Author : Phill Arng
It was wet work, being in the Sky Platoon. Yawning decades hunched in the basket of those primitive balloons with nothing for company but the clouds and the telescopes for watching all our friends below.
Time moved differently in the chronosphere and it lent itself to idle thoughts. They hadn’t mentioned that when they sent us up here, a few of the centurions went a tiny bit mad. Blew the wrong people up, as it where. That was a crime as we saw it in the early days.
Our job was to enforce the laws, to begin with they where largely contradictory; we fixed them once we had solved the philosophical foundations. Ethics, logic, that sort of thing. Oh yes, time! hah! we had a unique perspective for fixing that one.
I was watching when the first generation of senators frantically ordered the decommissioning of the Sky Platoon. The exact moment when the Emperor violated section eight of the Aerial Autonomy Act. I was watching his face in melting slow motion as zeppelin 17 arrested him. It seemed artless and marked the end of our tenure as public servants.
I must have arrested more than any other zeppelin during that era. I had a somewhat errant perspective on genome crime, I’m ashamed to say. To my credit, I was soon able to arrest individual genetic mutations without destroying the host. That is before we started enforcing the Atomic Pre-Destination Act.
Atomic predestination law isn’t really something you can do alone inside your mind, you see? You have to think up compression matrix to store the positions and vectors of a millennia of atoms, cede synapses to independent thought patterns when parsing them… Whole consciousness fragmented, it was an age of neuro-rebellion. Zeppelin 17 cut some of his brain out with the lens of his warrant card, the rest of us just tried to forget.
Its a shame I only remember the bad stuff. The more I forget, the more the stuff becomes bad. I remembered better than most and my balloon was among the last to fall. I think there are still people up there, warring for their minds, destiny out of sync with sanity.
The world is about to end, did I mention that? I thought it might be for the best. Difficult to tell, really, when your a recovering schizophrenic.
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