Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

This is one of the more embarrassing fics to write and post (which is why it took me a few days to finally get it ready to post), but now that I've finished it, I'm no longer embarrassed by it....

A red rose and a white rose tied together with a golden silk ribbon, for Henry and Monica Swinton;
A tiny pink rosebud and a thick thorny stem without any blossoms at all for Kenpachi Zaraki and Yachiru
A rose so dark a red that it is almost maroon, with heavy thorns hidden under its lush green leaves, and a brighter red rose with few thorns, tied together with a delicate silver chain, for the Merovingian and Neo

"One Touch of the Enemy"

by "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note: Written for crowdog66 and based on the prompt "caresses; every touch you give me steals my breath away"; it's set fairly early on in her exquisite "Degrees of Seperation" universe, during a time when Neo and Smith were separated and Neo sought comfort with the Red King of the Exiles.

Rating: Hard PG-13/soft R (unclothed and intimate touching, relationship dynamics)

Disclaimer: I don't own the "Matrix" series, its characters, concepts or other indicia, which belong to the Wachowski Brothers, Paul Chadwick, Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow Pictures, Joel Silver Productions, Burlyman Entertainment, Monolith, Sony Online Entertainment, etc.

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( By instinct, his hand reached across the silk-covered mattress )

::After trawling FF.N::

The random-humor fic writer known as "PossessedGummyBearInferno" is still at it. I think they post one new random humor fic a week! (I can remember the days when I posted a new fic/chapter a week, but at the risk of sounding proud, we all know I'm a much better writer; I'm even better at random humor than this twit is, but I digress...)

Their latest: The Merv and company going on a cruise. It starts out with the maids trying to finish the laundry and the Merv tripping on a blue sock. Then our ficthor has him singing this:

"99 chocolate cakes on a plate, 99 chocolate cakes!

Soon its gone,into a blonde...

98 chocolate cakes on a plate!"

Now, that gave me a chuckle, but considering whose mouth she put the words into... The Merv doesn't sing stuff like that. He sings opera or French art songs in the shower. If there's anyone in the Merv's household who sings stuff like this, it's probably this guy:

http://69.57.184.74/~mxoarchi/exiles/effectuator.png

Also, the insane author proceeded to trumpet that she's going on a cruise after her birthday, which inspired the badfic... and come to find out she's my birthday twin. My *EBIL* twin. I think I'm legally changing my birthday to August 3rd, so I'll be birthday twins with Lambert Wilson, instead.

Grr... I had the night from hell at work:

--Annoying customers who had to rearrange the contents of the bags I packed, (People, there are certain rules I have to follow when I'm bagging, and what you were doing completely violated everything short of putting a gallon jug of milk on top of a carton of eggs.);

--Horrid spoiled children:

Kid from hell: "Mommy, I want [this]! Mommy, I want [that]! Mommy, I want [the other thing ::Insert sugar and preservative-raddled crap of choice, up to and including "Choco-Rox (not a real sugary cereal, I made that one up)"::]!!"

MR: ::Internal:: Oh yeah? And I want a better job where I get paid to shush whiny little bints like you, who aren't using their indoor voices.

I spent the last two hours gritting my teeth to keep from screaming. I was so tired and drained that I lost my footing while I was trying to stow a bag of ice under a cart and I fell over backwards. Fortunately, I was crouching on the floor, so I didn't fall far, but I pulled something in my shoulder in the process. Unfortunately, that was the straw that broke the back of one very tired llama (I don't consider myself to be a camel, even metaphorically: I'm too polite and quiet). I ended up spazzing out horribly; since this was the end of the night, one of the supervisors named Stephanie (there's two of them and they look similar) let me go home early.

The Frenchman has me down for 20 hours next week; since That time of the month is upon me, I just might take Tuesday off as a mental health day:

Tuesday: Noon to four (TBD)
Wednesday: ditto
Thursday: ditto
Friday: ditto
Saturday: four to nine-thirty pm. (All times are EST)

And Sieges was having a lousy night running missions in the MxO. She's going to write about the miserable details in her LJ, but right now, she's too upset. I'd poke her for the short version, but she's quick with her fists and her feet... Our nickname for her is "the little girl with the big gun".

( Odd revelations regarding one of my Houseguests. Neo, take note... )

I haven't completely abandoned these. I just got confused about the days/themes and missed a few that I really wanted to write. I had a *GREAT* idea for a "Collateral" fic inspired by "September 17: Scenes from the life of a double monster" (Vincent-centric: I may want to lock Tom Cruise in a roomful of clinically depressed people in dire need of medication and watch them tear him to shreds when he tries preaching at them, but Vincent is a *great* character), but I missed that somehow.

No matter: I got this fic written/posted and it's worth the silence that's gone before it...

Title: Matrimonial Requiem
Day/Theme: September 25: What we had I cannot even say
Series: "The Matrix"
Character/Pairing: the Merovingian/Persephone
Rating: PG-13

Note: Takes place in perhaps the Fifth Iteration of the Matrix.

( Matrimonial Requiem )

I'd better clarify a comment I made in my somewhat geeky then suddenly wangsty entry last night: My boss came back to work from his honeymoon in Hawaii, and I was cursing God for *not* sending a typhoon to wash his bride off a sea wall as they were walking along it, the way it happened to some poor newly-wed fellow I heard about on the news a few years back. I honestly felt like announcing on the 'Net that I was going to commit suicide at midnight on New Year's Eve, if some reasonable guy hadn't tried to win my hand by then, but I realized this would be an extremely rash move: I'd probably get all kinds of sick, fucked-up (in all senses of the phrase) perverts responding to this kind of announcement.

I had to confess all this (and some other embarassing blunders) today when I went to St. Joseph's in Lowell, before I had a session with my therapist (If you're able to read this weblog, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, I am living *proof* that not every person who goes to psychological counselling automatically stops going to confession, to receive the sacrament of reconcilliation). Unfortunately, the priest somehow got the notion that because I feel my feelings so passionately that I scare guys off. I'm not throwing myself at guys' heads: far from it. If anything, I'm probably the least forward woman imagainable. I'm not the most voluptuously-formed woman (from the waist up, I'm virtually indistinguishable from a young fellow in his early teens, except that my face is feminine), and I'm a very conservative dresser, though my tendency towards wearing men's shirts (I like the cut: they're doing wierd things with women's blouses these days) and now a man's jacket (ie. the Oleg Cassini raincoat with no lining which I bought since it resembles Constantine's jacket) *almost* makes me a crossdessser. It would be nice if I could find some fellow who, like me, is wired to be slightly bisexual, but (unlike me) is a functional metrosexual: we'd get the best of both worlds that way. I'd get a guy who's deeply in touch with his feminine side (to the point of taking as much pains about appearances as most women do), and he'd get a gal who likes traditionally male-oriented things like manual labor and sci-fi.

Whew, that was long-winded... Typical Aspie behavior: giving a big, long, complicated answer where a so-called normal person would give a one or two sentence reply.

Now for the rest of my day... The bad news: The CyberCafe at Middlesex Community College is now open *only* to full-time students. Not to night students or former night students, e.g. yours truly. In order to use the computers there, you have to type in your Student ID number into a password-type box on each workstation. No more free printouts. No more editing pictures. No more burning CDs. I guess I really have to get a faster, better computer now.

The good news: I managed to steal an extra hour at the Lowell Library and update the AIFFOA, adding a link to Catholic Charities' page for donations to help their work in the relief effort for the Hurricane Katrina survivors. I specifically chose Catholic Charities, since I've been getting my counselling through them. It's my way of helping them help folks who are way worse off than I am, and showing them how much I value the way this charity has helped me. I'll be adding a link to their page from this weblog very shortly, for anyone who's interested...

I also nipped up to the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store, to see if I couldn't get that black tie I need for my Constantine costume. No such luck, but I bought that red canvas button-front shirt that gave the Merv conniptions when I spotted it last week. Of course I had to listen to him gripe in French for a few minutes, but I reminded him it's juuuust the right shade of blood-red, which seemed to appease him, though I caught him muttering that "the fabric may as well be of *burlap*."

Also went to the Tewksbury library with my folks: I renewed "Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" for the fourth time (It's a thick book with teeny, close-set type...), and I also got out the DVD of Charlie Chaplin's classic film "Modern Times", which is on the Vatican's list of great movies. Too bad the library doesn't have it on VHS, so my folks can watch it, too: considering the cramped conditions of the computer room, I wouldn't make them watch it on my DVD-ROM.

And I've just been watching the second hour-long documentary on Disk 8 of the Matrix Box: "The Hard Problem: The Science Behind the Fiction", which featured several experts on AI science and theory, including Cynthia Breazal (the gal who created our little buddy "Kismet", the face 'bot) and Ray Kurzweil (the greatest AI theorist since Alan Turing) and cyberpunk writers like Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. That's one segment that definately needs to be rewatched since it throws an incredible amount of info at you. One concept that I couldn't help getting out of it is that the incredibly innocent Kismet (a bot with the intelligence of a small child) and the extremely decadent Merv are close cousins, at least by their behavior: they both crave stimuli and interaction with humans (or in the Merv's case, human-like programs like himself), even if the one is extremely childlike and cute and the other is extremely adult and sly, and they will do what they can to get what they want/need. That's at one in the same time a rather scary thought and a rather reasurring one: it just goes to show that G.K. Chesterton knew what he was saying when he compared adults to overgrown children:

Some tie gold paper round their heads
And play at being kings
And others sit agains the wall
And think of serious things

We are not always very good
We strut and shriek a lot.
We have our games they all must have
And toys that they must not

-- From "A Nursery Rhyme"

I don't see it as "playing God" to attempt to create AI or A-Life: I see it as an aspect of our nature as beings made in His image, an ability to create something within the universe He has given us. It's not really right for us to mess with life as He made it, but I think if we *could* create AI or A-Life, it would give us a better understanding of our place in the universe, that we are subject to God as these beings would be, in a sense, subject to us. Hopefully we'd be as beneficent to these beings as God has been to us, but I don't doubt that we'd mess up and ruin things for them and for ourselves. I hate to sound like a gloomy oracle, but I can see things happening like in "The Animatrix: Second Renaissance". Maybe not in the extremes that the Wachowski Brothers portrayed (I hope not: the second half of that segment gave me the willies and I ended up with floaters of horrific images for days. I haven't been able to rewatch it, and even clips of it make me nervous), but something just as catastrophic. Consider this: We can't even get along with each other, how can we expect to live in harmony with beings that we might bring forth? And even if we *tried* to reach in to their world and try to understand and seal over the gaps, they might reject us the way man rejected his own creator... Man proclaimed "God is dead", so in a sense, the machines (however they manage to reject us) might declare "Man is dead". I just hope the world as we know it comes to an end before that happens, and we get that "new heavens and new earth" that St. John the Evangelist speaks of in the book of the Apocalypse.

Another lovely Neo/Trin fic: I love writing this pair as much as I love writing a younger Merv/Perse...

Title: New to Zion
Day/Theme: September 1: Here we are
Series: The Matrix
Character/Pairing: Neo/Trinity
Rating: G

Note: Takes place just after the first movie.

( New to Zion )

EDITED TO ADD: Got this in under the wire...

Title: Chatelaine
Day/Theme: September 1: Here we are
Series: The Matrix
Character/Pairing: Merovingian/Persephone
Rating: PG

( Chatelaine )

Three fic tonight... and lo and behold, the second one is from a fandom other than "A.I.", "Constantine", or the "Matrix" series


Title: Long Cool Lover-Mecha Woman
Day/Theme: August 24. I am waylaid by Beauty
Series: "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence"
Character/Pairing: Gigolo Jane/Original Male Character
Rating: PG-13

( Long Cool Lover-Mecha Woman )

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Title: "The Beauty of Friendship"
Day/Theme: August 24. I am waylaid by Beauty
Series: "Beauty and the Beast" (Disney version)
Character/Pairing: Belle/the Beast
Rating: G

( The Beauty of Friendship )

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Title: Captivated King
Day/Theme: August 24. I am waylaid by Beauty
Series: "The Matrix"
Character/Pairing: Merovingian/Persephone
Rating: PG-13

Note: Still early on in the Merv's courtship of Perse. Why? Because it's such a delicious challenge to write him that way and get the voice just right...

( Captivated King )

This fic has managed to lift my spirits a little. The mental image of a slightly tipsy Flood had something to do with it...

Title: The Red King's Wedding Night
Day/Theme: August 22: This red, red moon
Series: The Matrix
Character/Pairing: Seraph, Flood. Implied Merovingian/Persephone
Rating: PG-13 (for bawdy banter and a mildly intoxicated character)

Note: Takes place toward the end of the Third Iteration/ the beginning of the Fourth Iteration. Flood's lower on the totem pole at this time and thus much less stiff and pompous. Seraph is... Seraph.

( The Red King's Wedding Night )

These two fandoms and "Constantine" seem to be my fanfic fixations, lately, though I might be able to shake out a "Sandman" or an "American Gods" fic...

Title: Straight to the Heart
Day/Theme: August 18: Spring letters and spring tears
Series: "A.I.: Aritificial Intelligence"
Character/Pairing: Monica-David (Parent-child, of course)
Rating: PG

( Straight to the Heart )

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Title: Missives
Day/Theme: August 18: Spring letters and spring tears
Series: "The Matrix"
Character/Pairing: Merovingian/Persephone (with a Flood cameo)
Rating: PG-13

Background: The first half takes place in perhaps the Third or Fourth Matrix, while the second half takes place in the Sixth or Seventh.

( Missives )