{Loading…}
{Loaded.}
[>>Now replaying: Log 1.100.epi]
Date: 8.9.175 AA / 4404 LTC
Location: UNNAMED_DOMAIN(LARES)
//Violence, swearing us to Silence.//
[>>DATA CORRUPTED]
[//2]
[>>You have chosen [Oris - The Domain Hungers] ONE! :> - A Digital Machine Built from Flesh, devouring Divinity!
[
>>Thank you for using MemOS! It would mean a lot to us if you would rate the support you received.
And as always: Remember to Remember!
]
{CONSUMED LOGIC: 300 LB}
{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 1190 LB}
{Memory: 90/100 LKB RAM}
//Oris//
Current exchange ratio: 100 LB per MW
Current power consumption: 100 KW/h
Current power reserves: 20 W /1 MW
1. Convert 100 LB to 1MW
2. Begin Automatic conversion
3. Set Logic threshold(s) for automatic conversion.
4. Feast! :D
5. Exit
I mentally hammered on the first option as quickly as I could, before the warbled sound of faraway bells could even register in my mind.
//Oris.//
>>Exchanged 100 LB for 1 MW.
Current exchange ratio: 100 LB per MW
Current power consumption: 41.00 KW/h; approx. 1 MW/day
Current power reserves: 999998 W / 1 MW
{CONSUMED LOGIC: 100 LB}
{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 1090 LB}
The sound of distant, warped bells became louder as the heart began to grow in the fridge.
Feast! OwO
I immediately slammed the fridge door shut and pressed my back against it. The metal felt cold and stuck to my forearms in that icky way I really hadn’t missed at all.
Having pulled back their scarf just in time, Chris beeped at me, clearly relieved, despite the eldritch horror growing in our fridge.
“Do something!” I hissed at them, but they just jumped on the kitchen counter and looked at me curiously as something tried to open the fridge door I was desperately holding shut. My feet, braced against the floor, began sliding.
“Chris!” I said again, but they just tilted their head and beeped, perhaps a bit exasperated. Then they wrapped one end of their scarf around the fridge door and suggested opening it.
I gave them a wild shake of my head.
“What are you doing? It took the entire Old Guard to bring this thing down! Help me get rid of it!”
Chris just looked at me as if I was a bit slow, in that way that only cats can. And perhaps I was. Whatever the heart had been before, I had successfully installed it as a program, hadn’t I? But could I trust it? All the programs I advanced before had just been inanimate objects, not semi-sentient viruses, or cyber-fungi or unspeakable things from beyond the veil. I think I was clearly right to be worried out of my mind. I didn’t know nearly enough.
But Chris did. And I had promised them I’d trust them, cat body or not.
“If this thing is aggressive, I’m going to make it eat you first,” I snarled, then stepped away from the fridge before Chris could say or do something witty.
The door opened not with a bang, but a whisper. Just a slim crack. The light was still on, but a bright blue now, intensifying the longer I stared at it. When I moved to peek inside I couldn’t see anything beyond the cyan glare, and had to look away a moment later.
When I blinked the afterimages out of my eyes, a nice bowl of fruit sat on the kitchen counter. It had kiwis, bananas, and some apples.
Absolutely none of these fruit grew on Tobes.
Feast! ٩(＾◡＾)۶
I tried to ask Chris what was going on, but they were missing. After a panicked second of looking around so quickly my neck protested, I found them sitting in the corner, tail wrapped around their legs and scarf neatly folded into a bow, enjoying what looked like bloody chunks of meat from a cute cat bowl.
My heart finally stopped trying to drill through my ribcage.
They caught me staring, licked their lips, beeped once, and resumed eating as though everything that just happened was completely normal.
Now that my adrenaline levels were dropping like a daytrader’s portfolio in a stock market crash, I pinched the bridge of my nose against the mounting headache.
“Once I get enough Logic, I am going to upgrade your program until you get a speech module, and then we will have words, Chris,” I said.
“Boop,” they said between bites.
“You think this is funny, don’t you?”
They stopped eating, looked at me and blinked slowly, then said “Beep.”
Then they went back to their food.
“Jerk,” I said, rolling my eyes. And yet, I couldn’t quite stop myself from smiling at the familiar exchange as I walked over the the bowl of fruit and grabbed an apple for myself.
My eyes flicked to the fridge again, but after nothing happened for a minute besides Chris crunching through some cartilage and making me jump, I relaxed. Sure, I could have gone and inspected the fridge a little more, but I wouldn’t touch it if I couldn’t help it.
“I do want to talk to you again, though, Chris,” I said, resting my butt against the counter and crossing my arms, then rubbing the apple against my sweater. “I would advance your avatar now, and not having a voice sucks, I know, but… I don’t know when I will gain Logic again and…” I trailed off. If anyone understood my predicament, it would be Chris, after all. When there was no response, I stopped trying to clean the apple and raised it to my mouth.
I froze with the fruit centimeters away from my teeth. Should I be eating this? Why was I even trying to eat this? I didn’t need food, did I? Was this a trap?
My mind began spinning again, trying to look for potential danger everywhere until my thoughts became nothing but static pulling me everywhere at once. Underneath it all, like the hum of a powerline, there was a need for sleep, growing with every passing moment.
I lowered the apple again, rested it against my chin. There was that faint fresh apple smell… I had been through so much, and I hadn’t even begun to sort it all out, but when I thought about taking a rest to process what happened, my mind rebelled, scattered. No, now was not the time. Not yet.
Now was the time to eat an apple that possibly came from an eldritch dimension, but most likely was just some sort of digital metaphor for power consumption or whatever.
I sighed and took a bite. It tasted really good. There were no maggots or worms, and I didn’t immediately fall asleep, either. I chewed, and still, nothing. Then I swallowed, and all that did was make me realize how damn hungry I was.
I took another bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
Then another. Chew. Swallow.
With each repetition, my thoughts slowed down just a little more, my shoulders dropped a little, and briefly that tension headache from earlier returned with a vengeance, but then that faded as well.
When I held nothing but the core in my hand, I opened the cabinet underneath the sink and threw it in the compost. Then it occurred to me that I had just done all that without even thinking about it, but decided to continue not thinking about it. I didn’t want to go down yet another rabbit hole.
I washed my hands in the sink as best as I could without soap, then dried them on my pants.
My mom would have killed me.
Wait, pants?
I held up my hands and immediately recognized them because they were mine. Not that the brown-skinned ones hadn’t been mine. They’d felt more than right, towards the end. But these, I knew like… well, the back of my hand. I formed a fist, opened it. The feeling was so normal, I hadn’t even recognized the difference. Then I touched my face, my nose, my ears, my hair. It all felt like me, just like it had in Zephyro's Domain, but here the hair I pulled in front of my eyes was the strawberry blond I’d seen in the mirror for all my life.
In here, I was me again, wearing a black turtleneck sweater and slacks… Just like back home.
Thoughts of all the things I had left behind on earth hit me unexpectedly, but a few deep breaths managed to keep down the tears. I was too exhausted for this bullshit. If I started now, I’d cry myself to sleep.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
I pushed myself off the counter with an effort of will, dabbed at the corners of my eyes with a scrunched-up sleeve, then stretched. It felt good. Part of me still wanted to go through my agenda, to see what I still had to do, but the reality of it was that until the kids opened the laptop again, there was nothing I could do, except for exploring my Domain.
Holy shit, I had my own Domain. If I could accomplish even a fraction of the wonders Zephyro had created…. Despite the exhaustion and the remnants of my stress, the idea filled me with a sensation I hadn’t felt for a very long time. It was that feeling you got when you started on a new product, and all possibilities seemed wide open. It also felt like standing on that clifftop with my friends, swearing that oath to each other. Even though the memory was bittersweet, I recognized that electric tingle of potential that made your lips curl up into a smile. In moments like these, it was easy to forget the past and the future because the world, seen through wide eyes, seemed to be made of nothing but wonder.
Like all moments, this one had to pass, too, but it left behind a part of itself that I could cherish through reverie. Just like Lorelye, Jirrie, Stax, Patti, Olre, Iruli, Dezin, Vintas, Underbrook, Tuyk, Zurne… and Zephyro.
“Come on, Chris, let’s explore the house.”
Beep!
And so we went on a tour together. I quickly realized I had been right, and that the house was completely unfurnished, except for a couple of items. First off, a gigantic TV dominated the living room, on the wall I couldn’t see when I entered. There didn’t seem to be a remote or any way to turn it on, but the brand name —“Ardor”— made it easy to guess its function. I only hoped Ardor still worked in its old way, too.
If you came in through the front door and weren’t in a hurry as I’d been, you’d notice a coat rack on the wall, holding the futuristic coat that was Arx. A small wireless router that I was pretty sure represented Nexus hung above the door. It was wired to the doorbell (which was weird) and the letter slot, (which made no sense whatsoever).
Turning around, I walked down the corridor, through the rest of the house. There was a door that led to another room behind the kitchen, and further still, the corridor opened into a half-room that I had no idea what to do with, yet. From there, one door led down the stairs and another back to the living room. I debated looking upstairs first but then decided to check out the basement, finding two more bedrooms, a laundry room, and a mud room. I knew it was called a mud room because a couple of friends in Chicago had one, but the fact that the floor was nothing but packed dirt, and a wooden staircase led outside would have been another hint.
Upstairs was even more curious. The stairs went on for far longer than they should and led into a corridor holding 6 doors on each side, terminating in a spiral staircase straight out of an old lamplight movie. I tried the doors, but they were all closed, except for one. Opening it revealed an unending void, its paradoxical floor glowing a welcoming teal. I closed the door again and rubbed my temples.
When I opened the door once more, the room was just as it had been, and Chris slunk between my legs and entered it. The second they stepped inside, they started to float and once they reached the height of my head, they said “beep” and floated toward me. Once they crossed the doorframe, they started dropping, and I hurried to catch them in my arms. That seemed to have been the entire idea because they made themselves comfortable immediately.
I snorted. “You wish.”
But when I started to let go, they extended their claws, and I immediately reconsidered my approach.
“Jerk,” I said, and Chris rubbed their head against my chest in response, then closed their eyes.
I stepped across the threshold myself, expecting to float as well, but all I did was stand there, black cat in my arms. “Chris, can you change the physical reality of my Domain?”
“Boop.”
“Shame. That could have been great for a number of things. But wait, why did you float in here, and I don’t?”
No answer but a judgemental stare that suggested the answer was obvious.
“This is your room, then?”
“Beep.”
“Fair enough,” I said, not bothering to fight them about it. There had been enough space to go around even before I discovered the spacial nonsense going on in here. Plus, Chris was Chris. If they wanted a room in my house, they’d get a room.
I decided to grab the room opposite theirs, but when I awkwardly tried the door (it was hard to turn a doorknob and not drop the cat, which was another reason I preferred door handles), it didn’t budge. As did neither of the other 6 doors on this floor. Annoying, but not something I needed to worry about in the immediate future, except for the fact that I didn’t know where I was going to sleep if I could sleep at all.
That riddle resolved itself when I climbed the staircase at the end of the hallway and arrived at a landing in the attic. There were no windows, just a single, massive door. Twice as tall as I was, double-winged, and made of frosted glass it was nothing if not imposing. There also seemed to be nothing behind it, the glass showing nothing but pitch-black darkness. And yet, when I reached out for the door handles (vertical ones, like they have in businesses or official entryways,) the doors cracked themselves open for me, and a sliver of orange light illuminated the dark antechamber.
With a frown, I pulled the door open and stepped into an office, of sorts. The room was at least twenty meters long, likely much longer, and about a third as wide. It ended its stretch against a glass window that filled the wall from edge to edge, bottom to ceiling. And what a ceiling it was. As my eyes traveled the height of the window, I had to crane my neck for a glimpse of its terminus. Behind the window was a view of a world I might once have known, or not. It was difficult to focus on it because it changed all the time. The only thing that stayed constant was the gentle cyan glow rising from the bottom of the view, losing itself in the dark above.
And then there was the symbol, of course. As far as I knew it was impossible to set a stained glass mosaic into a single window without warping or breaking it, but in a Domain, that didn’t seem to matter. Hundreds of thousands of thumbnail-sized glass chips in reds, oranges, and blues formed a gigantic, blazing torch behind the only other feature this room had. A heavy desk, made of either metal or wood, dominated the far side of the room.
I gingerly stepped into the room and absent-mindedly noticed that Chris had jumped from my arms, staying outside. I wished I could have stayed outside, too. With each step, I had to fight to keep moving, scared that somehow I would disturb the sanctified silence of this room and stir its wrothful aura. And yet, I had to push on. My feet sank a little into the carpet, reminding me to tread lightly as the Torch flickered in the evening light outside. As I came closer, I saw the mosaic wasn’t made of glass shards at all, but postcard-sized pictures, each replaying a different scene. I knew they were my memories without having to step closer, and I wished nothing more than to turn away and not see all the details of laughter and loss, miracles and mistakes. I couldn’t, though.
Not while Pharus, radiant, still hovered above the desk.
So I clenched my teeth and put one foot before the other, adjusting my cuff links. I dimly registered I was wearing my suit: the sharp one that made me look even taller than I was, all lean attention and judgment.
My back straightened, and my steps quickened. Clothes do make the woman, after all.
When I finally reached the desk, there was a temptation to just grab the Torch and run, but I knew that would be a mistake. Instead, I forced myself to walk behind the desk and, turning my back to the memories that flickered in cyan dusk, placed both hands on the table.
I stared at the Torch for God knows how long.
Because I didn’t know if I should take it or not.
It was stupid, perhaps, or so a certain memory kept whispering into my mind. I wouldn’t be able to survive without it. My weapon. Standing in front of it made me sweat, but my hands felt icy cold. I knew it would burn me. Not today, perhaps, but someday soon.
I could leave it, close the door, and never return, just live out the next 1500 hours.
But then who would uphold my promise? Who would defend the kids? Who would find out what happened to my real body, and Novus Apex, and the Mage Lords, and Tobes itself? Who would make things right again?
Well, who had started this entire mess to begin with?
I smirked ruefully, thinking about all the bad decisions I had made lost in furious bliss.
Giving into my anger had been my mistake, there was no doubt. So I had to fix it.
I reached out and my fingertips had almost touched the handle when I realized how circular my logic was, and how easy the solution. Stumped, I stood there, heat wafting against my features, bathed in orange and cyan.
Then I began laughing. I laughed like a madwoman until I began to cry. All these decisions I had made had been mine. I had chosen to give in to the anger. I had chosen to kill all those Mages. I had chosen to slaughter the innocents of Veltruvia and murder my only chance at peace. And that was just the beginning. Over and over and over I had chosen the anger. It wasn’t some external force that pushed me to do things, it was me. I had chosen to be the anger, again and again. Chosen to be the Tyrant Divine. Because it was easier to just give in instead of fighting back. Because if I stopped then, I could have stopped all those days before, and not done all of those terrible things. And with each and every choice, the anger had gorged itself on the regret it begot, became stronger, and made the decision easier, until it stopped being a decision altogether.
The promise fulfilled itself.
But that wasn’t the biggest, most terrifying realization.
I let my hand fall to the table, where it lay trembling with the sobs that wrecked me.
I’d said I wanted to just be me, back in Patti’s arms, but who was that?
Without the anger, who was I?
I took deep, steadying breaths, trying to keep the panicked sobbing under control.
Eventually, I succeeded.
With gritted teeth, I reached out to the Torch, one shivering finger extended.
It felt like I was pushing my finger through burning molasses, but eventually, my fingertip met the small button on the side of my weapon, which gave way with a quiet click and nothing else. The flames stopped immediately, as did the roar of flames. I had been so used to it, I didn’t even hear it anymore. The silence that followed, however, was deafening, and terrifying, and hallowed, and thrumming with regret and sorrow.
And… hope.
I grabbed the Torch. The handle felt cold to the touch, and the weapon weighed as heavy as always in my palm.
{You are now an {Administrator} of UNNAMED_DOMAIN.}
{Salve Salvatrix.}
Turning with Pharus in hand, I searched the memories that flickered on the window for one particular picture. It didn’t take me long to find it.
Brown eyes, deep and so full of hope, staring beyond my razor-shell, seeing a struggle I had chosen to forget, and welling with sorrow for the woman I could have been, the realization I had to make, and the struggle to come.
I let out another shuddering breath and found twenty-four other eyes just like Zephyro’s. Each with their own little twinge of hope and sadness. Lorelye trying to laugh my pain away. Underbrook, a silent water so deep I could have drowned all torment in if I had known. Stax, dancing and prodding, trying to find a weakness he could exploit. Jirrie, always wondering what he was doing wrong. Patti, of course. And Olre.
Olre, who had been angry enough about my surrendering to my own demons that he had tried to set me on fire, in a desperate attempt to purge me of their influence before they consumed me.
I could have saved them all.
I found two more pairs of eyes, and two empty sockets, weeping blood.
My fingers traced Pharus’ handle. If I kept thinking like that, I would enter the spiral again. This, I realized with amused dread, was a decision. I wished I knew which of the millions of options was right. In the end, however, I had already made up my mind. I may not know who I was or who I wanted to be, but I knew I didn’t want to be angry again.
It wasn’t worth the lives.
————
A minute later, I closed the door behind me and found Chris waiting for me in solemn silence. I leaned down and picked them up, and they didn’t so much as beep. They didn’t say anything the entire way down to the living room, either.
With an effort of will, I called up memOS’ help menu and went through its quick introduction. I learned that as an operating system, memOS was responsible for handling files, distributing hardware resources, and being a platform for every other process that ran on it, potentially allowing for synergy I couldn’t even wrap my mind around. It wasn’t important right then and there, either.
I did, however, find out that memOS allowed me to access the menu of every program I had installed, which included Lares. The interface for the Domain had hundreds of settings, from tying the position of the sun to the outside world, speeding up or slowing down Domaintime at the cost of increased or decreased CPU cost, and setting access privileges.
I would worry about all of that later. Right then and there, Lares allowed me to personalize the Domain in exchange for Logic.
[
//Lares:
Rendering new object: Comfy Couch…
[A comfy couch, with 3 free* throw pillows!]
Superlogical Alteration complete.
Total cost: 285LB
]
{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 805 LB}
The couch appeared in my field of vision as a blue outline, and I set it down in front of the TV, then slid it back against the opposite wall to have a chance to even see the entire screen.
I threw myself into the cushions and rolled onto my back. They were indeed very comfy.
Through all of this, neither Chris nor I had spoken a single word. I’d just held them close and petted their fur, managing the alterations with my mind alone.
Now, frightfully devoid of distractions, I lifted the cat above my chest and looked into their unknowable cyan eyes.
My smile grew wistful.
“You’re not my Chris, are you?”
There was a pause of perhaps three or four small eternities.
Boop.
I’d known, of course. I’d known for a long time. I hadn’t wanted to be certain, but now I was, and it was as if someone had started blending my guts. My eyes felt hot.
“Do you know where my Chris is?” I asked, trying not to choke on the words.
Boop.
I pulled the cat close to my chest because I could no longer stand to look into its deep, cyan eyes.
“Do you know if they are still alive?”
There was no immediate answer.
Nor was there one in the minutes that passed until I cried myself to sleep.
[>>Defragmentation in progress…(1%)]
[//end log 1]