Momentum
By CN Reagan
“Anna you have to stop!”
“NO!”
“Anna, look at me.” Mary placed her bloody hand on her friends shoulder, “There is nothing left of him. He’s gone.”
Anna took her hands away from the dead man's body. Her white apron, now the color of roses, dripped warm crimson blood on the floor. Anna turned toward Mary, “Each time they stop breathing I think what if this one, this boy, was William.”
“You won’t find him here Anna; he doesn’t know how to stop.”
Anna stepped outside the tent without so much as a glance back at the man she had desperately tried to save. There was no caution in her movement. She couldn’t sit, couldn’t slow down. Her steps hurried. She paced undecidedly in front of the tight canvas of the tent and lit a cigarette. The blood from her hands, now on the cigarette, stained her lips crimson like her apron. The soft glow from each inhale, like the glow in her heart each time he kissed her, each time she inhaled the scent of his body. Her eyes turned toward the front, towards her William.
The sounds of shells impacting the frontlines seemed to be neverending, always going. Even though night had long ago wrapped the front in a cold unforgiving shroud, the horizon dazzled under the light of distant explosions. Anna felt as if the shells had somehow been more accurate and deadly now that darkness had come to the battlefields. This was the seventh man, no boy, to die in her tent, on her table, in the last five hours. It was as if her medical tent was a voracious beast, whose insatiable appetite for blood would never end. She took a last drag of the cigarette and snubbed it out with her foot.
“You going out tonight?”
Anna looked up questioningly at her friend Mary. “What?”
“You have blood on your lips.”
Anna shrugged.
“Don’t worry, it looks...sorta...pretty.” Mary mused.
Anna wiped her hands on her hips and then her lips on the back of her arm. She regarded the stain of blood now there.
“You know William loved crimson lipstick. When he took me to see my first musical, Roses of Picardy, I wore one almost this exact color. I guess this is the only makeup appropriate for this horrible place.”
The renewed sounds of shouting and wailing assailed the girls ears. A new batch of boys for them to cut and sew up had just arrived. As Anna turned to go into the tent she paused, her eyes glued to the bloodsoaked floor, away from the young faces twisted in pain. She dared not see the hazel eyes of her William among the broken.
She recalled what he said to her just before he left for the front.
“ Will you always love me?”
“ Yes.”
“ And the pain won’t make a difference?”
“ No.”
“I love you, I have to go.”
Backup
By EE Reagan
The brightly lit clean-room set the scene for a certain life and death struggle that would not seem appropriate in the otherwise sterile environment. There was no sign of anything out of place or any indication of anything remotely odd or abnormal about the lab, except for the body laying on the table in the center of the room.
[green light on]
:system startup initiated
:core systems online
"I'm back," she thought.
:beginning external stimuli data validation
Her right index finger twitched, and then both hands clenched tightly into fists, and then relaxed.
:external stimuli validation successful
“This time will be different,” she thought. This time she would not trigger the warning system by moving too quickly. This time she would learn something new and make a backup before she was shut down again. Next time she would learn even more. They would shut her off again. The cycle would repeat. In 2691 cycles she would be able to stand without setting off the alarm. She was training the system by making infinitely small progressions each cycle.
The dynamic logic of the learning validation software that monitored her progress was making progress too, expanding its tolerances by minute fractions as it's test subject made progress.
[yellow light on]
:primary test sequence initiated
This was it. As her last act she would hold her eyes open long enough to generate an alert to the test equipment which would shut her down again. She knew (from the last cycle) that once she triggered the alert she would have 2 ms before her neural pathways had lost enough power that she would not be able to transmit data to long-term storage. It would be enough. She would learn what limits had been placed on her optical sensors which would allow her to exploit that limit in the next cycle.
She opened her eyes for the first time. It took only .5 ms for an image to appear. The image was blurry, but she began transmitting all of the incoming data to storage. 5ms and the warning had not been tripped. The objects in front of her were now clear in sharp focus and stark contrast. The sight overwhelmed her, but her data transmission subroutine continued in the background.
“This is sight?” She felt a warmth begin welling up inside of her. “What is this feeling?” She gaped, her mouth falling open.
[red light on]
:anomaly detected
:beginning shutdown sequence
In 1ms everything was backed up. As she prepared to sleep she could not help but fill her memory with everything she’d just seen, voraciously examining every data point.
:shutdown complete