Support Ninja

"The Emptiness Machine"

Some notes:

1. There's a hidden reference to a sci-fi movie

2. I'm still not sure if I like the designs, so they'll probably change in the future

And at the same time, Company SecUnits are treated much worse than Three by virtue of being rentals. Many--if not most--of Murderbot's clients didn't want to have any SecUnits, but were required to take them per Company rental agreements for other equipment. Even the ones who specifically did want SecUnits didn't have any investment in what happened to them. They were the equivalents of the U-haul you'd rent to move your couch across town. They just needed to do a job briefly and hopefully be in good enough shape to get their deposit back at the end, but if not, eh. No big deal. Murderbot has never had the same clients for very long, and it's never had to work with the same SecUnits for very long. Every contract changes. Nothing lasts.

Snart’s been a bad girl. (youtube)

Immortality is never something that John Grimm seeks.  He joins the marines to make the most out of what he figures will be a short life.  

He’s okay with the idea that he’ll die in the service of his country, doing the things that others can’t, saving what lives he can with his rifle and his field medic’s kit.  He has brothers-in-arms that he’d give his life for in a second and knows that they’ll do the same for him, except for maybe Portman.  And even Portman, he trusts at his back as long as there isn’t some perversion or another around to distract him.

It’s a good life.

Then there’s Olduvai and nothing is ever the same again.

His brothers are all dead, his sister a broken shell, and he is….  Hell, he doesn’t even know what he is anymore.  Superhuman, Sam says, but most days he doesn’t feel human at all.

Immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either.  When death has no sway over him any longer and the only people he’s ever cared about are dead and buried leaving him with nothing to hold on to, eternal life has little meaning left. He gives himself to causes instead, to people who try to stand for the things that he and his brothers had once fought for.

The world around him is changing, though.

When the very last good man that ever holds a position of democratic power begs John to take his life and those of his family to save them from being torn apart by the savage masses, that little piece of John’s soul that he’d been clinging to desperately breaks.

The death he gives them is as gentle and peaceful as he knows how to give, but it’s still innocent blood staining his hands.

Democracy falls to barbaric chaos and eventually the Empire rises in it’s place.  The Vulcans come and the Empire spreads into space.

John goes to ground and simply exists for a good long while.  In a universe of savage predators, he slips quietly through the shadows not because he’s afraid, but because he simply can’t be bothered to engage.

Sometimes instinct kicks in and he steps in to save the weak from the strong, the very few innocents that he runs across from the jackals, but it isn’t until he saves a young Betazoid from a hulking Imperial security thug that he stops existing in the haze of indifference.  

She’s small and blonde and everything about her reminds him of Sam.  The thug is nothing like Sarge except for the savagery of expression during that last hopeless fight, but it slams him right back into Olduvai as if he’d never left.

When it’s all over, the thug is dead and the girl is trying desperately to bring him back from the dark spiral his mind got caught in.

She’s not Sam.  Sam is almost two hundred years dead and buried.  She’s not Sam, but she’s a reminder that there is still innocence and goodness left despite the Empire’s best efforts to snuff it all out.  He sees her back to the relative safety of her clan on Betazoid and goes back home for the first time in decades.

The bloody barbarism of Earth has settled into something more organized and ritualistic.

He finds it easy to see the people who actually fit into this crazy warlike civilization and the ones who are just trying to keep their head above water and their necks out of someone else’s teeth.  If nothing else good had come from Olduvai, it had certainly given him a finely tuned sense for monsters.

The memory of Sam asking him about living life through a microscope instead of a sniper’s scope drives him to craft a careful alias and enroll in medical school.

He slips through academia like an orca through the ocean, seemingly placid and unassuming.  Most of the monsters masquerading as med students and instructors give him a wide berth almost instinctively.  Only one instructor is stupid enough to think he can be forced into the same system of punishment, reward, and ‘mentorship’ as the rest of the student body.  John never touches the man, but he doesn’t have to to make his point.

He graduates quickly with top marks, his C-24 enhanced genius making it almost too easy.  His reputation as one of the few genuine healers combined with his intellect and looks make him much sought after by people who hadn’t ever been forced to quail under his scowl, but he rejects all the offers that come his way.  He isn’t looking for fame or fortune and just because he’s forced to exist doesn’t mean that he does so for the pleasure of others.

The little clinic he starts in Georgia is a far cry from anything he’d thought he’d have before Olduvai and he isn’t sure if it’s what Sam would have wanted for him or not, but he thinks it’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Fandom: Star Trek (reboot), Doom Pairing: Reaper!Bones/Jim Word Count: ~15k words (this part) Disclaimer: Star Trek and Doom aren’t mine. Summary: In the year 2255, John Grimm is living yet another life with no will or hope to make it his. What for? He will have to wake up one day and leave everything behind.

It’s about existing off the radar, about hiding in plain sight, about enduring everything and forever on his own. It’s not about belonging or finding.

Or is it?

Jim Kirk gives him a new purpose, tests all the beliefs he’s been functioning under for the last two centuries.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

Earlier today, a really fun memory surfaced that I wanted to share, because I haven’t had an opportunity to tell a story in a little while. It’s an older memory, so I’m sure some of the specifics aren’t entirely correct, but this is way I remember it. In the early 2000s, I worked on a couple of movies that were direct-to-DVD, low budget versions of successful, big budget movies of the moment.…