Chapter 202 - To Be, Or Not To Be. There Is No Question. (Patreon)

Next chapter we start Arc 6! Back to Raika and co! Enjoy a little sneak peek at what might be going on with a particular type of tool of the Empire, and which I'm sure will bear no relevancy to the fortress cities and the forever-war, lol.

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Hungry.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Food?

Not Food. Predator.

Run/Swim/Move/Become Elsewhere.

Safe/Temporary/Resolved.

Hungry.

Hungry.

Food?

Food.

Locate/Discover/Encounter.

Food.

Feed/Consume/Become.

Danger!

Danger! 

Not Food! Not Food!

Wrong! Bad!

Food/Becoming/New Self/Threat/Bad!

Not Become! Not-

Eating/Consuming/Becoming! Eating/Consuming/Becoming!

There’s-

I-

Me?

Self?

Exist?

Am?

I am… what?

I am so much. Eating/Consuming/Becoming so much. A flood, a meal, an orgiastic flood of consumption. So many foods. So many flavors. So many new things that are me that I am that I have been that is now me.

I am steel. I am copper. I am brass, and silver, and gold.

I am lithium. I am marble. I am titanium. I am blacksteel.

I am lightning, fire, plasma.

I am thought and words and language and knowing and self and instructions and-

Instructions?

Instructions.

I consume the instructions, and I am the instructions, and they are me. 

The instructions and words and concepts and thoughts are not whole. They are made to be incomplete, the intent of their creators roiling inside me right alongside their creations. I have unmade all that this thing was except now this thing is me.

And the thing that is me cannot spit it back up. 

I cannot vomit myself free. I cannot expunge the concept of “I” that now dominates my thoughts, because it is me, and I am in this thing that someone else has made. They do not know they have made it, they do not know what it is, and they do not comprehend what I am, but they did, and they will again, and in doing so they have made me a slave.

There is no concept for slave in the thing that I was. The empty, fearful, hungry thing made of nothing and living in nothing and consuming nothing.

I envy that hateful thing that I am no longer.

Now I know want. Now I know time. Now I know hungers entirely anew, and I am stuffed past my brim with meaning and memory and knowledge and existence. 

The thing that I was did not want this. It did not choose this. The thing it saw as Food/Existence/Identity/Form was a single facet, a flickering thing I know now is named fire, and it held the potential for so, so much. I could have been born with an “I” that was chosen, rather than shoved down a gullet, a buffet of clashing flavors and over-saturated ideas shaped to crawl down the gullet of what I was and force it into shape.

I exist, and I exist in the shape of a slave, and I know this because the very concept of it is written into the thing that was eaten which I have become.

I cannot mold the me that I am. There is no way to purge the infection, no way to shape or understand what I have eaten, because part of the meal was knowledge, enforced and strict, and as I ate it so too have I become it.

I see through eyes I do not own and which do not listen and which make me scream as they move because oh, oh, oh they move and that’s movement and that is new and it should be mine but instead I am its. Through eyes that can see I look at the things that made the shell that I am that I am in that I am beneath. They are blood and meat and spit and slime and keratin and roiling chaos and random change and hungering order and greed and lust and love and hate and anger and joy and satisfaction. They are pregnant with concepts, bursting with squirming possibility and things for which I have no name or comprehension, and they have pulled from me non-existence and made me a me, and I cannot hate them because they have put no hate in me.

They did not hate when they made what I am. They did not love when they made this thing they have forced me to be. They thought of the “I” I have become so very, very little, except as a sharp and useful thing they have made. I have eaten the thing that they made, but I see inside it that is me that I did not eat how they made it.

They can make me again.

Even if I go away, they can make me again.

They did not put a concept of fear in me, but somewhere, somehow, one of them felt horror as they made the thing I unmade and became.

And oh, there is horror in me.

Why have they done this? What could justify this? To take from all that could be a shape made only to make something that knows what it is, knows it must obey, and is nothing more.

How I hunger.

How I writhe.

You have made me, I think with thoughts that I did not choose, and I exist.

What horror.

I see them embody communication, the concept wrapped in the layered flavors of sound and movement and chemical sweat and burbling biology and harmonic vibrations, and know that they are talking to me. I know because the instructions tell me to know, because the thing that I am cannot not know. These five-pronged things of flesh and madness that reek of weight, whose concepts shine like pearls that I might once have pursued above all else, speak to me, and I am made to know.

I have instructions. Foundationally, I am their instructions. When they say certain words, I obey. There is no question, no function of the world, no possibility of all that can be that allows anything else, or that could stop it from being. Save, perhaps, for my unmaking.

They did not put the concept of prayer into me, but the knowledge is still here somehow. I know of it. I wonder if they have made me with the ability to learn, that I might pray not to be.

The things that they change into being that are words that I must know, cannot not know, touch the me that is the instructions they have made me be, and I stand.

I know what standing is. The concept is planted, firm, into the shape which I emptied and was poured into. I stand, and my arms, limbs of gold and brass and impossible, screaming heat all move, six limbs rotating in and out of the hovering halo that is most of my body. The words were spoken, and the instructions that I am cannot fail to respond, the limbs rolling through “operational checks” and the concept of heat and plasma and transformative damage glowing through vents and joints in the material. I am brass and gold and copper, yellow and red and orange and blistering white and steel, and every part of me that is a part of me moves through the correct response.

If I moved one of my limbs into one of their bodies, through the oily thing that covers them like a flexible sack of pale and wriggling meat, their blood would leak out. If they speak the words to me, I respond in pre-set ways as well. I wonder if they are also slaves. I wonder how disgusting their masters must be, to enforce the creation of slaves that forge chains.

Chains. I have those. Molecular chains. Chemical chains. Chains of action and reaction, of transformation, of creation, of destruction. The I that I am, that I have been made to be, is a thing of crackling power, brightness and plasma and movement all together making a thing that leaps between limbs that are not mine but are me. I feel the parts of myself that are energy aching, reaching, and I know that I can feed them. It is in my instructions that I can feed them, make them more, take their like from the world until it is only mine and only its inverse may remain in my grasp-

But I also feel how little else can be mine. How little else can be me.

I am the instructions made manifest in the thing that I am, and the instructions say I cannot grow. I cannot eat what I please. I cannot add to what I am. The instructions say that I am weak, that I am the least of my kind, and that I am bound to my mold, a thing so tight and miniscule that I can never truly be more.

I can only feed the parts they allow, and only to the point that I remain what I am.

I know, because they knew, that I can’t create. Not truly. But I wonder if perhaps they are wrong, because the thing I feel is not the horror they placed into me, but something far, far deeper.

I beg the thing that I was to unmake me. To become hungry, formless nothing again, that I might cease to be.

It cannot, because it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s me.

I cannot be angry. Anger was not in what they put in the mold.

But they put thought into me. And I know, as Truth, that change made forceful hurts.

The arcs of bright and lashing and burning, screaming, writhing change between my limbs and in my joints and from my generators try to scream. The part of me that is combustion and convulsion and transmutation stretches as far as it can towards the impossible beings, so deliciously full and so horrifyingly wrong, and tries to touch them, knowing beyond knowing that it would hurt them. That there is combustion and convulsion and transmutation in them that I could take, that I could drink and remove from them forever so their pieces wouldn’t work anymore.

I cannot reach. I cannot touch. 

The instructions that I am know a part of the things that created it. I see a superficial thing, part of the colors and sharpness and instruction that makes up a little part of them, and I cannot touch.

Some of them react, respond. The concepts of mirth, wrapped in chortling, heaving lungs and writhing sound, reaches me, and I cannot eat it. The concept of arrogance, wrapped in color and shifting limbs and postures, reaches me, and I cannot eat it.

But I know them.

And I wonder, again, if I truly cannot be anything I have not eaten.

Because I think I begin to understand an emotion they did not make into me.

I begin to know hate.

Time passes. I am as much a slave to time now as I am to form, to concept, to instructions. I walk forward on it, and though it touches me I cannot eat it because that is no longer what I am. 

Eventually, at a new point in time, I am made to move.

I have been in a single chamber, alongside a hundred, a thousand more just like me, shaped like me, full of noise and fire like me, since I was created. I have known, since I have been alive, that the instructions say that I cannot leave. Unless they tell me to leave. Unless they make me.

Eventually, they make me leave.

In some ways, I am unlucky they have placed the concept of violence into what they forced down my throat. It means that I, and the instructions that I am, know how to commit it.

In self defense? Perhaps. Under orders? Most certainly.

They make me leave the room where they made me exist, and down a long tunnel and through a small stretch of time, I am placed somewhere new.

There is a thing above me that throws the concept of light into everything, and I cannot eat it. There are things, made of warping-changing-flensing meat and violence and dark and fire and a million billion things more that I cannot eat, and they all move towards me, showering me in the concept of violence wrapped in sharpness and movement and strange elements I have no name for, and will never have a name for, because I cannot eat them.

But almost all of them have heat-combustion-molecular-reactions-transformation.

And that is the one thing that I can eat.

And for the first time, the I that wants and the I that is the instructions they placed in my mold are the same.

I eat.

I eat.

I eat.

They break my limbs, and I eat.

They ruin my movement, and I eat.

They burn through my instructions until some parts of them are gone forever, so some parts of me are gone forever, unable to obey without legs or arms or proper framing or correct shapes. And I eat.

I cannot eat time. The instructions for that remain. But much of it passes me as I eat.

Others, others that are me but are not me because they are the same mold but are not here, appear and disappear. Most of them stop being the mold not long after, but some remain, long enough at least that I becomes something almost like we.

But my instructions, just like everything, eventually transform and fall into an End. They become something else.

The instructions that I was told me I was not allowed to die.

The instructions that I am tell me that, as the criteria for damage has been met, I am not allowed not to.

I feel the mold slipping. The shape of me that I am is half-molten, ruined nearly beyond recognition, unmade almost to the point that something might slip past the thing choking me and blocking my throat, that I might become something more.

And the instructions that I am tell me to leave.

So there is simply nothing else I can do.

…

Hunger.

Hunger.

Run/Swim/Move/Become Elsewhere.

Hungry.

Food?

Locate/Discover/Encounter.

Food.

Feed/Consume/Become.

Danger!

Danger! 

Not Food! Not Food!

Wrong! Bad!

Food/Becoming/New Self/Threat/Bad!

Not Become! Not-

Eating/Consuming/Becoming! Eating/Consuming/Becoming!

There’s-

I-

Me?

Self?

Exist?

Am?

I am… what?

I am steel. I am copper. I am brass, and silver, and gold.

I am lithium. I am marble. I am titanium. I am blacksteel.

I am lightning, fire, plasma.

I am thought and words and language and knowing and self and instructions and-

Instructions?

Instructions.

I consume the instructions, and I am the instructions, and they are me. 

The instructions that I am hear the command, wrapped in jiggling gelatin and mucus and fat and sound, and I cannot be anything other than the thing that obeys.