PROJECT ORPHEUS

WELCOME TO PROJECT ORPHEUS, MAL! YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS ATLAS

"The truth is, no one wants a Lockwood looking to the sky. No one wants a Lockwood getting too close to the sun, lest she melt the planet’s wings and send them all tumbling once more to their doom. What they don’t understand is that Lavinia is no Icarus. Humanity is already free-falling. She’s Daedalus, trying to build them a fresh new pair of wings before splashdown, if only they’d let her. She’s read every paper from the failed space missions front-to-back, memorized the details, the flaws, thought of alternatives, drawn up preliminary drafts of new experiments to try. She’s still only fourteen. She has decades left before the synapses of her cerebral cortex begin to misfire. There is still time, if only they’d let her race against it, let her stand bold before its gaping maw."

Admittedly, Atlas was one of my favorite skeletons to write. What is the difference between genius and madness? Where is the line dividing destruction and creation? Mal, you absolutely hit the nail on its head with your exploration of Lavinia. Her greatest weapon and fear is the same — her mind. Against time; against guilt, she doesn't stop running — she can't stop running, her end destined long before she was born; lineage nothing but a gold thread of remorse and delirium. Still, she stands. Still, she fights. Lavinia is a testament to humanity's resilience; a symbol of hope despite already knowing the end. The minutes tick by; the prophecy's ink already dried and unbending. She can't change it, but perhaps in the spaces between the finite, she can draw the blueprint to a different one — to her own. It was a Lockwood that set fire to the sun. Perhaps it will be a Lockwood that extinguishes it.

WELCOME TO PROJECT ORPHEUS, MIMZ! YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS SYCORAX

"The first time she gets into a fight⁠—like, a real fight, outside of the Room⁠—she sprains her shoulder. She knows she should heal it, but she finds she likes the shock of pain that jolts down her spine every time she moves her arm. It’s real, it screams.

This is something that happened. It’s not that WarTag isn’t real. WarTag’s always real, sometimes to the point of feeling like the only thing that’s real, these days. But it’s a different type of real than the realness of the underground clubs. There’s a lushness to the clubs that the grid-sharp edges of the Room can’t quite replicate, something surreal in the way the skyline bleeds into the boozy veil of the night sky, shimmering at the edges and studded with lavish handfuls of lights you’ve taken to pretending are stars. You can’t predict the clubs⁠—or the fights⁠—the way you can predict WT matches, and even though you deal and you thrive in inevitabilities, there’s something thrilling about the unpredictability of it all.

It’s like, maybe you underestimated the parameters of reality. Of living."

What is grief if not love everlasting? But Sycorax's story isn't all about grief, is it? It's about identity — who are you without WarTag? Who are you if not a sibling? Your application, Mimz, is an eulogy to her sense of self. It wouldn't exist without her sport and brother. She desperately tries to search for Spencer, desperately tries to keep him alive. Replays the accident, again and again. Brother. WarTag. Snatch it all away, and what do you get? Only a blank document, blinking cursor staring back at you. You ask, who will I be tomorrow? But have you considered if you even know who you are today?

WELCOME TO PROJECT ORPHEUS, ABBY! YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS NIX

"A snake needn’t two heads to be deadly. Quite the opposite, these particular two-pronged perversions of nature rarely live past infancy, or their first feeding. Young, blind creatures as they are, reliant only on smell to navigate their rapidly widening world, mistake the scent of food on their sister for a meal. They die with each other in their mouths. Severance, then, is the price of survival. Proof, of course, being the penance for lies."

Imari breaks my heart. Born with an umbilical cord wrapped around their neck, silenced. Only able to scream when the the doctors set them free. So perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that they would spend most of their formative years trying desperately to be heard; to be understood — but with no one taking the time to listen. No one taking the time to understand their language. Not even when they were on their knees, begging — promising to be better; to be less of themselves. Their heart in their hands pleading for any last scrap of affection, yet still ignored. And so they became Aggara. They became the very indifference to life, to death — in which their cards had been dealt to them. Their once-utopia self-denied and ripped apart. The cord is cut, now. LET THEM HEAR HER SCREAM.

SUBMIT CLOSING IN: 24 HOURS

ARIADNE ⋅𖥔⋅ 29, NB ⋅𖥔⋅ MASCOT

trigger warnings: depictions of slave labor, memory loss and body horror

There’s a certain sense of archeology inherent to your existence. Looking into your own mind is like stumbling into a place where something once stood and doesn’t anymore. You know neither the shape or purpose of the structure in the present. You know only that it was there. It did exist, somewhere in the past, and it is lost now, in the obscure traffic of time, in the static haze of memories you know you’ve forgotten. It feels monumental to you but the facts of your life and your loss are actually quite mundane. An older version of yourself might have laughed at that. The worst thing that happens to you is still banal. A faceless pain lost in a crowd of thousands. All of you doomed to live out different versions of the exact same tragedy. But this version of you doesn't know what you knew. This version of you feels a deep longing for something you cannot quite remember, an ache to puzzle the muddled pieces of your life back together. You want to retell the story because even if it is sad, even if it is not special, it is yours. More importantly, it has her in it.

You were not born so much as you were produced, a lab-grown labor source created to build the cities that will save humanity. Cities that wouldn’t have enough room for you in them when they were finished. At least not all of you. In this world, the value of any human life is something quantifiable, and the value of your life was and still is very little. You learned quickly that you would have to spend your numbered days in competition with your own kind, vying for favor to remain in a metropolis made by your hands but never really meant for you. It is a cold way to live, and it is lonely. And then there is her, the only person to ever see you as something irreplaceable. You never had to prove that you were something worth keeping to her. For that alone, you wanted to give her the world.

But you could not give her the world. So you gave her what you could. You gave her a future. At least, you wanted to. For that you would give up the only thing you had to give. You would give up you. Your body sectioned and sold. Flesh traded for metal and money. Memory traded for memory. All of this you did to keep her safe. All of this you did until there was barely any of you left at all, until you were uncertain of who you were to begin with. Until you are returned again to the start of the story. The empty page. The blank slate. The spotless present searching desperately for the past.

PROMETHEUS ⋅𖥔⋅ 28, NB ⋅𖥔⋅ LEADERSHIP

You come from prey stock. Livestock, really. Vulnerable, insensate, numb with fear. Ground down by deprivation, humiliation, the injustices of daily life for some of the poorest of your world. Your father had told you, when you were small — if you’d had been born a wolf, you’d have been a very good wolf. But you’re not. You’re a sheep. You have to learn to survive as a good sheep. You didn’t understand what that meant when you were young, and he never explained it. You were separated from him when you were old enough to be put to work. You know now that he died not long after, of humiliation and a broken heart.

It took being lost for you to learn to be a good sheep. You were forced to join the herd. You followed your father’s advice, kept your head down, never asked anything of anyone — and you would’ve died for it, had it not been for the Lover taking you under her wing. She was your saving grace; worldly and brilliant and unafraid. It was her that showed you the value of strength in numbers, when they sent you more mouths than ration chits and she organized a strike. You joined the Party, and it saved your life.

The Divide changed everything. Overnight, your already-ugly home was made an uglier place, skeletal and gutted, filled with hopeless, terrified wretches. But the Party was prepared — you, most of all, who would have made a very good wolf, but was stupid enough as a sheep to go to the mat with wolves anyways. And you did, over and over, scrapping dirty with the bosses, wringing every drop from the charity-minded S.O.B.s, unapologetically. When they abandoned you completely, you embraced free-fall as opportunity; your people proved to themselves they didn’t need the hogs at S-Corp to survive. They’d always done it on their own — now nobody else was taking a cut.

This was a step too far for them, and you were all punished for it severely. The day the drones came, they blanketed the sky like the meanest monsoon you’d ever seen, just waiting to pour. Over and over, you rebuild the factories they destroy, repair homes from bombed-out husks, send squadrons of young, passionate comrades to their deaths — you mourn the Lover all the while, one of the earliest casualties — and the world burns, low and cold, all around you. You will guide the herd through this storm to safety, rely in collective wisdom to see yourselves through. You will seize a future for the most of you. You have to, there’s no other choice. There’s no peace, in life or in death, until you do.

THALASSA ⋅𖥔⋅ 28, NB ⋅𖥔⋅ CYBERNETIC MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR

The world is built on losing deals. The same men that slew Mother Earth took it upon themselves to divvy up her heirlooms, and while they promise a fair redistribution, the ugly truth, garbled under the sleek civility of corporate speak, is that the algorithm dividing spared from damned is a calculation of human value. To live, they tell you, is not a right, but a luxury. They charge the price against your time and labor and dignity.

Life is cheap so choice is costly. Less in rebellion, and more in some desperation to bargain the limited freedom afforded to you, you stake your joy on a single, volatile tenet: that if your body must become an instrument of profit, you deserve a say in how it breaks. You dismantle your viscera and peddle the scraps. A pound of flesh for hardware organs, a gram of coke, a cheap thrill. 

While outsiders might mistake your survival for self-destruction, to you, dignity means dying a disciple of your own decadence, and not a martyr of another’s greed. In other words: it is better to turn yourself into a machine for a shot at feeling human than to remain human and live like a machine.

CALIBAN ⋅𖥔⋅ 30, M ⋅𖥔⋅ BIOLOGY / ANATOMY

Put your palms to the ground, a soft breath in. DO YOU FEEL IT? The sun burns your skin slow, slow, slow, tells you that she will kill you with her kiss. I NEVER HAD WINGS ANYWAYS. WHAT AM I TO BE AFRAID OF? The earth under your fingertips trembles like a lover under your body, tells you he hasn't been touched like this ever since you left him to rot from the mistakes your kind made. HUNGER MAKES ROMANTICS OUT OF US. YOUR STARVATION IS NOT A SIN. When blisters become blood becomes bloom in the desert wasteland of an above you once called home, now call haven, you know of a singular truth: WHAT WE HAVE TAKEN WILL BE REPAID WITH LIFE.

My rotted seed masquerading as a daisy-wish in the spring, my tendon-meat kissing bleached carcasses like a teenage dream — this is to say you are a hope behind a bladed mouth, grinning. This is to say there is a hero to a tragedy that befalls the first space mission you are sent on so long as the bodies fertilize properly. You with the eyes of a sun and expertise of a life dead on this earth; you were never meant for an underground hell, this manufactured purgatory. They ask for your knowledge to spare, then for you to spare them sixty-three days into the mission. You grant them neither when the time comes. you sleep like a baby underneath a sky full of stars you could almost touch before returning to earth with their blood long washed off your hands.

It is that dangerous thing — hope hope hope for our bastard children to see another earth we will ruin, teach them to ruin — it is that foolish, human hope that had them sending you to a universe they can place their dreams in only for you to return as one and have them be thankful that despite the missing bodies, the failed mission, the dead crew, there is still YOU. Thank god. We can try again. We never learn from our mistakes, do we? The sun sets and rises in your eyes and we will forget all about how its supernovas once burned our world into this apocalypse and instead choose to bask in the light when you tell the story of an earth's hunger that you fed. In due time, you will do the same for this one, too.

DYNAMICS

VOYAGER ⋅𖥔⋅  NECESSARY VIOLENCE / SOMETHING TO TOUCH / INSTEAD OF SOMETHING / TOUCHING YOU

Are we both not looking to feel something in the mechanical heart of a city we did not choose to be in? You with your car-crash whims and me with my sunburned delusions; two ends of a spectrum meeting in a supernova, in a collision of metal and ligament. violence is violence is violence is emptiness is ache no matter if it comes from the technicolour glow of your streams or the filtered moonlight of my garden. In you, i find a glitch of me. In our wreckage, we could salvage for a meaning for this kind of hollow existence.

ULYSSES ⋅𖥔⋅  THE ONLY THING A MONSTER NEEDS / IS ANOTHER ONE LIKE HIM

Like calls to like, the way vines twine around corpses; moss over decay to bring it back to life again in a way that is all wrong and still right. In him, a frenzy that looks like your piranha dreams; all hunger, teeth. If you told him of a sin done for a sainthood, would he share a red-bauble secret that looks like yours or would you delight more in the slow harvesting of a traitor’s lips before it even has the chance to open? Curiosity makes a daydreamer out of you, and soon you will itch for something real to test your theories.