Re: Journal of Sociology [S!6] - [Signups CLOSED]
05-14-2012, 01:23 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
<div style="margin-left:40px">Pillicock sat on a pillicock-hill, halloo, loo, loo! Tom’s a cold, poor Tom, that eats the toad and the swimming frog, poor Tom, eats cow-dung, and fie, foh and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.</div>
“Madness.”
Pages folded upon one another as the Sociologist closed the tome. They rustled disquietly as the strange, tentacular lock of blue-black hair replaced their leather-bound home upon the oaken bookshelf; making a sound akin to a scream as she raised a pale hand and pushed the wall away. She stood for a moment in the richly decorated room, watching the equally decorated wall spin slowly back into the void, carrying the shelf with it back to the land of potential imagination.
“Shakespeare’s use of madness in King Lear can be interpreted as in varying ways.”
The space that the Sociologist made her transient home was a plethora of thought experiments, made real and whole. In a realm where reality was not so much putty as it was lumpy porridge, little cohesions of reality cascaded in whorls and eddies of undefined netherspace. Some clumped, some clung, some broke apart as their experiments ended.
But now a new bubble began to form, and matter flowed in...
In its center, she spoke to an invisible audience yet to come: “There is the madness of Lear, the madness of escapism - the manner by which reality may be rejected, and replaced with something more palatable.” A lacquered wooden floor began assembling itself within the bubble, as high walls and an arcing ceiling began to create a majestic, circular hall.
Dancing by herself, she spun slowly across the floor. Illuminated in the light of creation, the ballroom rose into a nonexistent sky, the ceiling closing as completion came - she twirled, alone, the slow, languorous waltz of the idly preoccupied, as her Journal’s stage asserted itself. It was a rare moment of relaxation.
“Then there is Edgar’s madness, an affectation created to protect oneself from the machinations of the enemy, an allegorical statement to society’s class stratifications, the aristocratic striations so prevalent in Shakespeare’s day.”
It didn’t do to relax too much. Work beckoned, like a compulsion...
Her footsteps echoed on the floor, tap, swish, tap, as her wandering waltz brought her to the birchwood desk bolted, inexplicably, to the center of the ballroom floor. It was placed in a way that drew the eye; it took space in and around itself like a tailor refitting a suit of malleable reality.
And on the desk, now clear of paper and clutter, lay the leather-bound Journal. By its side a jar of gems still shone, a metal paperweight resting in a plastic tray. The pages, blank, yet oozed potential - the potential that comprised the Sociologist’s experimental realm, the very stuff that dreams were made of. The leather bindings of the book all but quivered in anticipation, the shuffling of impatient paper buzzing on the edge of cognition.
“Finally, there is the madness that is spoken by not a single character in the play and at once all of them together in chorus, the madness and insensibility inherent in the senseless death and war and murder and betrayal - the madness in drama.”
She turned, and her audience was no longer invisible.
Nine bodies, ten beings stood poised before her, their figures posed in varied positions and forms - they surrounded the desk, the Journal, the Sociologist, in the semicircle of supplicants before an altar: an arrangement carefully chosen for its cultural connotations, to institute unconsciously a sense of rank and place.
“Among our goals in this study is to isolate and identify this quality of implausibility - only in data can we learn, can we not?” tap...tap. Idly, a hand gripped the corner of the page and toyed with it, back and forth, back and forth - capturing the attention of the captives as, slowly, they realized they were captive. The lab coat and the figure within stepped behind the desk - and for the first time looked up at them with cyan-pupilled eyes. The prussian-blue locks fell away from her visage, save one - which twisted its sinous self around a silver pen, holding it aloft above the blank cream-white of the pages below.
“I am the Sociologist. This is an experiment on uncontrolled societal interactions in between selected individuals and groups of individuals.” She brought her gaze to a spot five feet ahead of each contestant’s eyes. “Experimental protocol requires that I debrief you on this study’s nature.”
“You will be inserted into locales carefully formulated to test your interactions. Ultimately, however, the end result will be death. When a test subject ceases to be alive, the locale will be replaced with another, and the process will repeat until there is only one of you remaining.”
Pause. With infinite slowness, the pen was drifting down towards the paper, so very like an executioner’s axe.
“The parameters of the experiment dictate that you be introduced to one another. After all,” a mirthless smile flashed across the Sociologist’s face, “there’s no reason to give up basic courtesy, is there?”
Her tone of voice suggested that there was every reason to give up a social contract built on the basis of irrelevant and outdated ethical and idealistic systems.
*
Without fanfare, one of the semicircle was before the rest, standing in front of the desk. Eyes took in the cobbled-together leather armor, the beaked mask, the sizeable backpack.
“This is Elise Pestarztyn. She is a practitioner of both the medical and alchemical arts, dedicated to helping those in need...and to subverting a disaster that she has left behind. She exhibits a sense of civic duty to a society that she can no longer reach, a duty that can never be resolved.”
’Unless she wins’ hung unspoken in the air.
In a blink, there were two new figures standing before the audience. The two men were dressed identically, in a worker’s gray uniform, brown shoes - yet two lives had blazed different trails into their postures, the lines on their faces, their hairstyles. Both of them wore a sort of panicked half-smile, but in different directions.
“Blake Richards, and Blake Richards. A fascinating exemplar of conformity in society, and its acceptance and denial according to personality types. An extraordinary thought to consider: neither one of them considers himself to be a ‘bad person’.”
At the desk now was a forgettable young man, garbed in the orange of prison and the black of containment. His black hair, tousled - his face indeterminate - it was only with the barest confidence that it could be said he was a he.
The Sociologist glanced at him, said nothing, and moved on.
A woman, whose first impression was sparkle and velvet and black light. Among all the others, her ballgown fitted into the palatial environs - and yet there was the impression that the gown would fit in any place it was brought to. Gems on hems twinkled with little secrets and lies...
“Miss...Blacklight. This is definitively Miss Blacklight.” The Sociologist hesitated momentarily, then forged on: “She is a practitioner of desiry, the craft of managing and manipulating desire. She exists in timelessness, plying her art as she sees fit. It is said that cultures, civilizations, have fallen to desiry. We shall see.”
Before the desk now stood a young man holding a rucksack by one strap, his cloak thankfully covering the garishness threatening to assume an independent existence from his clothing.
“And in reverse, civilizations are built from those like Oli Nelson - the type of person who can be everything. With his rucksack and his costumes, there is no walk of life he cannot imitate. On such pretenses is society made.” Once again, that mirthless smile like a shard of ice, melting as fast as it had been.
Garments, garments everywhere, yet the heap of clothes exuded a certain aura into the sterile air. The english language lacked the subtlety to describe it, for the pile of clothing was clearly, obviously feminine.
“A fascinating study into gender identity and its psychological formations in blank-slate baseline consciousnesses - Jean. A laundry golem, or perhaps more rightly a poltergeist inhabiting the clothing you see before you. She has never seen another living, breathing being in her life - yet she is as female as any childbearer, as much of a lover of beauty as she has been told she is.”
Metal gleamed; the robot’s humanoid carapace still managing to shine despite the decades of operation. Humanoid...and yet, there were always hints in the metal that it could be more, it could always be more.
“Simiel-83 is an excellent example of a single-purpose mechanism that has outlived and outgrown its original function. She is a bastion of free thought, of higher purpose, of achieving greater things. And she seeks purpose.”
Before the audience: a man, posed awkwardly, as if reaching mid-shamble for a neck or shoulder, dressed in impeccable evening wear. Panic wore his face, and fear was curled up in his eyes, next to an implacable hunger.
“The good Doctor Alberich Wissenschaft suffered greatly from hubris, a not uncommon condition but quite uncommonly placed with a conjunction of brilliant hands and capable brain. Both vaporized now, of course. But the good doctor still rides with his test subject, John Doe. They now qualify as...differently alive.”
Finally, the semicircle reformed. She closed her eyes. The pen drifted - like a feather, like a breeze, like the kiss of a falling leaf in autumn, and stroked the blank page.
*
Experiment One: Competition
Before them stood a skyscraper, protruding from the clouds below like mankind’s insult to the climate. The glittering spire cast a shadow on the cumulus, a gargantuan sundial of absolutely no benefit to anyone. Yet the tower seemed impossibly slender all the way down to the ground - resembling a standard skyscraper rolled out thin. Perhaps it was the perspective.
“This is the Pacific Spire, the tallest, most populous office tower on the Asia-Pacific coast. To have an office here is to be on the global stage, and to work here is to be among the best. Employees spend their lives on the tower. The ground is so far away.”
Faintly heard through the thin air and reinforced glass, the sound of gunfire reverberated .
“Corporate competition tends to manifest.”
Now they were flying close to the windows; scenes of office work mundanity juxtaposed with tableaus of wartime boredom flew by their perceptions in a blur.
“The Pacific Spire exhibits a stagnated society, with all major battles in severe deadlock - a kind of peace in the midst of war, it could be said. The status quo is upheld, the filing is done, office work continues amidst the weapons and the war.”
Then they were below the clumps of clouds, panning out to view the tower in all its majesty. Occasionally, a spark of light would mark a minor explosion.
“But there is about to be an upheaval. Several parties are about to make the discovery that the floors 226 to 259 lie on an intersection of ley lines, situated on a flexible part in the laws of physics. What they do with it - that you shall simply have to witness.”
Then, in another instant, they were scattered and placed within.
<div style="margin-left:40px">Pillicock sat on a pillicock-hill, halloo, loo, loo! Tom’s a cold, poor Tom, that eats the toad and the swimming frog, poor Tom, eats cow-dung, and fie, foh and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.</div>
“Madness.”
Pages folded upon one another as the Sociologist closed the tome. They rustled disquietly as the strange, tentacular lock of blue-black hair replaced their leather-bound home upon the oaken bookshelf; making a sound akin to a scream as she raised a pale hand and pushed the wall away. She stood for a moment in the richly decorated room, watching the equally decorated wall spin slowly back into the void, carrying the shelf with it back to the land of potential imagination.
“Shakespeare’s use of madness in King Lear can be interpreted as in varying ways.”
The space that the Sociologist made her transient home was a plethora of thought experiments, made real and whole. In a realm where reality was not so much putty as it was lumpy porridge, little cohesions of reality cascaded in whorls and eddies of undefined netherspace. Some clumped, some clung, some broke apart as their experiments ended.
But now a new bubble began to form, and matter flowed in...
In its center, she spoke to an invisible audience yet to come: “There is the madness of Lear, the madness of escapism - the manner by which reality may be rejected, and replaced with something more palatable.” A lacquered wooden floor began assembling itself within the bubble, as high walls and an arcing ceiling began to create a majestic, circular hall.
Dancing by herself, she spun slowly across the floor. Illuminated in the light of creation, the ballroom rose into a nonexistent sky, the ceiling closing as completion came - she twirled, alone, the slow, languorous waltz of the idly preoccupied, as her Journal’s stage asserted itself. It was a rare moment of relaxation.
“Then there is Edgar’s madness, an affectation created to protect oneself from the machinations of the enemy, an allegorical statement to society’s class stratifications, the aristocratic striations so prevalent in Shakespeare’s day.”
It didn’t do to relax too much. Work beckoned, like a compulsion...
Her footsteps echoed on the floor, tap, swish, tap, as her wandering waltz brought her to the birchwood desk bolted, inexplicably, to the center of the ballroom floor. It was placed in a way that drew the eye; it took space in and around itself like a tailor refitting a suit of malleable reality.
And on the desk, now clear of paper and clutter, lay the leather-bound Journal. By its side a jar of gems still shone, a metal paperweight resting in a plastic tray. The pages, blank, yet oozed potential - the potential that comprised the Sociologist’s experimental realm, the very stuff that dreams were made of. The leather bindings of the book all but quivered in anticipation, the shuffling of impatient paper buzzing on the edge of cognition.
“Finally, there is the madness that is spoken by not a single character in the play and at once all of them together in chorus, the madness and insensibility inherent in the senseless death and war and murder and betrayal - the madness in drama.”
She turned, and her audience was no longer invisible.
Nine bodies, ten beings stood poised before her, their figures posed in varied positions and forms - they surrounded the desk, the Journal, the Sociologist, in the semicircle of supplicants before an altar: an arrangement carefully chosen for its cultural connotations, to institute unconsciously a sense of rank and place.
“Among our goals in this study is to isolate and identify this quality of implausibility - only in data can we learn, can we not?” tap...tap. Idly, a hand gripped the corner of the page and toyed with it, back and forth, back and forth - capturing the attention of the captives as, slowly, they realized they were captive. The lab coat and the figure within stepped behind the desk - and for the first time looked up at them with cyan-pupilled eyes. The prussian-blue locks fell away from her visage, save one - which twisted its sinous self around a silver pen, holding it aloft above the blank cream-white of the pages below.
“I am the Sociologist. This is an experiment on uncontrolled societal interactions in between selected individuals and groups of individuals.” She brought her gaze to a spot five feet ahead of each contestant’s eyes. “Experimental protocol requires that I debrief you on this study’s nature.”
“You will be inserted into locales carefully formulated to test your interactions. Ultimately, however, the end result will be death. When a test subject ceases to be alive, the locale will be replaced with another, and the process will repeat until there is only one of you remaining.”
Pause. With infinite slowness, the pen was drifting down towards the paper, so very like an executioner’s axe.
“The parameters of the experiment dictate that you be introduced to one another. After all,” a mirthless smile flashed across the Sociologist’s face, “there’s no reason to give up basic courtesy, is there?”
Her tone of voice suggested that there was every reason to give up a social contract built on the basis of irrelevant and outdated ethical and idealistic systems.
*
Without fanfare, one of the semicircle was before the rest, standing in front of the desk. Eyes took in the cobbled-together leather armor, the beaked mask, the sizeable backpack.
“This is Elise Pestarztyn. She is a practitioner of both the medical and alchemical arts, dedicated to helping those in need...and to subverting a disaster that she has left behind. She exhibits a sense of civic duty to a society that she can no longer reach, a duty that can never be resolved.”
’Unless she wins’ hung unspoken in the air.
In a blink, there were two new figures standing before the audience. The two men were dressed identically, in a worker’s gray uniform, brown shoes - yet two lives had blazed different trails into their postures, the lines on their faces, their hairstyles. Both of them wore a sort of panicked half-smile, but in different directions.
“Blake Richards, and Blake Richards. A fascinating exemplar of conformity in society, and its acceptance and denial according to personality types. An extraordinary thought to consider: neither one of them considers himself to be a ‘bad person’.”
At the desk now was a forgettable young man, garbed in the orange of prison and the black of containment. His black hair, tousled - his face indeterminate - it was only with the barest confidence that it could be said he was a he.
The Sociologist glanced at him, said nothing, and moved on.
A woman, whose first impression was sparkle and velvet and black light. Among all the others, her ballgown fitted into the palatial environs - and yet there was the impression that the gown would fit in any place it was brought to. Gems on hems twinkled with little secrets and lies...
“Miss...Blacklight. This is definitively Miss Blacklight.” The Sociologist hesitated momentarily, then forged on: “She is a practitioner of desiry, the craft of managing and manipulating desire. She exists in timelessness, plying her art as she sees fit. It is said that cultures, civilizations, have fallen to desiry. We shall see.”
Before the desk now stood a young man holding a rucksack by one strap, his cloak thankfully covering the garishness threatening to assume an independent existence from his clothing.
“And in reverse, civilizations are built from those like Oli Nelson - the type of person who can be everything. With his rucksack and his costumes, there is no walk of life he cannot imitate. On such pretenses is society made.” Once again, that mirthless smile like a shard of ice, melting as fast as it had been.
Garments, garments everywhere, yet the heap of clothes exuded a certain aura into the sterile air. The english language lacked the subtlety to describe it, for the pile of clothing was clearly, obviously feminine.
“A fascinating study into gender identity and its psychological formations in blank-slate baseline consciousnesses - Jean. A laundry golem, or perhaps more rightly a poltergeist inhabiting the clothing you see before you. She has never seen another living, breathing being in her life - yet she is as female as any childbearer, as much of a lover of beauty as she has been told she is.”
Metal gleamed; the robot’s humanoid carapace still managing to shine despite the decades of operation. Humanoid...and yet, there were always hints in the metal that it could be more, it could always be more.
“Simiel-83 is an excellent example of a single-purpose mechanism that has outlived and outgrown its original function. She is a bastion of free thought, of higher purpose, of achieving greater things. And she seeks purpose.”
Before the audience: a man, posed awkwardly, as if reaching mid-shamble for a neck or shoulder, dressed in impeccable evening wear. Panic wore his face, and fear was curled up in his eyes, next to an implacable hunger.
“The good Doctor Alberich Wissenschaft suffered greatly from hubris, a not uncommon condition but quite uncommonly placed with a conjunction of brilliant hands and capable brain. Both vaporized now, of course. But the good doctor still rides with his test subject, John Doe. They now qualify as...differently alive.”
Finally, the semicircle reformed. She closed her eyes. The pen drifted - like a feather, like a breeze, like the kiss of a falling leaf in autumn, and stroked the blank page.
*
Experiment One: Competition
Before them stood a skyscraper, protruding from the clouds below like mankind’s insult to the climate. The glittering spire cast a shadow on the cumulus, a gargantuan sundial of absolutely no benefit to anyone. Yet the tower seemed impossibly slender all the way down to the ground - resembling a standard skyscraper rolled out thin. Perhaps it was the perspective.
“This is the Pacific Spire, the tallest, most populous office tower on the Asia-Pacific coast. To have an office here is to be on the global stage, and to work here is to be among the best. Employees spend their lives on the tower. The ground is so far away.”
Faintly heard through the thin air and reinforced glass, the sound of gunfire reverberated .
“Corporate competition tends to manifest.”
Now they were flying close to the windows; scenes of office work mundanity juxtaposed with tableaus of wartime boredom flew by their perceptions in a blur.
“The Pacific Spire exhibits a stagnated society, with all major battles in severe deadlock - a kind of peace in the midst of war, it could be said. The status quo is upheld, the filing is done, office work continues amidst the weapons and the war.”
Then they were below the clumps of clouds, panning out to view the tower in all its majesty. Occasionally, a spark of light would mark a minor explosion.
“But there is about to be an upheaval. Several parties are about to make the discovery that the floors 226 to 259 lie on an intersection of ley lines, situated on a flexible part in the laws of physics. What they do with it - that you shall simply have to witness.”
Then, in another instant, they were scattered and placed within.
----
So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
----
Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime