Author's Note

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

(Tacitus

Violation

Log 9

I don’t trust words.

Just thought I would start there, because elsewise I’m not sure I’ll be making any sense. Thinking out loud is one thing, and talkin’ to someone who ain’t even there is another. The hard part is that I don’t know you, if “you” is ever going to exist, so I don’t have a bit of shared experience that I can use to talk to you. Like, if I knew you were from the Republic, I could talk about stuff that would make sense to someone on the old Texas-Lousiana line. If I was gonna explain somethin’ to you, I could… I dunno, I could explain it using examples you’d know. Famous people. Cities and towns we both know. Stretches of highway and irradiated streams. Or if you were up north in the Commonwealth… well, truth be told, we wouldn’t have that much in common. Things in Colorado are a hell of a lot better than in Texas! But at least we could both hate the fuckin’ black shirts together, and really, that’s all you need to be friends. Humans… we’re great at hating each other.

Which brings me to another thing: humans. I’ve started thinking about people as “humans” now because… well, because being on another planet will do that to you. Imagine you have like a picture, right? Framed on a wall? Now, you can’t see what is just to the right and left of those frames. But imagine if you started taking the frames apart and moving them and everywhere you moved ‘em the painting just continued. That’s what it’s like. I used to live inside of that little painting and now they moved the frame and I don’t know what any of the rest of this is. Now people are humans, or at least my people are. Because I don’t think anyone I meet here will be human, and then people will mean humans and others and honestly anyone who thinks they know how to handle that is a liar. You can set your watch on that. I would. If I had one.

All this thinking to say that I’m not the only human anymore on this world.

Brief synopsis: last night, I came back to camp and found an intruder. I pulled my gun. We talked.

He’s from the Concordat, sounds like Old South, on the coast. Which makes him slightly better than a Federal and slightly worse than the folks who live in those shantytowns in New Vicksburg. In NV, they’re honest--you know what parts of town ain’t safe for a woman who ain’t packing. In the Carolinas? Hell no, they’re liars. I can shoot a raider or run from him, I can bail when junkies get to looking funny. But a liar you can’t outrun.

What to make of him? There’s the problem. That’s the question.

On one hand, he coulda ambushed me straight up. If he’s good enough to sneak past the prox alarms… Damn, honestly? Coulda just waited up in that old crumblin’ tower and shot me as I waltzed back in, none the wiser. Pow. Headshot. No more exploring. He’s got the perfect gun for it, and readin’ between the lines, I bet he has the chops to do it from half a mile off and I wouldn’t even know until I was dead.

He was polite enough. Sometimes a little too oily for me, sometimes a little too… I don’t know. I was gonna say “smiley” but I happen to smile a hell of a lot. There’s nothing wrong with that. Where I come from, you learn to enjoy things while you can.

Of course, he was polite and nice enough… when I had the Judge on him. It’s not enough. You can’t judge a man by the smile he wears when an angry woman has a gun in his face, or else you’d get the whole lot of them wrong. He could have been trying to get me to calm down. Actually, he was definitely doing that… and I can’t blame him. It’s useless. Of course I needed to calm down. Whether he’s for real or not, he would have done that.

Then there’s the food.

That beautiful old whitebread mother brought me some day-rations. My mouth watered just thinking about them, and I hate the things. Food. Nourishment. I think I cried once.

I checked--fifteen days. Fifteen. Days. I can last… I can last almost a month now and that’s without hunting or gathering anything, so… God, I might make it.

I have to test these. Shit. That fuckin’ Dixie blueblood would be the sort to avoid a nasty firefight and all the blood by just poisoning the blankets and giving them to the damn savage.

Finally, the radio. He gave me an old as balls radio from before my dad was a kid. No clue how he found the thing. It’s got actual honest to god pre-collapse alkaline batteries in it. New, too. Maybe they still have those in the Concordat, how the hell should I know. I don’t go there much. Courier’s ain’t welcome and neither are drifters without money. Not that I’m broke, by the way.

Side note. If you find this, I buried a fuckton of money in the King Edward Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s a pre-collapse hotel, run down and awful and in the middle of a damn ghetto, but hey! Money, right? Enough to buy a whole settlement if you’re smart. A ton of Federal credit chips under a bunch of names and a lot of old greenbacks. Souvenirs, I guess. I don’t have a use for it anymore. Been adding to it for years. I figured, when I started, that one day I would have enough to move to Dallas or Houston and buy a house and live there where bombs don’t fall on you and no one shoots you and the police don’t watch you like a hawk on account of your little Courier’s badge. But somewhere along the way I just… I don’t know. I was working out of NV at the time doin’ the whole Courier thing and it was a one day journey every time I had a big stack to add to the pile.

Wow. Hadn’t thought about that in awhile. Sorry for all the rambling.

Okay, said I would talk and said I would be honest. I did say that, right? God, I’m not gonna go check. But I will be: I’m not sure about the traps.

I mean, yeah, I’m sure they have to stay. In my head, I know that. But… I’ve hunted. I’ve killed before--man and beast. Five men that I’m sure about and another six or seven I’m not. I’ve been hunting over a decade, so I’m not gonna even start trying to figure that part out, but you get it. I know how to do it, I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again if I have to. My dad used to say, ‘fore he left, that you never hesitate once the finger is on the trigger. You hesitate every second before that point. You don’t ever jump into a firefight and you sure as hell don’t kill anything bigger than a fly if you don’t have to absolutely do it. But when the finger is on the trigger. Well.

He chuckled and told me that when he did that, when I did that, then the jury returned the verdict.

I have to hunt. I’ve got to know if it’s possible to eat the local animals and I need a reliable food source that has the essential stuff I need to keep going after the day-rations give out.

I’m also not gonna quit looking for other kinds of plants. The waterfruit suck, but they’re better than nothing. I bring in a few each day. A couple have been really promising, and I’ll keep looking for them, but they’ve all been in short supply. I’m hoping to change that when I go out today.

I’m just… I’m not looking forward to the moment, you know? I never do, but this is the one time I can’t say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hurt you but that’s the savage law” and then gut the thing in peace. I’ll know as I put it out of its misery that I have food at my camp which is probably not poisoned, maybe, and that I’m not actually desperate yet and that just right rankles me. It feels greedy.

In the badlands, you hunt what you need and only what you need. Lots of reasons for that. Most are practical--the water is bad, the forests are bad, the air is bad, and so the population of things which you can eat and live off of is pretty thin compared to how it used to be, and so if we shoot too much… yeah. Bullets are expensive if you waste them, and .308 is the most expensive shell in the badlands. Why? Because everyone needs it and we gobble it all up faster than they can make more and push it out here. Most of the hunting rifles people are using these days? .308 is what makes them spit.

Damn. Speaking of, my rifle is probably fuckin’ trashed now at the facility. I loved that rifle. It had nice little patterns on the stock and everything. Also I carved my name into it with my knife for the hell of it when I was a little toasty and it looked super great. I’m actually pretty sad I lost it. I’ve had that thing for years.

Before I go out for the day, I’m going to check the perimeter again. Even if nothing bad came of it, I want to be sure everything is working. I need to be sure I’m not going to come back to the blackshirts hiding in the shadows this afternoon. In the meantime, I’ll eat my day-ration and then I’ll put the new ones in the module and we’ll see what there is to see. Maybe this Malthus guy is full of shit. Part of me hopes so. The rest of me wants him to be an okay guy. It would be nice to have someone to talk to, even if just on a radio that only has a mile radius.

The Pioneer checks her alarms with a studied care, and while she does this she is herself studied.

The lonely shaman hides in the dense bush. She has coated herself in specially mixed poultice and worked her alchemy on an old cloak that could easily be parted with. And she would part with it, for it felt unsettling to wear. Most alchemy was like conducting a universe eager to sing, but some things were not. Careful research in the scrolls and codexes she had brought with her from the deserts and from the jungled highlands beyond them had led her to believe that only an old and perhaps slightly dubious art would be of use in her investigation. It was not quite star-touched, and not quite as bad as the old blood sorceries, but it was unpleasant. The designs she had scrawled with mud and a variety of other unsavory things had dried immediately, locking the matrix in place…

And so now she watched, confidant that the strange bipedal creature could not see her.

This strange creature, this all but hairless thing, unnerved her. Not as badly as she apparently unnerved it, of course. Zecora was a kind zebra, if not the most social, and she had been ashamed when her presence’s effect had been clear.

She had not intended to scare the stranger, only to observe a new neighbor. When she had approached, it had pulled a strange tool that she had sensed danger in and barked in an angry, guttural tongue.

So she had withdrawn, respecting its obvious wishes.

But she was concerned for her new neighbor. It was obviously not of the Everfree, for it did not understand the forest at all. It had tried to eat things which were tricks of wild magic, illusions that offered no sustenance, all while ignoring every single plant and root that Zecora knew would sustain even such a giant with ease. As the days passed, she grew perplexed, and then frustrated.

Before her long wandering had brought her to Ponyville’s fabled forest, Zecora had been a teacher and a shrine maiden, offering from her mind and her shrine’s library the collected lore of a thousand years and more. Her greatest joy had been in passing on that knowledge. And when she had left? In gaining new lore and new knowledge.

This creature was going to starve at this rate. How was it surviving? Whatever food it must have brought must be all but expired now, for she had seen no evidence of it. She was all but ashamed to call herself a teacher.

Sighing, she turned back. The creature seemed agitated today, so she did not come out to meet it. She would return to her home and put together a basket of such things as the giant might eat and leave it with some note of offering. Surely it read the common tongue, and if not, the writing would at least give it some sense of the offering of a gift. She would leave it in the night, as the creature slept, and then retreat. Perhaps when it was not so hungry, she would try to talk to it. Perhaps she could find some enchantment in the old books for speaking in tongues.

So it was that her mind was full of such thoughts as she walked the old not-paths only she knew, and so it was that she was not fully vigilant.

So it was that she did not notice the marking on the tree and the pit concealed with skill on the path. For Zecora was indeed skilled in woodcraft, but she was only mortal. Painfully, lethally mortal. Her hoof slips through what she thinks blindly is merely earth. The weight is moved. The noose tightens around her hoof and pulls with terrifying force.

Zecora falls, her head hitting the ground hard. As she is dragged, it hits the rock used as a counterweight and her world goes dark.

The Pioneer pauses.

The creature is not dead yet. It is insensate, and she is grateful for that. The first human to feel the warmth of an alien sun both enjoys the feeling of the ancient bowie knife and hates the weight. It is useful. A knife is the epitome of humanity, she thinks acidly. Utility and lethality, there it is, all sharp and cutting. What can’t you do with a knife? Well, lots of things, but its a valid question. You can saw a rope away or beat back the wild growth. You can fight off a wolf in the dark.

You can skin what you’ve caught.

She sighed. It was the creature she had first met in this new world, and it was so much like a horse that at first she was sure that she would cut it down and spare its life. She kept thinking about the mare who had carried her faithfully, whom she had brought apples whenever she could find them. The faithful horses that had borne her for miles of deserted highway, through three dozen miserable towns, and past the hungry dens of every monster which man could aspire to become, with ease and alacrity.

Like one of those African horses, the zebras, the Pioneer thinks to herself, turning the bowie knife over and over in her hands.

She puts the knife back and pulls the Judge from its home. Does it shine in the foreign sunlight? No. It is dull and ready. As if it knows.

She checks the rounds inside. .454 Casull, the last argument of kings. She swallows and looks about her.

Another of her father’s old sayings: you don’t hesitate when your finger is on the trigger you don’t hesitate. Hesitate every single moment before that. But when the time comes…

When the time comes, shoot. She takes a breath. Her hand shakes. Why is this so different?

The creature is filthy, striped, and covered in that same covering as before. It looks like an absurd little pancho. She knows that if shoots it the pain will be instant. If she cuts the throat, it will not be. She cannot imagine its flailing and its opening eyes, so large, so panicked. If she watches it squirm, then she will not be able to eat it, and if she cannot eat it… then the creature, her fellow creature, dies in vain.

And she thinks about Sapphire, the mare who carried her so faithfully. Her hand feels cold on the gun. Yes, the little brown mare who bore her out of the junkie-infested hell, whom she had snuck sugarcubes when she had been able to afford it. She remembered giving her a nice rubdown after returning from a long ride out to deliver some mail and a package.

Unbidden, another memory, clear and warm: sleeping on the side of the highway that now only rarely saw cars, her head resting on the bloated pack filled with packages. A wide-brimmed hat rested on her head, shielding her eyes from the sun. She dozed, not quite awake but not quite asleep.

Suddenly, the hat is removed. The glaring sun shines onto her now exposed face. She stiffens and groans, and then peers up to find her four legged friend gnawing lazily on her hat. She laughs, tugging the old thing back. “Hey, that’s not food!” she says playfully.

She almost drops her gun, but she is too disciplined by the world she has grown up in to do that.

Do not hesitate when the finger is on the trigger. Hesitate every moment before. The paradox, she had always known, was there in plain sight: to be ready to slay in a moment but not to. Vigilance without cruelty, death with mercy, bloodshed without revelry. She swallows, and then realizes that her eyes are watering. She rauns a hand over them only for more nascent tears to form. Nausea comes over her in waves.

The little alien horse just hung there by its hoof, swinging slightly in the wind. She holsters her gun and walks around it, seeing no obvious wound.

The Pioneer swallows again. In her spirit there is a war between two voices. The first says that the little horse would provide a lot of much-needed protein. She still hasn’t found a source of food that can keep her alive more than a few days and she has no guarentee that this new world will ever have flora she can truly eat and process.

But she isn’t starving. She has no need for this. And she can’t. She can’t let go of the warm sun on her face and the laughter. It’s too awful to eat the first thing she ever met in this world. What if it had been trying to find her, thinking that she was the only thinking thing around? Like a lost dog being drawn to the only human it can find?

She breathes hard and shuts her eyes.

And feels, for a moment, like something less than human. It obviously wasn’t sentient. It couldn’t feel or think or talk like she could, but that didn’t mean she could kill it just because she wanted. And she did want to, honestly. She likes meat. She misses it. The need for something that her body can really digest effectively is rather pressing, and no one would blame her. Not a single human soul.

She grinds her teeth. Was that all that mattered? Pushing the envelope? Was that what being a pioneer was, eating and killing strange new things just because she could? If that were so, she wanted no part in it. She had been a Courier before, bringing medicine and food and mail. She would not become a butcher.

She tore the knife from her belt again.

It’s just an animal, a voice--her own voice--said.

It’s just an animal.

It’s just an animal and you’ve killed many before to survive. It would be the same. You can’t let sentimentality hurt your chances. Those day-rations could still be poisoned.

Fuck it, she says, and she slashes with the old knife. Fuck!

The horse does not fall to the ground because she is beneath it, keep its lolling head from hitting the ground. Gingerly, carefully, she lays it out beneath the frayed rope that hangs.

She curses again and steps back, startled to find that she is shaking. She keeps thinking about Sapphire and hunting with her father. Image after image, beating at her indignant hunter’s prerogative. Hunting with him had never made her feel this way. Not ever. Because you didn’t shoot does, did you? Because you had restraint. Because you were human.

She runs, leaving a dazed but not longer unconscious Zecora behind.

LOG 10

I caught the animal I met on… the second day? Third day? I don’t know. But it got caught in one of my snares by its hoof.

I let it go.

Because I’m stupid. Sentimental and stupid. It’s just an animal. And, yeah, I’ll be the first to say that doesn’t mean you can just use it how you want to just for fun, but I have an actual reason: I only have so much food to rely on and…

I just couldn’t do it. It looks like a horse. It is a horse. A little alien horse and it was just too much. I cut it down and bailed. God, I’m so angry at myself. I’m not sure if I regret it or not. I don’t know. I just… I feel so confused about everything.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had a dream that I shot Sapphire in the eye and then ate her right on the side of the road and I woke up and it’s a miracle I didn’t hurl all over my tent. I felt like I had the shakes. What the hell? I didn’t feel like I did when I was being watched but I still felt… unnerved. Think that’s the word. Unnerved.

And now here I am, lying in my tent right around sunrise, talking to no one. Because I’m stupid.

Watch the next one be a friggin’ bunny. I need to go on a walk.

Addendum

This is an audio log, so you can’t see it, but I’m holding a basket.

That’s strange, you might say, why do you have a basket? Also, where did you get it from? And if you’re smart, you might ask what’s in it.

I don’t know why I have one, I don’t know where it came from, and it’s full of fruit. I’ve been testing it all morning. Okay, roots too. Those were weird. I tested them too. It all… it all is good. It’s all edible. Unlike the waterfruit, which I proceeded to dump out into the woods in triumph, this stuff will actually give me what my body needs. I’ve seen some of it out and about, and honestly some of this stuff looked really off to me, but it even tastes okay.

My first thought as I read that little report the lab spits out was: what if I had gotten this after I killed that little alien horse, when I knew that all of this stuff was safe?

I feel like an ass. On multiple levels. I don’t even know. But I’m also overjoyed. Also terrified.

Because there was a scroll at the bottom of the basket, and I don’t recognize any of the writing on it. I need to call Malthus up and make double sure that he didn’t do this. I know he didn’t, I just… I just think that this is exactly what it looks like. A gift.

From an alien.

Because I made first contact while I was asleep.

Holy shit.

God, there’s just no way. Days of wandering and I just… get a friggin’ fruitbasket? What the hell? Oh, hey, welcome to the neighborhood Earthling. Maybe some of the others will drop by in a bit and I’ll get some old world fruitcake. I can go next door and ask to borrow some sugar! Maybe even casually chat about the weather with the locals!

I sound crazy. I’m listening to myself and I know I do. But how do you react to this? Is there even a way? The Doc talked to me pretty extensively about the idea of first contact, but neither of us thought it would happen. They hadn’t seen anything with probes that suggested aliens. Just critters and plants and grass. Just that, nothing else. It was all hypotheticals, the kind of thing you talk about but you don’t really think hard on because it ain’t exactly gonna happen.

And here it is. Happening. Because an alien gave me a fruitbasket.

I’m not complaining, just… what the hell?