I cannot emphasise this enough: rough draft, needed to post to make it in before the deadline. Corrections to come. This is still a rough draft for the reasons below, but I'd like to think of it as a final for the challenge.

Thank you to the lovely stop and trinityofone for beta, thoughts, comments, and general wonderfulness. What remains is my own.

(Also, I literally started this three hours before the challenge was due, only thought of the idea on Sunday, and I am well aware that this story is not coherent, not well-structured, not developed, etc. I'd like to think of this as a beginning, maybe something I could come back, an idea, but again as is, it really doesn't work and I acknowledge that.)

For the picfor1000 challenge. Can we notice me and my deadline love?


Real Subsumption
inspired by this
johnrodney, pg
28 february 2006

*

There are a lot of things John misses about the industrial world, mostly involving Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits CD and his X-Box.

His misses strawberry popsicles, heat insulating windows, Zirh Control hair wax, non-stick pans, and electric washing machines.

He misses health insurance, telemarketing phone calls, bad car commercials and good beer ones.

He misses getting up at noon on his days off.

He misses days off.

He doesn’t miss his gun.

*

In the short version, they win (with help).

In the long version, they're saved by technologically advanced social scientists, just passing through, just observing, whose non-interference lasts just about as long as it takes for one of them to be on the other end of a Wraith stunner. Their price is high though: do exactly what we say, and no one gets hurt. But the alternative is no alternative, and John's willing to submit to a "technological reboot" and "level playing field", rhetoric of the self-righteous guardians of universal fairness that the Loris aren’t.

In the real version, the Wraith make it to the Milky Way but not much further. John watches as negotiations decay into pleas, into quiet begging as he counts the days between hyperspace jumps, closer and closer, and by the time that idiot negotiator actually tried to "investigate the Wraith's cultural history," John's ready to sign away the galaxy for another year.

In the end, Earth's safe, Pegasus is safe, and they're still alive.

John figures that's the only version that matters anyway.

*

The Man’s got a list of rules that’s exactly two points long: Don’t act like you know you’re being monitored. Don’t try to change your circumstance through the use of outside influence.

John thinks outside and laughs.

“I didn’t make these rules,” The Man had said, “but I’m sure you recognize their practicality in protecting against data contamination.”

The first time John saw her, The Man looked young and lost, like that particular innocence that he’s only seen in people like the Athosians: the weight of bloodshed and tears, but never amongst themselves.

“What’s your name?” John asked.

She looked at him and said, “It cannot be pronounced by your tongue.”

Her eyes were blue.

He started calling her The Man Upstairs (literally: she’s in a spaceship orbiting their planet) and later The Man with the same adolescent irony that he used to pull off salutes to his father, The General.

She doesn’t seem to mind as much.

*

Officially, there’s a shiny black transmitter with a shiny red button locked in a trunk in the new governor’s cabin. John’s seen it exactly once, on the day the Loris left, and they were alone without the mechanical whirl of gears, ventilation, city life.

It’s designed to send a quick pulse of light energy directly to The Man’s ship. “A panic button,” she said.

When Rodney doesn’t make it back to cabin for a third day, it’s the button that he thinks about.

*

The last evening before the Deindustrial Revolution, John takes The Man out to dinner. He wears an only slightly-wrinkled sports jacket and shines his shoes.

“We actually start you a bit ahead of the others,” she explains over fettuccini alfredo, “to account for developmental amnesia.”

He thinks he’s being insulted, but then, everything she says is in the casually arrogant tone of progress.

“One of your theorists actually had an interesting idea about this. Real versus formal subsumption of labor.”

“You monitor our theorists?” John asked.

“Oh, of course. It’s actually a popular subfield in Pre-Galactic Integration Intellectual History.” She swallowed quickly. “Earth’s one of the more fascinating social systems because you’re so provincially isolated”

John thought, She was more Rodney’s type anyway. He said, “Oh.”

*

The last thing Rodney said to him before he left was, “Look around you John, what are we working for?”

The thing before that was, “Did you know Cadman’s pregnant?”

John had answered, “Yeah? Carson must be happy. I heard they’ve been trying for awhile.”

Sometimes, he likes to play that conversation again in his head before he goes to sleep. Sometimes, he wakes up calling Rodney’s name.

Mostly, he tries not to worry. This is the way the die rolls, and while John’s never been a gambling man, he’s been counting cards since the fourth grade.


*

Rodney stopped calling him “Colonel” the day they stopped having a military, but he didn’t start calling him “John” until they started having sex.

John hadn’t been expecting it, but the next morning when their bodies woke with the newly familiar rhythms of dawn, Rodney had said, “Damn it John, it’s your turn to feed the pigs.”

It hadn’t really been his turn, but he remembered the intimate blue of Rodney’s eyes, the way his body clenched, the way he breathed, “It’s fine, it’s good.”

John had been the one to start it. He had been quietly craving it all day, and in the warm, fresh maple interior of the cabin, it had been the easiest thing in the world to press closer against Rodney’s familiarity.

After John kissed him, Rodney had said, “Yeah?”

John had thought, only once, How does this fit into the theory?

*

When Rodney comes back, he says, “I think I figured out a way to stabilize the energy flow.”

For a minute, John thinks ZPM and Atlantis and the otherworldly desperation of survival, but then he remembers the generator and current fluctuations.

John’s not waiting for an apology, and he’s not going to ask, “Where have you been?” but he thinks Rodney will tell him anyway.

In the dark, Rodney says, “She asked me if I would change anything.”

John says, “You talked to The Man?” but what he means is, “Oh.”

“What are you talking about?” Rodney says, and later, “You know, considering she’s female and our current governor’s female and Elizabeth’s female, this whole characterization of oppressive figures of authority as stereotypically masculine isn’t very progressive of you. And, of course, wrong.”

John says, “We’re moving forward everyday.”

*