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edenfalling1. I feel kind of dumb for not noticing for nearly a week, but hello there blue funk! *arms self, refuses to let go of the world*
I think it crept up on me mixed in with the cold-that-was-mostly-exhaustion, which threw my sleeping schedule completely out of whack with any pretense of normal circadian rhythms. One symptom of depression for me is that I kind of... I guess the best way to put it is that I forget to go to sleep. It's partly because I start losing my connections to the outside world and so while I abstractly know that I will deeply regret getting only four hours of sleep a night, I can't quite make myself care. And it's partly because I start losing my connections to the outside world and so I start narrowly focusing in on something like a lifeline, and that something tends to be obsessive reading -- and you can't read while you're asleep.
The problem, of course, is that lack of sleep exacerbates the depression, which exacerbates the lack of sleep, which exacerbates the depression, etcetera etcetera. It's a positive feedback cycle going nowhere but down.
I am probably not going to get to sleep at a rational hour tonight either. I always mean to, but somehow it never quite happens. Fortunately I have Wednesday off work and no urgent errands to run, so I can sleep thirteen hours if I need to and maybe yank myself up and out by my shoestrings or something. Even if not, this will pass within two more weeks at most. It always does. (And you have no idea how grateful I am that it passes, and that I know it passes.)
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2. In other news, I mentioned a while back that Vicky got me two CDs for Christmas. One is Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons, which I had mentioned to her as an "oh, if you can't think of anything or don't want to get me one of these two specific books, maybe something by them or Florence + the Machine? I've heard them on the radio and kind of liked them?" sort of thing. And I do indeed like them.
The other CD is Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit, which is a group I'd never heard of. Vicky does that sometimes -- introduces me to artists she thinks I might like, based on other groups she already knows I like. Sometimes this works out, as with the Decemberists; sometimes it doesn't, as with the Mountain Goats. (I tried hard to like the Mountain Goats, but while the lyrics are interesting, I just find the songs musically unlistenable. De gustibus and all that.)
Frightened Rabbit is a (currently) five-person band, kind of indie light rock. Also Scottish. Very Scottish. And awesome. :-) I think I am going to look into their other albums sometime this year.
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3. Here is a horror story I have never figured out how to write properly, so I will just tell you the bare bones in 1,000 words:
--Red--
Once upon a time there was an expedition to Mars. There were a lot of technical complications that had to be conquered to get people to another planet, let alone to keep them alive for a few years once they got there, but human ingenuity is pretty frightening when enough determined people get together and work toward a goal they believe in with all their hearts. The first group was only twelve people, but once they got the base set up with the solar panels and the hydroponics and everything, another group was sent to join them, and shortly thereafter a third group. They set up ancillary bases to study more aspects of Martian geology and so on, and aside from the usual personality conflicts that crop up in any small, contained group (no matter how carefully selected for amiability and professionalism), things were going well.
Then one scientist thought he'd found evidence of previous life. Spores! he said, rushing in to tell his colleagues about his discovery. Dead and dust for millions of years now, but spores! Life had evolved on Mars and tried to make a go of it before the atmosphere seeped inexorably into space, the temperature dropped, and all the water was locked away at the poles.
He brought some of the samples -- tiny, round, red spheres halfway between cupcake sprinkles and dust -- into one of the auxiliary bases for further study. He was careful, of course. Everyone was always careful not to contaminate any samples with the detritus of Earth. There was no scientific value in discovering that you'd accidentally coughed on a rock and now it showed faint traces of cold viruses, after all. But he wasn't quite careful enough.
Twelve hours later, somebody noticed that the auxiliary base hadn't checked in by radio at the scheduled time. And the three people there weren't answering email. And the satellite picture looked kind of... fuzzy. There was reddish dust piled in drifts on the solar panels that covered the dome of the pressurized structure, as if the base had been abandoned for years.
Two other people went to investigate.
The spores, they reported, choked horror in their voices, hadn't been dead. They'd been hibernating. For millions of years, waiting for water and heat and carbon dioxide to come back.
And they'd eaten the three hapless scientists alive.
Decontam, come back, decontam again, and then a third time just to be safe, the expedition leader ordered. The two people did.
But not quite thoroughly enough. There were traces of the spores left outside the main base. They got mixed into the dust and carried to the other auxiliary bases in the crevices of the transport vehicles. And sooner or later, one or two slipped inside.
One by one, the bases went dark.
Everyone knew what was happening. They knew there was no help coming from Earth. It takes months to get to Mars under the best conditions, and the two planets were not at a good point in their orbits to launch a rescue mission.
Finally there was only one auxiliary base left, staffed by three people. They tried not to go outside at all. They had hydroponics, they had solar panels, they could hold out for a year if they had to while they waited for a ship from Earth to arrive. They didn't dare go get one of their own ships; they didn't have the fuel to go home and all three ships were at the contaminated main base anyway.
They held out for six months. They nearly killed each other several times in fear and frustration, but they held on.
And then one night there was a storm. It buried their solar panels in dust. Their power started to run out.
Someone had to risk going outside or they'd all suffocate to death within a week.
Better to die that way than eaten by the spores, one of the survivors said. Better to slit their own throats, really, he added.
That's a coward's death, the second said, and anyway, I outrank you. She put on her suit and went outside and cleared the panels.
We shouldn't let her back in, the first survivor said to the third. It's her or all of us.
But not every trip outside was fatal. The decontam did work at least eighty percent of the time. And leaving their boss outside would be murder. The third survivor tackled her colleague to the floor and kept him from smashing the airlock controls.
And for a few hours, they thought they'd been lucky again.
But then the third survivor looked down at an itchy place on her left hand and saw a bloom of tiny red spheres creeping up her skin from the edges of her thumbnail. She screamed.
She cut off her hand.
She shut herself in the clean room of the base lab -- which was on a separate airlock from the main living quarters, as part of the standard attempts to keep Martian samples free from the dangers of Earthly life -- and locked the door and wrapped the stump of her wrist in a lab coat and tried not to listen to her colleague scream as the spores ate through his gut before their boss killed him and killed herself.
She waited and waited and waited. Decontam ran automatically every time anyone entered the lab, but the spores had been in her body. She couldn't have been lucky enough to get them all out.
Except nothing happened. The room was clean. She was still alive.
And then she realized the hydroponics and the power controls and the food were all in the rest of the base. She had no pressure suit. All she had was a bunch of sterile rocks and lab equipment. The ship from Earth was still six months away.
She sat on the cold, bare floor of the lab, and she started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
The End.
--
Inspired by the 1/22/12![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
15_minute_ficlets word #112: hungry
---------------
Now I will continue not going to bed.
I think it crept up on me mixed in with the cold-that-was-mostly-exhaustion, which threw my sleeping schedule completely out of whack with any pretense of normal circadian rhythms. One symptom of depression for me is that I kind of... I guess the best way to put it is that I forget to go to sleep. It's partly because I start losing my connections to the outside world and so while I abstractly know that I will deeply regret getting only four hours of sleep a night, I can't quite make myself care. And it's partly because I start losing my connections to the outside world and so I start narrowly focusing in on something like a lifeline, and that something tends to be obsessive reading -- and you can't read while you're asleep.
The problem, of course, is that lack of sleep exacerbates the depression, which exacerbates the lack of sleep, which exacerbates the depression, etcetera etcetera. It's a positive feedback cycle going nowhere but down.
I am probably not going to get to sleep at a rational hour tonight either. I always mean to, but somehow it never quite happens. Fortunately I have Wednesday off work and no urgent errands to run, so I can sleep thirteen hours if I need to and maybe yank myself up and out by my shoestrings or something. Even if not, this will pass within two more weeks at most. It always does. (And you have no idea how grateful I am that it passes, and that I know it passes.)
---------------
2. In other news, I mentioned a while back that Vicky got me two CDs for Christmas. One is Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons, which I had mentioned to her as an "oh, if you can't think of anything or don't want to get me one of these two specific books, maybe something by them or Florence + the Machine? I've heard them on the radio and kind of liked them?" sort of thing. And I do indeed like them.
The other CD is Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit, which is a group I'd never heard of. Vicky does that sometimes -- introduces me to artists she thinks I might like, based on other groups she already knows I like. Sometimes this works out, as with the Decemberists; sometimes it doesn't, as with the Mountain Goats. (I tried hard to like the Mountain Goats, but while the lyrics are interesting, I just find the songs musically unlistenable. De gustibus and all that.)
Frightened Rabbit is a (currently) five-person band, kind of indie light rock. Also Scottish. Very Scottish. And awesome. :-) I think I am going to look into their other albums sometime this year.
---------------
3. Here is a horror story I have never figured out how to write properly, so I will just tell you the bare bones in 1,000 words:
--Red--
Once upon a time there was an expedition to Mars. There were a lot of technical complications that had to be conquered to get people to another planet, let alone to keep them alive for a few years once they got there, but human ingenuity is pretty frightening when enough determined people get together and work toward a goal they believe in with all their hearts. The first group was only twelve people, but once they got the base set up with the solar panels and the hydroponics and everything, another group was sent to join them, and shortly thereafter a third group. They set up ancillary bases to study more aspects of Martian geology and so on, and aside from the usual personality conflicts that crop up in any small, contained group (no matter how carefully selected for amiability and professionalism), things were going well.
Then one scientist thought he'd found evidence of previous life. Spores! he said, rushing in to tell his colleagues about his discovery. Dead and dust for millions of years now, but spores! Life had evolved on Mars and tried to make a go of it before the atmosphere seeped inexorably into space, the temperature dropped, and all the water was locked away at the poles.
He brought some of the samples -- tiny, round, red spheres halfway between cupcake sprinkles and dust -- into one of the auxiliary bases for further study. He was careful, of course. Everyone was always careful not to contaminate any samples with the detritus of Earth. There was no scientific value in discovering that you'd accidentally coughed on a rock and now it showed faint traces of cold viruses, after all. But he wasn't quite careful enough.
Twelve hours later, somebody noticed that the auxiliary base hadn't checked in by radio at the scheduled time. And the three people there weren't answering email. And the satellite picture looked kind of... fuzzy. There was reddish dust piled in drifts on the solar panels that covered the dome of the pressurized structure, as if the base had been abandoned for years.
Two other people went to investigate.
The spores, they reported, choked horror in their voices, hadn't been dead. They'd been hibernating. For millions of years, waiting for water and heat and carbon dioxide to come back.
And they'd eaten the three hapless scientists alive.
Decontam, come back, decontam again, and then a third time just to be safe, the expedition leader ordered. The two people did.
But not quite thoroughly enough. There were traces of the spores left outside the main base. They got mixed into the dust and carried to the other auxiliary bases in the crevices of the transport vehicles. And sooner or later, one or two slipped inside.
One by one, the bases went dark.
Everyone knew what was happening. They knew there was no help coming from Earth. It takes months to get to Mars under the best conditions, and the two planets were not at a good point in their orbits to launch a rescue mission.
Finally there was only one auxiliary base left, staffed by three people. They tried not to go outside at all. They had hydroponics, they had solar panels, they could hold out for a year if they had to while they waited for a ship from Earth to arrive. They didn't dare go get one of their own ships; they didn't have the fuel to go home and all three ships were at the contaminated main base anyway.
They held out for six months. They nearly killed each other several times in fear and frustration, but they held on.
And then one night there was a storm. It buried their solar panels in dust. Their power started to run out.
Someone had to risk going outside or they'd all suffocate to death within a week.
Better to die that way than eaten by the spores, one of the survivors said. Better to slit their own throats, really, he added.
That's a coward's death, the second said, and anyway, I outrank you. She put on her suit and went outside and cleared the panels.
We shouldn't let her back in, the first survivor said to the third. It's her or all of us.
But not every trip outside was fatal. The decontam did work at least eighty percent of the time. And leaving their boss outside would be murder. The third survivor tackled her colleague to the floor and kept him from smashing the airlock controls.
And for a few hours, they thought they'd been lucky again.
But then the third survivor looked down at an itchy place on her left hand and saw a bloom of tiny red spheres creeping up her skin from the edges of her thumbnail. She screamed.
She cut off her hand.
She shut herself in the clean room of the base lab -- which was on a separate airlock from the main living quarters, as part of the standard attempts to keep Martian samples free from the dangers of Earthly life -- and locked the door and wrapped the stump of her wrist in a lab coat and tried not to listen to her colleague scream as the spores ate through his gut before their boss killed him and killed herself.
She waited and waited and waited. Decontam ran automatically every time anyone entered the lab, but the spores had been in her body. She couldn't have been lucky enough to get them all out.
Except nothing happened. The room was clean. She was still alive.
And then she realized the hydroponics and the power controls and the food were all in the rest of the base. She had no pressure suit. All she had was a bunch of sterile rocks and lab equipment. The ship from Earth was still six months away.
She sat on the cold, bare floor of the lab, and she started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
The End.
--
Inspired by the 1/22/12
15_minute_ficlets word #112: hungry---------------
Now I will continue not going to bed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 08:53 am (UTC)3) this isn't a half-bad story in this form already!! Guhh. DX DX DX man that was cruel.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-25 04:19 am (UTC)I did say it was a horror story... Mostly I don't want to do the research to make the science sound halfway plausible, or develop the characters into actual people, but if all I'm going for is the horror/disgust effect, I don't need more than the bare bones. That's entirely situational.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 01:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-25 04:22 am (UTC)I do try with the sleep. It's just that it's like some necessary connection -- the one that lets me say, "Okay, this thing I'm doing is interesting but I need to go to bed now" and then actually go to bed -- is temporarily out of service. :-(
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 09:15 pm (UTC)...nightmare fuel. Eep.
...no, really. It's like Thread, from the Pern series, EXCEPT WORSE. BECAUSE EVERYONE IS DEAD.
(Your part 1 sounds eerily familiar. Especially the "you can't read while you're asleep" part. Good luck...)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-25 04:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-25 06:33 am (UTC)Re:subconscious: well, all objects can be divided into round and oblong ones, as Freud would say.