With clenched fists and battered hearts,
With our pain inflamed, the journey starts.
Find out where it all went so wrong,
Find out to whom your sins belong…
-Cas eld''Canduir, “Testify”
15-18
Justify
There was a particular wretchedness that afflicted a person consumed by grief. Both father and mother froze upon beholding the towering monster standing just beyond the doorway, eyes unfocused and misted with yet-tumbling tears. Though they were bare of obvious augmentations, their flawless skin and undoubtedly grafter-carved bone structures re-emphasized the place they occupied in society.
Beholding the ghoul that suddenly manifested in their family home while shattered from grief, all that came from the parents was strained silence.
“You killed him,” the mother whispered.
“You killed our boy,” the father followed.
Avo exhaled a frustrated sigh.
Looking up at the ceiling, he wondered if Calvino could see his glare. If this simulation bore any similarities to mem-sims, the artificial intellect likely could see everything.
“What do you want from this?” Avo asked, speaking to the unseen machine. “Waiting for me to kill them too? Mock their pain? Apologize? Does Voidwatch simulate their own snuff now?”
The voice of Calvino chimed in the back of his mind. “Oh, hardly. Now, you are disallowed from doing such things, and citizens are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish so long as another sophont isn’t truly harmed, but the point of this scenario isn’t about ethics.” The EGI chuckled. “Just saying the word is funny when contrasted with what you New Vultunites get up to. No. We challenge you to do something harder: I want to see if you can convince them that you were right to kill their son.”
That drove a surprised chuff from Avo. Unexpected. “Rules?”
“No rules, just limitations. You don’t get to jack into their minds. If you kill them, we’ll just load them back in–with the memories of their recent murders included. Don’t worry, these are sim-constructs. They’re based off real people, but–well, I suppose you don’t really care either way, do you.”
“Not really,” Avo muttered.
Facing the shivering parents again, he considered his approach as his Echoheads chittered in rhythm to the clicking of his fangs. He murdered their child. Such was the truth. Be they simulations of actual people or constructs created to test his patience for this experiment, he had devoured enough minds to know that this was well past the realm of reason and logic.
Justice was a nebulous entity in New Vultun, but these people were FATED. They probably thought of themselves as individuals who mattered–favored the Guilds and purposed for higher destinies.
It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about them. This was about him, and how he was to perform for his new voider consangs. They desired to see certain behaviors from him–though he was uncertain as to what demonstration of rhetoric or expression of emotion they desired.
What he could do was continue being interesting. It had served him well thus far.
“Yes. I am the one that nulled them.” Avo set the beginning of this conversation along the rails of brutal honesty. His words took a few heartbeats to sink in. The father’s hands twitched as he reached up to cover his mouth while the mother forgot herself and took a step forward. Her teeth were briefly bared, incoherent rage expressed in the white of her eyes.
She moved. Her body blurred. The implant firing in her neck would have been comparable to any used by a Syndicate enforcer.
Avo simply grasped her entire skull between his claws before her stride was even finished.
Lacking the proper implants to facilitate a lifestyle of violence made one feeble, while a lack of practice afflicted symptoms of predictability. Vulnerable to the world and all its torments. Bare of additional combat enhancements, for all the speed she possessed, the woman had the weight of a feather and posed a threat equal to that of a flea. Her head was small enough for him to wrap his entire clawed hand around it, and so fragile that it would pop if he only squeezed.
Still, she struggled with muffled squeals as she kicked and thrashed.
Avo fixed the ashen-faced man with a contemplative stare while he considered just putting the other out of her misery. A month ago, he very much might’ve. Now, the taste of her death would be bland. She posed no danger and her pain was a rerun of sorrows he saw across a thousand minds.
A mere ghoul would have taken pleasure from their slow torture before indulging in the finest meal of its lifetime. Avo, however, found little delight in snacking on lesser prey. Greater novelty could be found in completing the task at hand. Unable to draw on his templates, he could still remember some of their advice, feeling the echoes of their emanations pulse through him.
The dialogue was about priming and control. He needed to set the direction and parameters of the conversation. He needed to twist their emotions towards his own ends. To this end, he had to play the aggressor.
“Ask me why,” Avo began, taking two steps closer to the husband. The man backpedaled against his dead son’s jack station and swallowed.
“Wh-what?”
“Ask me why I nulled your son.”
His wife was growing tired, her hands losing what paltry strength they had as she tried to pry herself free from Avo’s clawed digits. Soon, she would have no strength left, he would include her as a participant instead of an impediment. This would prove to be a most exotic encounter.
The man bit back his hate and dread while his eyes flitted to the kicking legs of his wife. “Why…” the father swallowed, pausing as tear-soaked glints of agony built behind his eyes. Oh, how he looked like Essus in that instant. Hm. Perhaps the voiders inscribed such features in him as well. More points of symmetry to use as resonance against the ghoul. “Why did you null my son?”
“Because I wanted to hurt the source,” Avo snarled. Even he was surprised about the rancor spilling out from his honesty.
“Source?” the father squeaked, growing confused with this exchange.
His wife had stopped struggling by this point, and so Avo tossed her onto the chest of her partner, pushing both of them against the flashing stand holding the unmoving body of their child. “He was Crucible-diving. Did you know that? Riding the bodies of murderers and the murdered. Enjoying himself.”
They shared a look and went back to staring at him. A twinge of annoyance ran through Avo as he noticed the gibberish offered from the even pace of their thoughtstuff. Their minds should be like a sea in a storm right now, tossing and turning. Either Voidwatch didn’t know how Necrotheurgy worked–unlikely considering more than a few of their operatives were practitioners–or this was designed to be as pure a social encounter for him as possible.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Nonetheless, he pressed his attack. “Do you support the Syndicates? The murder of your kindred? The murder of other children like your boy?” He gestured to their son using an Echohead and they put their bodies between his reaching limb and their dead son again. No answer followed however. “Speak!”
The woman flinched. The father barked a seething response. “No! No, we don’t! We’re–we’re cyberneticists. I’m a cyberneticist! My wife’s security! We have nothing to do with the Syn–Syndicates! We’re just trying to live our lives–”
Avo threw his head back and laughed. “Trying. Living your life. This is your fault.”
“Oh, advanced victim blaming!” Calvino said. “Very impressive.” Avo couldn’t tell if the AI was being sardonic or not. “No, no. Don’t let me distract you. The other members of Aegis are very fascinated so far. Keep going and see this through. It’ll be interesting if nothing else.”
Interesting. Avo snorted. “So why was your son there?”
The woman spoke this time, her words an incoherence of rage and howling madness. She clawed at her own face and drew blood as she turned to stare at her dead child and back at the monster standing before her. Sinking to her knees, her blood-caked nails fell to get side as she hugged herself and began hyperventilating.
“Great,” Avo grumbled. “She useless now.” He didn’t need a Meta to know she was having a trauma break.
As the man knelt down, reaching out to instinctively hold his wife, he froze and a look of pain washed over him. Carefully, he stepped back and faced Avo again. Even simulated constructs feared the rash.
“What do you want?” the father croaked.
Audacity swelled inside Avo, and the momentum of his aggression carried forward. “For you to tell me I was right. That your son deserved this. That I was justified in killing him.”
The man’s eyes widened into saucers of disbelief. Sputters escaped from him as his hands opened and closed. He coughed, and his voice broke into a laugh. “This… I’ve gone insane. I’m imagining this. I have to be. I’ve gone insane.”
“Idheim’s always been insane,” Avo said. “I’m still here. Face me.” The father didn’t. Okay. Time to use older methods. “Face me. Or you cremate your wife too.”
The man closed his eyes and tears of stress began to fall. As he opened them again, he regarded Avo with a haggard expression. “No.”
“No?” Avo asked.
“No. Fuck. You. Fuck you, you godsdamned monster–you–you fucking–” He cupped his eyes and shuddered as a sob escaped him. “--you don’t get to do this.”
“Why not?” Avo asked. Now he took a step closer. The wife let out a piercing cry and clamped her hands around her ears. “Why not? Why don’t I get to be right? Why is it well that he gets to promote the murder of innocents and those without choice without punishment? Because he’s a boy? Because it wasn’t real to him? Because it’s entertainment?”
Avo was standing over the man now, glaring down at the human with baleful loathing. With each passing second, he found his own judgment growing clouded with scorn. A distant echo inside him–a fleeting whisper–told him that the act of nulling the boy was a magnitude deep into retaliation than any kind of true justice, but what true righteousness existed on Idheim?
“He was a twelve-year-old child,” the man said, the words wheezing out of him. “He didn’t know what he was doin–”
The ghoul’s counter-argument came in the form of a bite. Snatching the man off his feet, he tore a chunk of flesh out of the man’s shoulder. The tang of blood mixed with the soothing bitterness of adrenaline-taxed muscles rushed over Avo’s taste buds, and the deafening roar of suffering that came free from the man’s lungs served as a beautiful accompaniment.
His wife rose, broken from her catatonia by the suffering of her lover, but Avo pinned her in place using a single Echohead.
Despite the acceptable quality of flesh and the joy his base mind felt at inflicting such sudden cruelty, Avo pulled himself back from continuing down this track of debasement to see his point proven. He kept the man’s flesh clenched between his jaws but didn’t chew nor swallow. Instead, he thrust the man away from him as he spat the shredded clump of gore upon the juv’s body as an expression of the highest disrespect.
“‘I’m just a ghoul. I am compelled by urge and want to do this. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s not my fault.’” Avo flicked his tongue through the man’s welling wound and mocked him as he writhed in pain. “This doesn’t mean anything. Also has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”
He threw the man down beside his wife and took his weight off from them as he took a few steps back, reveling in his display of self-control. Inside, without his Conflagration actively distorting his urges and altering his cognition, he waited for the beast to claw its way out from the depths and try to assume control.
But the weight of his inner brutality never came, and he found himself standing, anxiously anticipating a spike of perversity that never arrived.
The beast was missing. Even when he rooted through his own thoughts and emotions for a sign of his old tormentor, he found nothing there. Nothing.
Coldness instead of triumph filled his veins. Something about this revelation felt… wrong. He never removed that facet of himself–always had to herd it or quell it somehow.
It couldn’t have just gone away on its own.
Was Voidwatch actively suppressing it using his Neurodeck somehow?
“I won’t do it” the woman stammered. These were the first coherent words she spoke in a while, and she turned to stare at Avo with a defiant glare. “I don’t care what you do to us. You don’t get to run from this. You don’t get to feel powerful. You don’t get to feel good.”
With his personal concern fading to the back of his mind, Avo considered the woman’s words and sighed. “Has nothing to do with feel. Has everything to do with action. Free will can exist. Free will can be fake. Doesn’t change the fact that he needed to die. He practiced the promotion of death. I simply didn’t want to do anymore dying. Our oppositions are… axiomatic.”
A series of claps sounded in the back of Avo’s head as Calvino hummed. “Nice. Big word.”
Yeah, the EGI was definitely being sarcastic. As if he didn’t have enough half-strands living in the back of his mind already.
“You’re not even a real monster,” the woman muttered.
Avo frowned. “What was that?”
“You’re not even a real monster,” she repeated. “You can’t even own up to this. The wrongness in what you did.”
“Our son might’ve done wrong, but why kill him?” the man asked. “You showed that you can control yourself.” He shot a wild-eyed look at the pulp of flesh that once connected to his shoulder resting on the boy’s neck. “You showed that. So why didn’t you consider showing my son the way instead.”
The momentum was shifting. They were pushing the questions back on him, forcing him to reconsider the situation. He needed to push back, he needed to unbalance them.
“Why. Am I his parent?”
Calvino mimicked a nu-cat’s meow for some strange reason.
Hurt by his words, the woman spat at his feet while the man whimpered. “But… but you have all the power. What’s the point of being a god if you can’t even change the nature of a boy?”
Something about that incensed Avo. Here he was, playing house with Voidwatch, watching as their dolls drifted from line to line as he tried to force them into a place of agreement. He knew this exercise was supposed to be impossible, but this provocation struck something even he was unaware of.
“Because I am not his master,” Avo replied. Resoluteness filled his voice. “I am power. I am a Godclad. I command blood and wind and shadow and lightning and more. I bend and shape minds with nothing but whims and memories. I am beyond death. But I am no one’s master. Not yours. Not his. Just mine. I am… the god of myself.” Letting the thought settle for a beat, Avo leaned over the two and let his ire flow. “At what point do we decide our own fate? At what point are we people? Was I not real before I had this Frame? Is even the choice of not being a sponsor to atrocity too hard a question for a teenage boy?”
Quietude. Mutual loathing. Just the way it has always been.
“Fine,” Avo said. “I’ll accept my transgression of murder. I killed him. I could have made his life better. But I want a trade.”
“Tra–” The man’s head came apart against the back of Avo’s hand. His wife began to scream, but the cry never quite made it out of her lungs before an Echohead drove itself through her.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Avo said, staring up at the ceiling instead. The boy, his parents… they were a smokescreen. The real conversation remained a step beyond. “You’re right. It’s impossible without tearing through someone’s will. But where does my agency begin? Where does theirs end? And where does your responsibility fall? Hm? Tell me of your power and justify leaving the meek to the Guilds. Justify yourselves to me as well.”
A few beats passed. A single string loaded through his HUD before Calvino finally spoke. “Well, alright then. Let’s do this.”