{"id":7909,"date":"2018-03-20T09:34:34","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T17:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7909"},"modified":"2018-03-20T09:38:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T17:38:07","slug":"object-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7909","title":{"rendered":"Object Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Baird Stoller never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn\u2019t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum\u2014then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his way back into the Chimp\u2019s good graces after miraculously coming back from the dead.<\/p>\n

Lian didn\u2019t kill him. Didn\u2019t deprecate him either. Waste of good coffin space, she said. She found a small inescapable crevice in some remote corner of the Glade where the gravitic tug-o-war was enough to pull your guts out through your inner ears. She ran a line from an irrigation pipe, set it to bleed a continuous trickle down the rock face. Hooked a portable food processor up to an outsize amino tank, parked it on the lip of the precipice, set it to drop protein bricks into the gap at regular intervals. Woke up every few years just to keep it stocked.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a0\"<\/a>

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

Mosko spent the rest of his life in that crevice. Maybe his stomach acclimated to the nausea before his brain turned to pudding, before he lost the ability even to beg, before he devolved into a mindless mewling thing covered in sores and compulsively licking the rocks to slake his endless thirst. Maybe he only lasted a few months. Maybe he lived for decades, died alone while the rest of us slept our immortal sleep, mummified and crumbled to dust and finally vanished altogether between one of my heartbeats and the next. An object lesson, way past its best-before date.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the story I heard, anyway. I slept through the whole time frame, from recruitment to betrayal to dissolution. I found the crevice\u2014found a <\/em>crevice, anyway\u2014but the plumbing and the processor had long since been retired, if they\u2019d ever even existed. For all I knew Kaden had just been yanking my chain about the whole thing, got some of hir buddies in on the joke for added verisimilitude. A joke. A warning. That would be just hir style.<\/p>\n

There had been an Ekanga Mosko listed on the manifest. Astrophysics specialist. Different tribe, but Eri <\/em>definitely shipped out with meat of that name on board. The official record said he\u2019d died when a bit of bad shielding had failed around the outer core: a blast of lethal radiation, an emergency vent to spare the rest of the level from contamination.<\/p>\n

Of course I asked Lian about it. She laughed and laughed. \u201cI\u2019d have to be pretty damn good to plant evidence that far down without getting burned to ash, wouldn\u2019t you say?\u201d<\/p>\n

She never actually denied it, though.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baird Stoller never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn\u2019t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum\u2014then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiblet","category-sunflowers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7909"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7915,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7909\/revisions\/7915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}