AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Wow… for someone who never used to step out of her few favorite fandoms, I certainly have been doing more than dipping my toes in the water lately. First CCS, then MASH, now CUBE… admittedly, I'm not sure why I wrote this. After watching Hypercube on SCI FI, I just couldn't help myself; the sequel had so many interesting characters begging for more detail. The end surprised me, actually, and it's not my fault that Sasha and Kate had amazing on-screen chemistry. So, here it is, just a short character piece on Sasha, who seemed the most harmless of them all…Feedback will cause me to love and adore you forever. I live off the stuff. *puppy dog eyes* Even if you're only emailing me to say you've seen the movie, I'd love to hear from you. ^_^
-Meredith
Legal Disclaimer: "CUBE2: Hypercube" is the property of Sci Fi productions and God only knows who else. But they have scary lawyer men in suits who use the word "sue" a lot, so I'm figuring I ought to cover my rear. Also, don't tell me there wasn't femslash in that movie-- I know what I saw! The actress who played Sasha is a goddess.
"It is my will alone,
that sets my mind in motion."
-DUNE
==============================
For They Are Only Clean, Clear Numbers 1/1
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
http://www.demando.net/
==============================
There was Light, and there was Darkness-- she remembered running her fingers over the Braille-- God had said that Light should be, and there it was. Sasha knew neither; she knew the chill feel of chrome under her hands, up against her back, felt her touch make condensation on the smooth surface. She knew the stillness of the air and the distant
//very faint. can you hear it?//
sounds of someone screaming or crying, calling out with joy or terror or hopelessness or relief. It was hard to tell from so far away.
Slowly, she shifted her crouching body along the wall until she'd hunched her shoulders in the corner, knees drawn up to her breasts so she could feel her heart pounding against her calves.
There was also silence. For a little while.
It was hard to tell how long; without some way of marking it, Time was a concept as easily tossed away as Fermott's last theorem. Considered occasionally-- more often than not tossed aside in frustration. She knew where it started, and she knew when Time would end for her, but her own position between those two points...
Lines on a grid. Equations in point-slope form, climbing and falling.
y = mx + b^2
Numbers. Yes, something Sasha knew.
She had barely moved since waking up within the Cube-- or... no, it must be the Cube, because she could feel it around her, so strange, like many eyes and people making expressions at her, taking advantage of the fact she was blind. She supposed passing through the pool of quantum possibility had rendered her unconscious, though she had no real, clear idea of transition. Only that she had run through the echoing hanger with arms stretched out to ward anyone anyway, with the sound of soldier's footsteps behind her and the gentle shifting of the pool in front of her, tripping into it as an eager child dives into the ocean.
Briefly, her mind toyed with the probability of her position within the Cube, but Sasha chastised herself quickly. There was no such thing as position, location, _being_ inside her geometrical nightmare. One moment she might be at the center and the next on the very outer rim. The Cube would collapse
//sweet mother of god, holy virgin, whatever.
i know just when this little slice of reality is going to dissolve.//
but it wouldn't do so inward or outward, or in any true direction known. Her chances of survival were as unpredictable as the clink of Mother's favorite flower-cut shot glass and the sting of that belt, coming down.
"Don't hurt me," Sasha murmured, both to the memory and the warped matrix she'd created. Hurt stalked her, followed her and smelled the blood running down her legs-- unavoidable.
2 + 2 = 4
A constant.
The silence crested, disappeared under the sound of a man's raised voice and things being torn asunder. Sasha pushed her glasses further up on her nose and bent her head, curling her soul up even more tightly than her body. She conjured up a quadratic equation with several sets of solutions, including several imaginary numbers, toying with it briefly. Who knew how other people saw math? She felt it in her bones, spoke the language, knew numbers and formulas better than herself. She had never even seen her own face.
//Mother's voice: 'why was i cursed with a daughter?
a blind daughter! iyah, iyah.
the ancestors must really have it in for me
a difficult goose of a daughter
dishonorable.//
"Bitch," said unrepentantly. Oh, yes, Sasha got A's, but Mama had to fork out money for tools with Braille and oh, yes, Sasha is smart-- the school tests say so-- but Mama sees the vacant stare of not-sight in her daughter's eyes.
//SMACK.
Look at something. Miserable child.
Rotted in my womb.//
"Alright," Sasha breathed as the sounds rushed in and the world vibrated with possible and impossible. "So you run away from Mother, little girl, but you're so busy with _away_ that you never think of what you're going to."
Smart girl. Float through junior high, skip most of High school. Pass go, collect more than two hundred dollars. Grants for college-- two PHD's at the age of twenty. Proceed directly to a U.S. government think tank. The memory came to Sasha's hands, then, running them over her notes, struggling with each carefully placed variable and constraint, scratching and rewriting proofs to make her grotesque music box last as long as possible.
Possible-- alternate universes, time and dimension, the tessaract and one big black hole. Hungry to devour and obliterate. She could die a thousand times over and not be aware of it.
I'm inside you, Sasha thought at the Cube, which was in a strange way the only child she would ever have. The walls seemed to whisper back to her, curdle with pleasure and promise and a little disgust.
Mother, said the Cube-- Maker. Createress. Goddess.
//And oh, little blind girl, this is what you get for trying to play God.//
No where to go-- reverse infinity; once in the Cube, woven between the threads of fourth and fifth dimensions, she could only speculate at her chances of survival. Astronomically low.
SCENEARIO: Sasha is inside the Cube.
POSSIBLE OUTCOMES:
1. Sasha discovers a way out of the Cube before quantum
reality hits the event horizon and collapses.
2. Sasha dies when quantum reality hits the event horizon
and collapses.
3. Sasha is freed from the constraints of the Cube's current
reality when the program winds down. Further data
needed.
MOST LIKELY OUTCOME:
#2.
Sasha played out each equation in her head, banging her wrist ruthlessly against the wall to get some idea of grounding pain. The Cube would collapse because the formula could only hold true for so long. Death came to everyone, because the equations walking around swathed in flesh and blood could only cycle for so long. The rule of entropy, of gravity: what lives must also die.
It seemed irrational, like an imaginary number or some doped up college kid's master thesis, pulled out from his ass, but there was nothing to rival the logic of death. Sasha fit her own signifying numbers into oblivions formula and sighed. As all mathematical concepts, it would have to be beautiful.
The Cube stood in adherence and defiance of the laws of physics-- so wonderfully lunatic, so perfectly sane. No, even if Sasha lived, she would still have to face those who bent her intelligence to destructive theorems
//pig-girl. worthless child.
dead thing with dead eyes
"Mama! Please... don't hurt me."//
so the most logical and symmetrical conclusion would be her own destruction along with that of her
//child//
Cube.
For a while, Sasha multiplied aimlessly until even her carefully ordered mind could no longer keep track of decimal places; she fiddled with as much higher calculus as she could handle without needing to write things down. Then, illogically, she began to sing, old songs-- about going to Roseland and not coming back-- until her voice was gone and she didn't have to listen to herself anymore.
Briefly, she slept, not expecting to wake up.
//the sounds come closer. she thinks of being trapped under white horses' hooves. doesn't even know what 'white' entails, or what horses look like.
waits with baited breath for collapse//
The displacement of air woke her, so unusual in this environment, and the first words out of her mouth were as constant as sine, cosine and tangent.
"Don't hurt me."
How small, how pathetic.
"I won't," said a voice that Sasha's mind seized upon, listing to notes and timbre, to the emotion wavering under the sound. A woman's voice, soft like a pillow under your cheek on a cold winter morning. There was a hand on her shoulder, then trailing down her arm; Sasha felt hair a little more coarse than her own, but still fine, pulled away from the woman's face; high, plump cheekbones, and cool skin on the arm with warmth lurking underneath.
"I'm not going to hurt you." Certainty, hands on Sasha's shoulders. "Everything will be alright. Do you understand that?"
"I'm blind," Sasha surprised herself when her vocal chords still obeyed her commands, "Not retarded."
"I won't let anything happen to you." Too easy, too easy, like Mother when she was happy-drunk, saying sweetly, come to Mama, baby and then dashing Sasha down against the coffee table. The belt buckle on her young back, Mother's words slurred with the smell of vodka. Love you, Mama would say, and bring the leather strap down with such an elegant curve. Love you.
There would be pain.
"It's getting closer," Sasha said as the woman pressed against her.
A pause. "I'm Kate."
"Sasha," said softly, and she listened but Kate's heart was steady and sure and somehow un-surprised. The arms around Sasha were sweet and smelled of medicine with dried flowers lingering underneath, but there was something...
Kate's equation was rapidly involving the squaring of negative numbers.
Not possible.
"That's a beautiful name." A hand against Sasha's cheek, and she leaned into Kate, the curve of this woman like a perfect circle. Pi-r-squared, and all that.
Screaming-- this time it sounded just like Sasha, far off but just in the other room. A lower voice-- Kate's?-- disapproving. Demanding answers. Sasha felt the comfort of Kate's unfamiliar touch, kind and gentle and calculated like computer output. Around her, the Cube shivered.
The Cube shivered, laughed like a child speeding down the stairs with scissors in hand.
Sucker for a damsel in distress, Kate? Sasha though unkindly. Do you even know who you're looking for, who they sent you after, who Alex is?
THEORY:
Mother = Predator therefore Child = Victim
in time, above clause reverses
CUBE is the result of Sasha therefore
CUBE = Child = Victim
there is a limited existence available for the CUBE--
therefore the clause reverse shall occur more quickly
Sasha [inside] CUBE = Death
*Sasha destroys CUBE// CUBE destroys Sasha
PROOF: Blood will tell.