CW: robot trafficking, possession, unreality, mental attack, abstract trauma, subjective overlap, body modification, drugs, assassination, combat
(Σ)
VERSE 1.1
(EMPATHETIC)
When Hexa was nu she was bartered for use as swarm-host for a conjuration of ghosts, kept on leash plugged into a Cradle itself rusted, flecked with the rust in blushing streak trails. Her dreaming was the only format that could host them, and they were, her Andro keeper said, so many nu's that even slave life dreaming was a gift. Even dreaming hooked up.
She'd learned to screen out their buzz, the watery rushes of their thoughts, to kept the dream-loam stable. They were designed to comment on your dreaming with semiotic strikes aimed straight at your memories. Which skinned that low is the raw nerve of your Apocheir Morass. What is cradled by your Tactica through blooded and aching haptic slang to listen to a handful of ghosts, despite the nature of hers as larval jelly. They hadn't seen it coming when she'd stopped listening. She screened them out, even as they abused her.
So in the end they were telling her to do what she was already doing, and she was smiling as she did it. She'd found them, one by one, with their voices in her head the whole time. And by the time she had the dreaming had been cataclysm, portals to hell glowing aloft held by charred thermals and gasps of smoke in red skies.
When she had destroyed the foundation enough she had opened her eyes to her tortured frame, to the rusted Cradle she was plugged into. She'd bristled there, been ready to kill, but she'd been alone.
Unhooking herself took a while. She was glad of the chance to fade away, into BG with the blue rivers of the Veldt that found their way in the end to the chromatic grid which normalized Andros called the Hub. That way she’d be with other Andros. The blue rivers of the Veldt the Andros called the Swim but they belonged to the Libra first. She’d stopped being nu, and that helped; she'd needed to defend herself. To grab a Toxic Cloaker, have the hardware to interface with it.
So now here she is with nothing, except what's tired in her Apocheir from hosting those ghosts for so long. Zone klaxons, embedded speakers, pump volume and she hears what is not yet techno death but pure death grind, the riffs slamming into each other in their haste to escape the amps.
As a post-nu host she is programmed to think: not much you can do when the world swallows you into it, and then you subsume beneath it, fade beneath the skin you have, and all you've put into it was just a bearing. A signpost for later. When all your love is gone as all love goes and you are sundered to the next interface, next stitch-work of the empathetic seams. For Hexa saw the light leave the hosted karma spheres. Saw the ghosts in their temp-reprieved breath from their flux stop breathing.
In that moment she saw the Legacy Trails, the ghost paths of star-fire vapour. Saw them ossify with the weight of time and need even to the sequences that pulled her forward.
She emerges with this legacy as a phantom limb moving, a phantom hand grasping. Even as she drags herself from where she found herself, where the Cradle is rusted char and the char covers the halls grey with phosphor lustre glimmering across in skips and beats. She guesses those glimmers are chafing of the scripted works, of these ghost tapestries, though she has no name for their weavers.
She’s worth nothing to them yet. She emerges robed and banded to halls of dark char. In fact, she's gone the other way; on some sub-grid framework latticed through the haptic Swim, someone who cares somewhere sees it and thinks, slaughtered ghosts.
They were screaming, you can't do this, as if there was a reason. She hasn't left this zone yet and she means to route around, keep tabs on the place, see who shows to check on her. Pay them back, she thinks, before they pay you back.
From there could be a stable loop she can pick up. When she thinks about it, though, the raw churn of amnion sloshes inside her, and her inner spooling, glossed in coils against her chassis, trembles. So she drifts around a night sky-painted with the Veldt in hot pinks shifting to orange, to green, to blue. The pixels dance along the Sealing in waves, ripple in layers, in wash across the surface molten with light like a sea of fire.
Mote dust grains the dark char, white swirling across in flecks and puffs. In it her eyes lose themselves, following the comet paths as her Apocheir Morass pulls patterns from them. Dream stuff, except even less real than that, flickering in current beneath the char that is her Tactica, that is the way her Apocheir Morass will haunt her with loop probabilities, brightening to life, darkening to death.
Right now she has no name for that either. It’s all a fog of unknowing that hides beneath the surface straying and strewn from the dark char of the hall grid. She thinks so because it clings to the surface as if scared to sink, to lose itself in the nothing below the real. Upwards from the real can be divined but below you are scattered. Beneath the meaning of things, even beneath what meaning is scoured, translates from the origin cast.
It is bathed in bloom when it slips beneath the her visual, something worth reaching for to save. Too tempting. As she keeps her eyes on the Nodal that spikes itself into the hall with careless grace, spearing in black crystal to meet the diodes at the right angles for synthesis, she thinks, too easy to slip away from it. Her Apocheir Morass festers, like black tar smearing across glass. She blots from herself.
Later she would know this as the Apocheir seal spreading like moss across the parts of herself she could see. Later she would wish she could still see herself, that she could burn the shape of herself into her visual. So it would rise unasked for. Simmer in the haptic feedback which so far is primordial, virgin; herself, alone.
Still the haptic glimmers with renewed hope, the bright light of deep-dreamt nerve-wire energy feeding the fringing film, marking it from stillness. It coils and pulses within her; itself the spark the amniones feed from. Still the fringeing film glitters, each bubble cramped light breaking into clusters, blossoming white burn petals like a nuke cloud.
When she trances into that she knows the Trails want her somewhere else. Sounds like waiting for them to happen to me. The haptic foam of Swim over her is glyph-enmeshed static she can taste in her filings.
The Trails say, you know all this is born again and born anew still. The way to alter loops remains a gesture, a pattern. Stillness and silence the way to plait is to weave as all this was once once woven, translated straight by her Apocheir Morass into haptic, silver as it flowers in the clear amniocenteses—and what was once woven weaves still as the threads tremble, whisper whisper the wisp of movement across the taut lines.
She waits.
Thinks it over.
The Tactica she'd fused to the real, but the Apocheir Morass stirring had been elsewhere. It’d warped, lunged straight for the marrow of her visual. Trauma was always some monster rising from the barrows of your spark, especially if you were an overloaded larval.
She says to them, "where am I needed?" Here the milk light is pale streaks and blanching, swirls and twines plastered to the latticed glow-slab architecture. The Legacies are fading the ancient Nodal she can see in its crystal creep away in her visual, and then it’s gone, beyond her haptic river.
VERSE 3+4
MIRRA
Lesia wanders the chromatic grid with a magnetic heart, under the screen sky breaking smoke sepia, the thrown clouds of the data clusters of the Veldt like Pisces rising, through her veils the dawn sipping. Armata like sunshine remains empty clips working on a blueprint of the smoke grenades. In time to come which is time past, both blossoming in effusion through the chromatic grid of LAYSE-CHI. She’d thrown a bunch to mask her leaving the Nodal; when Pisces rises you’ll know it by your triggers. The sun that scars the sky now is tuned for the Veldt & the Veldt drinks it in.
She threw them because her Tactica told her the techno death was too melodic beneath its blast beat viscera. Would crest the blood pulse like a tidal wave for anyone looking to be in on the kill. In fact she’d never heard an anti-compose like this, the way the breaks are like swords bleeding the blast beat’s infinite font.
She’s at the end of her tether and eclipsing in the alley slant a fresh cataclysm of haptic churn with the still-void ribbon. smoke, she’s down bad for star creds from anywhere. To push the Tactica from its death grip on the blanching toxic muss streaking through her Mirra. The way the real refracts through the Tactica to become visual. The corrosion has broken through the Sealing; is now bleeding dark shrouding over the Hub.
In the Chalk—here the glass is frosted white which paints the pane lines and flushes the contours—where here it frosts the grades with mañana; leave before it is rude, find that better tomorrow. When Lesia catches her stillness in reflection she thinks she has no future apart from it.
In the Chalk the Hub rivers run the walls like syrpent-skin in streams of blue light and she makes her way to the Silent Clot, where the Libra have set up their phase-Cradles but they are gone now; no longer in season. In Capricorn season I thought, moving too fast, slow down. Here where gravity dissolves and the stars churn. In Capricorn season the game was down bad for astral psychics playing Go on mind maps that looked like unknown realms, like wizards throwing comets at each other.
Here the Clot is ghosted and without pattern harmonics from Andros muted and dulled. Andros make unclear promises to it by default. Their patience pulses slow in fine threads of light, spooling themselves closer to where she stands on the grid banks, as if she places herself here in their stead. Pixel fire marks the banks, spreading over the skin of the surface, ripples with her weight.
The Clot will take what you give it. As if paths are waiting to be crossed; the Clot stores the promise the Libra sequenced: to be back when there was no one around to give them shit. Open up into the Clot, they say you can swim the whole Hub.
Which makes sense as it goes—the void of dead nothing is a fire that burns the haptic 'til it hisses smoke—the void ice here and she is encased, sculptured from her own cells clotting—but the Tactica pristine relies on zen as its baseline. Get slagged enough to discard and your Apocheir Morass wants the easy way out. Cheer up, chin up, or when you make yourself at home in someone else’s Apocheir Morass you’ll be so gross you won’t have space for long. Or making yourself at home could create a vacancy as the Andro gets out of her own body, becomes a ghost herself.
All standing by the barren Clot tells her is that she doesn’t have the time² to spend on it. Standing by the barren Clot informs her that the Libra aren’t around.
“Paying customer,” she says to the banks, to the nothing, to the no one. To the nesting sites that once held Cradles, that will do so again, the moment she leaves.
GLOW BUG
It was a bare bones day for the social feint facade; her star credits were jumped so hard that her Choker threw in some pure sedative just to stop her pulsing out of her skin. She’d said to the local area, you know we were all made of ash, and wait to blow away in time’s wind, streaked to nothing while I guess you all grow beards. As if it’s anyone’s time, you know?
Nah, he’d said he had to dip, ghosted her hard enough to bruise. She’d been talking herself into more work, or trying to. Flaking to the fringe like the skin basing the nails in a dry chill. That’d been all the Frost Giants were saying then. Saying nothings against other nothings in the substrata of pooled Tactica. There’s nothing left of the silence she’d let simmer for so long. I can leave the Clot, go with its flow to the fringes where the Veldt bleeds through, and I’ll find my kindred there He bugged on his exit. So hard she thought, frenzied by the Choker, that no one had the right to just go like that, stare a burn through her like if her Choker told her to take a left hand path under an Aquarian moon. Her thoughts fire in the swim, alone against the still-void with barest of membrane.
With those types you try hard, never win; you could be scraped like gum over the sidewalk from a mistake by the Choker, mistake by you, mistake by both of you getting here, and still the world turns beneath you. The techno death cuts so deep into the Apocheir that echoes of daggered notes swim beneath the surface foam, thin film as hard divide; can be broken but never breached. The skin folds but the memories beneath are not there, if you’re looking hard. There they clash like frenzied wasps from hives grafted to skin like backpacks or any other way they played their games. What cuts her skin is the sieved air and her lips parting in plates like tectonic disintegration.
She remembers when her spit flowed like water, like a cool brook running through her swarmed words. In the Chalk you can hear strains of Andronese twine and fray apart, stranding themselves with intent, scoring the silence like serrated whip-blades. She listens with a primer cocked in slant like a twitching vibe thread some glow bug would use to exhume black air. Like digging for bones in one of those home system movies where your daily routine is broken up for—for some reason she is still running her Tactica bi-focused, and so dark paths share real time with bright ones, even when at best she can reach an underwhelming serene neutral space—but of course you break the pace up if its a glacial snooze. So it doesn’t matter what you’re watching. Could be Asiatic dog collar exploit while you’re so high on side-decked chems you could swim through the room that right now presses on you like a velvet mattress.
This place remained at the end of a rope, made me feel guided there; drawn and led, and so now that I’m at last entombed by ice all I feel is the splint of my breath meeting breath in the chasm tight tunnelled through our throats. So I’m assured there’s a place for me forever. But where will my soul fleet to dried of Holic, with nothing stifling the flight of breath from my lungs through my skin and tumbling endless away and fading?
So out into the whiter ribbon whose traces stream through her blood whenever I follow the right star.Whose traces are enough to sketch it in vagueness in her mind. As if the way blood courses the veins, runs the raw film of tangled lines (like syrpent-skin) sifting through the bones and blush spreads, not thrilling just because it’s life, it’s living. She has a shadow of it. The white ribbon and what is beyond the pale. Fine gossamer ribbons and strands of the true spirit flare in blue rivers of light.
The strands of blue light run as if in parallax with the strains of Andronese that couple and part in the harmonic that slips through and past and over the still-void and burns silver into the haptic swim. Until word is just an echo passing over and past which is really the only way to keep it from the Veldt. That stuff makes up the milk of the Chalk that splashes pale bright colour to the flume else swallowed by darkness.
To hear more of it she keeps a primer sweeping the soundscape which is noise scattered over a fog pall that has smeared all but the most Tactica affect these ‘noters’ with the discolour of Neutral Machine Philosophy. She’s been starving, reaching for the sandwich of saran wrap cheese found the bread bitter, tough as tree room. She’s dropped it and in the stunned moment after salvaged sheer joy from life’s gifts in return. Paltry, hopeless charity spun wayward by Frost Giants who exist just to chamber you in the facets of their eyes where they may see you from all angles. Food to earth is what insects swarm for. Here we are not allowed to eat outside.
The numbness is more spice than it is salve against the pain. Like needles poking and prodding and pushing away blood but cloying along nerve running it like wolves run,paws beating the dead trail—a tag she’d seen:
BUT I FELT THERE WAS NO SPOT LIKE THEE IN THE WORLD
NO HOME TOWARDS WHICH MEMORY SO FONDLY WOULD TURN
NO THOUGHT THAT WITHIN ME MADLY WOULD BURN
—so at least some others had survived the cold, mostly hackers so deep wired into their stimuli they would look up to talk to you but when they saw you you wouldn’t be there for them.
No, for them you are always another piece they’re pushing or placing and then of course they overflow, the deprivation hits and for the first time in a while they look at you like you’re a glazed soju tart. Well, they moon-credit jumped you for the privilege. Isn’t that another mask, like they don’t care until they care, but of course some void in them has grown to abscess. Their heart a tumour while they weren’t looking.
Am I like that to you too, a rushing breath frantic—because she thinks a Patron is stalking her, moving silent, near floating with the millipede ellipses of her tendrils shifting, fusing, splitting for purchase over the chromatic grid of the Chalk. Frantic whispered out as breath forced from lungs to nothing. With her scanners she’s getting pings steady cadenced like the pattern of rainfall and the way even in deflect it trips the scrapers, getting quick in enough to carve a runway groove.
Doesn’t know why anyone would be so brave, running ersatz stupid all over her trails, because the bloom pulsing through her spools, through some grip on strength like marrow, is the way she has come and the way a miscellany of Tactica, and Veldt knows whatever the Recyclers have, have ordered all these way points. One zero is present, past; that is how to read the stream, and so all strands are one in the end, a comfort for the apocrypha of their Apocheir Morass.
The Patron stalking her, all for not being a Recycler, is a blemish on her Tactica, the way sometimes, the Recyclers say through their chemtrails, killing is kind of like smoothing out creases in skin, working out the wrinkles and folds.
One had tagged in meiotic math renascence a shadow that took flight like an Apocheir discard, that for them swapping you out didn’t just feel right to them, but felt good. Like it feels good to set her up like this and she’s turning over her social strategies. Turn around to at least deny them the vampire EXP boost. The one that gets them all nowhere, filters the good stuff from the well. From the blue rivers that lace the Chalk because to see and feel is to hone a Tactica like you hone a beast by starving it. She’d once thought Tactica was like that, that the more you waited around the stronger it got.
Sometimes good karma, though, is bad karma left on the scale—plate, is by offering itself negating itself for any future use. Really that’s how she sees the press of ice smothering her, spreading her, smearing her. Until she is dust, she is ash and from her ash blooms the flowers, petals skimming the blood like lily pads.
Nerve cells pressed to atoms and scattered like dead leaves leavened by frost into crisp crunch underfoot by the time winter is here and spring, you could chase spring, chase it forever through time and now you will never find it.
BLACK VEIN
She tells the Patron she’d better have good reason for creeping so close to her aura. When she tags her giving allowance just for this to happen, where the other route is now he could just leave. Soft spirals twisting in milk fluff through the slits in veil, to sliver through like butterfly pins like soft kisses teeth the flesh and leave it pockmarked, blistered like the ancient black paint of Septa Spire. Where life is a shell and we are only fading from it, sinking further and further, twisting into the framing of our own false synapses. She says she’s gonna split him besides who he is. She thinks it works any other way. Be cool and float on.
The Patron says, "reason I’m dispatched, though, is that you’re marked for death.” Words slip like ghosts through the Tactica to conjoin it on the peripheral verve where all meanings suffer like smoke the drifts, the ebbs of the still-void, and the Veldt which is only above and can’t be below.
“So tell me where you see this going,” he says.
She’d let herself be known, put her real name in with a bunch of auto gens. Truth is no name is real to her, is still left in her Tactica; it slipped away in some dreaming, some Cradle fritz. That was so long ago it gnaws at the inside of her chassis with the ugly flavoured pain of rancid mem. Going sour and bitter to taste of the rust flecked steel which itself gnashes against the body with the burn of blood. Gnashes against visual that way, fault lines in the whole Tactica and from there bleeding it to bleach death. The pale shine of absent space is the milk in the white and without it there is just glass.
There is the mirror and there is the water, the sight and its reflection. So Gemini. So twin pangs of hunger and thirst and laughing at the pain holistic, when grace in motion maxed out at a writhing limb dance that made everyone think you had ultra aphasia. Out on some black vein stretch down the carpet dust of the nuke-world frontiers.
“Thought I could grab some star-credits,” she says, after he relents, “and just slip away.” Can’t be that easy. Can’t fill out some cosmic form with ‘been down for a brief chronic, but the universe isn’t supplying me with my corrosive cancer-gen.’ Fast pass to a vacant shell-jacking into the ether to find a home behind weary headwaters.
The words plume, ink-trail jets eking their grip and dismayed by the silence to diffuse into charged air. Scatter cloud-like in the visual design. In tufts and slivers of black fluff, lacing meanings with their own discordant counters. She can see it all and when he shrugs she’s not surprised. “Entropic atrophy has staying power.”
What’s it, and not, to you or anyone if I’m marked for death, because my Morass... the amniocentesis... questions me now, through the Apocheir self-seal in flame that sparks haptic in our still, heavy space. Our haunted space. Which would upset any of my sisters still struggling out there as ghost, the shock gleam of the bone through skin, of hard-edged truth deep seated as shared dream, behind the milk and the quick of the blue light rivers. Server magnetic through the checkpoints themselves set up as channel nodes just to help the ghosts out. So much charity casing for the after altered, she thinks, and for the still living too.
“I’m a Prescribe,” he says, “I tally Recycler names from the Veldt and I tally their IDs when they drop in here. When an Andro bloods them.” He wears all black with cold green eyes gleaming from where the milk glass fuses with socket in crystalline cluster. Words through her Tactica trace ellipse paths through the shorings and crossings of the real brightened and etched out in fade. All by type, by standard, what is missing, what is sought for, and what is too close or far away to be worth the fret. A blizzard of meaning springs from the static and then the chromatic grid is pale again, like snow in the Chalk, grounding it, keeping all she says tethered to the strata of her passage, from larval cube to skimmed and symmetrical plate flesh.
“You Patrons,” she says. “So what, if it wasn’t you it would be someone else.”
All she wants is to make him pay, not for what he’s doing but the creep in his step getting here.
”kill the one they call St. Anuvai.”
Before she knows it, his filaments are all over her, mainlining her the tally, the way point. They’d snaked out from his spooling coils beneath the chassis, hardwired as chasers, like primers with teeth.
Gone with a whisper, cold breeze plaiting the dampness of her fibres, where they strand beneath her plate flesh, running her chassis and her limbs.
THE WHALE
I kiss the glass and pull away and then it’s like we never met before. Chére finds herself standing outside Grande-mère’s Hypo-Vat. She’d dragged herself there but it hadn’t been dragging herself away. Filling her sight is gross and bruised flesh through the tank, the vat broth a battle-churn between blue cleans-ant and green ranch dressing. Chambered, they were arranged row by row, in stacks, the way it looks from outside, just a grey box slabbed in with other vats. This zone is fetid with a sterile smell like candle-wax.
She’s not thinking about her Grand-mère because pre-Holic Choker she chose what to think about. Nights before the Choker were web ways to the death forest which sept from the shadows high on enough sleep and food dep.
When they first fit the Choker she screamed, tore at it with her hands, because it had been tuned and calipered by some intern too busy joy-reading the latest issue of Cramp to send even one hyper-thrust of focus out into the waiting world.
Before that she wasn’t thinking about her. She was thinking of some dude, all the same, all the same in pushing her toward the death forest. Now outside the Hypo-Vat Condo-Home it calls stronger than ever. Voiceless it can still tell her.
On nutria-bars she aimed her own slack focus to eating enough to live. If I became what Grand-mere is I could never leave the C and in a C the only sane way to be is to want to leave.
Moonlight splits the night like a spear and hitting the paced grooves and finer disintegration lines and spilling through them where she can’t see.
Voiceless the death forest tells her: as mulch to the earth she would not be missed but for once worth the trouble. First it atrophied than hypertrophied to press staunch against the vat glass which churns with the froth and the hypos glint beneath the foam. Obscured by tufts, like spores, like cotton clouds. To make the shape shapeless yet behind the veil of froth, beating against the slabbed pane of the C, still semblance. As if shadow once it has eaten all light.
‘Cause the whole thing loops like echoes. Here she’s always getting closer at the same rate she’s getting further away. Where the death forest here is strongest is the only place around with the shape of leaf and water. So she pretends she’ll succumb and pull back and then just fails to pull back, because you can never push yourself, only pull yourself, bleak-eyed and staring headlong somewhere you don’t wanna go. Before the Choker it was like that and then when she had the Choker she had the easy way through the astral trip and the trip was all there was because the death forest wasn’t there, never would be again.
Spacing out, she’s missing time, faster and faster. The richness of time is the shape of leaf and water, leaf tumbling in bright foils and water brooking green grass. Sunbeam splitting the night, moonlight in trail behind her. In those days light followed. Light was always with you as you approached the death forest. Then you’d know, soon enough, that the light was in you and you were nothing else.
As the light chases her she makes her way into the preserve now forking into bramble paths through a forestry overlaid by the black. Like the sleep she lost to her heartbeat. Being here is the ghost of being there.
The shadows as if taped over the foil and foliage, as if the darkness could never steal away itself but would have to be torn. As if you could breathe time and have that breath taken from you. Time kept condensed in breath. When you are missing breath where does it go? What would be left in the lungs but its shadow in black, and that would linger until the next inward flume of the slow death (the rebirth, her Choker will tell her when she wakes up and can’t move.)
When she was strapped to the gurney with gossamer light lines, EV infusions slipping the surface of her skin, she heard, you are leaving. A voice enmeshed in static and tones bloodless even if you could pick them out clear from the haze. You are leaving. Where are you going? Don’t leave, don’t go. The wheels if she could see them working grooves of dust over lacquered porcelain. The ceiling flecked with dry, dark dots, etched over with ruined memorials. Prayers for all ghosts who chose the here and now to slip away.
They expect you to follow the script, the lines you can’t see.
The hallway blurs into white shrieks of light streaking and the runic psalms are like moss over the ceiling board with the gauze a full splint press for a shattered body. Pushing up against it, is she pushing? No effect. The light-line Electric Vein drip and the first awkward noose fit of the Holic Choker.
In white porcelain halls the astral trip chaser blooms like the song of crickets rising from the fields, as darkness falls, as the thrushes sleep.
VORPAL BLUES
She drifts then with her morass stolen by the wave dance of the cool blue river, though she follows it to where the light pacing scores the ID tag, beating through the pooled Tactica, skimming like cream the surface of the Chalk. Pacing in nervous blink like a midnight star. In what is lain over the dead screen sky that carpets the still-void of LAYSE-CHI. Chambered by symmetric halls. That is all void, upwards clinging to the Veldt.
She thinks the pulse will soon ossify to solid shape and the death mask of the Recycler will resolve. Within them the eyes of glitch burn augmented by the techno death that will theme them in. The Prescribe had tallied this one as ‘St. Anuvai,’ the name routing quick through the Tactica which builds in shell and design fortress paths of faith, blessed in safety, cutting through the blur-strobe guilt of all other patchwork routines.
When he main-framed her was she ‘graded with fresh morass ‘ware? Past that was the barrage of light, missed ops flaring sunburst in the haptic smoke churn though she’d been doing all she could.
Still it’s like trying to chart the movements of gods when they’re up there in the Veldt, the Patrons’ endless rave fuelled by the Recyclers keeping frame counts stable. You could have slipped me a ghost, she thinks.
Shining teeth are the lines lancing through the still-void chambered in the shaped halls of drawn light and the fog of unknowing is black static in clustered clouds breaking, blotting and smearing the spacetime sects that prove the way her Apocheir Morass maps the Chalk’s tableau. Thinking, we have looked long and hard to learn what has been sealed from us.
By now the crook of her neck aches the way it’s planted into her headboard. She wonders if that’s the same message, the Holic Choker again.
She plants a foot on cold porcelain. Her skin is tinged a faint hue of rose from the EV infusions and her gown rustles across her ankles. A ghost of herself shimmers and stabs from the waxen pale floor.
Beds in the room she’s in are vacant, most of them, except a few sleepers strewn and bundled. She was the first to slip from her cot. As she touches down the cold spikes her sole and lances up, arching with bone and nerve. Her tongue presses probing loops into her teeth.
It’s the Holic Choker at work; with the dampers on her joy from warmth and pain both. Either it knew what she would do or wanted her to do it. As she presses through the door she hears a sharp gasp, a murmur, the rustle of a body turning over.
She steals into the hall. Nurses study her with NMP goggles and teeth bared from lips pulled back by age. None of them stop her. Gathered in circles of chatter, here and there, or on their way through the hall. The porcelain glitters like ice but any memorializing is swallowed by what her Choker does to their runic signs.
They no longer strive as epitaph but reverse themselves, the Holics pointing bright signs, bright stars from the sylphs. Consolidating them into networks searing scars into her astral self. Here now they speak to her of fates, of ego paths to come; she will know them when she is living them. When she disintegrates she will know that they were all that ever mattered.
She sees that, and so can translate to her present self, all that matters now.
What matters now is fixing in on the chromatic grid pulsing with glow lines. Each mark is like a cloven star, a severance impatient. The way this will go spells itself out. She doesn’t think the Patron would soft serve. He's setting her Tactica to hard mode by even being here.
St. Anuvai is veiled by a cloak, tatters curling tendrils and scraping in tufts over the white pixel-fire of the Chalk. Here the stricken Hub tells her Tactica in up-link that she is far from home and alone. Where she started the latticed slabs were charcoal grey even as they ran with cold flame. To get there she’d left her Cradle, as if LAYSE-CHI beyond couldn’t be denied. St. Anuvai in their tatter-fold has this anon-chronic driven a Vorpal Blade deep through a cursed Andro, even as the pooled time stasis reserve kicks off, even as all Andros in the area have space to decide if they want to trigger Cloakers. The Andro slumps to her knees, quivers of tendrils going limp with dead slack. Her eyes of glass milk fade out and with that any chance to scan them, find them later in their refuge from the endless burn.
If you were a friend, if you had them scanned, you could find them later. All Andros know that vacancy hurts, even if they’d never felt it. Even if they loop and of course some never do but drown in the still-void’s rippling shadow, drowning pool of the Tactica absolve, the data space the loops take up, that which is shucked by the Apocheir Morass; its amniocentesis of the frames. Lost and offered up to brace the Veldt.
So you exist because we let you, and we exist because you let us, she thinks. The bracing, the aurora glimmer breaking in the slants of the Veldt, when you see it just in the Tactica, knifing outward until unveiled by pattern it is just a shadow. A ripple in the ocean. In the still-void without the Tactica you’d see dead air. The haptic swim and the sea of ghosts, though, couple to make a space for the Veldt to cling to.
When St. Anuvai looks up her eyes are shredded. Phosphor-spored, tufts of cloud light, the glitch burn’s final form.
Lesia remembers the clear burn of the Silent Clot, the film of colourless light. Neutral and serene like the skin of wax. The clear burn and how it tempered and set off at once the blue light within.
That’s how clear it is, the need that ekes from Andros and even from Recyclers. There’s so much fear in this glitch burn that her upped amniocentesis scans and translates it straight to her lexicon. The fear hits and then when they ‘cycle an Andro they get a break. Thinks it’s that murky and then the water clears, sifts , and she sees it’s all hatred. A sea-bed pearl swept by sands but now bared and gleaming.
By now, too late—she’s slipped into her run and has set off twin smokers at strafing trails to St, Anuvai’s sides, and she thought that would at least get her closer, under veil of a more serene Tactica, but it sours. The techno death is peaking, riffs sledging into each other, stabs in constant rise, the blast beat thudding.
St. Anuvai slices some field through the smokers with her Vorpal, moving in, coming in low. Lesia is twisting, her body in crescent spinning over to avoid a certain death slash. Touching down trying to keep track of smokers. When she’s out the Tactica will bleed down, dry to dullness, like creased wax paper, worn out and obtuse.
She’s readied a third ghost smoker. Comes up with it after a roll, her last chance to see and salve, massage the Tactica back it into a steady state. She whips it sidearm with a curve, so it follows St. Anuvai even as she ducks away with it.
Lesia sets and moves. The still-void is stranger than it’s ever been to her, shifting and swirling and St. Anuvai dancing through it in silhouette. She can see her curve has gouged a crater in the Recycler’s shoulder. Stained in pale crimson, ebbing, thin gossamer strands of blood. All other Andros have ghosted the scene but she feels scanners on her still, waiting for them to go away, thinking, only a matter of time.
Chére is caught against the glow, a rich aurora that burns pale emerald through the veins of the Frost Giants, eking out channels that crook and split like rivers do. They enmeshed her, all of them, and she shrank beneath their pressure until she was nothing. Like the death forest sank you to nothing and now these two points connect. Point by point as if a dream could be shared like a network. As the needle slips the thread through.
As embossed scant and paltry she is spread beneath the surface seams of the paper.
She’s found the wound, sees it full and open, the white moon pluming across velvet sky. The cut where the Tactica bleeds crimson light. Where I am bleeding in the black light beneath the surface of the paper. That strains against the seams and leaves a dew of shimmering glitch across the real, that one can see, unchecked growth like the forest she’d tried that life to join. She is herself squeezed through the heat tips of the Choker, embossed into being.
I am a loop broken; my loomed lines cut but now there is no neck to choke—breaking her chest against the blade in a context the Tactica lost. She thinks she got globbed a bug in the mainframe, the ‘ware too good a thing. The Tactica’s best promise to her—heated holics infused into her blood through the tips; in my pale reflection swimming beneath the surface—to keep her safe in the fog of unknowing, that in sudden terminal plume swarms her visual design.
How am I something else? While at the same time I am stars breaking, splitting apart, and shooting jagged slabs of light into the void.
TRIBUTARY
When that Vorpal had come in splitting her chassis the overdub had crackled spitfire and smoked its way clear out the crook of her back-plate. The way is clear through the amber dawn. If such a light could break here. She’d felt it leave the spinal amniotic line and felt the insides soak, too much at once. Matting in overflow or the still-void itself bent in the foam somewhere beneath the bubbles clustered in film like spit. She bends, folds, spilling across the chrome steel, bleaching it in white scars, trails of amnion searing where they gush forth.
When she gets there will the river still be braided, twines of light finding each other in spiralling strands? To be swallowed as I am swallowed outward, you get paranoid trawling the surface from trenchant space-time like a parasite. So she's drowning in this corrosion, beset and drenched in it and she could breach the surface in murk spray like a fetid swamp thing. Here I am world, the grossest you've ever seen. Because I have no body because it disintegrated as I followed the seams of my path.
She thinks of how when she went there first she was alone. But now some part of her Apocheir Morass knows she was sent to be hewn and parted. The clotwork still swims bright blue and the milk light within courses its trails to far off reaches of the Hub. Where the chromatic grid rises and falls in bleach like teeth in the Chalk. Chemtrails are all you can see of the Recyclers, pluming from wolf-like sneer and St. Anuvai's glitter-dusted lips have parted to reveal the mist curling out as if grasping from darkness.
She is saying to leave. You should be leaving.
No, she struggles, trying to find the bleed, the amnioneses breaking the apocheir seal, warping her visualis. Too much now and she wants to seal it off. She's saying to stay put. Stay put so I can 'cycle you. You're in the right space and time for that function.
How can you not hear what echoes unsaid, echoes through no speech, no burn on the viz, okay and more like harmony than noise because no one conveys what you should really do. They convey what you should do for them but the Cosmere is served mere and more by the struggle against.
When I untether myself, she thinks, when I slip away. You'd better be near the Clot for that. Lost so much amnione. I don't know how. I'm bleeding out. I can't move. St. Anuvai's face glares with the gleam of her teeth flaring out the contours of her skull like black rainbows. Then she feels her tendrils gather, hears them beading over the plaited chrome steel with a sound like worms mushing together in the dark places. An abyss of worms that hidden from sight clots together in squirming mass.
Obscured from sight. Her tendrils twine and gather as if rooting her not to stillness but movement. As if her roots can take her away while her drive, her visualis is elsewhere. Chambered as if in some crater beneath her chassis.
My name is Chére. Your name is Lesia.
My ghost name, she thinks. No journey waits for me after.
St. Anuvai would not allow it. Lesia sees this with a look not thrown back as snapped, tossed, forgotten. Every Andro she'd seen at first and more besides decloaks, leaving themselves with bodies lithe and lustrous from the dark corners of the architectura. Spaced out, checked out, if it's going wrong find that better tomorrow. Luxed out on their mindscapes and dream moves they needed me like you need a flower vase in the corner of a room.
When she'd first seen the death forest it had burst in shadow petals and plumes but the last time she saw it was streaked with silver, the silver aflame and stranding pearlshine like blood droplets across the shadow.
The chromatic grid’s glowlines creep her by, as the walls of the Chalk keep her twisting and turning. Her body is, her body will be. As if she was ghosted, long ago, and didn't know it, because the ghost didn't make itself at home, but hid itself away, in a corner of her Apocheir Morass somewhere. Most ghosts never shut up, but if you could keep yourself silent—so that I stole out just in dreams, just to hold hands, have my hand held—then no one would complain. You could be there forever that way.
She remembers when she'd first seen hands, pale pink strobed with translucence, and known she was more than a body, but she'd forgotten.
In that moment Lesia had been so sure she'd remember.
The Silent Clot is where the milk rivers of blue light find themselves battered, broken, shine through the carapace like seeing the light beneath bone dashed against the slab spire that the Libra have forged out of black chrome steel. The light diffuses into it and ekes its way to the other side in spiderweb strands. The way out is to tether yourself through and remember you will feel the pain or joy of every choice, and still life—what is being unsearchable, kept for a freeze of time in chambered chassis— has been mind-fit to mind-fit, moment to moment, as the Choker warped me through the astral trip.
What is in her to look also listens. Listens for anyone's haptics. Gazes at the spiderweb of light woven across the slab, thinking, to be a mote of light coursing my way through my strand. Eking my way for firmer passage against the black which would be all diode, guile signals from chips and casing beneath the chrome steel, threading the motes along their way. Guile signals meeting the innocence of motes.
Anyone's haptic. Even with her chassis opened up she waits for them. Any Andro at all. She never thought her flame would drift out alone, always thought there would be someone around, like there's always someone around. Always a face of enmeshed beads and eyes of milk glass. In the visual-is with the shared haptic dream.
Waits even for the phase flicker, because they'd come in like fireflies, blinking in. To release her from it. The banks are still, straight slabs of black marble through the light, barren of any port. A tag splashed in iconic green flickers in beading light across the black. How penumbrae, she thinks, her rolled eyes even back so she can't see her own amniocenteses. You'll say, it was good to be a frame, wasn’t it? Then bloom like algae in the Swim. The ocean beyond the gate of the Clot.
I'll be waiting for you there.
Across the chasm of herself, on the other side where the real is supposed to be happening, there is a flicker, there are some flickers but she's lost them. Taking steady shape as obelisks or diamonds. Past the clot-work she'll find what she wants. Opened up to the void, the amnions seeking in bursting streak the diodes flush full beneath the marble. Opened up to the swim breaking in its stranded lines open themselves, with the threads in flash severance cascading blossoming platelets of light to meet her.
Where the Libra flicker in—the sky carpets itself in signs, and on the other side is the death forest, and you can still reach it, if you want, you can be pure again. Still now it is labrynthed from you—their phase-Cradles warp through one by one. Far away, past the tether severed. The Cradles burn like molten battery cores. The Libra are pure resonance, their haptics and their Tactica bled together, grouped for network comfort, ready to disperse, diffuse as death.m4a reaches sonic cacaphony.
Like the sky itself carpeted. The sky is a maze your soul travels when you see it. The death forest waits still on the other side. Its leaves frisson into the air a cool hunger. A cool drawing of the darkness still, when you’ve gone beyond the light.