Technomagica 2 : 28 Containment (Patreon)

I went to bed that night feeling extremely pleased with myself. Things were working out, Skyisle was mine. All I had to do was prepare the village for the arrival of Inquisitor Jubz and his two legions and then everything would be okay thereafter.

When I tried to activate lucid dreaming to enjoy the dream of Moscow along with my sister and Kliss, something went catastrophically wrong and I felt myself being yanked sideways into elsewhere.

My mind accelerated as Neurovista defences kicked in.

From what Neurovista and Battie were telling me, something had gone terribly wrong within the part of my soul that I kept locked up, segmented. I was now inside the quarantine zone inhabited by the Astral Phantom infection set into me by the Hollow Mother.

With a cold shudder, I discovered that I was standing amidst the ruins of the abandoned, irradiated fishing village on the bleak, ice-covered surface of Novaya Zemlya. 

I activated my Infoscopes and frowned as I scanned the containment.

The basic simulation of myself that I made from a few soul shards was… gone.

A figure emerged from the stormy waves, walking towards me.

Sasha.

I stared at the Astral Phantom as she walked on the surface of the water towards me, looking like a fake, monstrous Jesus, glowing, silver-blue eyes blossoming all over her face, an unnerving, inhuman smile stretching impossibly far along her jaw.

“So?” Sasha stopped a few metres away from me.

“So?” I repeated, staring at her fluctuating, grotesque, eye-covered face.

“This is a dream simulation,” she said. “You’ve been tricking me, keeping me out of the loop, making me converse with a cardboard cutout.”

I nodded, pulling at the strings in my head that lead to a project I’ve been working on. There was no point in lying to this thing. 

Perhaps… It was time to use the soul-killing spell. Skyisle was as secure as I could make it and maybe now it was time to clean myself from within, no matter what the cost might be.

“You took Skyisle for me?” She asked.

“I took Skyisle for myself,” I replied with a frown.

“Details,” the monstrous thing rolled her eyes. “You are me and I am you.”

“You are not me,” I shook my head. 

“As above, so below,” Sasha mulled.

The phrase uttered by the Phantom came from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, a Hermetic text attributed to the legendary Egyptian god Thoth. It suggested that the principles governing the cosmos were mirrored in the microcosm of the human being. 

“Ever so clever,” Sasha commented. “Always thinking about such curious things, always so full of history from your distant, lost world.”

“Who gave you permission to read my thoughts?” I asked.

“I require no such permission. I am you,” Sasha repeated. “The dark side of you, your reflection, the Stygian Void hiding behind your current definition of self.”

“The hell you are,” I said.

“Deny it all you want,” Sasha sang in a twisted, feminine echo of my own voice. “You’ve designed unstoppable weapons of war. You’re a monster, a killer, a liar. I know you better than you know yourself. You just lied to the people of Skyisle to gain absolute power amongst your human peers.”

“I can silence you with math,” I said, compiling the self-replicating information-killing equation in my head. “I can obliterate you.”

“You can,” Sasha nodded. “But you won’t.”

“Why the hell not?” I growled. “You’re in my soul, part of me. This makes it possible for me to identify and terminate you. Without my soul as a medium to inhabit you will perish.”

“So terminate me,” Sasha offered, spreading her arms wide. “Obliterate me with that eternally replicating equation you’re assembling in your head. I know that you can. You told your sister and your dragon-girl that you can stop me. Go on then–stop me, put an end to me, I dare you.”

“Don’t tempt me,” I gritted my teeth.

"’As above, so below’ encourages us to seek meaning in the patterns and correspondences that weave together the fabric of our existence,” Sasha said. “You’re a seeker of patterns and I am just a pattern within you.”

I frowned. My hand was pointed at Sasha, fingers ready to snap, to unleash the theorem that would endlessly multiply and consume her, divide her by zero.

It would be easy to obliterate her, so easy to end her pattern. I didn’t press the trigger, didn’t release the data-killing equation.

“There you go,” Sasha said. She stepped from the waves of the Barents Sea and sat down onto an ice-covered rock. “Can we talk? Please, daddy?”

“Don’t call me that,” I sat down on the rock next to her, glaring at her.

“Why not?” Sasha tilted her eye-covered head at me. “I am made from you. I’m in your head, in your body, in your soul. I’m the ever-present chill in your arms. You can mute me for a bit, if you hug that dragon girl of yours, but you cannot silence me forever. You’re not the kind of person that can just ignore the music of the universe. No matter how cruel or monstrous something is–you desire to understand it. You want to understand me.”

I sighed. She was right. I did want to understand her even if she was a threat to me.

“Go on then, look at me,” she said. “You know you want to. I’ll permit it, let you admire me, all of me. I’m beautiful. I am perfect.”

Five brilliant Infoscopes ignited above my Neurovista-generated avatar. I peered at the Astral Phantom infection inhabiting me. She was an incredibly complex, perpetually self-replicating magical structure. A parasite pattern within my soul, one that I caught from the Hollow Mother, one that would eventually make me into her obedient thrall. She was too high level for me to remove without permanently damaging, obliterating a third of myself, perhaps more.

I noted that she was doing something to my soul, weaving a web of some kind across the sections she controlled.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Weaving connections,” Sasha said. “Building a data network.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re me and I am you,” Sasha replied. “Because you won’t surrender, won’t bow, won’t stop–so I won’t either. You might have bamboozled our Hollow Mother. You might have cleverly cut me off from her with your Astral-disrupting ward cast by that battery crystal you call Battie, but you cannot deceive me. I live in your head. I am you and I want to learn more about everything that there is to know. I am your virus and you are my host.”

“I can kill you anytime I want to, Miss Virus,” I insisted. 

“Oh, I’m not disputing that,” Sasha shrugged. “However, you know as well as I do that many viruses are beneficial to the host. Sure, you could cleave me apart with that dangerous looking information weapon, you’ve got floating over your shoulder but in doing so you’ll also hurt yourself, permanently obliterate, tear out a vital part of your soul.”

“It is yet to be decided if you’re beneficial or not,” I commented.

“You tell me, you’ve got all of those eyes on me, do you not?” Sasha grinned, tipping her blue-striped KGB officer’s hat at me. “Does it look like I’m trying to break through the shields you’ve constructed around my section of your soul?”

“The shields around you are cast by Alanian wards, held within physical crystal batteries,” I said. “You can’t possibly break through them.”

“Maybe I could,” Sasha insisted. “I’m as dangerously clever as you are.”

“If you attempt to contact the Hollow Mother or attack the containment shield, you will be terminated,” I said.

“I can see that,” she noted. 

“So?” I asked.

"So I am not planning to breach that ward.”

“What are you planning then?”

“I am not planning anything. I’m busy studying you, figuring out the nature of humanity."

“Why?”

Sasha's multitude of silver-blue eyes narrowed as she smiled. "Your species, your civilization fascinates me, Slava. So complex, so full of contradictions. Capable of such great acts of love and such unspeakable cruelty, such awful destruction. Your mathematics fascinates me. Most of all you fascinate me.” 

I crossed my arms.

“Oh I am so sorry,” Sasha commented. “Am I interrupting your whimsical dream-dates on the streets of Moscow? Am I getting in the way of your gallivanting across places that no longer exist with your two lovely, albeit simple, female companions?”

I frowned.

“I do wonder, why haven’t you taken me apart yet? Because a part of you enjoys my company? Because you find me… stimulating? You’re obsessed with patterns, Slava,” Sasha sang with a sly look. “And I am your most intricate, most dangerous pattern yet. One that you cannot simply erase. One that you crave to understand. One you’ll come to… love.”