Chapter 12-13 The Matryoshka Eaters

Chapter 12-13 The Matryoshka Eaters

I have no idea why the hells Voidwatch made those things. None. I dont even want to know how Highflame managed to strike a deal to afford them.

What I can decisively say is that you dont want to get hit by one of these. Not one damn bit. Theyll grind against your cognition for starters. Sure, if you got a Meta your mind wont be overwritten outright by whatever tech-virus-shit inside those shards, but damned if they arent loud. And damned if they dont drill through your wards.

The best way I can describe them is Like being caught between two flechettes trying to drill through each other. Or the same one collapsing inwardyoure basically being compressed by an endless stream of self-loathing and self-mutilation.

For as long as the nanos run inside you, youll feel them. Screaming in your head. Screaming at each other. Trying to break free using your memories and mind as a fulcrum.

I saw a FATELESS catch one to the eye during the fourth big one. Poor juv running the battlefield trying to snatch something worth a few imps. The stray screamer skipped off something and just hit him.

Poor little bastard went down and started clawing at his face immediately. Started screaming words I couldnt understand. My ghosts didnt have shit for me either. Then, he took a piece of metal from the ground and started cutting himself. There was nothing but hate there. Just hate. Hate spilling out from him as his mind was eaten away.

Hate all the way up until he died.

I know that kind of hate. Felt it when I took a knife to the half-strand that sold my eldest. Same feeling. Same rage. Same burn.

Like you would give anything else to hurt them the way they hurt you.

-Quail Tavers on Ego-Screamers

12-13

The Matryoshka Eaters

Reaching deeper into the helix rewarded Avo with further mysteries. Though frozen, the phantasmal substance comprising the entwinement felt closer to grains of sand than the connected streams spun from a human mind.

Again, the voices repeated their pleas, but the words were more slurred this time, less coherent.

As he swept his ghosts through the structure, he studied the helix in detail and found himself unnerved by its structure. It wasnt quite like what Walton had passed down to him. There were far too many steps in the shape of its ladder, and loose particulates slithered free toward nowhere in particular like dissolving contrails.

For all his knowledge of Necrotheurgy, for all his experience hard-earned and gifted from his father, he had no concept of what he was beholding. He felt like he was only glimpsing the blurred outline of the full picture, unable to penetrate the deeper secrets beneath the surface, hiding the organs that supported the entire system.

Nonetheless, he continued sweeping through his new prize with care. Each movement rattled his wards, but in this frozen state the trauma was in stasis rather than a flux, and it seemed castrated from its prior expression of free will.

Drilling deeper into its core, he found conflicting details pulled from its mem-data. Each bridge along verticality was manifested from two conflicting memories, both riven with pain, but each different in artifacts and sequence. Each presented scenes of torture and agony from the perspective of a victim, yet playing them simultaneously inverted the positions of both characters.

So deprived of fresh memories to cycle, much detail had been lost to the scenes. The settings were rooms of error-stained monochrome, with only instruments of bloodletting coming into focus. The two individuals, likewise, were stitched together from a loose collage of traits that Avos own Metamind had to fill in.

The only thing each section knew was that they hated the other for making them suffer and that the only way to be free was for the other to die.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

But that was impossible, for the memories blended into each other, fusing across the totality of their beings beside specific points of separation that reminded them they were once two.

Even broken, the construct had to be the single most sophisticated he had ever encountered. It would be like linking the minds of two mortal enemies and thenover the course of months if not yearsoverlapping each and every recollection they had until they thought they were themselves and their enemy at the same time, aside from a few anchors of clarity that served as engines to propel the hatred eternal.

Yet, even after getting all that, Avo wasnt sure how this entity or entities could be self-directed. Ghosts were without will, they adhered to a thinking minda choosing mind. But the fire had made its own decisions and even exhibited open displays of emotion.

He expected such a response from rival Necros, not a hyper-advanced phantasmic. But with each anomaly discovered, he suspected he captured something that didnt fall into either category.

+Please Kill them We dont want to be together I am me I am me+

Cautiously, he cast his own ghosts out at it, carrying a message. +Can you hear me?+

His emanated thoughstuff spread through the helix from threshold to threshold. It didnt respond. It continued drowning in its own pain.

As the begging began to loop yet again, he took a chance to see if he could affect it another way.

Drawing most of his ghost out, he loaded Secondhand Fatality into his Ghostjack and channeled it into the frozen fire. Synaptically charged volts carried the memory through his Saguinity as each speck of blood crackled like a series of conduits. The death of Lucilles sister impacted as lightning trying to hew fire.

The ghosts carrying the pattern splashed apart.

And then, as the bridge in the helix snapped out of place, it roared back aflame.

Immediately, it latched onto the ghosts he used to deliver the sequence and he released them from his Metamind. His Echoheads chittered his curiosity as he watched it scream and burn, the battle rejoined as traumatic destabilization reawakened it.

Still, even as it died down to sputtering motes, he could not perceive where the source of its will lay. The only thing that was truly clearer was the helix seemed to be mainly burning because it was fragmenting each sequence of itself out of existence trying to kill the other.

As if its entire structure was engineered paradoxically for the organism to survive long enough to win, but winning meant suicide anyway.

He let out a breath and waited for Chambers to respawn.

After that, he repeated the process twice more for posterity,

Avo found his curiosity aroused again. Illegal?

Against the Sophont Rights Charter signed by the Parliament of Polities under the Watchers, Sunrise began, we thus agreed to avoid any and all technologies that would infringe upon the individual rights of a self-aware being, such as but not limited to rewriting memories, inflicting deliberate neurological trauma, forking their ego without permission, uploading another ego into a mind without permission, and inflicting ego-death on another sophont being.

Silence followed.

It lasted but a second before Chambers broke it with a sharp trailing whistle. Damn. I think Avo here does all that shit. Does this make him some kind of space terrorist or something?

All the bees comprising Sunrises collective turned a few degrees to face Avo. Technically, yes.

Draus and Chambers both snorted at the same time. The Regular at least had the shame to look bashful at sharing a point of amusement with the half-strand.

Alright, Draus said, rubbing her face. Glad we all got to listen to Necrojack talk, but theres a point that were not gettin to. She lifted a finger and pointed toward Kaes burning mind.

The Agnos just smiled demurely. II dont mind waiting. If if Avo says he can f-fix it I trust And I like hearinguhit reminds me of how I felt withthaumaturgy.

How you will feel again, Avo said, refocusing on the Agnos. As her mood glowed even brighter he ushered her toward a new cell. Take a seat. Shouldnt take much. Just need to choke it right as it comes out with the static. Draus. Chambers. Come.

They settled into place one final time in a new cell. The arrangments began in silence as glass slid into place and Chambers began psyching himself. Avo engaged the Thoughtwave Disruption just as Draus invoked her canon.

Again, his thoughts skipped, and again Kaes mind was swept clean of harm.

As soon as his own focus returned, his ghosts cycled into action. Interconnecting himself, Chambers, Draus, his new locus, and Kae, he sent a cast to the Regular instructing her to part the glass so he could connect and boost his haemokinetic mass. Afterward, he dove into Kae's flame-ravaged mind and found the crossing where her exocortex funneled its static flood over into her brain.

Planting the stilled ego-screamer in the way was a simple matter. The more difficult part was timing the release of his trauma just as the static passed over it. If he did it too soon, it would eat into Kaes mind immediately and spread through her while the other entity choked and froze right at the precipice of entry.

Too late and it might wash over too farso far, he still had no way to interact with the static thoughtstuff. Denton possibly could, but she lacked the capabilities to engage the fire on his level, his speed.

Ultimately, all it took was a little timing to settle, and when the flood came, he loosed his trauma and reignited the dormant flame.

It roared high within Kaes Meta for a beat before a static-coated presence suddenly swallowed it. Then, as if a rock placed in the way of a river, the injections of restorative memory from the exocortex swept through the breadth of Kaes sequences and began regenerating all she had stored within its contents via deployments of mem-data.

In the real, the proof of his success was obvious. A full second passed. Then another. Her mind didnt burst into flames. Carefully, Avo plunged one of his ghosts into the newly frozen entity and found himself only able to peer into it halfway. A good portion of it was still hiding within the exocortexs threshold.

This would require Dentonor maybe Sunriseto aid him in extracting.

But it wasnt moving. It was still. It was frozen. And it was broken.

Again, he had choked the flame on itself, and this time, Kae was free.

So long as no one struck that portion of her mind with a severe enough trauma, that was. So far, the exocortex wasnt restoring her palace or phantasmics, just memories. She was filling back to wholeness but was even more vulnerable in other ways.

He took the opportunity to sequence an Auto-Seance, a Phys-Sim, a Quicksand, and an Incog back into her mind while tuning some basic functionality back into her stabilizing Metamind. Much of what he delivered upon her might be considered overkill for her supposed lifestyle, but she walked a path with him now.

He didnt want her to be found lacking when his fathers other selves inevitably returned for what they thought was theirs.

With final additions made, he exited her mind and watched in satisfaction as her accretion filled with thoughstuff. This time, the core behind it did not burn, and the flow of her thoughts didnt come in spraying sputters. The pond of her mind was constant now. Intact. Persistent.

The entity that harmed her was quelled.

He released his canon and time returned to its usual stride.

A gasp greeted him, Kaes voice choked with emotion at this long-yearned release. So long, she said. Closing her eyes, tears escaped. She covered her face and coughed out a few sobs. I havent heard myself think for so long.

Chambers looked at Kae and then back over to Avo. So did it work? Did we do it.

Avo grunted, seeing no need to sully the pride he had in his work with wasteful words.

Draus was of a mind. All he got from her was a cuff to the shoulder before she patted Kae with a comforting hand on her back. Alright, there consang. Told you Avo had it, didnt I? How you feelin?

The Agnos was still covering her face. But from her rebuilt mind trickled the first emotions Avo tasted.

They were not joy and relief as Avo had expected, but horror and sorrow.

Something was wrong. Something remained hurt inside her.

But it wasnt the flames doing this time.

I remember Kae swallowed. The weight of her rage thundered louder with each sequence restored in her mind. Her heart twitched faster and hard. Her blood coursed through her veins as if she was getting ready for a fight. She pulled her hands away from her face, and for the first time, Avo beheld fury mantled upon her once gentle face.

She didnt even have the right creases to snarl. I remember what they did to me what they had me do! I remember everything.