Brent Stinebaker
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12-11 A Theft of Fire (I)
🕑 Added 2023-06-06 15:21:40 +0000 UTCWhat makes a good Necro…
Hell. Let’s start makes a mediocre Necro. Easier there, and it’s still hard.
Alright. I need you to do two things at the same time, alright?
First, you gotta be able to just… drown in someone else’s life. Their emotions, their thoughts, their everything. You got to feel as they feel and not lose yourself. Not for a moment.
Then, I need you to give absolutely no fucks whatsoever about their pain, their personhood their habits. I need to you detach immediately and identify all points of symmetry and reusable memory artifacts in those few sequences of memories.
Also, I need you to find all memories of analogous significance, because that’s how phantasmics are made.
You do this for hours. Days. WIth needles feeding you nutrients and water keeping you cool and you never lose focus. You never let yourself drift. You never get lost in their thoughts or your own.
Because if you do any of that, you’re not going to be a Necro for long. The trauma is going to eat you alive. The empathy is going to cut you up from the insane. The horror of what you can do to another person–how you can fuck them up like no one else can? That breaks you too.
You have to do all these things almost perfectly all the time.
Now, there’s you basic prerequisite to being a Necro. How many of you got the aptitude for that? How many? How many can live through the memories of a child being drowned by her drunkard of a father and then emerge from that sequence and say to themselves “Yeah, this will be mem-data pack number eighty-four.”
You can’t feel so much that you’re a full person; you can’t be so cold that you’re an absolute psychopath.
To be a good Necro you have to be… fractured. A piecemeal thing of a person. That’s why so many Necros sequence themselves into collapse and insanity. Too much to take, and they route the hurt into the wrong place.
You wanna hear me spit some honesty? I don’t think people make good Necros.
Only interested monsters do. Like those beasts wearing the flesh of humans in the Incubi. Or whatever the fuck those Low Masters are.
-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens
12-11
A Theft of Fire (I)
“The fire is alive,” Avo said. “It hides in her exocortex. touched me. It knew I was there. It was in pain. It was screaming. It wanted to die.”
The others gathered before he stared on, some blank-faced, others ashen by the implications. Between him and Denton, an unspoken understanding blossomed while the others looked lost. A few of Sunrise’s drones were buzzing through the air, monitoring the situation while Chambers and Essus sat on the chairs leading to the second level.
In the cell behind, Kae rubbed at her temples as she sat in the chair, mind aflame once more.
“Are you sure you saw static in its structure,” Denton said.
He cast a mem-data packet at her. She accepted without any hint of suspicion. The growing furrow between her eyes and the bending of her brows were told how severe the situation was, and the word she used next summarized how she thought of the matter thusly.
“Fuck.”
Cas jolted at his partner’s curse. “Whoa? That bad?”
Denton’s eye twitched. “Worse. I don’t know how, but I think the Ori just made something the probably can’t put back in a box if they let it slip out.”
The other Columner winced. “So… it’s like a thought-eating self-aware fire thing–”
“It’s a corrupted engram,” Denton said. “My best guess, anyway. How they managed to transfer that from pure data and information into partial Nether-bound phantasm, or why it hasn’t eaten through her exocortex as well, I don’t know. I do know that if the broader polities among the EGIs discover what’s going on here, we’re going to be looking at a vote of a mass embargo on the Silvers.”
Draus tilted her head. “They might choke the Ori is what I’m hearin’?” She hid her pleasure at that possibility well, but Avo could still taste the schadenfreude simmering beneath the surface of her mind.
You could excommunicate the Regular from Highflame, but that didn’t mean she was ever going to stop hating the Silvers.
“Alright,” Chambers said, interrupting the conversation. He slapped his ghoul-leather trousers and a loud crack cut through the air as he stood. “I’m ready. Avo. Do me.”
Avo paused. “What?”
“This is part of why I’m here, right?” He held out his arms and closed his eyes like he was a martyr. “My mind is ready for battle. I got the Soft Master Collection–”
A look of primal feature consumed Cas as he took a step forward, fingers twanging strings before Denton halted him. It took several muttered reassurances that the ex-enforcer wasn’t going to “rash-everyone” right then and there before he calmed down.
“--I got Nu-Dog in the Wrong Ass I, II, II, and Nu-Dog: Re-erected all primed. If the virus wants to chew, I’ll give it some special masticating.”
Chambers then promptly began imitating what was supposedly a nu-dog eating its way up something. From the angles he was biting, it didn’t look like a bone.
“Avo, pull this memory out of my mind,” Draus muttered. “I don’t want this shit.”
An atmosphere of disgust thickened, but Avo considered Chambers’ offer from another perspective.
“Vicarities. How many of them have mem-cons?” He shook his head the second he asked the question. Chambers didn’t know–he just downloaded from whatever was available.
Instead, Avo directly accessed the man’s mind using his Auto-Seance and began sweeping through. After he filtered through over two hundred ghosts’ worth of mem-data all for… things a ghoul didn’t care for, the number of infection vectors numbered well past ten thousand.
And they were all attacking each other to keep his mind in place.
Avo wondered: Could these clashes be used against the awakened flame?
This could be tested…
“Chambers,” Avo said. “Going to create a link between you and Kae. Draus. Open glass. Let him inside. I want to watch how he starts burning.”
The Regular eyed him. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
“There is a mind in the fire,” Avo said. “Want to see if it can spread. Divide.” Like a consciousness spreading and expanding like wildfire. If Avo could understand or even modify the structure to such an entity…
He needed it out of the Agnos’ head first. And to do that, he needed to observe it more.
On Chambers’ end, the choice was an easy one to make. Driven by ignorance or an unyielding obsequiousness tempered by the life he lived, he strode toward Kae’s cell with a mask of determination adorning his face and a reel of nightmarish smut ringing his mind like a crown of depravity.
Essus caught sight of something that made him wince and look away. Cas took a step behind Denton as the Glaive shuddered uncharacteristically.
Only Avo and Draus remained steadfast before the man’s approach, and even then, the mind of the Regular stank with disgust.
As the glass fractured and collapsed into a fan of fractals, she caught Chambers before he could walk it. A chitinous wing extended from Draus right shoulder, blocking the man from entry. She buried a single finger into his chest, and Avo found himself remembering his own encounter with Rantula. “If she gets the fuckin’ rash from you–”
“You’ll make me kick my own ass by folding my legs over my ears and back again so that I hit myself with extra momentum before riding me down the stairs?” he finished on her behalf.
Draus fell silent. “Well, I was just plannin’ on geldin’ you with my monowire, but sure, whatever makes you piss yourself.”
Avo turned to Draus. “I think that’s what he enjoys. Not what disgusts him.”
“He’s makin’ me glad we have the rash.”
As Chambers walked in and greeted Kae with a broad smile and rambling words, Avo considered the ex-enforcer again.
Rantula. She was dead now. Dead with all the others he massacred at Mazza’s Junction. By the slightest change of opportunity, by a missed second, or a different choice, Chambers would have been among them.
Instead, he was here, a Syndicate peon made Godclad almost by happenstance alone.
Avo felt a strange thrill at being kingmaker to the unworthy. He thought of the other Frame he took from the Godclad that once mantled the Aegis. Who else could be blessed? Who else could he empower? Bright Wealth? Req? A stray FATELESS with enough cause and hate in their hearts?
For now, the best option remained Kae herself. But that was only if he couldn’t dismantle the thing that dwelled along the burning veins of her thoughts. Such an entity would be useful to study.
And wield. But that required him to understand the full nature of its consciousness first, and if it was capable of choice at all.
Beneath the swaying locus, Kae sat at the table, exhausted and confused as to what was going on with the new arrival. Her attention brushed Chambers briefly before settling on Avo for reassurance. He followed into the room right after but stayed his stride as streams of droning insects formed into a concentrated core.
“I would wish to be a direct party to this as well,” Sunrise said, its voice sounding thoughtful. “It will be to our mutual benefit to examine the structures of such a construct. I think it resembles neuro-uploaded architecture we have seen before, but I cannot say for certain.”
One of the swarm’s drones settled on the shoulder and Avo studied the small creature. Every moment it reminded him of its presence, he found it harder to regard or define the Sunrise. It was a cybernetic bioform capable of thought at least at the level of a baseliner, but its mind was closer to being a simulated network running along coldtech channels.
More considerations followed. “Can you access her exocortex.” He paused. He never asked Kae or Draus where the Agnos obtained the implant from.
The response from Sunrise parted some of the mystery. “I suspect I will only be able to achieve partial success at best. The platform being used is missing several critical components to be regarded as a ‘coldtech’ product. Its nature is anomalous to my operating system.”
“Omnitech,” Avo realized. He turned to Draus. “How long has she–”
“Since before she got burned,” Draus said. “Agnosi have a habit of needing to draw on a hell of a lotta restricted memories. Keepin’ them logged in one mind that can be switched on and off is way some of ‘em avoid needin’ to flash their FATE Skeins constantly at Exorcists or GuildSec.”
That deepened the mystery behind her burning. If Ori-Thaum was deliberately trying to cripple or null her, how could they let such an instrument slip from their considerations?
Or was this another twist in the path that Walton ensured? Another unexplained act on the part of his father.
“It approximates the nature of virtuality and pure-technology mind deck, but the current materials it is using to support such functions are woefully insufficient,” Sunrise surmised.
“Insufficient?” Avo asked.
“There are no chips inside it. No proper hardware. Just a loose collage of plastic, silicon, and alloy arranged in ritual symbology mimicking the layout of absent structures.”
Thinking of the concept sparked a tinge of amusement in Avo. Most Heavens and miracles bent and overwrote the pillars of reality to serve new ends, but it seemed Omnitech was determined to use their subrealities to further reinforce reality itself. Or bypass logistical necessities.
Five entities occupied the cell now. Draus, Avo, and Sunrise gathered before shards congealing to reform over the doorway while Chambers leaned on the table and was telling Kae about how everything would be alright in a moment, and how the “half-strand in her head might be ready for the Nu-dog series, but the Soft Master Collection was on another level.”
Kae, for her part, was nodding along blankly, a pleasant expression on her face between winces of pain as the fire grew into narrower sequences sequestered in her subconsciousness. Doubtless she was just humoring the man.
Good too. Divorced from human emotion though Avo was, imagining Kae subjected to the knowledge of Chambers’ various viciarities was too strange for the beast to consider torture, and too unpleasant for Avo’s rational mind to consider it not to be.
“You sure about this?” Draus asked, her eyes locked on Chambers while her fingers twitched. She fought her instinctive urge to shoot the man as he leaned over Kae, talking animatedly about how he once caused a lobby to crash when he traded mem-data with it.
The Agnos’ nods slowed, and from her came more furtive glances, eyes wide with worry as she tried to signal Avo for help.
“She’ll be fine,” Avo said. “More interested in how his mind collapses.”
“You sure he’s gonna collapse? Because the way you talk about him, he’s nothin’ but mem-cons and traumas fightin’ each other.”
“Yes,” Avo said. “He is. Don’t think it will matter. The fire. It infested my ghosts. Wards barely stopped it. Dug into that too. Had to shed everything I used to map her mind for the first dive.”
Draus let out a breath. “So, what? It’s like a super mem-con?”
“It is more than a plague,” Avo said. “Metaphor not enough. It’s like…” An eighteen-year-old memory passed through him. “Like deconstructors. Nanomechanical fog.”
“How the hells did the Silvers learn to develop somethin’ like that,” Draus said. “And if they got that, why ain’t we all burnin’?”
“Don’t think most of them know it exists,” Avo said. “Incubi memories don’t have any recollection of it. I couldn’t find anything on Ori-Thaum owning nanosuites like this either.”
“Because they don’t,” Sunrise said. Draus leaned past Avo and locked perceptions with the swarm for an awkward instant before leaning back. “Voidwatch has not exchanged weaponized nanos with any of the terrestrial powers. All developments must be made on their own.”
“Or mimicked by another,” Avo said. His thoughts trailed back to Omnitech and the exocortex jutting from Kae’s skull. If they could make that absent proper material, would it take much for them to replicate something like the deconstructors?
“It is a possibility,” Sunrise said. A shrill note followed. “Aegis will not be pleased.”
“Aegis. That a voider thing?”
“Aegis is a cross-fleet security apparatus established to engineer conditions of continued safety and survival in a post-collapse galaxy.” The swarm hummed the words melodically and without pause. Like it ran deeper than memory.
Draus let out a breath. “Well, how’s that goin’ for them?”
Through the thick curtain of static, Avo thought he tasted a sliver of annoyance from Sunrise. “We live next to you.”
The Regular threw her head back and barked a laugh. Kae shivered in her seat at the sudden noise while Chambers threw himself behind her, using her as cover. Avo also sniffed the air. A trickle of fear-piss had also darted out from the man onto the inner folds of his “borrowed” pants.
“Alright,” Avo said. “Chambers. Get up. Get ready. Kae too.”
She nodded as she clenched the edges of the table. Chambers, meanwhile, crawled back to his feet, brushing the messy flap of the dirty blonde mop he called hair before miming two guns at Avo using his fingers.
The ghoul responded by invoking his Sanguinity’s Reign. A filament manifested between Chambers and Kae, allowing thoughtstuff to tread across a hair-thin bridge.
Motes of blood held the Nether-conducting construct aloft as Chambers and Kae both blinked. The enforcer’s face twitched as a growing uncertainty expanded out from him. “So… how… uh… how are the Tiers like? Heard you use to live up there.”
Kae frowned. “It’s… hard to remember.”
“Right. Fuck.” He sighed. “Bad question, Chambers.” He was about to open his mouth and ask something else before his eyes widened and a trickle of static surged through the link.
“There,” Avo said, pointing to the transference. “Not solid. Jumped like mem-data.”
Draus meanwhile was narrowing her eyes, confusion emanating from her mind as she tried to parse the chaos of the mem-data through her cog-feed. He cast a memory into her overlay for emphasis and she grunted her thanks.
Sunrise, meanwhile, dispatched a few drones to circle high above the Agnos.
“Don’t get too close,” Draus muttered. ‘She might forget I mentioned you earlier and crush one of you.”
Commanders to transmit to the drones along static lattices. They planted themselves on the ceiling from which the locus distended and observed the proceedings from there.
The flames came as whispered embers at first, trickling like scintillating flares cast into a pond. The initial flames sparked upon caressing the threshold of Chambers’ thoughts, but his mind did not come ablaze like Kae.
Instead, as veins of conflagration crawled forward, sundering surface thoughts like the spreading of soil during an earthquake, it struck the first bulwark of inner memories and suddenly its vectors turned in on itself.
Light speared into light as something digging through Chambers’ mind recoiled. Avo severed the link binding him to Kae, curious to see if he would still burn.
To the ghoul’s delight, the flames continued to crackle. What’s more, it retreated, burrowing its way back to the surface of the man’s thoughts as it sought the bridge of blood that served as the vehicle of its crossing.
Kae’s expression contorted into one of horror as the ex-enforcer’s accretion resembled the face of an eclipse, the contours of his cognition incandescent while the inner walls began to fall one after another.
The heroic expression Chambers’ wore twitched. “Avo, uh… consang. I ain’t gonna lie… It’s starting to burn when I think. I… It’s getting really hard to keep track of…. Of…” He strained himself, trying to clutch his thoughts tight. “It’s like my thoughts are there and then just… gone.” Whatever bravado he armored himself with melted away. His lips drew back in a taut grimace. “Fuck… Thinking burns. Shit. It’s like pissing out Scaarthian liquor. But in my head.”
Avo approached his new test subject and studied him in silence. He was enraptured by how methodically the fire now spread. It was teasing its way forward now, learning which sequences it had to burn through instead of rushing forward and crashing into itself.
The equilibrium of downloaded traumas and viruses had calcified into a phantasmal endoskeleton within Chambers, that momentarily befuddled the entity. But then it changed its approach. Stopped trying to eat away at everything and worked to boil away specific structures instead.
Soon, it would upset the balance of Chambers’ internal ecosystem enough that the man’s mind might collapse all on its own.
“Can do more than just think,” Avo said. “It can plan.”
“Not well,” Sunrise surmised. “It’s a primal intellect. It adapted out of necessity. It didn’t move with foresight. THe conditions of its education had to be forced on it.”
That was also true.
Chambers was cupping his temples down. Inch by inch, his memories rose as columns of flame. The effect was nowhere near as fast as what tore through Kae, but the progress was still staggering.
Avo wondered how Walton would have faced such a construct. By the feats it displayed now, he guessed his father would probably rather avoid something this potent altogether.
“Avo–Draus,” Chambers whimpered. He slid down the glass and his nails clawed bloodied furrows into his scalp. “Oh, Jaus. Fuck. It’s bad… I’m sorry about… Sorry Agnos lady. I thought I’d be…” A sob choked out from his throat. “...Tougher.”
Kae’s expression contorted into one of sorrow and disbelief. “A-avo! Why… stop watching! Help him…”
Avo ignored her. The fires hadn’t won yet. He still needed details on how fast they would–
A dozen sequences in the middle of Chambers’ Meta shattered into shrapnel, and from them the rest of his mind followed. Destruction cascaded as unchecked trauma exploded inside the man’s mind and shredded through his ego. Thoughtstuff erupted out in a pressurized spray as Chambers’ jaw went slack.
His perception dissolved. Drool spilled out from his lips.
His legs gave out under him and he toppled.
Walking over to get a better look at the damage, Avo’s focus was captured in full by entity flooding and consuming at that remained. A blank expression of mind-dead placidity finally took the man. He stopped struggling. He stopped thinking. He stopped being.
And a moment later, so did the fire, the last embers glittering as its frenzied assault simmered away into faint crackles giving a lingering emotion.
Relief.
Avo spread his fangs wide.
The thing felt. He tasted it. He knew the emotion.
It could feel.
It could be broken.
There was a way.
Letting out a low chuff of satisfaction. Avo beheaded Chambers with a thought, killing the man.
Grasping the head using his Sanguinity-boosted haemokinesis, he drew the meat up to him as he watched the last of embers die. He brought Chambers’ face close to him and spoke into its ear. “Die then. Run from me. Will claim you soon. You’re human too. I felt it. Broken maybe. But still human. Prey.”
And as an expression of symbolic mockery–and because his appetite took him–he bit off Chambers ear and savored the taste.
Turning his gaze down, he saw Kae looking up at him, her face wide-eyed and aghast.
He patted her atop her skull using one of his Echoheads. His memories told him humans used this method to comfort their young. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back. Do it a few more times. I see the solution. You can be freed.”
For some strange reason, that didn’t disperse the dread conveyed behind her eyes.
