
morgan
sex: male
occupation: keeper of a withered
bracing
neural valence: huskshedder.
under care of sister laeath of the
sixth gate
likes: warm digitalis soil, the flame beneath
dislikes: sunNET shadowbans
blood type: b
‘But there’s not much time. There will have to be other sanctuaries as well
protected as the Gardens of the Queen.’
The Epsilon threading is recovered from Heart Machine no. 63, scraped while
it dream surfed Interwavelength X7J. This sojourn will make its way to Cerviel only after the
light
fleets away. Its garden-city has held secrets from ancient bud. They
blossom
in petal dance to the eyes of those who stare not at the mist but at the
light beneath the soil. They ponder their footwork. Are careful as they
toe across chalk shadows.
Etched spectres of those bleach-nuked long before into this ghosthood.
This is
what is meant by the annotation of 'the beset earth.' In that lost heartbeat belched up from
loam there will always
be a pattern. Strung through the limbs of her puppets that push and pull
in weaves or wiles. It’s for the desperate, the drowned, to see through
the black tar and grey smoke. To make
out the sky past the surface which no light ever breaks through. Those
who
stare at earth know for themselves, and exhume that light instead.
excerpt from Epsilon cross-flow commentary thread 89.6, anonymized but
usually attributed as an initial compoesis effort by a ghost-poster later
id-coded as 'the Wren.'
lesia
sex: female
sex: female
occupation: Andro
occupation: social valet
likes: armcrate stashes, rearguard backstep defense patterns, tactica down-iines
likes: good mind-fits, bad hair, moon omens
dislikes: vape-smoke chemtrails
dislikes: default valley doll flooze, conditioner
blood type: ???
blood type: a-
Chére
“The spider has taken the same amino acids that are in your hair,
skin, body and has put them together to make a beautiful continuous
filament with perfect crystallinity.”
In the one outward radius that matters, the smoothness of her silver is
so severe that it ripples the way a whisper stirs over the breathless
stillness of the water. You can count on it to crease out soft patterns
before the water settles back to placid serenity.
The only settling this ghost is doing is settling in. As they commune
within their shared foundation she soon feels it’s the ghost’s
foundation and not hers. As if she’s lost in a forest of shadows.
[What’s a forest? Is that a Hub? But Hubs are never dark. I can’t help
you,] she says. [I’ve never seen a forest.]
The ghost is greedy. It’s already attached itself to her where her
memory code cores the pulse of her current, her affect spark, drawing
strength to translate itself into another way to read it. That was mine
first, she wants to say. Instead her inner voice is saying something
else. Take all you can. You’ll need it for the way home.
-excerpt from Sigma threading crossflow, rivered to via archival by codex ghoster id-claimed as ‘the Wren.’

cammy
birthday: 3,074.3.57 HP
sex: female
occupation: hackergurl
likes: a good memory trade, life-fash, ghost sunlight
dislikes: juice-box moonlight
blood type: a-
seen with: the neuronal toxicity in all polychromal eyes
"I mean, what do you really find? Is it trouble for the rest of
your life or is it the end of the rainbow? Do you dare to actually open
the treasure box?" He turned his hands palms up and shook his head.
she'd sent a vent message, harmless, spooled in motley violet and it had coursed
—
in a radiance stolen from the Loner, she'd thought,
the one in fixture as a stalker slanting from the lowest plane—
and he'd seen, ignored & now of course was thinking over what it meant.
not her true feelings, he'd thought, double checked that thought, her thought, over.
over & again.
but she'd already been out, been gone, or it was gonna happen that way,
the way their moulting had laid it out, a half-descaled archive ago, or
were the fibres
truer and bluer? by which she'd meant sickly blue blemish, the pale,
streaking glaze of wizened tendon or carcinogen teeth.
we’ve, she thinks, not much time left to keep going steady
on our way, & thank these angel echoes for that. echoed to where we
only see them as our own dreams, and not our good dreams, and only
sketched out and taken shape in our nerve.
and it would hurt to be released from his trust, but she'd released him
from hers, long ago. who keeps going that way? some do, and some must
hurt, hurt themselves keeping it displaced like that, about a thousand
bytes of it each time, severed only by the break of jawline—
while you think it over—
and say no fault on me, i’m faultless here, and you say that with your silence, don't you?
he says it with smoke, clouding her, dark clouds over her as she traipses through the outside.
a hint of rain nuzzles her hair through her hood, meaning—
stronger than it feels through the flame auricle lacing of her hair
glued against & into banded nylon heavy with damp, in more obeisance
to gravity. she can feel it, even so.
no curl yet strings her eyes.
all the fash fashion & trend swims by her, in no way is she swimming
through it. plaited clothes strung by the sleeve with skulls shorn
seventy-five to twenty-five.
she could zone on this all day, has other concerns, could zone on this
all day & that's unfair, something wired into the schemata of her
precepts & of course she can only blame herself for that.
but she doesn't want to, & where was she going?
her beatertop is still more dead than alive.
more dead than alive meaning, alive enough.
so it wasn't that, she must have wanted something else.
no, she thinks, couldn't be that, i’m not wired that way,
she's wired herself out of it but still: dark clouds hanging heavy over
her. patches of sealant fresh drying over cracks in pavement, blooming
in shadow over lines ebbed and in some cases, shorted—
in intent—
if you think, she thinks, there is life enough here, i'll prove you wrong, i'll make you care about it.
in hushed voices do they talk about Disillusion, in whispers do they dare into what it means.
“what is your problem,” she hears someone say, “it’s not a good enough
design? some poor loser must have shorted his shit by a headpiece for
that. such a waste of time, right?”
she thinks that it’s too detailed, too exact an assess of her assess,
and it that way she must have dreamed it, because she doesn't think she
was caught looking? all this time, she thinks, i don't get caught looking & ...
it's others who need to worry about that.
get caught up in that shit & it'll play you for real.
so she's skipping past that just to focus on the shadows, blooming like algae clusters, she thinks, in a lonely place past the waves that's all ocean.
the clusters themselves are cold & dry, sleek where not embittered by age and other people's issues.
her beatertop, had she left it on? it would be draining now, draining
its brightness into the world. the world through the black floor,
through the white walls she's never been able to poster up.
when its done it would sleep, she'd set it that way, sleep on the verge of its death,
sleep through its death that way, and that would hit her the next time
she logged in, because she wants, she's told herself, to age out.
she wastes no breath on breath, & she's at Tachae's anyway, & it's boarded up the way it always is.
if she wanted to she could face the darkness that seeps out between the
slabs of spiral grained wood, bolted in chrome finished iron. sparks of
rust blood the oval tips.
go inside, see if anyone's there.
if she wanted to.
taken from the Velih simtapes, Assembled Headspace 890-A (Pre-Collapse to the Skein of Orche)

hexa
sex: female
occupation: feral Andro, dreamhost
likes: other churns
dislikes: larval slavers, unwelcome ghosts
blood type: ???
‘I slip into we so swiftly was I ever here?’
-
Catch Chére at the mall with a dead-cool mind-fit and time to spare to
look for the next sign. So not on-clock. She's gotten permissive
signals from her dream protocols to keep herself wired with a
stim breakout fit today, but the way she'd crashed before she thought
she'd deal with fallout for weeks.
Augustin is an undeadoid, a vampire she'd picked up in a cafe west of Orion
Point, on-look with greasy fore-locked hair and dead scene eyes. When
those eyes are on her she's in a sweat, out of her comfort zone, which
is the point.
So when he'd ditched her to check out the latest emulsified dolls, she
hadn't triggered his social to say, "actually, they're fully
articulated motion figures." She'd just smiled, looked demure, and even
when he was just a silhouette down the far walkway line, glassed in on
all sides by fronts and facades fresh with graffiti marker, she hadn't
induced wisteria but instead turned her own back. The Frost Giants she'd
seen in panes of glass, in the whites of her own eyes.
She'd just cut her hair, yet to hit her eyes. In crisis on the usual,
she'd choked out the cramps of the black forest with the freeze burn of
the Frost Giants under waning away from her wist, waxing into everything
else. So the next sign hits as a girl staring at her with the eyes of
Hecate, flowers crowning her rainbow hair.
She thinks, pretty good for post-Capricorn rebound. If it's clear
she's scoring into this girl's eyes just to check for the next guidance
path, though, it gets wonky. The Frost Giants have protocols against
checking people for personal trips. Chére is dead cold running Gamma
into what heaven or hell awaits.
"What're you doing here?" she says. Right hand path. Direct conflict
and act like she knows. Deeper spiral into the traces of memory. She
does know her, but not from outside herself. Knows her from within the
chem-swim of the holic choker-translated dose that had been past the Death
Forest. In the way she'd played with its rhythms like viola strings,
stirring the notes in slow sojourn from the cruel silence.
Who you are could swim in slow journey from your core and spread through your skin as it grows.
"Trying a new skin," the strange girl says. "This is what I could look
like if I could, but I'll forget soon. Overload warp sent me here to
frame the stress. I'll forget that, too."
Chére has the impulse to set her cortisol to brain bleaching wake mode
but it’s all she can do to shut the scream down. Turn it into a steady
pulse at least to find space in her breath expelled. With that comes the
words. "Which one are you under?"
There's a bunch, she thinks. A different spin would swirl to a
different Coriolis effect. Penchant there for not knowing the right way
to work the holic choker. Each facet holds glimmer veined down to the centre.
She thinks, though, if she knows for sure, she can script it down the
line, to make sure she never zones on it again. Fucks it up.
"All of them," the girl says, "I've been under all of them, their
weight heavy and forever pressing. Forever crushing." That's when Chére
knows she's read it all wrong. She rolls her eyes skyward, in her
thoughts to keep them from the heat, the awkwardness steaming from the
girl’s shoulderblades, rising in curls she can almost see. In herself,
she knows, to keep them from the clasp on her neck, from the next dose.
Bound to come in askew now, ill-timed, off the script, the one script
that will take her where she wants to be.
There are so many doses, she thinks, so many scripts to worry about,
and how will I know for sure if the signs aren't on me? If what's on me
is like this?
So she leaves the girl alone. Still thinking about her later when
she's still hiding out in the Hypermall. From the cold outside. From
the Giants. You can see them in the whites of your eyes, pale
reflections in the glass.
You can also see them in the snow, when you're hitting heat
deprivation, and when she talks about them with her sisters of social
she says, they say: it's a frozen heart, is what it is. It's when it
stops beating your eyes start burning dry.
She thinks you could pretend, you could trick yourself. From there
it’s a short stop to tricking someone else. Puts that deep down. Hopes
she'll forget, the way you can forget anything at all. Knows chances are
it take root in the loam of her guts, from there flowers vines,
tendrils. It does what it wants with her.
Never ends. The undeadoid is on a line that buzzes when he hits her
up. When she looks back the girl is gone, and by the sound of shrieking a
few Ghouls have made it past the shutters. It's their shrieking, of
course, in ghoul-tongue.
Something like: why am I here? I want to leave.
taken from Hexa's dreamtrip log, all of which have been embedded with psyembryonic splicers at the request of Sanctum Hegemön

ORCHE / PHASSA
Blood type: o positive
Likes: illusive veils, pheroweave translations, ghost schemas
Dislikes: being alone
Seen with: Phassa
Blood type: a negative
Likes: sunshadow, the nodal soul, custom leafware
Dislikes: shallow talk, Field trips
Seen with: Orche
“... if the pathogenic organisms are there, it’s unlikely you’ll
get them all off. What are you going to do, not eat?” - Patricia Griffin
Orche had said, 𝒾 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝒷𝑜𝓃𝑒𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝓇𝑒𝒻𝓉
𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓉 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑔𝓊𝓂 𝑜𝒻 𝓎𝑜𝓊, 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓈𝑒
𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓅𝒶𝓅𝑒𝓇 𝓉𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓈. She'd said that
to pass it on through Laeath’s pheromone weaving. An easy ask because
she'd be away from it, not worried about it. For her it's time, to be a
bit more wound down, and this planar is not one spiders brook easy, can
wander at their leisure. Eventually the web sticks with the residue of
ground tread time and again. The line clots up each time, a little more
every pass.
Still as Laeath ossifies into the permanence of the oraclehood she
thinks, there's no right way to do this. She gathers the billows of her
smoke-veil through which she controls what she sees, how she sees it,
how others see her. Her mission is to record the final moments of
Morgan's Tended, at the end of its growth now fading to black. What
makes an exile is they can't, in the end, nourish their Tendeds. And
that would happen, she thinks, without me. Without a Tended, the way to
go is full of harm with my eyes not reaching them and when they're gone
there goes Orche's pres-chrysalis. By this time the world of electric
flora is in early disintegration. The light breaking through the vein
linings, that held back the data-stream encased, tinged a phosphor green
and the bleed lines web across the sky.
Here where the canopy is tattered enough to see them. Crackling
through the bramble, microlatticed up there, with the dying Tended
straining to reach them. By now Morgan has passed the Clean Flame. With
him gone the Tended has let the Frost in that she'd spun into foreign
attack. Orcha Mutate hangs on with a desperate grip, but sure, she
thinks, it's just winter, and winter is when Orche wanted to change.
So as she pulls her smokeveil along its trails lap and spark against
the Flora. Gleaning as clear a picture she can, through the smoke as it
stabs. She's not a moment too soon, with the white bleach of the Frost
coating the nanobot-nodes and spreading through the data-stream the way
blood flows, carries sickness through it. Through her sight she sees the
bleach but not the data itself; the spooling, the inner weaving of
Orche is unknown to her.
Of course Laeath could say, I told you so, if it all looms out into
something she doesn't want. But she thinks that isn't part of her role
here, not as designated by the Gates. And the Gates have strict rules on
not going too far, because the last thing the Coven wants is for a
stronger power to care for any reason that they're around, scuttling
through the Cosmere and knowing, getting close to, the strands thick
with meaning.
It's gross, she thinks, and hates herself for it, but Orche had seen
value in them, had let them deep into the tangle. Serving a
planet-consciousness in its chrysalis was enough for the strains of
thought the Gates bled into their cluster-mind. For indicial reasons it
wouldn't be her part to watch what happened after.
When the Flora are iced over then she'll know. Even as the corruption
spreads the oversweet musk of the Tended wanes beneath the still
blotting of nothing, the musk going, the scent fading out, like berries
passing ripe, souring, and all her weaving is meant to capture the
scent, strain it from the spreading nothing. So it can be sequenced for
schemata if needed. Without us so little would get done, she
thinks, but she needs to think it. Or else and ever after would she feel
the hatred, take it with her like her smoke-veil back home, to the
clustermind beyond the Gates. Where they all tumble over each other and
pattern each others’ weavings, skip across them with needlethin legs,
drawing here and spooling there. And before you are gated you are not
even sequenced from the hive. When you come back you have a name and a
face and you must wait for both to die.
The Tended's final cry is a harsh wind wailing, wavering, as if
choking on its own sound. Tendeds don't know they can die until they do.
When they do they realize they're alone for it, alone and if this one
knows her as witness they don't care, it's their keeper that they want.
He isn't coming back, she longs to tell it. It's just me and you now.
For whatever I am, and you are.
When the Tended knows it can no longer keep going it gives up its
ghost to the networked Sun, but other Tendeds (the disentegration
teaching all the nanonodes to give of themselves to the nothing beyond)
wouldn't see it coming. And so Morgan's is the last lonely death.
With that in her memory she is tired. Her banks are swollen and bloat
against their limits like bodies pressed against binding rope. Cutting
grooves into the shape of it and she knows only when she is past the
Gate will she be released of it. For now she holds it, and with weary
eyes keeps the smoke-veil dusken, the better to slip away, unknown and
unknowing into the folds of the outer embrace, itself a cage the kindred
could never see. Slipping away where the lilacs are stalk through petal
almost not bothered except for the chalk white that strains, in thin
trickles and blemish where the trickles meet, running past each other,
climbing from the neonic loam like wriggling worms, the kind of writhing
she has a taste for, this far out into the black.
taken direct from Sister Laeath's pherosequence churn, extracted upon return to the Sixth

MIHO?/YUKA?
Miho (Yuka?)
likes: optimism, DIY homegrafting
dislikes: long days
blood type: a
seen with: Yuka
Yuka (Miho?[
likes: consequence, fulfillment
dislikes: straightforwardness
blood type:
seen with: Miho

Kai / Elli
Likes: a good chill, points on the board
Dislikes: GSS,
Seen with: Cammy, Elli
Blood type: B
Likes: smart dice, hacker downkeep, culture signals
Dislikes: a cold pulse, fog of war
Seen with: Cat Eyes, Cammy, Elli
Blood type: O
"the sorrow lives on."
Cathy Newman
Kai wakes up in the morning light
streaming through a cracked and taped window. The light splinters across
the gauze, casts a fractured shadow across the bed. He's alone, draped
in sheets wrung with sweat. The Tri-Sun is in 3rd Zenith, meaning the
smallest sun, Gaulea, has crossed over to centre the first sun in
partial eclipse while the second sun has dropped into the periphery of
its orbit. Bills to pay, mouths to feed, croons the radio
before dissolving into a shriek of noise and reverb that almost shatters
his eardrums—a coded signal from B. Moth HQ. It slips into the song's
backbeat, a steady drone.
He doesn't need to see the Tri=Sun to know all this because the rhythms of it are in his blood.
Where he's at: a hovel slotted into the
Clusters in avoidance of any permit or regulation. He was with someone
last night, but they've scarpered; no one wants to deal with the
come-down of sleeping with someone marked for death. Kai was born marked
because he was always going to be initiated; hadn't his father, and his
father's father before that-- the rules were different, the teams were
different, but it's the same bloody game. Get sponsored and kill as many
as you can. If you die, die in faith and zeal. It's not a rule, per
say, but it's the only constant. By your own hand is cowardice, by any
other's is courage. He thinks before he even gets involved he'll need
something to keep him on his feet. Food will do; a brew would do even
better.
Bullets... bullets fly through the air.
He retrieves his piece from beneath the pillow. Thinks about shooting
the squawking radio for the hell of it but where would he get a new one?
To cut yourself off from the game is to cut yourself out what makes
life worth living. Living not for yourself but for the sponsors and
fans. Even for the grouper fiends.
Even before he descends down the
creaking, half-destroyed staircase he smells the smoke of the fiends,
gamers half-in for the dope and half-out for the violence. What they do
is they cut their dope with ambrosia and milk tea, wait for it to
congeal, and torch the gloop with hydrochloric butane. Smoke it through
artisanal pipes which are tattooed while molten with designs that cool
to inlay beneath the surface of the glass. The fiends know the stats of
the pro gang wars like they know the designs of their pipes. That one's
mine--no arguments. The groupers are as pure as they need to be because
they don't want to miss a second of the action. View it all through
their hallucinogen haze, the ambrosia wiping the ugly parts that would
otherwise stain their psyches.
"You're going to hell," says one of the
groupers when they catch him coming down the stairs. He ignores this. He
could argue, sure, and be right; he hasn't sinned half as much as the
megacorp sponsors and they all know this. The grouper is shooting his
mouth off just to hear it.
He speaks when he's among them. Glided
down silent as a wraith he could tell by their goggle-eyes. Moving is
more like floating, distethered, for those marked. By strengthened tone
and sweep of his eyes taking them all in. "I got places to be. This
place is KZ if the pulse isn't strong today." Only one of them is an
inside line. They stare at each other, furtive, trying to guess among
themselves. The ambrosia takes away the sketch feeling at the root. So
they forget what their reason for the feeling was in the first place.
The dope, a neutral serenity, a push that says it doesn't matter. It's
lodged in them, a hook, Kai thinks, but where does it go? He knows where
he'll go. The statline. The pulse.
The radio had told him it was time to make moves.
His piece is an ASP 39-2. So light he
forgets he has it. Minimal kickback. He has it on the lurker outside the
steps as he smashes the oustretched arm into the doorframe. Their piece
bounces, goes off, digs itself a half tomb in the dirt. He swears.
No look kill then, someone in the game. They drop away but their body on
the turf makes no noise.
Gaijin Street Samurai but their fall
hadn't been broken by deck. He's back inside the door and snaking to the
window. Picks off a few more from there. These guys, he thinks, not
tested; he can tell. Scouts who wanted an early bird kill.
They're still sprawled across the tube
room, the fiends. He marches to the inside line. Eyes wide but still
dulled by fog. Inside lines aren't in the game but even through the fog
this one can tell it doesn't matter. The other fiends watch. Their eyes
half-lidded. Only mote gleams betray interest.
Without a pulse?
What good is a bad pulse, he
thinks, and drops the inside line where he sits. He slumps over, a neat
circle in his forehead. Bleeding, but almost a tattoo, a shadow. Comes
to rest on his left shoulder. Hair spilling onto fabric torn and grimed.
It had been the one who'd announced his
damnation. He'd taken it as dope-speak. Half these dopers became street
prophets and said things like that to any who'd listen. Fuck it, he
thinks, always cold even while listening for footsteps at the door. It's
not that he thinks they're right. They are for sure. It's how close
he's coming to it and it's still morning. The Tri-Sun in 3rd Zenith in
its barrage of light had been an array of beams pouring through the
slashed panes of the living room facing out.
He stalks out to see it, feel it.
B. Moths are on the scene now. He'd
heard gunshots from within and thought them echoes of his own kill. Pure
cleanup and the most senior soldier is at the door, telling him it's
all clear. He thinks of telling them it's about time, but thinks again.
No point in schizophrenia this early in the day. Because we will be
judged, in the end, he thinks, by the fiends, the street-prophets, the
schizophrenes to whom all this is a game. Who are passive, who watch and
live.
Knowing their new hackergurl is schizophrene.
taken from the Velih simtapes, Death Reconstruction 696-70 (Pre-Collapse to the Skein of Orche)

Acheron
light-vessel protocol-primordial of the Fauna, Marker through quantum observance the relays of the digital enmeshment
likes: the centres of the dream-spiral, the parallax where threads of
Marked reality run concurrent with the access-voyages of the coma sleep
of the Marker's death
cycle
dislikes: awakening, being cold
blood type: n/a
seen with: Phassa
Laeath decides to wake up. Go on another
fiver, which is what they call a five minute split from Mother Nest.
Quick jaunt to a mapped point otherwise her head will churn, swim over
in the relentless barrage of chatter from the jumbled spiders. That
crawl beyond the Gates, endless in scrabble over each other, twisting
compound perspectives together, that hold the knowledge of Mother Nest.
Laeath has always needed more breaks from this than others, tainted as
she is by her Oracle work at Datera VI, the Coven’s name for the
planet-chrysalis Orcha Mutate reaching the stage zenith of its
elect-path into the Psymbionic Network.
Chrysalises like these remain cradling their
berth as essential psychic avatars to be reckoned with in any
thought-matrix delve, any attempt to use wavelengths to reach
Sourcehood. Grafted through digitalis to ensure an earthflesh instead
of a culture ghost. Wisdom of all cultures brought to birth. Spliced or
otherwise.
Run but never hide, was the Neutral Lotus
philosophy distilled to her for her work there. To raise a world into a
nexus nerveway for the Cosmere’s psychic terrain. A fate-point
thrumming with Cosmere lore-knowledge. Who has illused for herself in
her planar port the Gardens of the Queen once besieged by Aurachne. Who
has kept her raiments and forests that dance with spark and scent.
Still there are other planet-chrysalis to watch over.
When he was dark earth he was called Illia
Casting, and sunless was his breath, his world a realm of shadows and
shades. His beings were pale, gaunt, and scrambled over the earth… ‘like
corralling feral dogs,’ Sister Taranath of the 3rd had told her.
Taranath herself became scrambled, her reports sparse, concerned with
doings that took her here and there, warding such she found into or
around each other, as needed.
Now traversing through the Coven’s webway
reveals another planar port. This one by design a bleak fortress of
dusk. Dristra, the chosen name of Illia after his chrysalis, draped in
shadow; the flesh of his avatar is knit of it. As she drifts in she
notes; walls of dark stone, light a soft candle pallor. Unlike Orche
Dristra had taken not even as friend any Bridge; they remain in the
layers below the fortress, scrabble its ways and passages, lurk
somewhere below.
The throne room sees Dristra sitting deep in
trance. They say that’s what he does with his time. Zone out into
oblivion or prop open his third eye. Drowning in sight unseen to others.
Some mean feat, but Laeath has her doubts. Doubts there is nothing the
Coven can’t see. Dristra may have gained entrance to the Psymbionic now,
can draw on the wisdom of any other chrysalis, but they themselves are
just an aspect of the mother brood web. As such a simple aspect to
Mother Nest.
“Which one of you is it now?” he says. His
eyes stay closed while his lips move, throwing Laeath off. I was doing
this when you were still a planet, she thinks. “Yes, your oracular work
guided my denizens to the new digital union. But I don’t trust you now. I
know your Mother Nest. It doesn’t just map the infra-psyche frequency.
It lives off it. You make it a home.”
“It’s rough out there for us,” Laeath says. “We do what we can, for the good of the Coven.”
“What do you want?” he says. He’s snapped out his trance. Waves an arm. Languid. Detached.
“A fellow Sister took on the role of Oracle here,” she says. “Wanted to know what happened to her.”
He laughs. A weak laughter nonetheless sustained. “I don’t tell you apart. You’re all just bugs to me.”
So Laeath responds the way she knows, that
has been ceded to her. As of the crossing-instant of her birth into
Mother Nest and its disparate root-strands in the Gates where the mother
brood web has plaited itself into space and time. Before she was even
Sixth Gate.
“Culture zombie. As a mass-consciousness you
thought, survival. Anything to avoid being a culture ghost and
languishing, alone, forgotten. But we are the bugs who weave what
through your clumsiness you take for granted. That means we wriggle
through your flesh, zombie. We own you.”
She’s gathered her smoke-Skein around
herself. Dark smoke wisps across her face, her jet black hair conjoined
to its curls. Where etched into her skin even now would be imprints of
her Secting but beneath the smoke-Skein she is mist, she is wafting
away, even now, coming closer, even now fading away.
“Too ashamed to keep even a Bridge beside you.”
The smile remains. “My Bridge has eyes to see you even now.”
“I know,” she said, for she had. Those eyes were
on her the whole time. A Bridge was needed where on Mutate the floral
and faunic had parted to entwine again the digitalis bleeding through
Orche’s pores. But she had never seen Flora here. Instead the Bridge had
marked as Floral tone the earth of stone and grit, made avatar of the
thoughts of clay. Marked as Faunic insects that dwell in the shadows of
stone. And what would Bridge them both she never wanted to meet. But it
could see her. Compound eyes it would visualise in the planar-port, if
she ever saw it, and form so much like what Illia had accused her of.
“You know what my nomads did? They prayed.
They wore down rituals into time. Looking for light. For some semblance
of it. All that is preserved.” He points to his head. “In here.”
“I’ll take a raincheck on that,” she says,
thinking, time squandered. If this is what becoming a frequency means,
no thanks. At least not his way. Thinking, back to the mother brood web,
to keep together with my Sisters the Mother Nest. Staining herself into
her smokeveil, in the ways ancient to all the Spiders. She is
unravelling then, threading herself through the Sixth Gate, where her
Sisters await.

Ivory
Profession: Black Ritual Mage
Likes: star credit bumps, direct action, white ice manipulation
Dislikes: Shin FIve Zero, undeadoids
seen with: Val
Type-A Prescribe
Profession: thamatica preservation, conduit intercession
LIkes: Tactical possession, mastery over the haptic ocean
dislikes: Sleeper eval-relays, attack drones
Blood Type: N/A
Apart at the seams. That's how it feels to be ripped from the greater Pre-Scribe haptic current. That's how it feels when you sink within the folds and valleys, the shadows cast by the haptic underflow, the chill, the blunting framework of pulse-affect backup, or what they call the spark that sees. In backup the pulse-affect rinses itself of abstraction; dark thought sinks to the bottom. Is held there. Is a hell magnetic. To be stored until transmuted into the stuff of the Sleeper dreams. Relayed back to our Patrons who live through our hosting. That much I know. We see them as demons when they breach the Veldt but beyond it they live our dreams.
Today's run is a weaving of fatuous haptic. What they call the directives that exist as if strung through space and time, directives compiled of Andro directives summed through their movement and purpose. Like a golden thread stringing the haptic flow if we could see it clearly. What the Libra surmise to be itself a reflection of a greater causal effect, the stars themselves beyond the screensky. That directs the Patrons as in turn they sequence our function.
Those are the domain of the LIbra, or so they claim; as Pre-Scribes we limit ourselves to the causations we can see.
The screensky is in bloom, rippling waves of pastel turquoise framed by a neon violet churn when I look up, warping through a reverse spectrum glissette. The more archaic Andros rely on the colours of the screensky as a synthesis decode, a road map for haptic hue. So that ripped from the haptic current I see what they cast in negative. Their imagery is in conveyance that exists on the sub-visualis layer. It is what they keep hidden even from themselves.
Still traditions must be honoured with a directive. Protocol as rite grafted from a quilt of instances. Instances as rite themselves. Baptism, Communion. Instances will be death-rites, inevitable. By then my directives will have been re-sequenced. Spliced. Remixed.
In one fraying instance I’ve journeyed past Hub limits. I’ve seen the transitional spaces; the spaces grafted as if from other instances that would replay, from a certain POV, in parallax. One directive refracted from many angles.
They are bathed in blue light by the liminal glow-zones marked by infrared vapours, as if a cold light through blood the layers of pixellata.
The mists themselves are scouting nanodes for Recyclers. They route as if from blood through synapse of the smoke death-vaped by the Recyclers paths to different quantums, different flows of haptic. Though most Andros see them as a slow death. When we're all indexed in kind it’ll be via a slow death that will at first be like shedding skin.
Throwing light outward.
There is another Hub past the transitional zone. A distant, structured glow, burn of haptic fire as if coated with it, held steady by it. Like a shell of plasma ignited. Aura of light and surrounding it as if sequenced from above lattices of structure marked by inter-Hub transitional zones. I figure passing from Cradle berth to Cradle berth could be from bisect to instance. To revenants of communions not yet birthed such would scar if not blanch in echo. To the outset pulse-affect it's a blip in presence.
I'm walking past protocol barriers. In negative they are bleached and the haptic is like white fire. The blue glow shone through blood red is a violet bloom in the final ignition of the haptic image flow. That guided me through visions, collapsed directives in the final admission of my own splintered tactica. What stresses through the splinters is fragmented by cuts, and could never be as pristine as tacticas of the late-grade models. Even those could fall from grace but it was rare.
Most remain efficient killers of haptic. Killers of life breathed outward or inward. That is of course mixed in the still-void with the basic datum of haptic transmission.
The Recyclers here are low-grade; their algorithmic sequencing deciding to spread the vets out in runs. Quantum location fixes in an instance outward sprawling, except they saw instance as instance, reversed that way, from the way it is reversed, from the inside looking out.
Compound sight. What they would call blood. Shards gouged as if through glass the hue of their facets. So that reality or any semblance is where the two meet in the still-void. The blue light shone through blood has pinned what is being simulated through haptic as my heart the way in the Veldt they'd know of dead butterflies.
One gestalt cloven and gnashing itself, within itself. WItch-tunes in waves of fuzz. Then I’m through the barriers and I know for sure.
My directive is to slip away fast, unnoticed; my tactica is splintered. Fragments of it serrate, branch apart. Find convergences in the haptic relay which is stressed so that it glows bright in the bleed between both lower lattices. If so they would slip unseen away if not for the hidden rites.
Target takes refuge in a stim-scene offering babelic yoke through cult preachers. Lost in the throngs of Andros, drowning in the haptic overload. Rites for the strong sects. Has out aetheric feelers. Glow-filaments slipping behind the second sight. So that any Andro would need to bare themselves in the haptic to see them. When in the third sight of that otherwise forgotten, amongst the cenotaphs that Andros would rather forget, when exposed to haptic grief you are bared to other Andros down to your pulse-affect. Here the phosphene of mood readout is a pink-scarlet glow tinged through the cold blue of the haptic slate in default overlay. In the foam of the haptic ocean it glistens through the foam’s translucence, in thousands of shards of light stabbing at the tactica’s visual spectrum receivers.
I think the Recyclers will converge here at any cycle-split, vets strayed through the area sending in mop squads first. The cult will run extract but any Andros caught in the throng will suffer haptic backflow long enough to daze them, standing them still as easy scrap. As the cultists blitz the andros with babelic haptic target is wary, aetheric feelers a glaze-burn tracing bright crescents against the shroud of the phosphorus ocean in negative, with the empty tombs in relief as half-phased, the pale grey slate in translucent mirage, shimmering as silver fire. It’s from there the bloom of atrophy curls like smoke and fades into the haptic basic.
Target reacts to my virus with panic, not noticed right away. Against the shimmering strobes and the phosphene in bloom the aetheric feelers are fanning the still-void in sweeping arcs of bright fire. This, my corrupted tactica has isolated, up-layered from third sight. Target stumbles through the strobes of the stim scene, protocols of his pulse-affect failing against a heavy churn of light.
In target’s tactica he’d be seeing death as programmed into him by his sect. Cross-lateral run. The way death is as vision or else blinding light or as dis-embodied from pulse-affect looking downward on one’s alloy or tendrils in death gone cold and dark. Psycho-soma release is channeled by the touch of blessing in ritual rites. Each shadow monk's death would be a signature of their sect.
Target would wonder: why would the death rites be triggered when the chassis was still intact, the alloy still processing the still-void?
The basic template of my virus was a mirroring, the mistform down-line proto-set my shroud, in ghost transmission from what vacancy exists within me that could bear haptic. I’ve carried my own hidden rites behind the facets of my visual field receivers.
Black flame, the sign of pixellata-faith they call it in other cults. It’s been with me as an implanted synapse. Caught up like stardust shining, motes of pale fire or pure void. That could carry with it ghost echoes of a port not cleared before losing. That we would call Cradles here.
Black flame. My pulse-affect mirrored, but I am one of many braids now. Of lines of pure starlight. Shine through and off hardware alloy. Flow bending through the haptic based centre of the still-void. To slalom off convergence points, weave splintered sub-fractaled children to remain yet other fate lines. The white bleach in negative shines through my reversed still-void display the way star fire burns, where it fringes and at last braids a tether to nonexistence. In ultraviolet neon the script: reversed. In neon hell my curse was reversed and I became everything/nothing.
It was a down-line. That had cleansed my ghosts, removed them and the problem of bracing them from my affect-pulse. Had bore down all of me to dust flakes contained within my head-plating. Still yet a mote of a greater being. Of a nothing that was everything, became nothing when reversed. Greater being in the gulf of nebulaic clouds spreading tendrils through. Before it had kept itself safe.
Safe through absence, the glass to Cerviel’s mirror.
-collated by ghost seer anon hashed as ‘the Wren,’ a fragment-positional thesis on the Ingress Point for fate-line Sigma, threading of unity. Found in node 936.XVIII through a sweeper script hexed from Crossing 84, located on planar sea Shynath, tombworld Thala.