🌸Blog o' the Raptors Flight🌸

Abattoir LX-4 Orange Wing Clock in time: 08:30 A.M. Jan. 15th, 2043 Lunch Clock: 13:10-14:01 Clock out time: 18:30 Jan. 15h 2043 Associate I.D. 1661214- Julian R. Verga

The drive to work is treacherous. I would not imagine that Rock understands that all these people who drive beside us, work beside us, are incredibly obtuse. None of them have any real aim in life. They drive as if the vehicle were only a projection, and their use of the machine is indecorous. I am certain of my intelligence and of my wit. I know Rock has intelligence too, for he always listens to me. Especially when I know what's ideal, which is always. He just absorbs the world in a way that's foreign to me. Our friends are all sharp in their own ways; intelligent and can carry a conversation. 

I remember back to the first time I ever observed Rock. It was at a train stop in Nome, the final stop of the Western Coast Line, in Alaska. The train lines pushed north, but only militarized transport trains were allowed further, sans civilian passengers. Rock’s reduced, spindly frame, clenching to the arm of a woman he hardly knew, stood out to me. Despite his obvious attempt to conceal himself. His eyes swept rapidly back and forth across the station, making note of every person and pathway. There was a swarm of people present, of all different ages and circumstances in their lives, but all were trying to flee the Dominion to Russia. From the station, we got on a ferry that transported us north to a small city surrounding the entrance of the Tunnel of the Bering. The ingress at the tip of the Seward Peninsula took us into the tunnel, on a rail system, where we were hurtling hundreds of feet underground and towards the Diomede Islands. When we resurfaced, the pod stopped abruptly and tossed everyone around the cabin. From the skylight, we could see the dense, urban city surrounding us. The islands are fairly small, but an intricate and compact metropolis was fabricated on top of them, like a termite colony rising from the earth. Decades earlier, the government built a military base on them and began work on a tunnel to the territories in the Chukotka region; the proposal to the global community was to build a rail line that could take anyone from the Dominion to the rest of the world. A political arms race to see who could get the connection done first. The Dominion or the East. The police and military blasted the pods open, and mayhem ensued. I remember the gas filling the station as groups of people tried to shuffle out; I remember falling into the tracks; I remember seeing Rock tumble out above me; I remember him reaching towards me. Despite the paperwork and the years of waiting, the government claimed every person trying to flee was deflecting and committing treason. So, we were treated as prisoners.

Rock and I got to know each other while in service to the Diadem. A textile plant in Guam. It was a prison camp, and we were their little silkworms. Everyone who attempted to flee was sent to the camp as punishment for the shenanigans. During the stint there, we met Silas and Flo. The two of them were planning on riding the train to Russia and further to Siam. That camp is also where we met Kammie. Each day the wardens woke us up at 6, and work began at 7. Rock worked next to me on a hemming table. We would chatter quietly during the shift, and every day I would try to pry his exoskeleton back bit by bit. Any progress I'd make was often shuttered by a swift swat to the back of the neck by a warden, and then dismissal for dinner. The evening was coveted. The darkness allowed Rock and me to fall in love. We would slip out of the bunkroom and go down to the beach and sit with our feet in the softly lapping waves. Eventually, he felt comfortable enough to open up to me. The darkness made him calmer, he told me,

“When the only thing to look at is the stars and moon, and the glitter on the water, I feel like I can think more clearly. It's easier to see you when the world is hidden, I think.”

 He was the only person who made me feel understood; simply by listening to me. I soon found out I understood him too. Two weeks before we were set to be released and sent to work at the Abattoir, sitting on the beach bracing against each other, his hand clutching to my pinky and ring finger, he asked me to open a fallen coconut. I crushed it open, to his dismay, and thought it was spoiled as there appeared to be a grub inside. Then I saw the glimmer and pulled a ring from the sand. Rock told me he loved me, or rather, he thought he loved me, and that he’d constructed the ring from brass scrap and an ornate button; a token for me to always feel him on my hand. That night I let him put it on, and so it has stayed on since.

The freeway exit is always backed up when we arrive at work. Managers are instructed to stagger everyone's schedule so there's less traffic and to appease security, but most associates come in around a similar time and just idle on campus. Rock abhors being late to anything, especially work. He plans every morning by the minute, traffic and idling time included. I park the car and keep the radio woofing for a dragging ten minutes before Rock is ready to leave. The walk to the lines we work on is somewhat of a distance, but Rock has it timed out so we are certain to get to the clock-in podium within a minute of the beginning of our shift. He always says hello to the security, counts the doors and track lights as we walk, and hums to the sound of the fans throughout the building. Sometimes I wish I could see the world through his eyes. Everything to him seems so much more resilient and makes sense in some convoluted way. Nothing is as clairvoyant to me as the way it all appears to him. The world is putrescent and inhospitable. Excluding, of course, my lover, my friends, and my colony of locust.