Daleks and Davros and living forever
Mar. 27th, 2012 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThis morning I dreamed about Daleks and people deliberately turning themselves into Daleks. But I saved the day by letting the new Daleks do the plunger thing on my brain so they knew all the same things about Daleks that I knew and realised that was not the way to be.
It was a bit complicated in the setup. There were these people who were uber healthy, could heal any injury, didn't age much, didn't just die of old age. From the perspective of us regular humans these guys were immortals. They seemed to have paradise and no worries.
So when I found them collaborating with Davros I was utterly shocked. What could he have to offer them? Hate filled cyborg that he was, blind and sitting in his half tank, he was still even more durable than the locals. Closer to immortal. Any number of beings had tried to kill him any number of times and he was still there. So what they were doing was cloning him, over and over, until they had enough bodies to transfer all their minds into, and they would live even closer to forever. And they would need to build more travel machines to put the new bodies in, but then they'd be armoured. Even better protected. And Davros was in need of repairs, which he couldn't do for himself with one hand that flicks a switch sometimes, so the collaboration made sense for him. But I still couldn't understand why they would feel the need. They'd give up so much, and for what? They lived so close to forever already! But one explained that mortality still bites when there's fewer causes for it. In fact it seems worse, because there's no feeling of it being inevitable, no idea of death as the great leveller that comes to all. It's a horror every time, unfair, cutting people down when they had so much life ahead of them. Because they had nearly everything they'd do nearly anything to grab that last little piece of safety.
But I knew too much about Davros and Daleks to think they'd be saving any piece of themselves by this plan. It isn't just what happened to him any more, he's remade himself and his creations so thoroughly they have no room for change. Take a Dalek body and pour in a mind with a thousand years of civilisation and art and culture and you just get a screaming machine that kills. It wouldn't know how to care any more. To protect themselves they'd give up everything they wanted to preserve.
Telling them, however, was not sufficient. Too many had gone too far with this process. And they knew Davros had enemies, but they believed his lies and thought it was all jealousy, the mere mortal kicking against the ones who have gone beyond mortality. So I had to show them, and the only way they could know what I knew was to use that Dalek interrogation method on me. The one that ends up with fried corpse.
Still, it was that or the death of a civilisation and the rebirth of the Dalek army.
I knelt and invited them to look.
So the darkness closed in around my face and my head felt hot and full of sparks and the pain started to build. Before my mind's eye, and I knew before my interrogator's, I saw everything I knew about Davros and Daleks being extracted. The deaths and the terror and the futility of it all, and that moment in Genesis where he says he'd destroy all of creation just to know that he could. The images got brighter, burning before my eyes, being burnt out of me, and I was burning, everything dark around the edges, getting darker, falling pitch black as the pain crescendoed...
...and then the light came back. I fell down but I wasn't dead. The Dalek turned around and touched plungers with the next machine, who turned to the next and the next. They were sharing what they'd got from me. But of course these new machines were built by people who could already take the mind out of one body and pour it into the next. It might be they were where the Daleks got the capacity to read minds from, but they were substantially better at it, since they'd always meant to use it on the living. I was going to survive.
And then one of Davros' Daleks rolled in, and found these new sort talking and having opinions together, and tried to give them orders and move them all along. It got more and more agitated, screeching and building up to ex-ter-min-ate. And it turned to look at me.
So I threw my hat over its eyestalk, and the other new Daleks took their chance, and there was a great big rebellion.
And by the end of it Davros had nothing, achieved nothing, except letting these near immortals know there were still things worth fighting for other than their own skins. They'd been Daleks now, you see, and come back again, which was just as simple for them. And they would remember. Because it wasn't the pain of their own deaths that had sent them to such lengths for protection. It was all the other lives they'd lost. The love they'd felt through all their long lives that left them desolate when those they loved were lost. They'd do anything to protect those loved ones... but now they knew the Daleks wanted only to destroy them all. Not just protect themselves or kill their enemies, but destroy the very capacity to value each other. So having gone right up to the edge of that they knew the feel of it, and would not go there again.
Big win, and I didn't shoot anyone.
So I woke up feeling pretty good, albeit exhausted. Saving the world in your sleep do take it out of you.
I keep dreaming of Daleks lately. Not the old recurring dreams, new ones, but being just as trapped. Usually the options in a Dalek dream are die or become them.
This time I found another way.
Which pretty much rocks.
It was a bit complicated in the setup. There were these people who were uber healthy, could heal any injury, didn't age much, didn't just die of old age. From the perspective of us regular humans these guys were immortals. They seemed to have paradise and no worries.
So when I found them collaborating with Davros I was utterly shocked. What could he have to offer them? Hate filled cyborg that he was, blind and sitting in his half tank, he was still even more durable than the locals. Closer to immortal. Any number of beings had tried to kill him any number of times and he was still there. So what they were doing was cloning him, over and over, until they had enough bodies to transfer all their minds into, and they would live even closer to forever. And they would need to build more travel machines to put the new bodies in, but then they'd be armoured. Even better protected. And Davros was in need of repairs, which he couldn't do for himself with one hand that flicks a switch sometimes, so the collaboration made sense for him. But I still couldn't understand why they would feel the need. They'd give up so much, and for what? They lived so close to forever already! But one explained that mortality still bites when there's fewer causes for it. In fact it seems worse, because there's no feeling of it being inevitable, no idea of death as the great leveller that comes to all. It's a horror every time, unfair, cutting people down when they had so much life ahead of them. Because they had nearly everything they'd do nearly anything to grab that last little piece of safety.
But I knew too much about Davros and Daleks to think they'd be saving any piece of themselves by this plan. It isn't just what happened to him any more, he's remade himself and his creations so thoroughly they have no room for change. Take a Dalek body and pour in a mind with a thousand years of civilisation and art and culture and you just get a screaming machine that kills. It wouldn't know how to care any more. To protect themselves they'd give up everything they wanted to preserve.
Telling them, however, was not sufficient. Too many had gone too far with this process. And they knew Davros had enemies, but they believed his lies and thought it was all jealousy, the mere mortal kicking against the ones who have gone beyond mortality. So I had to show them, and the only way they could know what I knew was to use that Dalek interrogation method on me. The one that ends up with fried corpse.
Still, it was that or the death of a civilisation and the rebirth of the Dalek army.
I knelt and invited them to look.
So the darkness closed in around my face and my head felt hot and full of sparks and the pain started to build. Before my mind's eye, and I knew before my interrogator's, I saw everything I knew about Davros and Daleks being extracted. The deaths and the terror and the futility of it all, and that moment in Genesis where he says he'd destroy all of creation just to know that he could. The images got brighter, burning before my eyes, being burnt out of me, and I was burning, everything dark around the edges, getting darker, falling pitch black as the pain crescendoed...
...and then the light came back. I fell down but I wasn't dead. The Dalek turned around and touched plungers with the next machine, who turned to the next and the next. They were sharing what they'd got from me. But of course these new machines were built by people who could already take the mind out of one body and pour it into the next. It might be they were where the Daleks got the capacity to read minds from, but they were substantially better at it, since they'd always meant to use it on the living. I was going to survive.
And then one of Davros' Daleks rolled in, and found these new sort talking and having opinions together, and tried to give them orders and move them all along. It got more and more agitated, screeching and building up to ex-ter-min-ate. And it turned to look at me.
So I threw my hat over its eyestalk, and the other new Daleks took their chance, and there was a great big rebellion.
And by the end of it Davros had nothing, achieved nothing, except letting these near immortals know there were still things worth fighting for other than their own skins. They'd been Daleks now, you see, and come back again, which was just as simple for them. And they would remember. Because it wasn't the pain of their own deaths that had sent them to such lengths for protection. It was all the other lives they'd lost. The love they'd felt through all their long lives that left them desolate when those they loved were lost. They'd do anything to protect those loved ones... but now they knew the Daleks wanted only to destroy them all. Not just protect themselves or kill their enemies, but destroy the very capacity to value each other. So having gone right up to the edge of that they knew the feel of it, and would not go there again.
Big win, and I didn't shoot anyone.
So I woke up feeling pretty good, albeit exhausted. Saving the world in your sleep do take it out of you.
I keep dreaming of Daleks lately. Not the old recurring dreams, new ones, but being just as trapped. Usually the options in a Dalek dream are die or become them.
This time I found another way.
Which pretty much rocks.