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spacebrick3 · 4 years

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Friday Night Fights!

A piece for Friday Night Fights—the only way I remember it’s Friday now— organized by @promptsforthestrugglingauthor, with prompt #1053 (also the opening lines) as the prompt of the week!

“Do you think I asked to answer prayers? Do you think I wanted to spend my immortality having to listen to you mortals drone on and on and on about your silly little trifles?” The goddess Hiencythia snorts with indignation. “Please, leave me alone unless you have something worth my time.”

At the small reflecting pool, Avra Mechan and Sydney Spendlove exchange glances, each motioning imperceptibly for the other to start speaking first. Avra, with the handicap of extreme impatience, loses that battle with a sigh. She looks up at the goddess from her wheelchair, thinking both I really hope this works and Sydney’s going to pay for making me be our standard-bearer. “With all respect to the Great Goddess Hiency-“

“Oh, knock it off with the bowing and scraping,” she snaps. “I don’t have to pretend that I’m more powerful than you. I know I am.”

She nods, letting out a breath through clenched teeth. “Right. Well. We’re not asking something of you—not specifically. Not a one-way street like a prayer is. Instead—uh-“

Sydney takes it, giving the speech he’d practiced over and over in the mirror, trying to perfect his intonation, facial expressions, hand gestures—anything that could inadvertently see them smote by the capricious goddess. This wasn’t an environment conducive to second chances. “You spoke of spending immortality, Hiencythia. Now, I certainly don’t mean to presume, but I believe…you were granted your deityship, correct? You were once human?”

“What’s it to you? Didn’t want it,” she snaps. “Told your priests all of this, back when your affairs still interested me.”

He gives a nervous laugh. “Of course, of course! But…I presume that what can be granted may also be given away? That if you so desired—and I certainly am not asking this of you,” he adds quickly, “you could pass your immortality to another?”

The goddess seems unmoved. “That could happen, yes. A thousand things could happen in every second of every day, however, and I am not disposed to expend my—admittedly, infinite—time on them. Or you, currently.” She flicks a finger and the water of the pool begins to drain away, and, with it, their connection to the goddess.

“Wait!” cries Avra. “We’re not finished yet!”

The water stops draining. “Congratulations,” Hiencythia says drily. “I had thought I would let you live, despite your inconveniencing of me. You’ve just removed that option.”

She offers a weak smile, looking to Sylvester. “You…won’t regret waiting. Give us just a second to set it up…”

He lugs forward a large, cloth-covered bundle, cursing under his breath at its weight. Even from here, she can smell the smoke that still clings to the machine, the product of countless hours spent, day and night, in their workshop. She had not been afraid to call Hiencythia back because this is truly their life’s work—if she had left, if they had not been able to present it, it would have been their death just as surely as the goddess’ fury.

“The idea was given to us by a philosopher,” she explains. “He asked whether a person could ever truly walk anywhere, because to travel any distance—say, one meter—one would first have to cover half that distance. Then, they would have to cover half the remaining distance, and half the distance after that, and so forth…essentially, that any finite distance contained an infinity of subdivisions, and no person could ever complete an infinite number of motions.”

“That’s ridiculous,” scoffs the goddess. “I have watched your companion walk right here, right now. It’s utter foolishness to call that impossible when it’s plainly done.”

She shrugs, wincing as a particularly loud clang echoes from where Sydney struggles with the machine. “I don’t mean to argue philosophy. But it did get us wondering, yes, about subdivisions. For if there are an infinity of ways to divide a finite object, then, surely, there must be a larger infinity of ways to divide something infinite?”

“Even if we indulge you,” Hiencythia snaps, “what it’s to me?”

Sydney pulls the final lever, and the machine spins into motion. If it were diagrammed, it would look quite simple—energy is inputted, processed, and stored in a simple chemical battery. But the construct itself is ludicrously complex, for it involves a type of power conversion that no one has ever attempted to perform mechanically: to change life into usable energy.

“Goddess Hiencythia,” he says. “To put it frankly, science abhors infinities. But you are not a construct of science, and contain one of these very infinities: immortality. This machine is designed to convert those years into energy we can use in our cities, in our homes, and you lose nothing in the bargain,” he says, eyes aglow, only half from reflected light. “To take a piece from infinity still leaves infinity, does it not? No matter how many pieces are taken.”

She sneers, but her voice is laced with curiosity. “Does it work?”

“Come and see,” he says, all traces of nervousness gone. “Just—just place your hand here, and it should begin to work…” With a glare, Hiencythia does so, scarlet energy seeping into the rubbery pad. For a terrible, awful moment, nothing happens. And then the battery begins to light up, the first bar of energy blinking.

“It works!” cheers Avra.

Sydney gives a sigh of relief, pressing his hand to his heart. “Of—of course it works.”

Hiencythia pulls her hand from the pad, turning it over as if expecting to see injury. “And what do I gain from this? I am not a battery for you to use as you wish.”

“We would never presume such a thing,” Avra says. “No, you benefit immensely. I’m sure you’re aware that…well, people are simply less interested in the gods than they used to be. In the streets, I hear it, calling them—you—irrelevant. But if they could see the work of a goddess wrought in the very lamps that light their path, in the power you give to a city, a nation…”

“…then they would believe again,” muses the goddess. “And they would believe in me.”

“Precisely. And as you gained followers, you would gain power in proportion, enabling you to spread your influence farther. You would lift humanity from its darkness and be lifted with us!” She and Sydney had been shunned from their laboratories, their universities, for this machine, in letters and denunciations accusing them of mixing your science with mysticism. No more. No, from today they will be hailed as saviors.

Hiencythia smiles, and Avra can see the same calculation behind her eyes. “A useful bargain indeed.” She presses her hand to the machine again—and, as she does so, the slow gears of the future begin to turn.

#writing #friday night fights #FNF #Empty Space has predisposed me to write too many unethical scientists #(or questionably-ethical)#there's also a lot of implications for this innovation #most of which are…not good

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luwaonline · 4 years

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VI. The Smart City: The Other Side of the World

Before the smart city project started, I had planned a holiday with family to New York. Although I was excited about the prospect of leaving London to relax, recharge and explore what the big apple had to offer; I had a newfound excitement to look at the city through ‘smart city lenses’. Given that I was on the other side of the world away from my team, this felt like the perfect opportunity to flex my image-making skills as a form of visual research, to generate evidence of and communicate my lived experience (Rose, 2015). This medium of research helps to convey a meaning that would otherwise be missed using text alone. This reminded me of a beautiful TED talk I watched a few years ago about pen pal communication between a London and New York without words. This beautiful project has been documented through a website and a book.

Tuesday: I arrive in New York at 7pm (midnight New York time). Exhausted, but trying to beat jetlag I watch TV and surf the net, planning my week’s activities.

Wednesday: Home to a museum that “fuels creativity, ignites minds and provides inspiration” visiting the Museum of Modern Art was paramount (MoMA). MoMA's exhibitions were vast, spanning 5 floors with installations, video and art. On the4th floor, I was drawn to the New Monuments exhibition that looked at the future of buildings in terms of shape, purpose and material. The conceptual buildings hung, drooped and oozed mimicking their material, the unpredictable effects of the process of creating them, but most interestingly reflected the political climate of the time. The hanging city reflects the warfare of the Vietnam War, feminism, the oozing designs feminism. What would our possible world be made of? What do we want it to reflect? The monuments use materials not only for efficiency, but to add a new layer provocation.

New Monuments Exhibition - Hanging Cities of War

New Monuments Exhibition - Oozing Cities of Feminism

On the 3rd floor, I explored the Taking a Thread for a Walk exhibition - a suspended macrame knot sculpture creating a woven textile exploration, featuring combinations of natural and synthetic fibres.

Thread installation

On a plaque nearby, its creator was quoted: “just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships … traced back to the event of a thread.” This piece felt so poignant, echoing the literature of Haraway and Ingold using threads and metaphors of cats-cradles to represent the infinite relationships between seemingly unrelated things.

Thursday: After our group discussions and speculation about the juxtaposition between new and old, abandoned and repurposed spaces and visible vs. hidden, I thought it important to visit one of New York’s most prominent monuments - the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Outside National September 11th Memorial & Museum

Re-designed World Trade Center Station

9/11 Memorial with freshly laid roses

When I saw these roses, something Chris said last week popped into my mind - tiny monuments. Despite the atrocity that happened here 19 years ago, the names that surround the repurposed space act as a memorial, and each rose I saw a woman place stand as a tiny monument representing loss, hope and simultaneously the pain and beauty of death and renewal. Being in this repurposed space gave me time and space to reflect. Where was I when this happened? I was 11 and just got home from school to see a plane crash onto a tower on the TV. Where was Edward Francis Maloney III? Where are his family now? Without this repurposed space, I may have never known he existed or peeked into his life. As Kidd writes, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”― Sue Monk Kidd (2001).

Friday: As I moved around the city my eyes couldn’t help but dart between towering skyscrapers. I found myself looking up a lot until I saw steam rise in front of my face. I looked down to see the heat from the subway escaping through a grate. It brought me back to our project. I knew about New York’s famous subways, but what else was down there? It turned out the ‘concrete jungle’ is a city built on water.

A plaque at Two 5th Avenue to remind city dwellers of the waterways that once were

Under Manhattan's streets lie the remnants of one of New York’s 101 lost waterways. Once one of its largest, Minetta Brook used to wind through Lower Manhattan’s farmland before being paved over in the 1820s. For centuries, it was visited by Native Americans for angling due to its abundance of trout. In the 1600s, Dutch settlers arrived along with their slaves, who were eventually emancipated, making the area home to one of New York's first African-American settlements. As the population increased, the large roads surrounding it were renamed to reflect its people.

However, as Manhattan became more metropolitan, Minetta Brook became an inconvenience to city planners and developers, and in the 1820s, it was physically buried using land from nearby hills, and eventually paved over. Its past was overwritten.

This trip was eye-opening. Although these experiences were outside London, it was beneficial to look to other cities for perspective. It showed me just how intertwined the themes of time, space, nostalgia, memory, loss and monuments really are, and the dangers created when a community has no way to embrace them. A few weeks ago, I was unsure about Dunne and Raby’s cone that referred to a preferable world. I didn’t understand how the decision on what a preferable world was could be made without bias. I now understand that a preferrable world is one that gives its citizens freedom and space to feel, whether the emotion is positive or negative. It adds rather than taking away, bringing us closer to a sentient city.

As always a trip gives you the chance to be open and gain a new perspective, but too much time away opens up thought to the objects, customs, processes and uniqueness of your home that you come to miss. I’ll go back to London jet-lagged, but with new stories to tell.

(1053 words)

#new york #smart city #city adaptations #creating space #taking up space #community space #roses #death #memorial #memorials #abandoned spaces #reclaimed spaces #tiny monuments #minetta brook #musuem #celebration of the dead #MoMA #9/11

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