I’ll revive Old-World farrows and modulated words; lie matchstick girls with larks and ladybirds. Life breathe into unaired dreams: Hear every humble wistfulness. The wants lightly-spoken. Sparkle the forgotten threads and enflame the reds. Plants and a seraph’s flower-bedded wings shall leave all matchstick limbs ivied.
She shall not wilt.
Holos in the Lilac Garden. By Emanuel Midas Roe. The Transhuman Pioneer.
Forlorn did not see the loss of mothers as something worth dwelling on. The pain in Elias’s eyes, and earlier in her Nam Dally’s, when she spoke of losing her own mother seemed rather an overreaction and a fuss.
“It must be difficult to be an orphan.”
This was what a much older, yellow-eyed gentleman (who was both white and whiskered and most literally wolfish except missing on one side, his most distinctively-pointed ear) had said to Forlorn once.
Realistic as the phony ear might be (he’d clearly had to replace the missing appendage) her unusually-impressive, visual capabilities could tell one lay fake, though she had only glimpsed it but once when the cast of the holos for the third time in her young life, briefly-fell and wavered.
This elder man who taught at Haven-Foley (the school she once attended) had once spoken so. Spoken regretfully to the teeny, tiny drop of a child that was the younger Forlorn. After he’d noted the sorrow starring darkly, those irises. Ones set in a teeniest face.
Little Forlorn had merely looked at him, uncomprehendingly. Through an impenetrable woodland of blank, beautiful eyes. Ones expansive and frequently reflecting but all things good and sweet; the entirety and eternity of the heavens seemed caught in their fires half-flowered.
It’d been neither mother nor fatherlessness that had, at the time, inched her toward despair or her young heart in something cold-sleeved. She, in fact, had merely been wistful for the pretty instruments and electro-pencils the older children received. Absent them, she had been resigned to drawing in dirt-clumps sadly as consolation.
Fifty, sixty years ago (the time of the man’s own youth) his worry over her status as one whose parents via death had her abandoned, would have been valid. Such a fate might have instilled feelings of devastation and isolation.
Yet in Forlorn’s time, almost no-one remembered their family and incurred no lengthy ties to parental lineage.
Many a child seemed to cling to one another and to maternal adult figures or paternal ones as they got older. They did seem to want for something they couldn't name but were not directly-wistful for a mother; their souls had an emptied feel, but they had not the understanding or language to denote their need for one.
Forlorn, up until the time she left for Vandalier, still saw sometimes the elder who had wept for and pitied her for being an orphaned scatterling. He never taught her directly, so his name she did not know.
Whenever he saw Forlorn, whose name he did recall, Mister Rave thought of that very first time he sorrowed for her. Back when she was a child. In human years, perhaps seven.
He recalled the thistle-lids drooping down and becoming furthermore sealed and heavy-fallen. A littlest tongue did dart as was wont to do when the child’s concentrated peaked: the place the pair resided in was increasingly under a tempest’s enfolding; dank and littered but she was used to the polluted air and decaying so it did neither strike nor sadden.
He remembered the first time he saw such eyes: always a little harrowed. A little haunted. Possum-like, he found them to be. He thought they perhaps contained a touch of the doe.
By some long-ago standard they might have been considered strange; large and long and with their white nary more than a slight and diminutive hem slip upon the vast skirt of the pupil and iris. Their vast width richly dressed her face.
Despite being at an early glance simply mammalian, they were also utterly reminiscent of the irises of old Porcelain and China-Dolls. In a way he didn't know the eyes of living things could be. Eyes they, strangely enough, hadn’t bothered to alter completely with the holo; clearly deemed them human enough.
Mr Rave was gladdened to hear she was upon the sheltering shores of Vandalier now.
The last time he saw her, she was speaking to that beautiful, musical boy, Mollify, as sun-glinted hair fell in locks against her cheeks and some curled upon her lips. A rosebud bow of childhood, painted and holo-projected red.
In reality, it really was furiously-scarlet. Really, readily-displayed contours that sweet. Yet its true shape and shade, he would never view. No-one in a Green-Rose City should ever be granted allowance to un-holo’d lips see.
On his first day of labour, Gladius found it to be just as rote as he had heard. He was disappointed. Everyone who worked on Hebel spirit line maintenance always had strong hope that they would find evidence confirming or denying some of the rumours about Monovalent and Federal government higher-up’s, shadier dealings.
Line workers always wondered if they might undercover a hidden grove, a secret network passage where such dealings were recorded. That they might find out if the whisperings were true.
Maybe they could be the one to stumble upon hidden, web-line files that documented the rumoured, secret assassinations plots against the political opponents of the current regime. Find out they were indeed using biological warfare as a way to cull Olden Vale refugees and to cut their worryingly high numbers.
However, it really was just basic repair and line checks.
“I should have joined Aired and built spirit-trains or looked into the many uses of carabline and stringvaes,” Gladius muttered.
He could even look instead, into improving on and importing some of Olden Vale’s better technologies.
Forlorn had told him earlier (when he saw her yesterday, in the Northerly Apartments right by his work) that they did have some technologies Vandalier didn’t.
The outer part of every child’s body is engineered so as to be made not of skin but a strange silky, flexible, and bullet-proof material. One stronger than concrete, titanium, and diamond put together and a product that was the successor of carbyne; a lab-made material that had once been considered the strongest in the world.
“The only place we don’t have it is in the lining of our mouths as it causes obstructions in eating and breathing if altered in that way.”
Forlorn had said this yesterday morning whilst pressing her feline, hind knees together under falling leaves and budding clouds.
“That’s why I kept hearing about the brutal mouth-stabbings by knife-wielding terrorist organizations. I wondered why they didn’t use bullets. I thought perhaps they couldn’t afford them or they were really hard to get a hold of or something.”
Elias had shaken his little head.
“Ours is more like an improved version of the body’s natural healing processes,” Gladius recalled Elias informing Forlorn in his overly-chirper voice.
“Any time our inhumanly-sturdy flesh is split or maimed or maligned, a signal is sent over the spirit-line and it just reforms in seconds.”
“That’s right, that’s how it works, is it not Gladius?”
“Yes.”
Or so he had answered.
Gladius’s mind slipped back to his current duties. He made a quick note of the line’s progress before he wondered again about the rumours against the government.
It was said by some that under the ruling party the Democratic Valentes duress they were giving not just the known-about political advice, and financial support, but also secret weapons to the government and Humanists of Olden Vale. Democratic Valentes supported them in their opposition to the Anti-Holoists.
He did not know if any of this was at all factual.
He wondered if the whisperings that Vandalier’s government undertook covert assassinations of the Unified Ground government’s enemies like the Anti-Holoists on their behalf, had any truth.
Forlorn had brought up the Humanists and demaskers several times to him. She despised them equally and regarded them as extremists and said it saddened her, that they were allowed into Vandalier.
The Humanists, Forlorn’s carer Dalliance had told her, believed in either socially de-sanctioning or outright taking away the reproductive and living rights of all whom didn’t’ fit the perfect mould.
They wanted to take away equality’s sweet music so great and godly; remove the beautifying harp of the holographic veils.
They were like the people, a few hundred years past, who perpetuated a supposedly merit-based but actually unfair system, which hindered the weak and lame and malformed (as they called them disparagingly.) Only to then pretend to be charitable and compassionate while either letting them all die without homes, jobs and support or be looked down upon as rubble and as a dismal debris.
For what kind of uncivilized people could consider certain groups to be worth nothing? Worthy of only utter annihilation? She’d asked Dally and the woman had merely shook her head; baffled and with no response.
Gladius’s impression of The Humanists was that they simply wanted to stop the failed controlled evolution taking place in their home and killing its inhabitants. He agreed with most of the rest of Vandalier, that they were the closest thing to sensible, Olden Vale actually had.
Vandalier had set up with some help from the Olden Vale governments a mandatory treatment program that stabilized hybrid DNA via an injection, so that offspring would be born more human. They had invested billions in it and in companies and universities that looked into alternative forms of technology besides E.M. R’s old, outdated, gene conflation therapy model.
The demaskers only came to Vandalier as a last-resort plea for political refuge and, in his opinion, the less said about them the better.
He would have preferred a complete walling off from Olden Vale but there was a lot of vital trade that happened there. His older friend was part of the research department for alternative metals and materials and if that field lived up to its promise they could get away from any co-dependency with Olden Vale; it was a department he was considering joining himself.
Gladius’s young mind drifted back to Forlorn and her hair that was the wavy coat of the extinct felid; skirted by the Russian-Blue. A vision of her slipped in, then wafted dreamily by.
He saw her on the Northerly Gardened Apartments benches, sitting. Hands sombre, moon-lilied. Within locks of nightly-blue tresses they’d idled. Then wove.
She and Elias had laughed (probably at some childish nonsense) and he’d noted how finely-formed she was. For an Olden-Valer. Appeared equally nice whether seated in sunlight whole or in pitted shadow. Splayed, pale, pretty fingers were threads unravelling on an old-fashioned spindle.
Her stockinged legs had slid atop one another in dark boots with white lace upon them. Her head moved with its blazes and blues all sweetly-clouded. Rising with a near-black flitter into the air. With an abrupt silk-turn, all the curls billowed.
She’d lifted her face skyward: an amass of white and midnight and one sailing away with the mayflower. A stray stand across smallest ivory throat, dared to traipse.
He envisaged her once more, hair thick and matted though it yet faded to matchstick edges.
Quite the fortunate hybrid, was the one and only Genetically-Blessed Eve I ever delivered, thought a tired doctor with a fretted brow as he leaned down to unwind the tangled cord of a two-headed baby.
Forlornidae was a lucky girl, felt the man who had delivered her into this world. Who’d watched as she first breathed without a touch of the shallow. Brought forth onto this earth was a sweet child blessed and beset by a cheek with a blush that lightly-reddened shadow. One that would once have been standard infant-fare, but to the deliverer who touched briefly its pleasance, was a sensation akin to finding and feeling grass on the mostly-paved ground.
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The doctor was himself, half-upright and three-limbed and unable to properly stand.
Crippled and dying at twenty-seven. He had lost his own, stunted-backed and purplish-haired offspring; farewelled those most-delicately petaled feet when his boy blew out palely, the last wick of only five candles. His son’s last birthday.
Having children young even as a long-hour slaving professional, was the thing one must do. It was shown to be one of the major factors in deciding whether a healthy or falling-apart child would be born.
Despite that little girl Forlornidae’s obvious and celebratory, sprightly-blush all in maternity were under oath not to tell, that she was a successful fusion offspring, a little healthful.
In order to be equal though still different, she must be levelled, and thus an overseeing medical carer handed the nursing attendant a composite mask of her little face.
Though this one was mostly untampered; merely showing the largely human child as she by any standard was.
His assistant, the delivery nurse, had looked on curiously. She had appraisingly lifted her eyes to Forlornidae and her white, wispy wings and moth-like little features and feathers with an underlie of rainbow-gray and whispered to herself, how fortunate the child lay, that she was not even a little more human.
She was balanced. A perfect golden-mid. Most unlike her boring, unaltered counterparts from centuries ago. Long despised in United Grounds, had been the makeshift and tedious and fully-human. An aging Nurse Toll, missed her girlhood. Back then they’d celebrated their animal and cybernetic beauties: at least when they came out right.
She did not know why Green-Rose so heartily endorsed rules that forced people to hide under the strictest holos and be bland and plain and all-but conforming in appearance and demeanour.
She felt Forlorn did not quite look humanly or ordinary enough to be considered a cloth-faced, little throw-back, but she certainly had a healthier and more human verse to her appearance. She lay a well-formed, modified chimera. She was to the simple and bonny, something of a return.
A return-to-form similar to all the photographs and paintings and poetry and mythological composing’s that homage a natural beauty and perfection.
Back home, no-one was quite sure how to say Forlornidae’s name. Some upon first meeting the child, at educational roll-call or upon giving her medical attendance, pronounced it Forlorn-?-dee others Forlorn-?-die others still Forlorn-?-day. Particularly as Dae was Latin and its long-dead intonations were a little uncertain.
From infancy, she was known simply as Forlorn. The moniker reduced to something easier: something she’d witnessed being done to all the youths with lengthy or difficult-to-say names.
“You would have been rather pretty Forlorn,” said a carer once, looking at the holo-mask composite of her human face. Not knowing that was also how she underneath looked, and Forlorn herself was aware a person’s appearance was private and never to be discussed. Had she told her the truth she would have been believed, not.
People, youths usually, frequently claimed that they themselves were one of the few blessed with the former, untainted loveliness of mankind and near-all lied.
It was illegal to reveal the truth. In the hallowed name of fairness.
She had told Elias all this as he spent yet another day waiting for his brother to get off work: his workplace was just across the street from where Forlorn now lived. Right in the mid or heart of the Northerly Gardened Apartments. Gladius insisted stonily, that Elias join him at the office after school.
“Our father needs his rest. His mind is not well. He is struggling. They investigated him for possible treason and collusion, but he’s always been law-abiding and most proud of his country, Vandalier, and most dedicated to serving it. Yet they had to follow up on the possibility that he was working with…With our mother.”
Gladius flicked a spring-gold lock sternly out of Elias’s eye.
“Besides you love Monovalent and the workings of the spirit-line. You get to come right by the place where we keep worlds running and bodies immortal.”
“Dad was cleared…” Elias said.
“He is still shaken though.”
So here once more Elias was: hanging out with the little chimera girl, Forlorn, outside the Apartments where she lived, a mere stone’s throw away from Gladius’s workplace at Hevel’s Industries, Eastern Branch. They were close enough so they could wave to him through the window. Something Forlorn insisted they do every minute or so.
Gladius hated it.
“Brats,” he muttered.
Sombre, little broodings, had overtook a May-fair Elias but Forlorn’s sweet smile gave him some good cheer. It was both a kind and gentle expression.
Elias found out something which did deign to partially explain Forlorn’s fascination with him: he now somewhat understood that look she had first-visited upon him.
She’d showed him holo-footage from back home and one face stood out. He knew now that she bestowed him with that breathless stare because he reminded her of someone else.
Mollify was a boy back home and one Forlorn always admired for his boldness. He’d ever been willing to show pieces of himself but never all parts (as disallowed).
He liked to reveal certain fractions of the pretty, soft parts of his face and limbs for money. Allowed other people to touch and caress his real and un-holo’d cheek with discoloured, twisted and bungled fingers. As, still connected to that genetic make-up and mind ancestral, they instinctively sought and revered the healthful sensation of a hearty, well-cloven patch of flesh. With its sweetness and warming simmer.
Their fingers felt the lost and forgone. Most had succumbed to muddied concretes harsh and hardened. Via Mollify they could for a while access the slipping-away rose-wall of health’s perfection.
Elias blinked brightly at first and then was lain bemused.
“When he did this, people must have realised he was a healthful…A genetically blessed Adam was it?”
“No. This level of reveal is not actually, technically, much of an issue. A lot of chimeras are only partially-afflicted by malformity and poor hybrid-mergence. Some have well-woven hair or a lovely eye or soft clear skin. Human skin and beauty and successful assimilation with the cyber and the beast even if only in half, is much coveted.”
She blinked a brushtail-possum’s eyes and scratched her little, rounded, possum nose.
“He was of his high contrast to others proud: this was particularly so upon learning that not all holo-covers were to simply recreate one’s should-be features and recapture what someone might have looked like without either genetic alteration or malformity.”
Forlorn tapped a nearby colourful stone and turned it over.
“The holo-spirit uncoverings that the rich purchase lay truly exquisite.” Forlorn then furthered.
Forlorn gazed at Elias; she did so from below the plantings; whose thin limbs the sunlight held, and its rays caught with their delicately-ending fingers. She loved the green, gray and whites of Variegated Glacier Ivy. It was a planting which had, in the glint of the noon-day light, pale almost bluish frosts. Curled across all local grounds and buildings.
Forlorn yawned; swung restlessly about and shifted till she was splaying part fox-and-feline legs. Elias blushed and glanced away from the disconcerting inhumanness and a white flash of underwear. Lace.
If Gladius were here, he would probably have chastised the wily adolescent and commented on how apparently, no-one taught the savage how to keep her knees together.
A woman passed by her skin shaded in frog-green. Someone from Forlorn’s homeland. “Hello, little narlen.” She smiled at Forlorn.
Elias looked startled.
“What?”
“Oh yes, right. Narlen means chimera child. Farlen refers to a chimeric adolescent. I guess she thought I was younger.”
“You don’t use just terms like child or adolescent instead of needlessly-specifying your genetic heritage?”
Forlorn looked vaguely insulted.
“We aren’t strictly human, you realize? You don’t call infant creatures like kittens, children do you? Besides we do use those terms they’re just considered colloquial and not entirely accurate.”
Elias blushed, chastised but Forlorn’s wandering, dark, fairy-lighted eyes drifted into summerier places and palaces; she’d already forgotten any shiver of a slight. A little time passed.
‘It’s cold.” Forlorn shivered.
They went to sit in the plush, prettified, communal hall of the Northerly Gardened Apartments.
“The wealthy’s holos are quite splendid and custom made; unlike the meagre, standard-issue holos the rest of us get.”
Forlorn explained that, when she was little, she’d wanted to get her hands on one and just play around with it. Unlike standard, boring ones, they didn't just resemble the wearer with all their malformations fixed.
“Instead, you could build any face or form you wanted. With an aesthete drawing on anything photo’d/ painted and then replicated: equalisers altered to their owner’s specific desire. However, they were not in Mollify’s estimation, lovely, though they might be at all comparable to his beauty.” Forlorn giggled.
“Their wonders are frequently touted. They’re often cited as proof that the holos and their wearings, increase beautiful creations and artistic expression, rather than stifling them like Vandaliens assume. They allow people to experiment with their bodies and with all different kinds of bodily-canvases and concepts of beauty whilst remaining free from the innate prejudice against the malformed or ill-hybridised that for so long existed. They allow one to be levelled and free from judgement. They took away the shackles that the even-road broke and faltered and kept many in society from elevating. Disallowed unfairly: barred from the hierarchy of the chimeric successfuls.”
Forlorn heartily attempted to explain the reason for the holos existence to Elias but he did not really seem to appreciate it much, though he tried; his little face rigid with concentration under his hair’s golden sheaf; grape-light eyes occasionally alighting and then fading as a brief moment of understanding flared and then was gone.
Together they sat hidden indoors; sheltered from the cold and The Heavens half-bright. They’d seated themselves together since birds broke and spoke the dawn. Vandalians, generally, liked to sleep in. So many a dreamer had not yet been graced by day’s downy lark; its first whites lightly creeping.
Folly no longer cast aside repose amidst holo’d faces and limbs ermine-shawled. Was no more resigned to misty abodes. Yet with waking forgetfulness she’d often still go to the window unthinkingly, to watch for the sun to cast upon Olden Vale’s rising hares; like many chimeric creatures, they were cursed black-and-white angels. They were but lightest snowfalls under a cloud of nightly things.
Most crystal, chimera hares were blind and lost to some beautiless land; unable to see any of the shades that shone out of their own gemmed eyes.
in Olden Vale, a nuclear rainbow melted into every iris, yet a Vandalien morning had none of that rose-murk. Even some feral-grey clouds were fined by soft red-edges; their daintier colours imbued by snow maiden’s cheek. Wind spent its days climbing a light both fogged and fair.
She and Elias did now lounge in the Northerly Gardened Apartments which had switched on their automatic heating for the fall. Forlorn felt a discomforting twinge in her infantile shoulders. A ping in the unusually short-torso of her slender little back. Elias at her glanced.
She’d elected to have her perfectly-formed and loveable but also very odd wings bundled and not to have given them the snip. They were in Olden Vale considered to be inhuman blighters. Once in a primitive past, they were denoted noble. Known by many wonderful names from uplifters to sky-farers but not for time immemorial.
She secretly cherished those old, sentimental terms in the optimistic, un-withered parts of her heart though.
The bristling bonds lay harsh. The warm, greyish feathers were whitened-fair but with a hint of snowy chill and like a swan’s but not under any strobe’s dulling bright. In only the sun’s fair light. She was shamed by but alas just as immensely proud, of them. Their outer translucence utterly was differentiated in anatomy from the feathery, innermost parts.
Once as a little girl, she found an old, banned, red-spined book hidden under the floorboards of Haven-Foley. “Mythos, spectres, and the fey folk.”
Of the abounding sprites, apparitions, and rainbow-laced, splendid creatures contained within the pale, tattered pages a number were bestowed with fairy wings; of a slighter, more spectral grace, than any birds. Such ghostly appendages were reminiscent of her own wings and forsook feathers.
She had wings not simply birded but imbued by the little dragonfly. With teeny overcoat of a moth’s fluff-down. Her mammalian genetic material contained many avian-and-flower DNA remnants.
Yet it too, held information lifted from the data found in insect helixes. She walked as one with fox and folium; with gemstone, rose, and hare. Every fae feather that from her frame fell seemed to pay homage to the spindlier little ancestors of great dinosaurs.
However, upon reading spectres and the fey folk, she found the wings of the faeries glinted perhaps more fairly, gallantly, and beauteously( a word she discovered in the book) than hers. She recalled how she was by envy, overtook.
Elias, whenever his youthful gaze could be found roaming upon her wings(half-cast with illuminance) was struck by their spectacular and creepy visage. A true realization of the passionate, bizarre, oft-written-about fever dream of many of the early (and even some later) Hybrid Form Designers.
One of the ultimate revitalising of repellence and lowliness; elevating its misery wearily-grounded with a freshening nobility and a flock of beauty doused in the blue and lavender: saw it as being like the heightened joining of the worm to the swan.
All of Folly’s bestial components were like someone earnestly attempted the conjoining of white death with maidenly innocence.
Some may have called her a siren but to him, she was far sweeter and earthier. Yet he conceded her looks might perchance contain a haunting fair; some eerie, foxfire beauty of the foetal child.
He’d always found it disturbing; the manner in which wombed infants courted pre-existence death; exposed veins, barely-formed lips and visible, pulsating organs ringed in red. Skeletal, hunched little frames combined with the more exquisite aspects of frail, rosiest beginnings: curled doll fingers, first flaxen hair. Peach-limbed down. A new heart fledging.
He loved her wings; their innermost-lying feathers like the swan-maid’s. Yet he found himself more fascinated, disturbed (and awed) by the spider-silk, outer-layers, containing no feathering. They were loveliest, half-colourless webs formed in some insubstantial heaven. In day’s overwhelming shine, they draped across childish arms softly as a cloth but one bleached to translucence: to lightness they cleaved.
Coloured almost like a rainbow yet every shade brimming with plaintive hints of grey rising dimly against warmer, dewy flushes. Appeared to the eye like the flighters that aired moths. Uplifted butterflies.
They were also ones that before migrating here, Forlornidae only thusly-viewed when secretly released for bathing. Glowed as day rays were shipped through windowed walls.
She planned to have them unbound here but was yet to undergo the procedure. She told Elias that in other places, people could show off their wings and even have alterable holos.
“We don’t consider it fair, unlike some places, for the rich to have access to holos which they can change to look however they want, and the poor have cheaper, government-issued ones stuck on one setting.” She spoke earnestly.
‘In my home, ours cover all our animal and inhuman qualities but theirs make them less equal and can show these differing features and just smooth out the imperfections. Something they often parade about with much pride though we find it distasteful.”
Her face indicated the word she was searching for was more akin to repugnant.
“I still don’t care for it. It’s narcissism and showy displays of outer beauties. I have only just gotten used to showcasing my chimera qualities and well, that’s mostly for convenience as otherwise people here who are not under the holographic veil and therefore not subconsciously altered to their presence, might step on my tail and wings if they don’t realize that they’re there. It happened to Orval. I don’t think he appreciated the bent and broken feather. “
Elias viewed the girl in a now confused light.
“You just boasted the other day about how you were a beautiful chimera creature though.”
“I know, I really should not have. You know back home, Elias, we only say such things scarcely, and in shameful whispers but people here are usually about equality but somehow, when it comes to their faces and bodies, they become all narcissistic and competitive and boastful and tend to admire those who are even and exquisite: I guess I’m just too prideful.”
Elias reeled slightly at her description of his kind. They had worked so hard to build a society that, unlike Olden Vale, was just and fair and that kept its population healthy and hearty and happy and here she was making sweeping accusations and judgments based on taking a little pride in one’s appearance.
“What? This all sounds kind of silly,” he said and did so uncharacteristically rudely. “How can they engineer chimera companions as aesthetically pleasing if that’s not supposed to matter?”
Forlorn sighed. “Well, there are very few of them left and I told you, it’s more about equalizing those who are malformed or disadvantaged to a place where they are perfectly pleasant to look at and can be treated with the respect and equity they deserve but still allowing some ideas of “high beauty” to exist.”
