12-12 A Theft of Fire (II) (Patreon)

The Reverie Mark-II Exocortex is a pretty handy piece of kit, but it won’t be replacing your Meta anytime soon.

It's a tangible implant, main benefits being:

1. Ease of access; no need to schedule an Agnos appointment to get one burned in
2. Direct installation; any grafter can connect it to you
3. Dual-aspect connectivity; you wanna connect to machines using ghosts or whatever weird tech stuff Omnitech is simulating? Sure. Do it.

The problem is expense. This thing costs a million imp. One million. That money will buy you a tac-nuke.

I mean–those aren’t that expensive, but still. Five last gen rigs at least. Decent ones too. I’m talking the Sang Gorillabadger series or the Highflame Ascender Starfallen Warshell.

Oh… oh, of course Omnitech cultists are gonna start spamming their “disgust” emotions into my lobby. Am I wrong? Is it somehow cheaper for you?

No?

I’ll be able to access the Noosphere?

My kindred through Jaus, why would I want a shittier version of the Nether? I got enough mem-cons to contend with. I don’t want whatever weird sloppy-second viruses you guys stole from Voidwatch.

-Omnitech Reverie Mark-II Exocortex Review

12-12

A Theft of Fire (II)

When Chambers resurrected, he lacked any memory of his immolation.

Whether that was the Frame protecting him from trauma or just a byproduct of all those memories burning away Avo couldn't say for sure, but it certainly did remove the need to convince the man to try again.

Bereft recollection of his mental collapse and anguish, a certain glee began to build inside the man as he threw himself at the task.

After all, if whatever killed him didn’t hurt anymore now, who’s to say it ever hurt to begin with?

Kae protested on his behalf, her resolve more shaken than his from what she witnessed. Watching Chambers rendered hollow in mind and animation inflicted a sympathetic agony inside her. She must’ve been seeing her own demise, in a sense – the outcome of her existence should she have been without the exocortex.

Ultimately, there was a point to her discomfort.

Avo wanted to see how self-aware the entity was, and if it shifted to her horror, if the entity caged inside her mind would give off some kind of reaction to watching its “twin” or divided self die.

After another two burnings, it was clear that it didn’t much care at all. There didn’t even seem to be an indication that it noticed the “demise” of the other flame. Drawing these details together, Avo theorized he was dealing with a being only scarcely aware of the world beyond, seeking only to accelerate its own demise by burning down the enclosed cognitive neuro-systems it lived in.

Fascinating. Delightful. Revelatory.

After killing Chambers for a third time, he brought the man over into another cell and began a new trial.

This time, he would establish a connection across the two rooms before having Draus seal the second cell. From there, should the entity begin spreading its crawling fire through Chambers’ mind again, the thoughtwaves would be disrupted.

“So, uh,” Chambers mumbled, as he fidgeted in his seat. Even without memory, a building nervousness was creeping through him. “How’d the last two times go? Did… did I do well.”

“Depends,” Avo said, the bulk of his focus directed toward configuring the second cell’s locus. “Withstand? For a moment. But it adapts fast. Your mind is a solid collapse. Confuses it. Teaches it to break one sequence at a time to collapse your mind. Intelligent thinking. Automatic problem-solving. Ghosts would need another will to direct. This entity adapts in its attempts to die. Nothing beyond that.”

Chambers nodded slowly as if a studious pupil receiving tutelage from a wizened master. A wizened, people-eating, mind-torturing, god-channeling master. “So… I did good?”

A distant memory slipped out between the flowing folds of Chambers’ surface thoughts. It spilled over into the Sanguinity, and Avo found himself staggered by the intimacy it betrayed.

Withdrawing haemokinetic tendrils from the hanging locus, he examined the escaped sequence in the depths of his Meta and bade it to run in a newly expanded entrance manifested in his cog-feed.

The contents played from the perspective of a far-younger Chambers. Only running the surface-level functions of the vicarity, Avo kept himself at a distance as he cycled through the scene, studying the squalor the boy lived in.

Forty square feet of room for mother, father, two sets of grandparents, and little Chambers himself. Three sets of beds collapsed into the walls. One closet. No cooking appliances. A single transparent cleaning unit that was obviously unbolted and smuggled into the room.

His home resembled little more than a storage room because it was one. They had a shelf drilled in along the far wall of the room holding seven different urns with seven different names Chambers could no longer remember. Beneath the shelf was taped a patch of cloth that Chambers had painted crude imitations of the sun and sky.

Avo thought the art lacking, even for a child.

They didn’t talk about his siblings much, but his mom sometimes looked at the shelf when Guilder news chimed in their propaganda, proclaiming their glorious victories during the Third Guild War.

Avo integrated himself deeper into the memory and his ghosts filtered in in additional details from the scene using secondary mem-data he accessed directly from the man himself.

Chambers’ father was a rare presence in the small confinement of his childhood home. As were most of his grandparents. Things usually only got cramped by the time it was night and everyone came back to sleep. With the coming of light, most of his grandparents fled the abode driven toward separate hustles. Most worked for one Syndicate or another, serving carriers of specifically sequenced mem-cons made to wander the territory of a rival, or selling themselves as volunteer jock pilots for whatever block-raid had an opening.

His father was supposedly a street squire of some renown, but most of the time the man bled their imps on drinks and joy. His mother wrangled several jobs from the sanctuary of their home while caring for little Chambers.

He remembered her jacking to the body of Wights to serve as “soft obstacles” for Crucibles. Those jobs were rough. He learned to play alone in the corner while his mother finished her weeping in the bathroom, scrubbing her hands raw to clean blood that just wasn’t there.

Her in-block mem-data smuggling gigs made her a lot fewer imps, but at least those didn’t make her throw up sometimes.

There were also a few other jobs she did. Ones she had to visit the grafters for. Those ones were really big money, but she lost all energy to play with him afterward.

He hated those jobs the most.

When she was done though, she would always put him on her lap and watch some kind of stream with him. When the block’s cog-cap wasn’t strained, they could sometimes pick up shows that the Tier kids got to watch: fully supported vicarities that let you feel what it was like to live during a certain time or fed new words and maths straight in your brain.

More often they get memories copied from other memories, viewable only as dancing phantoms of holograms projected from the entertainment system.

It rattled always and broke often. They needed to shut it down every fifteen minutes or the locus would go spinning out from its port. Grandma said there was something broken inside the machine, but she didn’t have the time or the energy to fix it.

So that was the way things wore.

Until Chambers made his decision.

One night, while mom and dad were screaming at each other over something Chambers willed himself to ignore, he positioned himself next to the spinning locus and studied the rings. He wasn’t an engineer or a Necro, but he thought if he could just find what was broken, he could tell his mom or dad or someone and they’d make it good. That he could be helpful to everyone instead of doing nothing.

That night, he saw something stuck between the metal rings spinning beneath the locus. He saw what looked like a needle trapped between the sections, vibrating with each rotation.

Cautiously, he reached out and fit his small fingers between the cracks. And pulled.

The rattling stopped almost immediately. Joy spread through Chambers as he held up his prize toward mom and dad, toward his grandmas and grandpas entering the room. It was a small pointed rod. Like one of the things his father’s gun shot.

“I fixed it,” Chambers said, giggling. He pointed at the near-silence of the spinning locus, proud of his dead. “I fixed it.” His eyes locked on his father as the man rubbed his tired face, brushing his oil-slicked blonde mop of hair back over his head. “I did good, right? I helped?”

His mom stepped away from the bed while his dad just scoffed and turned over in bed.

The feeling of happiness sputtered and choked down to embers as his father shuffled once and went to sleep. His mother salvaged what little she could by picking him up and asking him to show what he pulled out.

The mem-data simulating her person was a blur. A miasma of interlacing traits and features that didn’t mesh. Chambers couldn’t remember what she looked like anymore. Not fully.

And in her place, Avo’s Meta had automatically plugged in aspects of Walton to flesh out the woman’s form. The end result was dissonant in more ways than one. And fascinating as well.

Avo stopped and regarded Chambers in silence, studying the exaggerated nonchalance he held himself to, tasting the effort the other man spent on being a caricature, building distance from himself, within himself.

There was little alike between them in nature, nurture, or physicality, but the desperation of acceptance–the need to obtain someone else’s approval…

That Avo understood even without feeling the requisite emotions.

But where Walton gave all he could for Avo, Chambers found no such relief.

Strange city, New Vultun, where monsters were more loved than man.

“Yes,” Avo finally said, reaching out to pat Chambers on the shoulder. Even though he didn’t feel like it. But this was more than feeling. This was proper. This was the world Avo wanted to see.

Who could Aeodon Chambers have been if he got to behold all the colors he wanted?

Nervousness and false bravado melted away as the man’s eyes fell to gaze at the clawed hand placed upon his shoulder. A tremble ran through his lip. A moment. Second. And then, much like Chambers’ mother, it vanished without any more fanfare.

The boy dissolved. The half-strand resumed his place. Chambers leaned back in the chair and sighed with satisfaction. “Well, you can always count on your consang, Chambers. Come on, Avo. Light me again. I’ll get the fucker this time.”

He wouldn’t. But he sure believed it.

Avo corrected his judgment. Perhaps the boy wasn’t far from the half-strand at all.

The ghoul finished priming the locus and it began to flash. He constructed a new link directly across the cells as a fiber of blood solidified through two doorways.

Like fluid injected through a tube, the entity shot through the bridge without any consideration toward its path. The moment it struck the outer layer of Chambers’ thoughtstuff, he dissolved the connection to Kae and signaled Draus to begin the next steps.

Fused plates of mirror-bright glass snapped shut over each other as the doorway vanished as well. Light swept through their sheens as junctions formed, the Twice-Walker jumping from each connection like a leviathan emerging from the depths.

A primal fear swelled in Chambers as he inched back, eyes fixed on the shimmering Heaven made from jagged wings and gleaming eyes. “Jaus. That shit never stops making want to piss–”

The thoughtwave shredded through both their focuses just as the entity bit into the first layer of Chambers’ outer memories.

It promptly went out like a hurricane slapping the burn out from a candle.

And when Avo’s thoughtstuff filled his accretion again, he realized it wasn’t returning.

Without an exocortex, the Nether-culling blast had stripped the entity from existence.

Chambers blinked. “Did… did I beat it?”

No. No, he didn’t.

“Yes, Chambers,” Avo lied. “You did.”

The man’s smile grew wider. The burning did not return.

How very interesting…

***

The act was repeated twice more in two other cells with similar effects each time. As things stood, the exocortex did more than let the entity nest within its depths, it also protected it from the cognitive winnowing inflicted by thoughtwaves.

From there, his experimentation developed, and with it was Chambers’ mind further altered.

Avo played a careful game at first, resequencing burned memories using his wealth of ghosts. To his delight, the fire revealed something of a personality, tearing itself from its present path to lash at the structures it thought destroyed. Its movements went from creeping to snake-like, the inferno rearing high and cracking back like a whip.

While it was diverted of focus, Avo mended and reinforced some of Chambers' mem-cons and altered the architecture it had been clawing through.

Staring down at the being from the bulwark of the ex-enforcer’s instabilities, Avo admired the pace at which the flames unstitched his ghost from existence. Part of him was interested in deploying the fire in place of trauma-patterns from the raw potency it presented. But another thought occurred to him: what if he could culture it differently? Have it spread and grow new structures instead of just destroy? Use as something akin to the Lushburner and Woundshaper both, but specifically for the Nether.

He didn’t know if such a thing was possible, but seeing as it held will and mind both, if he could direct it…

Avo shook the desire from his mind. He needed to secure it first. Then conduct more experiments and reviews. Only then could further configuration follow.

Upon its return, he felt its building outrage as artifacts of blended memories dissolved within its crackling form like phantasmal steam. More than annoyed, it was outright furious now, and drove itself hard against the remolded mental pathways.

The Woundshaper laughed approvingly. “Yes, master, yes. Trap it. You can learn much from another walks your halls. Their appreciation. Their habits.” It paused. “Their failings…”

As the fire roared to a new intensity, another matter of interest seized Avo’s attention. The static was fading out of the entity, like a curtain of rain that was breaking to reveal the supple flesh beneath. Further details of note were highlighted by his cog-feed; the flames weren’t just eating through things, but cycling other sequences into itself. It was surviving on a diet of hardened thoughtstuff.

Little wonder why it burned so hard–it wanted to die, but everything it touched ensured only persisting growth.

That, on top of how unbroken streams of fire seemed to act as if a singular entity gave Avo a strange thought.

Waving at the glass with a haemokinetic tendril, he had Draus drop the passage so he could link with Kae again. Fusing a small single-facet locus next to him, he threaded a sting between her and his new instrument as the scant dozen ghosts he filled it with began burning immediately.

Following a hunch born of his observations, and inspired by the agitation of the entity, he brought another of its… nodes to bear. The link to Kae was dropped, while a bridge formed between the locus and Chambers.

At once, two things began to happen.

First, the newly lit flame–static-skinned and blind to what lay ahead–roared out, seeking a final escape expressed through embers.

Second, the existing flame–infuriated by new fronts opening where it was certain it had burned through–ripped itself free from devastating Chambers’ innermost memories to crush what it had supposedly missed.

What happened next was exquisite.

Flame met flame in a thunderous clash and the spearheads of both fires shattered in an eruption of fragmenting ghosts.

The smaller conflagration shuddered as it tried to bear the weight of its larger self at bay. It tried flanking its larger self but found the new limbs it was sprouting encircled in turn. It tried to retreat but found the path behind it sealed off. Seeming more confused than terrified, it buried itself as hard as it could against the larger alternate, briefly halting the greater inferno’s advance before solid thoughtstuff swept over and swallowed the static.

All of a sudden, the flames froze in place, no longer cycling through memories, no longer moving. Pain filled the air. Naked. Raw. Primitive.

Trauma bled out from the fire–the entity. For what ghosts still circulated in its burning structure, their forms began running memories of death and fratricide. Then patricide. Then suicide.

Something shattered inside the entity. No longer did it push forward. No longer did it fight. It just burned thoughtlessly, oozing trauma into the Sanguinity.

Avo hissed a triumphant laugh. The sibilance of his mirth made Chambers shiver in her seat and he noticed Draus and the others studying him through the unfurled doorway. He knew his kind had such ugly laughter, and a gleeful ghoul usually suggested someone was missing a few parts of their body.

Not so in this case.

Not yet.

Tentatively, Avo cast his ghosts out directly into Chambers’ mind and ordered them to interface with the unmoving fire. Anticipation clutched his pulsing veins and he prepared himself to sever himself from this dive if need be.

But no such necessity followed.

The ghosts sank into the frozen flame, and instead of being consumed, he felt himself ricocheting off a wall of bubbling trauma.

WARNING: UNKNOWN PHANTASMIC CONSTRUCT DETECTED

->SCRYING…

As his Metamind worked to dissect the structure of the semi-alien cognition, it detected similarities between it and the Secondhand Fatality trauma pattern.

Such a thing made sense. Lucille felt her sister die, and the entity was made to devour another variant of itself through Avo’s deception.

Perhaps it wasn’t as ready to die as it thought.

Or perhaps death wasn’t actually what it sought in the first place at all.

He extracted it then, blasting it free from the sequences it was still attached to. Chambers shuddered and foamed at the mouth before pitching over. Didn’t matter. Avo transferred what he needed into a newly constructed locus.

Currently, it was frozen at a capacity of two-hundred and ninety-three ghosts. No longer was it burning through them either. Instead, everything about it seemingly went into stasis.

Once his wards adapted to its trauma, he pushed himself past its outer layer and dug into the entity’s internal structure. Casting his Whisper ahead, he used the phantasmic to gauge what he might be facing within the unknown depths.

Then, he himself was halted by the way its deepest memories were interlaced.

All consumed memories were captured, filtered, and converted into the shape of a twisting helix of trauma that ground its sequences out of existence at the core.

A thought echoed. Avo heard two voices, one deep and once soft, both thick with agony. +Please… free us. Kill them. Please… we just want to be ourselves again…+