The Perfection Regression...Chapter III

Ariadne Chin was the first of the rescued.  Mai, her mother, was raped though rape was not a word that was used very often in her mother’s world.  Mai could see it about to happen.  Maybe she was partially to blame she would later think.  She should not have been out of her hut and wandering around with the sun going down but there was so much to do, and her own mother would angry if the washing had not been done. So, she had gone out into the fading light to finish the wash and gather water.

When she thought about it later, the men were no more dangerous than anything else she would face that night.  She was small and could very easily be taken by one of the large snakes that tended to hunt at night.  It had been warm out and when it was warm, the jaguars liked to hunt early in the evening for some reason.  It was not unusual for a snake or a jaguar to take a lamb or a calf this time of year; for them to come out of the shadows and drag an enticing little whining thing up into the trees.  She was barely bigger than they and an enterprising or hungry animal could take her rather easily.

Earlier in the week, when the moon was high in the sky, Lin had disappeared from right next to her.  The sherekamen, animals with tough, thick hides, and large fangs that waited in the water for small females like her to show themselves in silhouette against the moon from their vantage points beneath the water would strike and quickly and quietly drag girls like her into the water.  Or maybe Lin had just run from her masters to take her chances in the next village over.  Who knows.  One moment she was there and then next Lin was gone. She had never seen a sherekamen, only heard the stories.  They only took young promiscuous women and ill-behaved boys according to legend.  There was no reason to believe they were anything more than a tale told to keep young women and ill-behaved boys in line.

The men were walking along pretending to talk about other things; laughing and poking each other.   They likely did not work at anything consistent. They like the other predators about her, were creatures of opportunity.  They would work for food and labor when necessary, but they were not given to get up every day when the sun rose and toil on a daily basis.   They found work when they needed money.  They found sleep where they were allowed.  Much like the predators around her, they found sex when they could take it. Later in her nightmares, their faces would run together and she would never really know who did what and when. This was their camouflage; laughing faces that showed their teeth in amusement rather than intimidation but the affect was still the same, elicit fear in the prey.

At some point, she passed out.  Her mind had escaped when her body could not.  Her mind could only do what her mind could do; leave her body behind and go somewhere else.  Her eyes swelled shut from the blows to her face.  Her body got pregnant when her mind was not there.   Her mind never really returned to her body.  Her own body did not feel like her home.

Lorraine was out of place.  She was nearly six feet tall, platinum blond with blue eyes wearing a cotton polyester black robe.  She was a full two feet taller than anyone for miles.   She had found a somewhat inconspicuous place from which to watch Mai and chart her progress.  She had set up her tent in the woods and made herself as comfortable as she could.  Something in these people brought them a calmness that Lorraine had only been able to assume from her reading in the future. Mai would walk by every day on her way to the river; every day getting more and more plump with her child and Lorraine would watch. Mai would never say anything to the white woman in the woods.  Whatever had brought her there would be revealed in time.  Other villagers saw Lorraine too and they did not say anything either.

9 months went by and then two days before her due date, according to Lorraine’s calculations, she stepped into the path in front of Mai and told her in nearly perfect old Mandarin, “Your child will be a girl.  When she is born in two days, I will take her.  She will have a good life and you will have a good life.”

Mai thought about the proposal that did not seem to be a proposal at all.  Lorraine had merely said it in a matter of fact way.  Her child was going to go with this tall white woman and that would be that.  It was neither request nor command; merely a statement of fact.  Mai would love her child, but she could not care for her and she knew it.  Her gods had told her in dreams that her child would be a girl and girls did not fare well in this world.  She knew from experience that girls did not fare well in her world.  Mai thought about the world where Lorraine must come from and where she would be going back to; her child in her arms.  She looked off over the mountains and assumed that was where she was going and where she would take her child.  She had explored the plains to the south and the men told stories about the places far beyond where she had been able to get to in a day’s walk but none had ever come back with stories of tall white women.  None had ever gone over the mountain and returned, so she deduced that must be where Lorraine was from; where the snow matched this woman’s skin.

“Come to my dwelling when you are prepared to have your child.  Tell no one, please” Lorraine had asked.

When the contractions began two days later, it was the middle of the night.  She was not sure she could make the walk to Lorraine’s tent and again there was the fear of predators who might get two snacks that evening for the work of one.  Still, she rose and quietly stepped over sleeping brothers and made her way along the well-worn path, pausing during the contractions; wincing with pain and breathing lightly.  She was a little frightened that her groans would bring jaguars or possibly other people from her village.

Lorraine heard her long before she arrived and met her on the path.  She brought Mai into her tent and administered a sedative.  Mai woke with the birds chirping and without her child.  The mat on which she lay was the most comfortable thing she had ever lay on.  Lorraine had left her with all the gear she had brought from the future, the tent that was more sturdy and less leaky than any hut, and some medicine for the pain.  She recorded a message on the view pad that explained that everything there was hers and that there was powerful magic there. 

Mai did not believe in magic now and was not sure if she ever had.  When she saw Lorraine on the view pad, she did not think that Lorraine had somehow shrunk herself and put herself in the little screen.  It was something that she was unaware of how it worked.  There were all sorts of things that she did not know how they worked.  She had not believed in gods much before she was attacked in the woods and even less so after she was attacked.  Where ever Lorraine had taken her child, she knew she would be safe though not some version of a heaven.  On the view pad, Lorraine held her child for Mai to see and then disappeared.  Mai rolled over and went back to sleep.

Lorraine decided to call her Ariadne, a name she had always loved.  Her family name would be Chin.  Lorraine swore she would never lie to her.  It would be best for her to know everything, right from the beginning and start off with the time travel thing right from the beginning because Ariadne Chin was going to do great things.

She called her mother, or at least the woman who was raising her, Lorraine and Lorraine never called her anything other than Ariadne.  Lorraine made sure that Ariadne knew that she was not her biological mother; not the one who had brought her into the world but that both her biological mother and she loved Ariadne very much.  Lorraine was always very plain with Ariadne in that respect; letting her know that though she would never lie to her, there were things that she would only reveal when the time was right and she was old enough.  Those were the rules.

Chapter IV

Beth would not be the one.  She could tell and it broke her heart.  It is hard for a parent to see these things in their child, to believe in the boundless possibilities that await them and then, suddenly, watch it all fall away.  Jordan knew that her daughter would not be a Traveler.

Mason was there in the corner of the hospital room.  He seemed to be hypnotized by the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor and the subtle “whooshing” of the some machine that was helping her breathe.  She stared out of the window into the city lights but from time to time she would let her gaze adjust so that she could see the room’s reflection in the window and Mason sitting there; staring straight ahead as his daughter struggled for life.

Star Trek Discovery, The Reverse Bechdel Trajectory

The reverse Bechdel Trajectory?
I love Star Trek Discovery, for now.  Episode 7 presented some problems for me and it makes me wonder about where the show is going.
For the record, I am not a big Trek universe fan.  I was largely indifferent.  Even when they had Kate Mulgrew as a captain of the Voyager (let's blow past the thread of it being about a female captain who gets her crew lost in space #womendrivers am I right?)  The movies, the tv shows, webisodes, etc all were lost on me because there was very little science or reality in them.  Many of them had deep moral lessons about racism being bad or something.
ST Discovery caught my eye because it is an exciting show with strong female characters talking about the ship, leadership, how space works, etc.  The first five episodes were simple and self contained .  Then comes Lt. Tyler.
When I first sat down to watch the show I was impressed but I told myself that the moment she went all weak in the knees over a boy, I would turn it off.  Episode 7 sent me spinning because the show was beginning to fail the Bechdel test.  Are there two women and do they get together to talk about something other than a man.
We get some glimpses of her attraction to Lt. Tyler in Episode 6 when they sit in the cafeteria and he introduces himself.  The problem is the shift in the characters.  Burnham is dealing with "daddy issues" with her adopted Klingon father who is dying light years away and even that is problematic  (maybe I will address that in another screed.).  With that and her newfound crush on this guy, she is becoming a cliche.
Her only friend on the ship, Cadet Tilly, a young cadet she was trying to mentor, has now become her mentor in that she is teaching Burnham how to loosen up and dance with boys.  Cadet Tilly just says things like "the new guy's cute" and concocts sitcom-ish ways to leave them alone.
The rub for me comes in the premise of Episode 7 where the ship is caught in a time loop and only one officer is aware that there is a dangerous criminal on board who keeps taking over the ship and killing the crew.  The officer has 30 minutes each loop to convince Burnham to help him stop the criminal.  She, in turn has to convince Lt. Tyler to help her.  The only way to do that?  Not by coming flat out and telling him that there is a dangerous criminal on the ship and they need to stop him.  Lt.Tyler IS the security officer, after all.  No, apparently the only way to do it is to get him to like her and trust her... and dance with her.

The show still passes the Bechdel test overall, but can this become more problematic?  Considering the fervor over it being picked up for a second season, one could assume they never expected to have a second season so they were trying to cram everything into one season to show off.  So, in a sense, they had to introduce a love story.  It was a bit ham fisted and trite for my taste.  The show has created a character that is really impressive and Sonequa Martin is bringing a great deal of life to the role.
Still, I don't think we have seen the end of this arc and, if it leads to her character doing something dangerous and unbelievable, for the sake of a boy, then I fear the show may lose me.  Female characters who stand strong on their own, especially in sci fi, are few and far between and the quickest way to get me to change the channel is to have them do something stupid for a man.

Barbara Lee.

The Perfection Regression

The following is chapter 2 followed by the beginning of Chapter 3 of The Perfection Regression.  A book about women chosen to travel through time. Chapter 1 will be posted in its entirety soon.  We encourage people to follow along and send in their own submissions at xensationllf@gmail.com

Chapter 2… Where are they?

The prism theory was established by Christina Sub 2 in alt-time 3219 A.T. (Alt Time).  The idea was simply this; although it had been thought that there were infinite timelines, the Travelers devised that there was actually only one time line initially that was split, like a prism, from the time each Traveler had gone back because nothing had the power to create an alternate time line except for Traveler.

Christina Jeffries Sub 2 came to this conclusion after a number of calculations.  It had become the focus of her personal research because she refused to believe that all of her predecessors had merely blinked out of existence when she altered the time line.  Their words were still there in the form of the book and they had the compendium of knowledge in the book of Travelers past so she believed that they were still out there somewhere in time.  Moving forward, those who were supposed to come after her would likely never be, yet it is because of them that she is there and because of her someone will follow her in the past.

Christina Jeffries Sub 1 was her mother.   By now, The Book was a few chapters long.  There were little things like how to wear your hair when traveling; the book suggested a bun if you had long hair or crop it short so as to avoid it flying in your eyes during the journey. These were lessons learned hard.  By far the longest entry and the most useful was that of Ariadne Chin and Lorraine Martin.

Lorraine was the primary of the two and one of the last time travelers to go back more than 1000 years in Alt-Time.  Lorraine was also one of the few to then travel forward in time.   When most go back, they stay there unless they are going back for a reason.  Lorraine had gone back a thousand years for a reason.  Growing up, Lorraine had been trained in time travel by her mother from the age of 19 and made her first jump when she was 26.  She could remember how her mother had told her, over coffee or tea in the breakfast nook of the family home one weekend when she was home from her first year of college.

She was being forced to declare a major and was on edge because she could not decide.  She told her mother something that she had never really shared with anyone; that she didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up.  All the kids around her knew or at least had some idea as they were growing up; pretending to be those people on the playground, but not her. While they were playing cops and robbers, she was content to be the bystander.  She always felt it would come to her when the time was right.  Upon hearing this, her mother leaned close to her and in the manner of a spy, even though it was only the two of them in the house, whispered to her that she had something to tell her.

What happened next was what Lorraine would consider her part of the puzzle; her addition to the Book.  She vowed to tackle effective recruitment and training.  Previous time travelers had not really thought about a system.  In fact, many spoke in the book with fondness about the “reveal”; a moment after the successor had been chosen when they would share the secrets of time travel.    After this particular conversation with her mother, Lorraine felt there had to be a more concise and practical way of telling someone and asking them to believe.  There had to be a method that, while different for everyone, would entail setting certain markers so as not to be off-putting.  She would later shudder at the thought of how the Project  (as the entire program had come to be known) would suffer if even one of them had, at some inopportune time been shuttled off to an insane asylum.  There had to be a way; fail safes had to be put in place.

Lorraine could remember having only one thought when her mother told her.  She wondered how, at 19, she was going to deal with having her mother committed.  Would she have to quit school and move home? How bad would it get?  She was rather proud of herself in that moment.  Thinking then that there would come a moment when she would have to maybe change bed pans or spoon feed her mother, she thought she could and would do it without complaint.  Her mother had once done it for her and there was no reason she would not return the favor. She had found her mission.

“I have traveled through time and so could you… if you want.  I can show you,” were her mother’s words.

Lorraine figured her mother had gotten into some meditation thing.  She wondered whether there was some charismatic guru lurking about somewhere, slowly bilking her for money.  Her mother got more and more specific and the more specific her mother got about the science and the intricacies of time travel, the more Lorraine began to wonder how and when or if she was going to contact her father.  Her parents had divorced some ten years before and he was off with his new wife and young child, enjoying being able to start his life anew.  Would he help?  Her mother had been a fairly prolific author and scholar.  Money was not an issue.  These were not the things she was concerned about.  She was worried about the emotional and physical care her mother was going to need as whatever this was progressed. 

“Hire a nurse and go back to school, Chipmunk,” she could hear her father say.  He may not say exactly that but he would have a terse, cold response, punctuated by a diminutive nickname.  He would think he sounded both practical and paternal at once instead of simply indifferent.   He was different around his new family.  He always called his young son, “buddy” yet with her he never used the same nickname twice.  She wondered if it was normal to pick up on such things.  Was it odd to desire to have just one diminutive nickname, not several constantly changing names that could be construed as him having forgotten her real name?  She noted the way he looked at his new son, reveled in the way he, at four, could throw a ball, or spell his name.  She was both an athletic and intellectually precocious child and to her recollection, was light years ahead of her half- brother when she was his age.  Consciously, she wanted to believe that her father, loved her just as much as she loved him, but subconsciously, she knew there was something different.  He was a boy.

“Mom, are you ok?” she asked when her mother was done.  Her mother had spent the better part of an hour explaining the math and science behind time travel.  Lorraine was smart, mathematically literate and was able to keep up for most of it, but she was not as well versed in physics so the parts she did not understand, she believed her mother was simply making up.

“I’m fine dear. I knew this would happen.  I should have been better prepared and I should have better prepared you.”

Lorraine would find out later that the tradition among previous time travelers was to find someone to impart the knowledge on at an age they can handle it and then go from there. By default, travelers chose daughters.  Lorraine would later, in her studies of the travelers, find out that her current situation was a rarity and how to choose a successor was not really discussed in The Book.

Her mother, still in a well-worn bathrobe, stood and shuffled to the hallway closet.  She retrieved a shoe box from the top shelf and brought it back to the table.  Lorraine wondered about the etiquette in such a situation.  How far should she let her go before just saying, “Mom, stop!” and go into a speech about how they were going to get her the help she needed.

Her mother showed her a series of pictures she had seen before, but now, in light of this conversation, had a whole new meaning.  There was a picture of her mother, young and just starting college herself.  In the picture, she is standing next to another woman and they are both in front of something that resembles a phone booth, shaking hands.

Her mother had told her it was something that she and an old college friend had built as a lark for Halloween, but she was now stressing that it was, in fact, a working time machine. She then showed her another photo with the woman standing with another woman in front of a similar booth.  They looked similar to each other.  Like twins, but one was a little older.  Picture after picture, sepia toned, black and white, faded color, instant, on and on.

It was starting to make sense to Lorraine even though a pile of pictures of women standing in front of what looked like a movie prop was still not entirely convincing.

Then her mother produced another small box from within the first box.  She grabbed a peach from the fruit bowl and placed the fruit in the smaller box.  She pressed a small red button.  Her mother, with shaking hands, then opened the box.  The peach was gone.

Lorraine shook her head.  Was this some sort of magic trick?  Was her mother now spending her days learning cheap tricks on Youtube?

“No, it was not a magic trick, Rainey and no, I am not losing my mind.” 

“Where is the peach?”

She could imagine her mother spending the day planning this but not.  Her mother does not do things like this.  She would not spend a day planning an elaborate practical joke. 

“Don’t think too hard about it, but I need you to look at this.”  Her mother said, and held up the first picture again.  There, in the picture was now a peach.  How?  If somehow her mother had sent the peach back through time, wouldn’t she then have always remembered there was a peach in the picture.  Somehow, Lorraine knew and understood that there was not a peach in the picture before and now there was.

“Everything that is and needs to be is always what has been.”

Lorraine looked at her mother a little more calmly now.  Maybe her mother was not losing her mind.  Maybe Lorraine was.

It took them two days to build the time machine and another six years for her to figure out what she was going to do.

Lorraine’s mother died two years after their talk at the breakfast nook. All the plans were made and she felt that they had said all that needed to be said.  Her mother’s last words were “Don’t do it.  Let me go.”

They had talked about it a number of times; the urge.  There was always an urge that time travelers got.  There was an urge to go forward, and back in time not for the sake of the project, but for personal reasons.  There was always the urge to alter some event in their lives and though there was no reason for them not to, the problem was developing an addiction and the desire to play God.  Altering time can be fun but then there are things to think about.

They had found that time was malleable, in a sense, but not infinite for each Traveler.  One could not cause horrendous damage, but given the urge, one could waste a great deal of time going back and forth, saving people who were dying or even going back in time to pay a bill they had forgotten.  The problem is that it is both delightfully simple and amazingly devoid of consequences.  There are very few things, short of personal recognizance, keeping a Traveler from abandoning the project and ruling the world.

With her mother gone, she was left to figure out the rest from The Book and make up some things on her own.

Chapter 2:  Down to the River

Ariadne Chin was the first of the rescued.  Mai, her mother, was raped.  Rape was not a word that was used very often in her mother’s world.  Mai he could see it about to happen.  Maybe she was partially to blame she would later think.  She should not have been out of her hut and wandering around with the sun going down but there was so much to do, and her own mother would angry if the washing had not been done. So, she had gone out into the fading light to finish the wash and gather water.

When she thought about it later, the men were no more dangerous than anything else she would face that night.  She was small and could very easily be taken by one of the large snakes that tended to hunt at night.  It had been warm out and when it was warm, the jaguars liked to hunt early in the evening for some reason.  It was not unusual for a snake or a jaguar to take a lamb or a calf this time of year; for them to come out of the shadows and drag an enticing little whining thing up into the trees.  She was barely bigger than they and an enterprising or hungry animal could take her rather easily.