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
