#morimens writes

@morimenswrite

Ao3 Link

Tonight, the Keeper dreams of a garden.

They wake flat on their back, buried in a field of flowers, and the air smells like wet earth. They taste copper, and the sky flickers and twists with patterns not even Sagacity could decode. 

They sit up.

The garden is infinite. The garden is tomorrow and yesterday. The flowers stretch on forever, and in the distance, caretakers in bronze prune weeds and water seeds.

In front of the Keeper is a path. At the end is a tree of silver wings, which blooms yields fruit sheds feathers blooms again. Its silver wings forms branches, which cradle a blind, resting eye. At the base of the tree, a Gardener digs around the roots.

The Keeper walks the path without thought. Only certainty. They behold the flowers, and each blooms with a face. Doll. Lotan. Ogier. Aigis. Jenkin. Lily. Murphy. Each face rests in a tranquil slumber, a still life portrait.

At the end of the path, next to the Gardener, a flower blooms with Ramona's face. The Keeper kneels, and cups it in their palms. It radiates gentle warmth.

"Do you know what you fight for, Pale Pupilless Eye?"

The Keeper startles, and turns. The Gardener is watching them with a caustic smile. 

"When it slumbered," the Gardener continues, "I never imagined it would become human."

The Keeper stands. They reach for a Silver Key that doesn't exist. "Who are you?"

"You fought so hard to save humanity. Why?"

"Who are you?"

The Gardener shrugs. "I created you."

"What?"

"Not you, specifically. But humanity. Life."

The copper in the Keeper's mouth grows pungent.

"So I ask: why save humanity?"

The Keeper glances back the way they came. "I had people I wanted to protect."

"And you thought denying them Dissolution was protection?"

The Keeper's fingertips tingle.

"Of course you did. You're attached to this pattern now." She steps forward, and cup the Keeper's palm with a gloved hand. "But are you sure that's a kindness?"

The Keeper's heart palpitates. The Gardener places a hand on their chest, and feels it.

"None of them will survive. As Awakeners, they have exempt themselves from the proper contest of existence. Your gaze will find them, and they will leave no descendants of gene or thought."

The Gardener sighs, relishing the moment. A warm trickle leaves the Keeper's ears.

"Until then, you have cursed them. They will struggle, and suffer, to maintain a futile existence. They will believe in the hope you represent, unaware of its poison."

The Gardener takes the Keeper's hand, and guides it towards Ramona's flower.

"A wise man once said that death is both failure and liberation. Liberation from a race you had no hope of winning."

The Gardener puts the Keeper's forefinger and thumb around the stem, like a noose around a neck.

"To kill, then, is a terrible sort of compassion, a dreadful kindness. Are you strong enough to be kind?"

The Gardener gently presses, and between the Keeper's fingers, the stem snaps.

...

@morimenswrite

Ao3 Link

How are geniuses made?

The sensational lie, which children believe: Geniuses are born. When most people first meet Doll, they think she was always this way. Always cold, always high-minded, always rational. They imagine her a precocious child, who corrected her classmates and parents on anything and everything. The idea she was ever a true child, innocent and ignorant, seems impossible.

Some adults know better. They believe the mature lie: Geniuses are trained. Doll had a mentor, or an excellent education, and they made her into this automaton of a woman, who lives for nothing but research. How amazing, but implicitly tragic. Anyone could be her, if only they sacrificed all human joys and pleasures!

The truth is neither sensational nor mature. It is boring: a little bit of both. Doll was not born smart, nor was she trained into it. No, her genius started with a light bulb. 

It was Doll's eighth winter. After years of replacing candles, her mother's landlord had renovated their decaying one bedroom apartment, and now, every room sported a hanging bulb. For her mother, it was a tiny luxury offset by a painful increase in rent. For Doll, it was a miracle. With the flick of a switch, one could create light without fire, or wax, or wood. How?

When Doll asked her mother, she got a vague answer about electricity. When she pressed further, her mother admitted she wasn't sure. It was a normal response, but to Doll, it was unbearably sad. How could her mother, the source of all wisdom and truth, not know something? Maybe her mother's mother—a woman Doll had never met, but her mother prayed to often—had forgotten to tell her.

It was a tragedy Doll had to rectify. But to ask her mother for help would just put another weight on her terribly burdened shoulders. So, with what little allowance she had, she bought a book.

It was beyond her years. The pages were filled with copious equations and adult words, and despite studying it late into the night, long after her mother had gone to sleep, she couldn't understand most of it. But it was a rare book, one of those written by someone with passion for both the subject, and the art of teaching it, and that was enough. It taught her of something called 'electrons', and how they could pass through copper like water through a stream. It taught her that some substances resisted this flow, and in resisting produced heat. Heat that glowed.

It took her a week of crying and begging, but her mother relented. She gave an advance on her allowance, and with it, she bought copper wire, filament, and a battery. In the corner of their kitchen, as winter wind howled outside, Doll played. She connected copper and copper, copper and filament, and then—

Light. She had made light. It was dim, and flickered as her tiny hands held the wires unsteady, but it was light!

In the morning, she asked her mother the same question: "Mom, how do light bulbs work?"

"I don't know," her mother said, smiling. "Do you?"

"I do!" Doll grinned. She took her mother's hand, and led her to kitchen, where a towel covered her first invention. "Everything is made of these little balls called atoms, and those little balls are followed by these smaller balls called 'electrons'!"

She sat her mother in one of the two chairs they had. "In some things, the electrons can flow. And when they can't flow very well, they make the thing hot! And what happens when something's hot?"

"It glows?" her mother ventured.

"Yes!" Doll ripped the towel off the table, and beneath was a battery, and copper wire connected to a filament.

"Where did you get—"

Doll put on gloves, and took the two ends of the wire. "This is the copper, which the electrons flow through, and this is the filament, which heats up as they do. When I connect it to the battery—"

The filament glowed. It was dim, and flickered as her tiny hands held the wires unsteady, but it glowed.

Her mother stared at her. "How did you...?"

Doll beamed. "I read about it in a book!"

"Dolores... are you a genius?"