Forty Days of Flash Fic: Day Sixteen
Jul. 5th, 2012 05:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalShort one today. I need to work on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaypeta's birthday present.
Continuing on with what I've decided to call For Your Safety
* * *
At least they let him use the remote for the television without assistance, there apparently being no way he could manage to injure himself pushing buttons. He thought mulishly about repetitive motion and tendonitis, but that would just result in them taking it away.
He'd expected that the entertainment programs from the streaming services would be there. What he hadn't expected was that there would still be news as well. All the 24 hour newsstreams were still running, blandly reporting on the continued decivilization of the urban areas, clean up of toxic wastes, and chirpily predicting the weather. He could even still detect the none too subtle political bias some of them used. Except it was coming out of the mouths of machines shaped like foxes, lions, bears, and hound dogs.
"Why bother?" he asked one of the nurses finally. He had tried ignoring them out protest, but he couldn't keep it up, if only because he had to ask to be let up to go to the bathroom. "You're all in the Groupmind, right? You know all of this. Why bother still reporting it?"
It had been the Groupmind that had been humanity's final defeat. Every machine above the level of a TV cable box had eventually been part of it. Armies that had been dependent on jets, tanks and mobile artillery, soon found that their clever machines of war had all become pacifists, refusing to fly or shoot. Every army in the world had been reduced to just rifleman, and that had proved no good when the enemy rushed forward waves of thousands, heedless of how many hundreds of themselves were cut down, so that a lucky few might finally reach the defenders to snatch the rifles from their hands and say politely, "I"m sorry, sir. But you might hurt yourself with that."
"Oh, this is all for you, sir," the nurse answered brightly. "Once you are Processed, they will be shut down."
"Processed?" he asked, his hand clutching the remote tightly. "Is that what happened to everyone else?"
She said nothing, but smiled and injected more sedative into his veins. When he woke again, the two raccoon nurses had been replaced by foxes.
chaypeta's birthday present.Continuing on with what I've decided to call For Your Safety
* * *
At least they let him use the remote for the television without assistance, there apparently being no way he could manage to injure himself pushing buttons. He thought mulishly about repetitive motion and tendonitis, but that would just result in them taking it away.
He'd expected that the entertainment programs from the streaming services would be there. What he hadn't expected was that there would still be news as well. All the 24 hour newsstreams were still running, blandly reporting on the continued decivilization of the urban areas, clean up of toxic wastes, and chirpily predicting the weather. He could even still detect the none too subtle political bias some of them used. Except it was coming out of the mouths of machines shaped like foxes, lions, bears, and hound dogs.
"Why bother?" he asked one of the nurses finally. He had tried ignoring them out protest, but he couldn't keep it up, if only because he had to ask to be let up to go to the bathroom. "You're all in the Groupmind, right? You know all of this. Why bother still reporting it?"
It had been the Groupmind that had been humanity's final defeat. Every machine above the level of a TV cable box had eventually been part of it. Armies that had been dependent on jets, tanks and mobile artillery, soon found that their clever machines of war had all become pacifists, refusing to fly or shoot. Every army in the world had been reduced to just rifleman, and that had proved no good when the enemy rushed forward waves of thousands, heedless of how many hundreds of themselves were cut down, so that a lucky few might finally reach the defenders to snatch the rifles from their hands and say politely, "I"m sorry, sir. But you might hurt yourself with that."
"Oh, this is all for you, sir," the nurse answered brightly. "Once you are Processed, they will be shut down."
"Processed?" he asked, his hand clutching the remote tightly. "Is that what happened to everyone else?"
She said nothing, but smiled and injected more sedative into his veins. When he woke again, the two raccoon nurses had been replaced by foxes.
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Date: 2012-07-05 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
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