Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective 7
🕑 Added 2022-10-24 14:00:00 +0000 UTCRefer to the announcement posted last night, please. Fans of Psychoprotective should be happy, at least.
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The names of all of the stations were pretty ominous, but ‘The School of Missed Chances’ was… less so. There were plenty of things that Tanya regretted over their lives, and this sounded like it would collect them.
When Tanya left the train station, they emerged into a place that looked primarily like the War College. As they saw such a building from the overhead view of this section of her mind, it was likely that they were in that very place. Visha followed her, silent as Tanya contemplated her surroundings.
The caricatures here were depictions of various members of the 203rd. Not the flight commanders, but the more ordinary mages among the cream of the crop, no doubt luminaries of their respective basic training blocks, but unable to secure notoriety when among the best of the best like Weiss, Neumann, Koenig, Grantz, and Visha.
Tanya knew well the feeling of being good but not great, succeeding only by dint of hard work and yet unable to achieve the highest echelons. While it was right and proper for an HR manager and direct military superior to learn the names of their subordinates, Tanya always made sure to remember both their given and family names, in solidarity of their unfortunate situation.
Tanya wandered the halls of the school, noting that each ‘classroom’, each reached from a portal in the hallways to a sub-dimension that usually held very little resemblance to a classroom, seemed to mostly torture the students rather than actually teach them. Well, Tanya knew that their methods were harsh, but it only took seconds of observation to note where educational value was deliberately sabotaged in order to inflict more pain.
Tanya would like to say she was surprised at seeing this… but she wasn’t. Tanya never really understood why their training methods seemed to give her battalion such a positive opinion of her. Sure, she pointed them where they could kill to their heart’s desire… but then why did they…
It wasn’t important. They’re not around to ask. Eventually, Tanya found something curious. Instead of some kind of portal, it was an ordinary classroom. It was one that Tanya knew well, but the real curiosity was the metal dog that was bounding around the room, excited to see people.
Upon closer inspection, the ‘dog’, despite acting like one, was actually a safe. It had legs, it bounded around, and the sound of it panting in joy was very dog-like. But the face was replaced with a door that held a combination lock. Recalling Agent Nein’s brief overview of mental entities, Tanya realized this must be a memory vault.
Tanya whistled for the dog-vault, and it immediately halted and ran up to her, presenting its contents: a tablet, with a slideshow program already open. Distressingly modern depiction aside, Tanya picked up the tablet and set the program to play the slideshow.
The title slide said ‘It was/n’t my fault!’, an ominous beginning. The first slide depicted Tanya in class, with the blackboard saying ‘Military Law’ rather than having anything specific about the curriculum. The second slide showed Tanya presenting her paper on how to prove that the enemy left you no choice but to shell a city. The professor looked intensely interested. The third slide showed the exact same presentation being given to the General Staff. The forth slide showed panicked General Staff considering a map labeled ‘Arenne’. General Zettour was the only one calm, presenting a file labeled ‘Tanya’s plan’. Already knowing where this was going, Tanya pressed on. The fifth slide showed Tanya engaging the Francois partisans, a burning city around her.
…There was a smile on her face. A large cracking sound echoed from outside, and the now-open window showed the sky in even worse shape than before. The cracks had doubled, and the golden light had tripled in intensity, creating a beacon shining into the sky visible even from here. The laughter of a madwoman drifted in on the wind.
“...Major?” Visha asked.
Tanya jumped in surprise, launching a PSI blast to the surprise stimulus. Visha used a barrier of her own to block the blast.
“I’m sorry for startling you, Major.” Visha said. She took the tablet from Tanya’s hands, placing it back into the vault and closing it. “Come on, let’s move on. You’ve seen enough here, I think.” Tanya nodded silently, and allowed Visha to pick her up and carry her to the train station.
By the time the station had opened up to the next area, Tanya had regained their equilibrium, and the sky looked less broken. It still had many glowing cracks, an unsettling metaphor if there ever was one, but it had recovered mostly from the damage it had sustained. “Visha? What do those cracks mean?” Tanya asked.
Visha hummed. “...It means exactly what you think it means, Major.” Ah. Of course. The type 95. “Come on, the Generals are waiting. They’re expecting you.” Of course they are.
The office was a little off when compared to the real Military headquarters, mostly by possessing a splash of anachronistic modernity here and there. A set of desks that used to be an open plan now had cubicles, the carpet in one hallway was a gray polyester, and the water cooler was plastic instead of the glass one that Ugar was so excited about when it was installed. “I’ll make you some coffee while you’re meeting with the Generals, Major.” Visha said when they finally approached the office, ducking away to another room.
“Thank you, Visha.” Tanya said. After a beat, Tanya took a deep breath and shoved the doors to the office open, striding into the room like she owned the place. After all, she did.
“If we order a flanking maneuver here-”
“That’s too obvious!”
“They’ll never see it coming if we attack from this direction. Deus Vult!”
“No one ever expects the full frontal assault… except EVERYONE!”
“We should encircle them first!”
“With what bait to lure them in?”
“Tanya.” “Tanya.” “Tanya.” “Tanya.” “Tanya.”
The General staff was rendered as five hand-puppets, crowding around a tactical board as they bickered and hit each other with sticks.
The puppets were of Zettour, Rudersdorf, Lergen, Grand Head Zanotto, and Agent Nein. The board they were debating tactics on seemed to be depicting the bloody battlefield Tanya had passed through on the way here.
“Tanya.” Said the Agent Nein puppet. “It’s a good thing you’re here.”
“The battlefield is a bloody stalemate.” The Rudersdorf puppet continued.
“As usual.” Snarked the Lergen puppet.
“But with your help, change can be made!” Announced the Zettour puppet.
“It will be dangerous.” The Grand Head’s puppet commented.
“Blood and Glory are your only rewards.” The Rudersdorf puppet said solemnly.
“No pay.” Added the Agent Nein puppet.
“You know, the things you love.” Finished the Lergen puppet.
Tanya frowned. “I hate war.” She insisted.
“Nonsense. You’re the Devil of the Rhine.” Retorted the Lergen puppet.
“You’ve done it more than anything else.” Pointed out the Zettour puppet.
“For very little pay.” The Agent Nein puppet reiterated.
“With a smile on your face and a prayer in your heart.” Added the Grand Head puppet.
“Now be a good little monster…” Sang the Rudersdorf puppet.
“AND GO KILL!” Shouted all five at once, with voices like artillery and eyes glowing with death.
The force of the declaration flung Tanya back out of the room, through the office, and back into the train. The lever immediately turned itself back to the start of the rail line, and it started to go, the sound of the train starting interrupted only by the sound of shattering glass.
“No…” Tanya whispered. “No, no… nonono.” She gripped the lever, trying to pull it back away from the bloody battlefield. The laughter of a madwoman echoed through the tunnel. Organ music started to play, with a choir accompaniment. “I’m not a monster.” Tanya whispered to herself. “It was the rational path.” She insisted. “I want to go back, I want to see Japan again.”
Tanya continued to frantically pull at the lever, glancing at the train’s lights indicating which station was next. “Already halfway there…” She said with horror, redoubling efforts to pull the lever. “I want to see my first life! I want to see…” Blank. “I want to hear…” Another blank. “I want to see my parents again!” She’s forgotten their faces. “I want to see my friends!” What friends? Did she have any?
The woman’s laughter redoubled, as it became accompanied by the sounds of explosions and screams. The choir sang battle hymns as the organ music intensified. “I want to see my face!” Tanya shouted at the top of her lungs as she focused her entire being, mind, body, and soul, to pull that fucking lever.
The lever gave way. It went all the way to the other extreme, breaking off with the force of Tanya’s will. The Train stopped immediately, sending Tanya flying with the broken lever in a death grip, landing head first at the back of the train. “Ow…” Tanya whined.
The train, unlike when going the other direction, continually sped up, never slowing down as the lights in the tunnel passed by faster and faster. The force of the acceleration kept Tanya on the back of the train car, as flames started to manifest around the train. The metal slowly turned red hot, then steadily shifted up the thermal scale as the speed increased ever more.
Then, suddenly, with a cheery ding, the train stopped. Tanya’s body was flung forward, blowing through the front of the train and into the realm ahead… at the End of the Line.
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Pain. One of the pettier details of Being X’s reincarnation shtick is that he made sure that the transition was exactly as painful as one would imagine getting run over by a train would be. Forget the fact that she should have been dead so fast that she shouldn’t have felt a thing, enjoy the sensation of every single pain receptor screaming at the soup that their surroundings had become, let the pain echo through a shattered nervous system, just unload it upon whatever spiritual existence that allowed Tanya to inhabit an infant’s wetware without melting it with her adult thoughts.
In hindsight, such an experience was probably a big reason why they were able to fight that first battle over Norden despite serious injury. It didn’t hold a candle to dying.
Of course, by now pain and Tanya are old coworkers. Pain was something that they understood better than any one of their subordinates, and giving it more work to do among others was their primary job task, both in training and on the field.
Even without that, the echo of that first death… it wasn’t so bad, when compared with the second. It was because of that that Tanya was able to stand, trembling, shortly after recollecting the memory of that impact.
The End of the Line was another train station. The train had restored itself from the damage inflicted by Tanya flying out of it. The cracks in the sky were repeated here, but unlike them, there was no golden light within these, but instead a cloying darkness. It reminded Tanya of the echo of her first life, back in the bed of her first memories.
There was some resistance to separating from the wall, but after literally peeling themselves from the inexplicable brick wall, the splatter of blood and viscera faded and the pain that Tanya felt went with it… mostly. Her intuition noted that the wall wasn’t hiding anything behind it, it was just a wall.
The train stations before each had some of those caricatures, each positioned in exactly the same way. This one… didn’t. Well, it had one.
Tanya’s murderer, faceless and unkempt, stood with his arms outstretched, pushing an absent Salaryman into the front of the train. What was his name? It’s not important. “Being X stole your thunder, I suppose.” Tanya said, taking a moment to consider doing something petty. It’s not worth bothering with.
Tanya took the steps upwards from the station. The sky was black nothingness. The ground was absent, the station just a single platform among a void. Mental Cobwebs suspended it in the air, trailing off into the darkness anchored on nothing. Figments occasionally flickered into existence, depicting all kinds of old things. Mascots, computers, fistfuls of dice… Japanese food. Each one layered itself onto one of the cobwebs, reinforcing them as they were forgotten.
Footsteps. Tanya turned around, and saw a sad little memory vault walk around the entrance to the train station, going straight to Tanya and looking up with sad little eyes. It opened up, and a tablet with a cracked screen, a collection of memory sticks beside it.
Tanya picked up the tablet and inserted one of the memory sticks at random. The slideshow began, titled ‘Damn you, Being X!’. The slideshow was as expected for Tanya’s first death. Unsettlingly, the Salaryman was headless, as was his murderer, the display’s pixels dying as they tried to render it before fixing themselves as the slide progressed.
Tanya took out the memory stick and inserted another one. This slideshow was titled ‘I Cannot Win.’ It showed… her childhood. Her first one. The parents were simply not shown above the shoulders, their faces out of frame. It showed academic rankings, with the name obscured but highlighted in the blatancy of the concealment, it showed a ranking pedestal on at least three sports. It showed a list of rankings for an academic competition. Each time, the Salaryman placed second or third.
“...Looking at it like this…” Tanya said to herself. “That’s not bad. Achieving high marks both physically and academically… on national stages even…” Then the last two slides showed themselves. The first showed university major selections. Even without the face visible, the Salaryman was the very picture of fear and exhaustion. The final slide showed the Salaryman leaving Todai with an economics degree, walking straight into a building labeled ‘Modest, Safe Career’. The trash can in the foreground held other documents, labeled ‘Engineering’, ‘Law’, ‘Medicine’, and ‘Sports’. Hrm.
There were two more sticks. One was in excellent condition, shining like new. The other… was not. It was in the poorest condition, the connector slightly tilting as repeated insertion accumulated damage from clumsy handling. Selecting the pristine one, Tanya inserted it into the tablet. This one held a familiar sequence. It wasn’t a real set of memories, but instead ‘Lies and Torture’, a sequence of fantasies that Being X taunted Tanya with at one point during their second life. It showed the Salaryman’s face this time, smiling as accolades were sprinkled upon them, as the Salaryman found someone to grow old with. In hindsight, the fact that Visha was the wife and Tanya’s own physical form was the daughter proved that it was just more lies from Being X.
The face, though… did she wear glasses? Figments spun into existence before settling into the cobwebs as Tanya tried to remember wearing glasses. After a moment of recollection, she mimed adjusting glasses to settle better on her face, and eventually experienced a jolt of familiarity after a few tries. She did wear glasses! She mimed adjusting her glasses again. Yes, this was definitely how she did it back then.
But the fact that it took that long to remember even that much… The face was that of a stranger. A handsome stranger, to be sure… was that even what she looked like? Tanya wouldn’t put it past Being X to inflate her ideas of how attractive she was. She would have liked to look as imposing and dignified as the salaryman in the fantasy did. He must have had all sorts of women flirt with him… which Tanya remembers zero of. But was that because they were never that handsome, or because they just don’t remember it?
Taking the memory stick out, Tanya inserted the last one. The slideshow program on the tablet glitched, error messages piling on before the tablet visibly rebooted. After waiting for the reboot, the slideshow’s title card was displayed: ‘This is it’.
The resulting scenes were disjointed and incomplete. Tanya remembered each one vaguely, but they had no rhyme or reason to be grouped together. There was a slide of wargaming, with a familiar-looking man the only one with a visible face of the five or so people in the slide. There was a slide of one of Tanya’s college professors, the one that had explained the Chicago school of economics to the class. There was an image of an after-work drinking outing, with one or two visible faces that also felt like she recognized them. There was a picture of Tanya’s old office, a man in full dogeza begging to keep his job. Firing someone in corporate Japan was a big step, due to both laws and custom, so Tanya didn’t feel any pity despite not really remembering why she had fired him. Tanya only ever fired people after exhausting every alternative… except for one time where they brought shame onto an executive, but she was just the messenger that time. She wasn’t the one who fired him. The pictures weren’t even in chronological order, and when Tanya went backwards to compare some of the images, the order had changed.
After a few minutes of reviewing the odd scenes, Tanya realized why it was called what it was. “This is it.” She said out loud. “This is all that’s left.” The reason why Tanya couldn’t find locations associated with their first life… was because they were gone. The scraps scattered around the other two mental realms were the last vestiges of memory, with this vault containing the very last strings of memory remaining, hidden in this memory of death.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Sarcastic applause from behind Tanya startled her, Tanya throwing the tablet aside as they took a combat stance, mage blades forming around her hands. The memory vault ran after the tablet, catching it in mid-air.
Tanya’s killer was there, smug as they stepped up from the underground train station. As Tanya examined him, he melted away to reveal a different appearance underneath the facade. “She finally understands!” Shouted Tanya’s voice out of the being. It resembled Tanya’s own appearance, but it was a metal facsimile. It seemed to be some kind of furnace robot, the torso and mouth being a grate rather than a solid panel. The interior was filthy, covered in but otherwise completely empty. The design brought special attention to the approximate location of the heart, showcasing the empty space. “You say that you’re not a monster.” The robot taunted.
“I’m not!” Tanya snapped.
“I say that question is a matter of perspective.” The machine continued, ignoring Tanya’s response. “Specifically, who are you to say what you are and are not?”
Tanya’s frowned at the question. What kind of freshman-level philosophic nonsense was that? “I’m me!” She said. “My name is…” Tanya trailed off. That wasn’t right… No, that also wasn’t right… What was her name? It was definitely not Tanya, that was just used as a convenience because she couldn’t very well go by… what?
“You are no one.” The doll accused. “You have never, not once in any life, been anyone that could be called ‘yourself’.”
“Bullshit!” Tanya shouted.
“Recall the basics of Signal Theory.” The machine said, now using the voice of that college lecturer. “It does not matter who you are, only what others see you to be.” And!? That doesn’t mean those opinions do not exist! “Of course it does.” The machine said, addressing Tamya’s internal monologue just like Being X did. Using that bastard’s voice, the machine continued. “You have never accomplished a single second of true self-reflection, coveting the sense of purpose that continuously escaped you no matter how hard you toiled to create one in yourself.”
Tanya tried to retort, but could not summon her voice. The machine laughed as it walked closer to Tanya. Tanya stepped backwards, slowing but not stopping the distance between them shrinking.
“Even the shattered Agent Cruller has a greater sense of who he is than you. He feels, even if he does not remember the pain that agonizes him.” The machine said in the aging man’s voice. “You’ve based everything you are on a ghost, someone who does not exist, and even in life, that man was just a shell, everything resembling hopes or ideals having left him long before the train destroyed even that sad remnant.” She shook her head, tutting at the tragedy. “Even in this life, you cling to that void just as strongly as you try to throw away Tanya von Degurechaff.” Why wouldn’t Tanya want to leave that behind? It was terrible! “What makes one past so much greater than the other?” It was the first! “Was it because you liked it? You liked being an empty husk that could only summon an echo of motivation when it came to seeking something as base as money?” Money isn’t base!
The machine had finally entered arm’s reach. Tanya tried to step back, but she was already at the edge. She willed herself to attack, to break this doll who spewed only lies, but remained fixed in place. “Don’t worry.” The machine said in Miss Milla’s voice. “I’ll take care of you.” She continued. “You’ll be much happier if you look at the world with a smile.” She quoted once more, with the grill on her mouth warping into a macabre smile. “Just open your mind and you’ll see.”
The machine gripped Tanya’s throat, and opened up the furnace that was her torso. While she did so, Tanya could not move a single muscle. “I’m sure your inside is just as beautiful as your outside.” Miss Milla’s voice quoted one last time before rents opened up in the metal, glowing fire–red as tendrils made of a flowing purple substance shot out and grabbed Tanya, dragging her into the too-small space within the machine’s body.
“I am You, the Heartless Machine.” Was the last thing Tanya heard before everything melted into incomprehensible chaos.
