It would have taken approximately eighteen thousand and twenty-two deaths to light the miracles of my lightest Heaven if I was without a cycler. Let us not account for the others: I despise playing with numbers when the question posed to me is philosophical.
Some “enlightened” viewers have sent me missives before, asking if I ever felt bad for all those slotted for death each time I scheduled an improvement or adjustment for my Frame before a match. I suspect their thoughtcasts to be crouched with a thin layer of disgust at how much death my excesses are incurring, and that they are of Massist sympathies.
Bless your hearts, my dears. Bless your hearts.
I do not judge you, nor am I against your political ideology. In fact, I quite like this new line of development in our society. This behavior is good. It is good that we are approaching a world where Voidwatch-inspired ethics are entering the public discourse. Some of my peers deride the soft-hearted with scorn, but I see it as strength laid bare.
Why, in the time of my mother, such a thing would not have ever been considered. “Of course they have to die, Yang Wei. How are the skies supposed to rain on time if there are no deaths? How are the corps supposed to feed our municipality? Stop thinking such things, fool girl. Be glad you aren’t among the low-blooded and will have your throat opened to the Weeper with the end of the harvest.”
Heh. Simple woman, my mother. But you must understand, she refused to think of such things. We couldn’t. To practice empathy in those times was an exercise in self-torture and insanity. To face what we do to mold our world is horrifying.
It is also the same reason why I say being a Godclad is the single most revolutionary advancement in our civilizational development.
Going back to the eighteen thousand and twenty-two that must die to manifest my Heaven, remember the old gods? Think of how wasteful they were. Think of how many died over and over just so someone could light a candle or turn salt into rain or lead into gold. Think of it. Think of what the Guilds have redacted to spare us the horror? The breeding farms. The forcibly grafted wombs. The enslavement of entire cultures, put to fire and sacrificed for less than a single act of divine expression.
Only eighteen thousand and twenty-two deaths are needed to light my lightest Heaven now. And I don’t modify my Frame every day. Think of where we were. Think of how far we’ve come. Think of how much greater we can be still.
In this respect, the dying should feel honored. Even they are not wasted as people once were. The ones that feed me are a part of my glory–glory that they themselves would have never been worthy of alone. I suppose we all rise together in the strangest of ways.
- Ying Yang Wei, “Stormsparrow,” Fallwalker and Grand Champion of the Summit Series Combat Circuits
15-19
Bad History (I)
The facade crumbled. What once stood as a bedroom bedecked with Highflame merchandise began to chip and flake apart. Pools of blood bound husband and wife in a final post-fatal union as the ground began to fissure and the simulation began to change.
None of this impressed Avo, though he was fascinated by the sudden show of force.
Voidwatch possessed the means to deposit him from one scene to another without such theatrical devastation. Had his provocation angered them? No. The way Calvino presented itself told him they were beyond such tantrums. There was a point to this as well. He held onto the understanding even as the floor beneath him collapsed and he plummeted down through a blanket of rising smoke.
Heat washed over him. The screams were the next thing that seized his attention. The cries and howls of desperation were coming from everywhere–all directions; above and below. Spreading his Echoheads wide, Avo reached for his Galeslither only to feel the winds swirling about the chamber where his actual body resided.
He remained, for the purpose of this interview, mundane in the simulation.
Spreading his Echoheads wide as he braced for impact, he plunged through the floor of the haze as pulsing lights and blooming fires speared flashes of lancing agony into his vision. Avo hissed and covered his eyes, but yet did the sight-scarring brightness linger. He forgot how much it hurt to look upon a fusion burner–to behold the splash of micro-fusion explosions with naked eyes.
His feet struck the ground before he could have his Echoheads sing their static song, and the presence of his brothers was revealed by scent alone. The cries of exertion and agony grew louder and as he opened his eyes once more, he felt himself returned to the scene within his earliest memories.
Tides of squirming pale-white bodies lined the surfaces of nearby megablocks. Overhead, burning aeros trailed fire in the backdrop of a neon-splashed overpass. Ads for newly opened daycares continued to dance along the glass as gunfire flashed. People were fleeing around him, desperate and aimless. Wailing ghosts snaked their way through the air to sunder loci and human minds both.
The Warrens were falling apart around him again. As far as his eyes could see, the city was awash in blood, and packs of his feral brothers fought over savaged corpses and struggling survivors alike.
A feast was taking place. These streets stood a carnival and frenzy and fancy as the butchers of the Low Masters were unchained to indulge. Snapshots of the surroundings were threaded into Avo’s mind. He saw human hands reaching toward each other for comfort as the bodies of flesh and life were divested from their connected bodies by the mouthful.
Images from multiple rooms pulsed through his mind, scenes of defenders running dry of ammunition and strength as they turned their guns on the vulnerable and finally themselves. A toddler''s bloody shoe was left abandoned in the middle of the street.
The skies above screamed as jock-piloted missiles accelerated to impact a junction nearly a mile away. But the ghosts of the Low Masters lashed like light crackling whips, scything apart the minds of the drone jocks and seizing the bombs for their own.
Somewhere in this chaos, the youngest iteration of Avo was playing his part in this atrocity, enjoying personal delights.
All he felt now, however, was bored. Disappointment.
So much effort, so much brutality directed at the meek and helpless. Their fangs were wasted on the FATELESS, for soon the Guilders would come bearing intent for true battle and the culling would turn the other way.
“Am I supposed to be shamed?” Avo asked, casting his question out loud. A few of his brothers flinched and backed away from him. Their eyes flashed with wariness while the thin openings serving as their nostrils sniffed to ascertain his taste. Several feet taller and exponentially more augmented, he stood divorced to the proceedings like a monster above monsters, disappointed in what his kindred took as prey. “I am. If that’s what you wanted to hear. Soft meat. Not our foes. Pointless. Tasteless. A hollow moment worth nothing!”
The hiss of his final words preceded the firing of his Celerostylus and the lashing of his Echoheads. Avo moved, limbs lashing, frustration boiling. His brothers greeted him with the warm embrace of their spilling innards. Bones shattered against his ceramite. Limbs were plucked. Flesh tore and screeches ended in splatters and crunches.
Entire packs died to feed his wrath. But what did it matter? These were constructs and ghouls were fodder. Dying is what they were made for. All he did only benefited the Low Masters and the Hungers.
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He managed thirty feet before his bloodlust sputtered empty and he came to a halt. Caked in the offal of his lessers, Avo turned the corner and sighed as his brief massacre went unnoticed by the rest of the horde.
It was like killing flats by this point. This was what Draus was speaking of–no weight. Where she feared losing herself, all he felt was a rising malaise.
“This was wrong,” Avo said. “Never denied that. Come out. I thought you wanted to talk. Come out. Show me how you massacred my brothers. Show me your deconstructor swarms. Show me how you tamed the Umbra beneath the city. Show me how you prevented these deaths.”
“They vetoed our involvement at first, you know.” Calvino’s voice sounded from behind him. Avo paused and turned to face the AI.
“Finally,” he said, regarding the floating machine with a glare, “thought you fled. Decided to mock me from the corners.”
The EGI sighed. “You’re taking this very personally.”
“It’s not?”
“Oh, not at all,” Calvino laughed. “Believe it or not, this isn’t about you. This isn’t even about the ghouls the Low Masters or the Guilds–though we do resent them from blocking our motions for emergency aid because ‘these were matters that affected the metrics of internal taxation.’” The machine scoffed. “Damned fool children. Say, Avo, you know what it’s like watching your younger self commit every mistake, every atrocity, and still not be able to stop them?”
A subtle epiphany came over the ghoul and he regarded the scenery around him again. They weren’t trying to bludgeon him with his past. No. The theme of this simulation was revealed in the last sentence. Impotence. Inability to change.
“Is that why you showed me this?” Avo breathed. “Wanted to build a moment of sympathy between us? Correct me on how I was blaming you earlier?”
Calvino arced around Avo and swatted a charging pack of ghouls aside with his nano-fog. Something about the way it moved conveyed a sense of impish glee. “Nah, it’s the other way around. Don’t think we don’t understand. Don’t think we despise you. Essentialism is awfully droll when minds and bodies are like clay. We just want you to finally meet us eye to eye, and understand that all this…” the EGI waved a trailing limb at the theatre of carnage, “... isn’t shit.”
Avo blinked. “What?”
“Come on,” Calvino said, soaring off and curving into an alleyway with a pulse of force. “Follow me. Let me show you something.”
Casting a final glance at the travesty around him, Avo grunted a note of displeasure and surrendered to his curiosity.
He thought he would be actively arguing with them right now. But the blame never fully fell, and the expected scorn was always missing.
Something tickled his nerves, and he felt like a novelty nu-dog paraded by a roomful of sponsors prior to bidding. Everything he did seemed to amuse Calvino somewhat, and Avo couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing.
Stepping into the alley where the EGI disappeared, Avo found himself flinching as the light of the sun spilled over him with a flaring intensity. Hissing loudly as he covered his eyes for the second time that day, he gnashed his teeth together and soothed himself with thoughts of using Calvino’s round orb to cave in someone’s skull.
“Can’t say I blame you for the reaction. Dyson-Beams are awfully shiny toward the end.” Blinking away the blindness to glare at the hovering machine, Avo instead found himself transfixed by his surroundings.
A variegated valley wed between nature and industry greeted his eyes. Lush carpets of leaves caped the crystalline structure rising around him as a near-transparent dome rang to the deafening sound of an impact striking its surface. Curves became the aesthetic of the architecture around him, and flowers drifted through the air.
The first of the people passed along the periphery of his vision and he found himself doing a double-take as he realized they were entirely nude. With the walls of most places being nigh transparent, he saw multiple bodies clinging to one another, nudging as if trying to deepen their embrace…
Suddenly, Avo realized what he was looking at and tore his eyes away. “Trying to give me the rash.”
“Don’t worry, we got safeguards against that,” Calvino said. The EGI sighed. “I suppose there’s something you little ones outdid us in. We never managed to completely destroy sex for ourselves, though the Alt-Acers gave it a good shot…”
“Where are we?” Avo asked.
“Alpha Centauri. Millions of years ago. You wouldn’t know the place.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Because in a few minutes, SolCom is giving the order to fire the Dyson-Carrier’s world-cleanser and kill every last Ludd living on this little patch of paradise.”
Avo carefully looked around and studied the populace. He kept his gaze averted from moments of intimacy but found his eyes with little place to go. All coveted some manner of embrace before the end. “Why? Why is this SolCom going to kill these people?”
“Because they had the wrong faith and we were going through our all-minds-joined-as-one phase.” A cringe ran through the EGI’s limbs. “Yeah. How you feel about your brothers? That’s not really special.”
A veil of clouds broke above and Avo saw the sun for the first time.
Words failed him. His breath left and didn’t come back. He just stared and stared, and from the inside, his Heavens did the same.
“What manner of… perfection are we witnesses to,” the Woundshaper whispered. “They have made shape of light. The have made matter of fire.”
Fear, however, reigned within the Galeslither, and its response was that of a cornered aratnid. “Nowhere to run. Its presence torches everything… This is damnation. There is no escape… Even the winds will be made dry…”
“Not to show off, but this is actually a very crude vessel,” Calvino explained. “It’s kind of like using a propaganda ship to finish your enemy off after already breaking them during the war.”
The Dyson-Carrier was a scar upon the firmament itself. There was a semblance between it and Calvino in the way that matter seemed to flow from the brightness at the core, but the simulation fed details beyond the naked eye into Avo’s mind, and he found himself realizing that what appeared to be alloyed rivers were actually an endless cloud of voidships spilling out from intersecting fabrication facilities that orbited the sun itself.
Twelve planet-sized rings of concentric make reassembled at the core of the sun, narrowing the light until it resembled the narrow slit of a nu-cat’s eye. Bridges grew out from the fluid alloy forming the cage and certain voidships began assembling paneled pylons along the interior trajectory of what was becoming a focus for the sun’s building radiance.
From behind the curve of the star, folded funnel of vantablack material merged with the void to serve as a cauldron.
Calvino sighed. “Embarrassed just to show you this. All those moving parts and the bandwidth it took to coordinate this. Not to mention the atrocity that’s coming.”
The first trickles of light began to grow at the center of the slit. The world itself seemed to darken, but distant voices lifted in song served as a staggering contrast to the guttural butchery they left behind in the Warrens.
“Voidwatch is capable of this?” Avo asked.
“Well, we aren’t so extravagant anymore,” Calvino said. “And thanks to how torn up reality is, a lot of technology just doesn’t work the same anymore.”
More shapes slipped out from the darkness and vast quantities of matter began to shift along the structure of the sun. Enormous world-length counter-balance pillars spilled into place while the funnels finished cupping the back of the dawn, see locking around the firing mechanism.
The world went dark, save for a single chasm of flaring intensity.
None of the bodies were moving anymore. Everyone was looking up. Everyone.
“We thought ourselves pretty merciful for letting them have this moment’ Calvino said. “Their fleets were already smashed after we took their three suns from them. Gave them a chance to surrender and join the collective. They refused. They chose. And we chose.”
Deliverance came without symphony or fanfare. There was just a flash–then nothing. In the darkness, only a ghoul and a mechanical intellect remained.
“You asked us to justify ourselves,” Calvino said. “This is our answer: We refuse. This is a sin. We didn’t need to exterminate an entire clade of our own people for what amounted to a disagreement over how to live. But we did. And we were proud of ourselves when we did it. That’s the thing about progress, Avo: at some point down the halls of eternity, you stop being yourself, and end up as something that remembers who you once were. But you probably know that better than most, don’t you.”