicted to being on the computer instead of touching grass - can be a real problem in people’s lives but does not constitute an addiction. in “luminous” it really focuses on the concept of vr hooking directly into your nervous system. some people just enjoy the sensations it can give you and others get so into it that they end up hacking into it to get more. the way it’s portrayed just seems more like addiction than a lot of fictional addictions

there’s a scene at the end where the siblings’ dad shows up to explain the themes of the novel but it works for me bc they are so fucking mad at him about it. he’s like “here’s a little vignette that is obviously a metaphor for the robots in this story” and his kids are like “shut the fuck up old man. why were you such a bad dad”

I'm a big fan of this series. there's a subtle element of body horror and unpleasantly organic visuals to the characters' daily lives bc all their technology is biological in nature, derived from kaiju parts. they get new organs implanted in them, grow houses from modified plants, and use bioengineered leeches for medical treatment. so there's a subtle grossness that I enjoy and then the kaiju themselves are dangerous bc their flesh and blood react with other living things in terrible ways. so there's some truly disgusting reality warping horrors going on whenever the kaiju parts get out of the government's control. and sometimes it happens under the government's control