What's the Opposite of Social Distancing (RB Vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 4) · 6:16pm Apr 18th, 2021
Kindle app says we're 12% in. Woohoooooooo.
Previously, on Empress Theresa:
First meeting to marriage in a matter of pages.
And now:
Just a reminder, the last chapter ended with this line:
I was driving the car alone one Saturday to go grocery shopping, thinking of the wonderful future waiting for me.
I suspect that line may have been supposed to be the first line of this chapter. Or at least it should have, considering chapter four continues from there as if there weren't a chapter break at all.
I preferred to go to a supermarket in a direction away from Framingham because the extra three miles it took to drive along this isolated road more than made up for the waiting in Framingham traffic.
Things suddenly take a turn for the dramatic, however.
It was on this road that three cars ahead of me suddenly drew abreast of each other and stopped. I was forced to stop too. Six men with handguns drawn got out of these cars and surrounded me.
“Get out of the car!” one man ordered.
I got out just as a van pulled up from behind.
It was a large van with three bench seats. “Get in!” someone yelled as the door to the middle seat opened. I got in, sat down, and found myself surrounded by men pointing guns at me, three behind me and two more in the front seat.
“Isn’t this overdoing it?” I asked.
A normal reaction to such an event.
I’d known for a year that the President was stewing over me and a struggle seemed pointless.
Then why did he help you in the last chapter? Man, this president seems to change his whims with the wind. Who could imagine such a man being elected—
Oh.
Right.
Anyway, Theresa gets driven to a field, with a pair of military helicopters waiting there for them.
It was some kind of VIP transportation helicopter with seats looking forward like in airplanes. It was probably used to haul generals’ butts around to important military spots like Las Vegas and Disney World.
Yeah, I'm... sure that's exactly what it's used for. Uh huh.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To an aircraft carrier” answered one of the men holding guns on me.
“Am I coming back?”
“No.”
There it was. The death sentence.
If only.
Theresa then goes on to reflect on her mortality in the stiffest, most Boutin way she possibly could: by being melodramatic, and then criticizing people for being melodramatic.
My face softened and tears gathered in my eyes. How many thousands of stories had I seen on the news about young people like myself being killed by murderers or in accidents and I didn’t think about it long. Now it was my turn to face death. Death! Death at eighteen! My mind could scarcely believe it. The unfairness of it made my body shake with revulsion. Dead at the peak of my beauty and youth when I was just beginning to taste the best life offered! I was a little angry for a moment but returned to sorrow.
But I didn’t cry. I wasn’t a phony movie actress using hysterics to milk all the drama she could out of every moment. I was a real person and I didn’t give a damn what these kidnappers thought. thought. I’d had years to consider something like this might happen someday. Besides, I had a solid upbringing. I’d been taught that this life was just the beginning. Death wasn’t the end. It was the start of a wonderful eternity. Still it was natural to mourn the loss of this world.
These guys probably had never told a girl she was going to be killed and must have expected a soap opera scene. I gave them Navy SEAL. They said a few words to each other once in a while. I noticed their voices softened. I sensed I’d won their admiration.
Ma'am, I really don't think these guys give a damn.
You know what three words I really don't want to hear from either Theresa or Mr. Boutin?
I waxed poetic.
I'm going to spare you the rest of the paragraph. It's low effort and adds nothing. It's about as poetic as The Tay Bridge Disaster.
“How are you going to do it?”
“You’ll be put in a plane with an atom bomb.”
My eyebrows went up a little. Wouldn’t a bullet save taxpayers a hundred million dollars? dollars? But then I realized they wanted to destroy HAL, not me, and everybody said nothing could survive an A-bomb.
Except for cockroaches, so you'll probably be fine.
There's some bits here about the journey, they stop for refueling at one point, why do we care? We don't.
And then, I kid you not, the best, most accurate line in this entire damn book.
I let my mind wander aimlessly over the incidents of my short stay on Earth. In retrospect I’d had a charmed life. Nothing had happened to me.
See? Mr. Boutin can admit this book's flaws!
Nothing. If I were to write my autobiography now I’d write three lines: “I was born. I had a good time. I was vaporized by a bomb”.
This is honestly a good line, and I'm probably as shocked as you are that I got to write that. Good job, Mr. Boutin!
But then we return to the usual. Theresa talks about how she doesn't like dogs, and one time she observed a head-on collision on the motorway.
Other than that my life had been an amalgam of routines. And this is what made up a life, not the spectacular events that make the news. I’d been satisfied with my quiet life.
Would you please make up your mind on whether you want a quiet life or not?
Anyway, they eventually end up at an airbase, Theresa guesses that it's probably in Florida. Theresa gets taken to the canteen and told to eat. For reasons that will become... apparent, if not clear, she's very interested in whether or not the drinks come in plastic bottles.
myself. I grabbed a tray while looking down the line. There was a beverage dispensing cabinet at the end. Hopefully it had plastic bottles.
There were 20 oz bottles of Coke in there. I grabbed twelve bottles and put them on my tray.
A few feet beyond the end of the cafeteria line was a garbage can. Leaving my tray on the end of the slide shelf for a moment, I walked to the garbage can to retrieve the garbage bag. It was after hours and the crew had cleaned up and put in a new bag before leaving. I pulled up the plastic bag and returned to my tray to put eleven of the twelve Coke bottles in the bag. Then I sat at the nearest table to eat.
If you're confused, don't worry; so is everyone else.
The men watching me, three of them aiming guns at all times, were impressed by my calm.
I really think you're assuming a lot more than is actually going on, here.
Building 39 had a cot in a back office. They took me to it.
“Try to get some sleep” I was told. “We leave at four a. m.”
They left me alone. No doubt they had every escape route guarded. I could have easily killed all of them by throwing hard objects at them, but where could I go? An army would be sent out looking for me.
I laid down on the cot and slipped the garbage bag of Coke bottles under the blanket so that it couldn’t be removed without disturbing me.
Somehow I feel that letting her take a garbage bag full of cokes at all, let alone letting her take them with her is a serious breach of prisoner protocol.
We now resume Theresa's regular pontificating about her life, beginning with Steve. Mr. Boutin feels the need to have another go at the scene in Theresa's dorm room, perhaps forgetting that that happened in the last chapter.
I wore that flimsy little black dress outfit and wondered if he’d attack me or run for his life.
Is this normal human thinking? Are we sure Theresa was ever human?
The next morning, she's taken by car to her plane. She gets given an airman's jumpsuit by one of the guards; the plane will be going up to sixty thousand feet before the detonation, and the man is worried about her getting cold.
Somehow, this also plays into Theresa's plan.
It fit in perfectly with my plan.
See?
And then it's time for more pontificating would you please just get on the plane already so we can be done with this.
You know what? You folks get to suffer with me this time. Share in my pain.
When pushed to the brink someone can panic, or despair, or hope. I had always believed. Some people said they had doubts about God. I pitied them. How could they have doubts? Simple reasoning told me the universe could not be in the form it was without design. It might be a chaos, but the beautiful way it was ordered against a trillion to one odds of elements just happening to have exactly the properties needed to sustain life could only be somebody’s design. Besides that, people’s intellects could not be material alone and could not be hardwired to understand any concept presented to it. The human mind held universal ideas beyond the reach of matter and evolution. The intellect could not be made of matter. Nor could the human soul operate on its own. It needed an omniscient and omnipotent intelligence to move its thoughts. But most of all, the unselfish self-sacrificing goodness of my mother, father, and Steve was not something that could exist in animals.
There are a million and one things I could say to challenge this, and I'm not going to say any of them, because I don't care enough to get into an argument about theism and evolution vs. intelligent design over this pile of trash. I'll just say I disagree and move on.
When Socrates was in prison waiting to be executed, his friend Crito urged him to escape and go to another country. Socrates said he enjoyed living in Athens all his life and owed everything to Athens. If he ran away he would be betraying the decision of the Athens people even if it was wrong in his case. If we want the life God gives us we must accept the bad along with the good. That is a life well-spent.
Ditto this and free will. Moving on.
I’d grown tired of thinking hard
So had the author, and so had I.
They stop off at an aircraft carrier for refueling for three or so pages and—
Okay. So I've never served. Can't; my spine decided it hated me in middle school and I haven't been able to stand up straight since.
But.
But.
This can't be proper procedure, can it?
Because guess what?
She still has the damn garbage bag full of Cokes.
They removed the pillows and belts and handed me the jumpsuit. I stepped in the aisle to put it on. I picked up the garbage bag of Coke bottles and followed the goons out the door.
I mean, I've heard of military intelligence, but this is ridiculous.
We arrived at the group of officers and waited while the jet plane was prepared. The oldest looking officer said, “They didn’t tell me you were a girl.” I was right. They hadn’t known. Would it have made a difference? Probably not.
There were three female officers in this group. The Captain probably thought the condemned man deserved a last look at females.
What the fuck?
And then, like... this happens, but I don't care, please just get on with it, I'm so sick of this chapter.
This triggered something in the young woman’s brain. She thought I should have the opportunity to say something in my defense. Nobody had been given a protocol, so this young woman pulled a cellphone from her pants pocket, and boldly walked around the government men until she was almost in front of me. She held up the cellphone and activated the video mode.
“Do you have anything to say?” she asked. I was nervous, but at this point I was more disgusted than nervous.
“This is the most stupid thing ever done.
You said it, not me.
I’m glad I won’t be here to see what happens.”
She sounded disappointed. “Is that all you have to say?”
My face softened. Yes, that was the wrong way to leave my family hanging.
I once read a famous quote by the Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh about singing a death song and going out like a hero. I had rewritten it for more universal use, never dreaming that I’d use it myself so soon.
“If people grieve your passing, rejoice in the good you did, and die like a hero going home. I feel good about who I was.”
She was more than satisfied with that. She was thrilled. Surely nothing better could be said.
How about 'THE END'? I would have preferred that, honestly.
I climbed a ladder and awkwardly got into the cockpit still carrying the garbage bag of Coke bottles.
Still! She still has the bag, folks! She's taking it onto her death plane! They're letting her take it onto her death plane!
Anyway, the plane takes off, and Theresa begins to... do... this:
First, the seat belt harness had to go. I felt around the belt attachments next to my hips for release buttons. I couldn’t find any. The belts seemed to disappear into metal slots. It was the same at my shoulders. There was no time to waste looking for the release mechanism. I reached my right hand down to grasp the belt at my left hip. I pulled and pulled with ever increasing force. The belt stretched and grew thinner until it snapped with a dull pop.
I grabbed the garbage bag of Coke bottles and put it in my lap. I uncapped a bottle, poured its contents on the floor, tore off a small piece of garbage bag, wrapped it over the opening of the empty bottle, and screwed the cap over the plastic covered neck. That would make a water tight seal. The bottle went inside the jumpsuit under my left armpit. I did the same procedure with a second bottle which went under my right armpit. And a third bottle went on my left side. A fourth bottle went on the right.
Eleven bottles would provide enough buoyancy to keep my head well above water.
The altimeter read 54,140 feet. It was time to go home. As a believer I was sure I was immortal and that gave me courage. I pulled off the oxygen mask and said a silent prayer in my mind.
Father, forgive me for all my sins. Take me into your house forever.
The canopy was moving! Something somewhere was distorting. Metal or something was being stretched, torn, destroyed………
The canopy suddenly flew off.
And then she jumps out of the plane.
You cannot, you cannot convince me that a rational person came up with this plan multiple days ago when she heard about the method of her execution, and was able to execute it flawlessly despite the many, many ways it could and should have failed.
Additionally, it's not even a good plan. She's skydiving without a parachute from around 55,000 feet, into the ocean. The terminal velocity of a skydiver is about 193 km/h. There's been no mention of HAL increasing her durability, which surely she would have discovered by now. Forget being buoyant; you'll be a big red stain when you hit the surface of the water.
And even if you survived that, somehow, stuffing your jumpsuit with bottles—well, for one, you may be invulnerable, but the bottles and the jumpsuit sure aren't. They'd probably burst on landing. And even that aside, you've only increased the buoyancy of your chest; if you manage to make it into the water, you'll lose consciousness eventually, and if you end up face-down in the water, you're still dead, coke bottles be damned!
And even if all of that went well, you'd still be stuck in the middle of the ocean with no food or fresh water!
In essence, this plan is monumentally stupid. She would have had an easier time taking over the aircraft carrier.
Oh, and also, the bomb goes off after she jumps out, so she's probably irradiated at this point, too.
But anyway, she makes it.
The waves appeared larger every second. Their approach seemed to speed up and I knew there were only seconds left. Once again I covered my face with my arms. My body made a hard belly flop. I was knocked out.
The waves brushing my face were stimulating. I regained consciousness. It was the South Atlantic, far below the equator, and for the Southern Hemisphere, June was like December in the North. The water was ice cold. My feet and ankles hurt but there was no escaping it. I started whimpering. The cold sank deeper into my bones. I yelled and thrashed the water. It got worse and worse. Now I was close to panic and screamed. Dying was bad enough. How painful would this get?
In a couple of minutes my lower legs went numb. The skin all over my body was losing nervous sensation. My screaming stopped to be replaced by intermittent whimpering and groans.
It was nearly over now. I quieted down.
It was time. All accounts were settled. All debts were paid. I had no more use for this world.
I passed out.
And then she dies! THE END! We did it, everybody! Wait, what do you mean we're only 16% into the book?
God dammit.
See you next time, folks.
The madness slowly is creeping in.
I wonder which will win first, your phone trying to commit seppuku on this, or your brain trying to leave your eyes by the quickest route out.
Not sure on the odds yet.
Death! Death at eighteen! Thank goodness she would die at the peak of her beauty and not as an old hag of twenty-five.
Oh boy, you sent me down a McGonagall hole with that link!
This is far from the first story I've read where I rooted for the protagonist's death just so it would be over. :B
This chapter is an insult to both science and religion. I'm not going to bother ranting about all the logical fallacies inherent to the idea of "Intelligent Design," but suffice to say, it's a lazy mental shortcut that has all the structural integrity of an arch without scaffolding or keystone.