Just watch this, okay? You won't regret it...

This is an absolutely gorgeous short film that manages to be heart-breaking, beautiful, and about the wonders of technology all at the same time.

But just watch:

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Review: Captain America or How I Learned to Love the Bomb Cold

As usual, I am late to the Captain America party. I’ve never even read the guy’s comic and a furious Wikipedia search before I saw the movie only enlightened me a teeny tiny bit on the long and convoluted history of the Cap.

I know he’s originally from the 1940s circa World War II and that he gets frozen in ice or something to end up in our current timeline alongside Tony Stark and the rest of the Avengers. I know he recently died (and maybe even came back as comic book heroes are wont to do) and there was some sort of drama with him being unhappy with the state of the government or mixed up in the most recent election…blah di blah.

I didn’t need to know any of that to enjoy the movie (the hallmark of a good comics-movie translation in my opinion).

When we went it was a Saturday, a full week after the movie had come out and the line for Captain America was out the door of the theater. There were hardly any seats available for us by the time we got there, and the crowd was wide and mixed. The packed-ness of the theater a full week and late-night showing later should have warned me that the movie was going to be pretty good.

I was not expecting it to be as great as it was.

The movie begins in the Arctic wastes, with what I’m going to guess is a present-day thingy since there are modern guys crawling around in a frosted-over ship. I will admit to being momentarily confused; if I didn’t know the whole “literally frozen in time” thing about the Cap, I’d think I had wandered into a showing of Transformers: Dark of the Moon by accident.

Luckily, it’s just the set-up, since we then flash back to a small store in some sort of Germanic place in what looks like WWII. You can just tell when it’s WWII, can’t you? That smoky feeling to the shots, the desperation as people run in their paperboy hats…

I was almost expecting this song and dance number...

 Anyhoo, an older man with “Going to Die” written plainly across his forehead is in his shop when Elrond barges in wearing what looks suspiciously like a uniform for the SS. What Elrond is doing being Evil so far from Rivendell is beyond me, but I’m going with it because he is a delicious bad guy. Right, Mr. Anderson?

In a great show of continuity, the glowing cube from the end of Thor puts in an appearance…many years before it was acquired by faux!Loki in the future where Thor takes place…  At least there’s a nice set-up for The Avengers going. Elrond discovers the cube hidden in an enormous carving of Yggdrasil that the old man has plainly on his wall. I mean, if you’re going to be hiding Asgardian tech in your workshop, perhaps an obvious homage to the Norse gods isn’t the smartest place to hide it? Just a thought…

They call the cube “the Tesseract,” in what I desperately hope is an homage to A Wrinkle in Time but probably isn’t. The old guy dies as we knew he was going to and Elrond holds the Tesseract aloft in all of its glowy awesome before…

We flash over to the World’s Fair circa 1942. Since there actually wasn’t a World’s Fair in New York City in 1942, we get our first not-so-subtle glimpse that even though this looks a lot like our universe we are actually in a parallel kind of place. Even though DC is the company with eight-thousand Earths, by setting up this funky thing, the director and writers very nicely establish the “neighbor universe” concept that is so important to our suspension of disbelief in comic book movies. All is not as it seems, and as we pan down the street in this could-have-been World’s Fair we meet Bucky and Steve, two men out for a night on the town, or rather Bucky is. 

Steve, all 80 pounds of him, is desperately trying to get the army to accept his application to be a soldier. He wants to fight, and he has the heart of a soldier if not the strength. It is almost impossible to ignore at this point in the film the amazing effects being put into place by the production team. Chris Evans, who we know to be this hulking figure of a man especially since he bulked up for the part, is a short, scrawny, tiny minuscule… I can’t even explain how little and small and sad they make him look. It’s obviously Chris Evans, I mean it can’t be anyone else, but it’s Chris Evans as he would have been if he was an asthmatic, malnourished nine year-old.

That's him. There in the front....the man behind him is only 5'4"...

Steve Rogers, this tiny man, walks into the recruitment office and falsifies his registration information for what seems the hundredth time. It turns out that our Mr. Rogers has been trying and failing to become a soldier in the US Army for quite a few months now, and each time he is rejected by dint of his lack of strength. This time, however, the officer who does his physical examination sees something else in the small-statured man: a fierce and overwhelming desire to help, a love of country that is miles wider than he is tall, and a humility that puts everyone else to shame.

The doctor, judging from his picture, might admittedly be a little crazy... also look! Stanley Tucci!

This examining physician however, is an escaped German, on the run from the tyranny of Elrond’s SS-like people. And like Einstein and his escape with the Bomb plans safely nestled in his head, Dr. Tucci has brought with him a serum that could very well change the outcome of this war and every war to follow.

He offers Steve the chance to join the United States Army, allowing him to finally carry out his dream. When he reaches the training facility, however, Dr. Tucci must prove to the higher ups and the beautifully clothed Peggy that this mere slip of a man is in fact the perfect test subject for their testosterone-enhancing serum.

To prove the caliber of Steve Rogers over the already present hulks of men, Dr. Tucci throws a live grenade into the center of the army training camp. There is a silence, a terrified silence, and then tiny, scrawny Steve Rogers breaks ranks and runs toward the grenade. He leaps on it and curls into the fetal position, completely covering the deadly object.

Poor baby. :(

At this point in the movie, our theater drew a collective indrawn breath mixed in with some escaping “aww’s.” Who could help it when you see little, shrimpy Steve Rogers, He Who Stands Up for Everyone Except Himself, fling himself on the grenade he thinks is going to end his life? This reaction to his attempted sacrifice shows just how much we really connect with selflessness and Goodness. The grenade, of course, is a dud.

This act of heroism in spite of his small stature proves his worth to the captain of the guard or whatever he is and the green light is given to go ahead with the super serum-ing. 

Rogers is taken to a back room, strapped into some sort of metal pod and injected with adamantium the super serum. The lights flicker, some sparks fly from the control panels, and the room rumbles. But then, with a “woosh” and a clatter, the pod bay doors open and out steps…

 …Da-yum...

Of course there is a secret not!Nazi spy who has infiltrated the testing room, and he proceeds to shoot kindly Dr. Tucci and scarper with the last bit of super soldier serum. Flexing his new muscles, Steve Rogers leaps to the rescue, following the spy out the door and down the street.

The ensuing “New Power Discovery” sequence is one of my favorites. Mostly because it shows instead of tells. The Captain’s heart and motivations are displayed better than if someone had explained how to move about now, or the limitations on his new strength. He just leaps into action because he feels compelled to – it’s the Right thing to do. 

I don’t know how he does it but Chris Evans just exults in the power that Rogers must be feeling in this moment. Like we saw in Thor, there is a deep and dark longing when your body won’t do what your heart and mind want and need for it to do. The Captain’s heart for the people was in a body that was three sizes too small (like a reverse Grinch) and he now has the physical power to go with the power of his heart.

Only...not like this at all...

The movie takes off from here, establishing Captain America as essentially a propaganda guy because he’s too important to go to the front lines. He is the first and last of the Super Soldiers because the last bottle of serum was smashed in the chase. That doesn't last, of course, and there are some awesome scenes wherein the Captain and his team (setting up a nice parallel to the Avengers by canonically establishing that Cap is a good leader) blow stuff up, ride into the sunset, and generally just cause mayhem. There is pain and sadness, but there are jokes and the pulling together of different groups. I wish the scenes with the team hadn’t been a montage, but I understand why they had to be.

Also there is a really phenomenal musical number.

But let me drop something (controversial?) here. Chris Evans, he of the cuteness and the adorable GQ magazine interview, is the best choice to play Captain America and he did an amazing job. He is hard as a rock and delectable and boyishly charming and adorable. I didn't know it was possible to keep the humility of the 90 pound weakling in the performance given by the hundred some pound strong man, but it's one of the reasons the movie really worked.

While Chris Evans as the Human Torch was funny in that kinda rapscallion way, he brought an air of wonder to his portrayal of Steve Rogers that I am not sure would have been possible by anyone else. One of the things that was really integral to the story was the fact that Steve Rogers was chosen as the recipient of the super soldier serum because he was someone that you would root for regardless of how he looked. He was one of the forgotten people, those whose hearts are twenty times larger than the shape afforded them by nature or God. It's as if the super soldier serum takes the potential for greatness found in the unabashed, loving and humble Steve Rogers and makes the outsides mirror the insides. It's like a wish fulfillment fantasy for the under-powered and the alone. 

The movie is the nice little lift that we  as a country needed: the good guys can win, there is hope for not only those who are weak and little and only trying to make their way in the world, but for those who are worthy, there is almost a sense of "it all gets better". Steve Rogers is a stand-in for every scrawny person who wished they could just be a little bigger and then they'd use their powers for good.

And what's wonderful about this is that he DOES. At no point does he falter in his goodness and representing what it is that he has been entrusted with. He doesn't take his new-found powers and wreak havoc on his erstwhile tormentors. He doesn't take his new strength and use it for his own goals. He submits to the authority he was willing to die to protect. He takes his new gift and uses it for the good of others rather than himself. If anyone deserves to have used new powers for a selfish reason at any point, it's Steve Rogers. And he doesn't. 

Like all the flack leveled against Superman for being too much of a Boy Scout, there's a lot against the golden boy persona of Captain America. A flimsy show of American supremacy? No. A Boy Scout with no real danger or turmoil to make his character someone the layman can relate to? No. But these are things I run across pretty often when folk describe the Captain.

If there is anyone deserving of angst and despairing and railing against his lot in life and what he is now thrown into, it is Steve Rogers. The movie really impresses upon you the inherent sadness of his situation. He loses everyone he cares about, he is thrust too quickly into a world he wasn’t even allowed to glimpse at the start of the movie. And yet he just takes it, looks at the adversity he finds himself in front of, assesses the situation, and then jumps in with the right thing. 

In our day of anti-heroes and fallen heroes, of villains being re-purposed and shades of grey, Steve Rogers and Captain America are the shining white light at the end of the tunnel. They stand as beacons for the rest of us. And yes, even beacons have shortcomings and even Good men have failings, but Captain America's intrinsic rightness is not one of them.

I am off soon...

...but in the meantime, I would like to share this remarkable artist with you. Perhaps you haven't heard of Joanna Newsom, I certainly hadn't until very recently (like...accidentally...while stumbling through Wikipedia...). But I am ridiculously fond of her and her voice and her harp-playing.

The longer I spend listening to folk music, the more I find I love folk music.

I can't say a lot about her voice, the gravelly notes to it, the high ululations of it, the slow counterpoint she presents to her harp, how it sounds as if someone said, "we need a Human voice," and gave it to her. I am in love.

She speaks for herself, however. And the imagery in her lyrics is unreal.

Summer of Horror: Dragon Tears

Dragon Tears by Dean Koontz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Yes, Mr. Koontz. The 90s are a crazy time full of crazy goings on and off the wall capers. Arguable there was no "moral fiber" no "law or justice" and the youth were obviously "revolting" (in every sense of the word). Yeah. I got it. Wait 'till you get to the ots...


While I always enjoy a good paranormal horror (and Mr. Koontz's are usually top-notch) this one just had me rolling my eyes. Creepiness came from the rare moments when TickTock (our antagonist...worst name for a bad guy ever. It's like naming him 'Fluffy' frankly...) appeared in the next line where he hadn't been anywhere in the scene. When you picture it happening, it is terrifying and Mr. Koontz utilizes this device to its fullest extent. But that was one of the only creep-inducing things to come out of the entirety of this far-too-long novel.


As well, I feel like I shouldn't be noticing all the research the author has done in pursuit of realness. I don't really care about the specific plant types found in this neighborhood, or the precise medical effects of ecstasy (called 'E' now, not 'X'...sign of the change in times?).


I don't think horror books should feel dated but Dragon Tears fairly dripped of the early 90s as well as a huge dissatisfaction with the era. Plus: the whole "disparate characters seem to be completely unrelated but then meet-up and save the day" trope was not really utilized to its best potential here. The story would have read just as well without the frequent side-trips into the minds of other characters it was hard to feel anything for. In this case, these "other main characters" really only served to corroborate the sanity of the Real Main Characters. Something we knew wasn't in question.


The Dog was infinitely more useful.


View all my reviews

X-Men First Class: An Analysis...Kinda...

I am pretty sure I was the only person in my family of admittedly geeky people who was excited to see X-Men Origins: First Class. Let's face it, we've been burned by the series before and my people weren't ready to give the franchise that delivered such dissatisfying fare as X3 and Origins: Wolverine another chance.

But I am the kind of person who is still looking forward to The Legend of Korra even though the creators took the original show in a completely ridiculous direction and then vindictively stomped all over my fragile, shipper heart. (Who's bitter?) I watched all of the Underworld movies, Van Helsing, and Jennifer's Body.  I even went back for Glee's second season after the episodes stopped being about any kind of plot and started to be vehicles for musical careers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I am an eternally hopeful participant in the TV/Movie game. I will give chances and throw myself on the mercy of the writers' good graces over and over again. I was fully expecting to hate First Class. I had remarkably low expectations after the unmentionable pile of refuse that was X3.

I am glad my assumptions were so grievously wrong.

X-Men Origins: First Class is not only a great X-Men movie (one of the top two hands down) but a good movie on its own.

Even though the movie-verse messes with established character timelines and canon, a little suspension of disbelief goes a long way and it's almost worth it in this case. The storyline is intricate enough to keep you interested while still relying nicely on things blowing up and people shooting beams out of themselves. The effects are really good, the writing is fun and funny, and the actors do very good jobs.

Plus, this movie presents the fun conundrum of all prequels: how did they go from This to That? The evolution of Charles, Erik, and the entire mutant/X-men backstory was really interesting and well-handled (at least with regards to the movie-verse's continuity).

Forewarned from here: The HMS Spoiler is all set to sail because I have nit-picky, analysis-type things to get into below. If you don't want to be spoiled, suffice it to say the movie is well worth watching. Go forth! Watch!

Anyone left? Good. Let's get into the fun stuff. >=)

The movie begins in the 1940s with what I assumed was the "Adagio for Strings" (it's not, but it sounds so similar, I am just gonna keep calling it that). What a way to start the movie. At this point I am expecting some sort of heart-rending Schindler's List-type cinema and I'm not really disappointed. Poor Baby Magneto is ripped from his parents in a concentration camp and so proceeds to rip the camp's gate free of its moorings. An extremely familiar looking man pulls Little Erik into his office promising him chocolates and happiness if he can move the proffered coin across the tabletop. Oh look! It's Kevin Bacon! Looking very old and slightly stretched and kinda evil... And his status as the villain of this flick is cemented when he shoots Baby Magneto's mother in cold blood, prompting a magnetic storm to occur in Bacon's adjoining Roomful of Torture Devices. Who keeps one of those attached to their office anyways? Damn Nazis...

Look at him scream, the poor Baby Erik

"So," Evil!Kevin Bacon says, "We unlock your gift with anger and pain. You and I are going to have a lot of fun together." I got legit shivers at this point even though Baby Erik spent so much time screaming in the last scene it read as funny rather than traumatizing. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, however, just got a whole lot easier.

This horrible reveal of Erik's powers and their Dark Side-nature is nicely contrasted with the tracking shot of what we know as the X-Mansion. Inside, Baby Charles wakes up, pads downstairs, and proceeds to Mind-bend a Baby Mystique into dropping her disguise. "Join me in my giant rambling house with missing parental figures!" he tells her in all of her adorable baby blueness. Or, you know, close enough.

Small Mystique is adorable

We skip forward in time to 1962 and the rest of the movie takes place in this halcyon time of potential nuclear disaster and really bad track suits.

The continual contrast between scenes of what Erik is doing (killing) versus what Charles is doing (studying) are...acceptable. If I hadn't felt as if the editor were trying to ram it down my throat, I'd have enjoyed it more. Nature/Nurture arguments are fun and all, but I like to have them after the movie, not in my head during the scenes where things are blowing up. We would still have seen the extreme differences in upbringing and outlook on life between these two guys without all of the overt switching.

I did, however, love the use of different languages throughout the scenes a lot. In a time that is categorized in our history as one of fear (and there is a scene later showing actual news footage that made me so glad I wasn't born yet) all of the different languages being batted around are really cool. The scene with Erik in the bar in Argentina switching languages at will is so awesome and cringe-worthy and yet serves to showcase his character really well. One of the things the constant language-switching does is really impress upon us, the Audience, how intelligent these guys are. It's one of the things that makes their break-up so interesting later: two brilliant men with vastly different opinions on something that affects the both of them... see, this is a more subtle version of the constant scene-shifts from earlier and it works a little better, in my opinion.

RE: Erik - There's a reason it's so fun to write characters motivated solely by revenge. They're a lot simpler and these characters will often push the edges of what is traditionally seen as "right" and "wrong", crossing into fun torture things while still being full of ennui and angst. Erik is so full of angst it is almost strangling him.

MAGN-ANGST-O

Charles' storyline by this point in the movie has dovetailed with Moira McTaggert's and he is in the process of convincing the CIA that mutants can be an important part of covert ops. A note on Moira, by the way: I really don't understand why the producers/writers would choose to make her an American CIA agent when her own backstory is so awesome and integral to the X-Men continuity (plus, she's Scottish! They chose to make her American, why?). They are really playing fast and loose with the canon...

Of course by the point in the movie where it was time to reconcile the two storylines (Erik's and Charles') I just kept getting "James Bond, JAMES BOND" vibes from Erik's side. I guess it's because the only Bond besides the newest ones I've seen is Octopussy and I swear that Bond wears a wetsuit just like Erik's. But the switching between the James Bond espionage scenes with Erik and the scienc-y CIA scenes with Charles are...interesting. It really kept me on my toes tone-wise and I don't know if I would have liked it if I weren't enjoying the movie so much.

Wetsuit looks like this.  Pretty much exactly.

When OMG a submarine comes off the bottom of Kevin Bacon's ship, we finally reach the crossing of the storylines. While I was enjoying the movie up until this point, it was only after this that I started really liking First Class. From this point, where Erik tries to raise the sub (from underwater because he is being dragged by the magnetic pull or something) and Charles talks him down, the movie became the prequel I wanted it to be. And also, it introduced me to the wonderful bromance of Charles and Eric. I still don't understand how these guys broke up. Or rather, I do, but pretty much all of their scenes together make me want them to stay together forever.

From here on out, the movie is about finding baby mutants, training them, and putting nods to the original duology in as often as possible (X3 didn't happen, I tell you!).

A break before I analyze the heck out of character motivations:  My notes just say "Beast! <3" for the introduction of Dr. Hank McCoy. ...Yeah. :)

Awww, isn't he adorable? And so full of Science and Wonder...

...and then he turned into a blue muppet...

What the movie does well at this point and for the rest of the film is really showcase the nebulousness of Charles' "goodness". He is going to be Professor X, upstanding member of society, leader of the X-Men and all around great guy, but right now? Right now Charles is a twenty-something year old who's just gotten his PhD in genetics and can't stop calling people splendid when they're uncomfortable with themselves.

He has that smug arrogance of the highly educated young adult. The "I-am-so-smart, Look-at-my-brains" proclivity with the added fun of being able to talk to people and affect their actions with his Mind. He's intrigued by the possibility of mutants and his PhD helps enable him to speak about it in a group setting. What his brains and his Brains don't do for him, however, is provide a justification for the manipulation he is doing.

Any way you slice it, telepathy is a kind of creepy power. And Charles is shown to have such great control he can literally force people to do things they don't want to do. This isn't a power to be taken lightly. And yet, while the movie goes out of its way to show the creepiness inherent in being able to control metal (Erik's initial tantrum plus his slaughter of all of the Nazis he can find come to mind) it does a lot less with the invasion and control Charles constantly exhibits.

I mean, Xavier is the guy who mind-bent Baby Mystique out of her disguise, outed Dr. Hank as Beast just by shaking his hand, psychically removed Erik from the magnetic pull of a submarine, put three soldiers to sleep while running, controlled a soldier to turn his head and look through his eyes, penetrated a fellow-mutant's mind (more than once), and physically controlled an officer on a Russian ship to do something he had absolutely no intention of ever doing. And that's just the stuff I can remember four days after I saw the movie.

Charles isn't really into this whole "gotta catch 'em all" collection of baby mutants for the good of everyone, he is pretty selfishly doing it to study mutants in their natural habitat (search your feelings, you know it to be true!) and build a family of which he is the unequivocal head. He is oligarchic at heart and while his actions reflect that, they're never cast in a Bad Light. Fridge logic at its best, right?

The training scenes really serve to showcase my idea that Charles Xavier is secretly a terrifyingly selfish force. While he builds secret bunkers for children who explode (coughHavokcough) and races Dr. Hank around the grounds repeatedly, Charles gives off the impression that he is training these children to better protect the world when it comes time to save it. But at this point in the movie the CIA base has already been destroyed, the only black character (Darwin! And he had such an awesome power and a level head!) has been killed, and the mutants have been kicked out of the government. Charles brings them all to his childhood home, outfits everyone in hideous tracksuits, and goes about ensuring that these kids are going to be competent killing machines to aid the cause of a group that doesn't want their help.

Yet he is seen as the benevolent and altruistic leader of the newly formed X-Men. I am not going to say that Professor X isn't altruistic and loving and the best and most kindly bald-headed leader for the X-Men he could be. But Charles? Charles is kind of a dick. (sorry, Mom)

In my notes I wrote that Charles is like Dumbledore only more meddlesome, which isn't right. Charles is like Dumbledore in that he thinks 3 steps ahead, but not in every direction, just 3 steps ahead in the direction he is going to force the world into. He's a formidable personality, but not a Good one.

It offers up a nice contrast with Erik, who's not Good but motivated by revenge, something typically depicted as a thing only Evil people will do. It affords the question of which is "better": selfish motivations that help other people peripherally or revenge which is pretty focused on yourself without really hurting anyone else (….except the objects of your revenge...they bite it...hard).

The training scene also presents an interesting scenario: Charles is stronger than Erik is but only insofar as he is able to provide support. He's the squishy in the Raid group, hanging back and using his mind to provide information, control the enemy, and be the leader. As a general, he plays by the tried and true "stay in the car" methodology of battle. Which is fine. You don't want your mages up in the front pulling aggro and dying all over the place. You keep them back and Charles does just that. Ostensibly, the training sequence is about showing Charles pushing all of his mutants to their full potential, but really he's testing them. And what he does to Erik, invading his mind, making him cry, sharing his memories with barely a blink of the eye, it squicked me more than made me appreciate what he was doing.

Charles may be the pin upon which the picture turns, but Erik is the heart and you feel more for his plight than that of the spoiled, manipulative Xavier.

Case in point: while everyone is running about in tracksuits, moving giant satellite dishes, and catching mannequins on fire, Charles is...not training. He is too good for it, apparently.

Sometimes Havok sets the entire ROOM on fire...

For all of his insistence that the kids are normal, he still manages to forget that they are just normal kids. Kids who are finally among people they don't have to be afraid with. His blow-up at their harmless jubilation made me angry. Possibly that's where this anti-Xavier tirade comes from... But come on! I could be onto something here! ;)

Seriously though, can I be a telepath, please? I promise to be less creepy than Charles.

Anyhoo, the rest of the movie, after the training scene, is all about the X-Men flying in on their awesome super-sonic jet and making the entire world angry with them. The fight scenes are well-choreographed and, call me cheesy, I really love watching movies where people spend time training and then kick butt at the end. That's not a cliché for me, it's one of my favorite tropes. So Banshee flying around and using his sonar, Havok blasting things with his chest... all of it was cool and worth watching and felt right.

Plus, suits!

But of course, we couldn't end the movie without the Chekhov's Gun (the Magneto helmet) making an appearance and the break-up between Erik and Charles is almost heart-rending. Erik as the cause of Charles' paralysis? After their chess-playing, night on the town, Russian-invasion friendship? So sad! But it nicely resolved a problem I'd been having, namely the disparate attitudes each of the men was taking toward mutant integration and place in society. 

There's such nice continuity expressed by these chess games.

Erik magnetically manipulating all of the missiles and finally letting them fall into the ocean only to save his friend? Very nice. If it was a bit of a cliché, I was willing to accept it because it had been built up to so well.

Charles, for all of his flaws really does want the mutants to keep living and thriving and learning (he might just want to study them, though. He did write his doctoral thesis on mutations) while Erik wants them to be Special. Both of their ideas have merit. Both of them could be construed as Right.

And so this movie did pretty much exactly what it meant to do: threw up a cloud of fog obscuring the motivations and Rightness of two characters who we have seen as diametrically opposed in the past. What side are you on? It's not as simple as the first 2 movies would have you believe. And set in a time-period where black and white was essentially the norm (Russians are bad, U.S. is good, etc, etc) such a lovely shade of grey was a brilliant contrast.

7.5 on the Richter Scale of my Heart

Three Word Wednesday: Simulator

Grip;  Prefer; Thread

"Would you prefer the flashlight or the headlamp?" the helper-bot asks in its pre-programmed voice. 

He'd prefer to be home, all things considered, but he pushes his glasses back up his nose and holds out his hand. 

"Headlamp, please," he says. There is a whirr of hydraulics as the 'bot lifts its arm and then the headlamp falls into his outstretched hand. "Thanks," he says, pushing himself out from under the busted simulator and adjusting the lamp against his forehead. 

"Why do you talk to that thing?" a voice says from the corner, "you know it's not really talking back." The man who is underneath the simulator is silent, his hands occupied with the long stretch of wiring he is methodically pulling from the machine's insides. 

"You can't ignore me forever, Felix," the voice says. There is a note of anger threading its way through the words but the man beneath the simulator does not answer. 

"Pass me the 3/4 inch clamp, please," he says instead, directing his request to the helper-bot that is still hovering.  

"Felix!" the voice yells, the word barely audible over the noise of the helper-bot rolling across the workshop and returning with the clamp.  

"I'm not listening to you," Felix says, his voice muffled by the bulk of the simulator he is repairing. His hands are tangled in the machine's cabling and he grunts slightly as he pulls on the ones he needs. 

"You're not allowed to ignore me," the voice says, getting closer. "You're the one that came to me, you're  the one who didn't want to come home alone." The voice is quiet, then it sighs. Felix doesn't take his attention from the delicate cable splicing his hands are doing. "If you'd just left everything alone we wouldn't be in this mess." 

Felix tilts his head back, the headlamp's beam reflecting off the bottom of the simulator and shining through the two bare feet standing near the sim's rounded edge. The feet shift slightly as Felix pulls himself from beneath the simulator.  

When he is standing, he pulls the headlamp from his forehead and flips the switch that turns it off. Felix can still see through the figure that is now crossing its arms and glaring at him from beneath delicately arched eyebrows. 

The girl is mostly translucent, the forms of the table and tools behind her vaguely discernible through her body. She is barefoot and bare-armed, wearing a knee-length dress that is swaying slightly in a wind that is not present in Felix's workroom. When he pushes past her to put the headlamp on the table, his arm passes through hers. The only indication  he has that she is not a figment of his imagination is the short crack of electricity he feels when he presses past her shoulder. It makes the hairs on his arms stand on end but Felix doesn't change his expression, setting the headlamp down on the table and collecting a screwdriver. 

"Felix," she says. Her voice sounds as if it is coming from far away and her chin-length hair is blowing in the same wind as her dress.  

"Sanri," he says, crouching down with the screwdriver gripped tightly in his left hand.  

"I want to go home, Felix," Sanri says. She sits on the floor, resting her head against the side of the broken simulator and watches as Felix slowly screws in the simulator's face plate.  

"We all want something we can't have," Felix says around the last two screws he is holding in his mouth.
  

Sanri frowns and stands. Felix thinks he can see grass poking between her bare toes and finds himself wondering where she would be standing if she were not stuck in his workshop. 

"You invaded our home," Sanri says finally. "You convinced me you weren't real. You told me you were lonely, that you needed me to come back with you to prove that you were alive..." She trails off and when Felix looks up at her, her eyes are heavy with the promise of tears. 

Felix puts the screwdriver down next to his knee and leans against the side of the simulator. He holds his hand out and Sanri collapses into a puddle of girl at his side. The static-shock of her presence doesn't make him flinch and he puts his arm around her shaking shoulders. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend she's really there. 

For all he knows she is. 

"I didn't know the simulated worlds were real ones," Felix says finally, fixing a blank-eyed stare against the back wall. It is covered in charts and schematics, traceries of nebulas and rudimentary maps of not-so-imaginary worlds. 

"Of course they are," Sanri sniffles. "Everything is real." 

"But I didn't know that," Felix insists. 

"And now you don't know how to send me back," Sanri says, her voice small and resigned. 

"Yeah," Felix says, closing his eyes to block out her crying. 

They sit in silence, the room buzzing as the simulator warms up. The helper-bot is quiet in its corner, arm outstretched. 

"Can we try one more time?" Sanri asks, her voice a whisper. It is so quiet, Felix can almost pretend she didn't say anything, that her voice was lost in the electric whine of the computer booting up, the simulator's engine humming to life. 

Felix opens his eyes and stares at the far wall. Sanri is an electric presence against his side, the simulator that brought her here is an electric presence at his back. 

"Yes," he says.