“I got the stick?” Commander Taera asked, “Are you kidding? I got the biggest, shiniest golden carrot imaginable. Sure, the stick is there, but look at that carrot!” Her eyes were tearing. Was that genuine emotion? I mean, she was an empath BEFORE the system existed, and basically manipulated people this entire time. It seemed unlikely.
I shook my head, “Now I am confused. A shitty manual, and wooden tier? What’s your carrot?”
She almost glared at me. “Divine Paladin Kushiel. You are 40 years old. Try using your brain. Your pain is no excuse for you being this stupid.”
I thought about it. Yes, I was distracted. It still sounds like a shitty reward with the worst failure condition in the history of… history. But…”
“Oh, you can’t cultivate?”
She nodded, “I cannot cultivate. I do not have a divine root and can’t get one, I do not have a cultivation base, I do not have any dantians or meridians… Yours were burned, but mine never existed. I am made almost entirely of barely differentiated T-cells, kept alive by an essence battery and an electrical system, and I have no sex, identity, or even a real name, just an experimental designation.”
I nodded, “So you want to be able to cultivate, why? You already have a powerful gift. Unless you want to be a physical combatant?”
She shook her head, “David, please. What can happen when I move from gold core to Twin core?”
“Body refinement and re...oh.”
“Yes, Oh. I don’t give a scrot if it removes my immortality, I don’t give a scrot if I suddenly start to bleed. I identify as female, but I am not… All I care about is that someday when I pass gold core, it will give me a renewed, purified, and altogether HUMAN body.”
“I want to be female. I want to experience everything I have ever heard about being human. I want to feel for myself the emotions I detect from everyone else, every day, but can barely touch. I want someone to kiss me on a bridge with a stupid lock on it and feel, for just an instant, what it’s like to be in love. To me, that is a golden carrot worthy of ANY price, any sacrifice I, personally, can lose.”
"A bridge?"
She glared at me again, “That's not important. Just an old tradition. More importantly, you are dying, David.”
I sighed, “I know. I was actually surprised I made it this far. I had to take a shadowstep transport because a node shift would have killed me. And if I don’t die, I deviate, soon. I am so packed with necrotic aura it’s a wonder that plants don’t wilt as I walk by.”
“She can fix your caliban.”
I nodded, “Yes, and I intend to ask her to do that as soon as I finally track her down in this… overly luxurious killing yacht. But then what?”
“Then you bond her. She’s practically begging you to. Your auras are so perfectly matched… and then most of your quest is complete. She’s happy, you’re happy, both of you massively spike in power, and then we rip our way across the galaxy getting her to gold core.”
I shook my head, “I think you are the one who isn’t using her brain this time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am DYING, Commander. The caliban won’t stop that. All it does is help me simulate intact meridians and transfers a small amount of necrotic essence into fake meridians. I am literally half the paladin I am meant to be. I have almost as much metal as flesh in my body, I am on my way out. Do you know what happens when a Maenad’s bond deviates?”
She shook her head.
“They go irredeemably insane. Not “Lock her in a room for the rest of her life’ insane. More like “unleash her potential as a wave of evil that could engulf the entire sphere’ insane. You haven’t seen what she can do. She BEAT the Kobayashi scenario, Taera. She didn’t fight it to a standstill, she didn’t cheat it or bug it or use any of the other methods of playing it… she WON. Just using ONE of her four affinities, she consciously blocked out her others or they were stripped by the tech nature of the simulation. She ripped apart a titan, as a tin tier, with nothing but her pod and a giant pile of Sargasso space. And do you know what she said?”
“What’s that?
“She said she felt guilty about its bugs because she knew that the Titan’s aura would have killed her. I checked her logs, she was too far away. Even if it had a simulated aura, she still would have killed it. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be.”
“So when she fixes my caliban, I will be great for a while. And then the necrotic energy is going to force me to deviate… and if I manage to kill myself before a Spectre Lord moves in and says hi using my body, well, then she goes catatonic or dies. So no, I am not going to bond her. It’s too dangerous. I will find someone else.”
Taera smiled and shook her head slowly. “I bet you constantly question why you were made a paladin, don’t you?”
I nodded, “Yeah. Pretty much. I am not that great of a guy. Stole lots of candy as a little boy. Broke a few hearts, killed someone that didn’t need to die.”
She smiled, “That’s exactly why. Not just the questioning, but your entire rant. That is the core of being a Paladin. Putting the good of others above your own. Not in a celibate, ascetic, patting-yourself-on-the-back way, but when it really hurts, you choose the course that you believe is pure.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“I cannot understand that. I’ve never been able to understand that. I have always acted from enlightened self-interest. Scrot, even that quest. The stick? The only reason I have the slightest interest is because of that reward, and because I LIVE here. It’s hard to live when you and everyone else is dead.”
“But you, you are a silver-ranked divine paladin, just short of gold, on the verge of immortality, with a string of heroic victories behind you and an unbelievable future ahead of you, and you are willing to throw it all away and give up just for the chance to save an ugly little goblin and give her a better life. I don’t understand that, but I respect it.”
“For an empath, you don’t see too well. I am not giving up," I replied.
“No?” she asked.
“No. I am still going to fight to the bitter end. I’m not throwing in the towel or giving in to despair. I have fought more hopeless battles than you can imagine, even at your age. I intend to win. And if I do, I will happily bond that ugly little goblin, and ask for a goblin body when I am remade, and then take her home to her nameless little scrothole and fill her full of babies until we both die of old age. You forget bonding works both ways… I have seen her aura, felt it, and I desperately want it. So no, I am not giving up, I am preparing for the worst and praying for the best.”
“Well, add me to your prayers too, then.”
“How’s that?”
She growled, “Because I want my rewards too, dammit! So I can’t give up on you either. Remember, my benchmarks are tied to your survival, so if you deviate or die, I am completely scrotted, and it will be all your fault! If I lose my stupid kiss on a bridge, I swear to God I will haunt you and make your afterlife even more of a hell than your life is right this minute, so you had better not give up!”
She smiled winningly at me, “So please, don’t be a complete dolt. Let’s go see your ugly little goblin and ask her to fix that silvery piece of scrot on your spine that’s putting you into such a loser mindset, shall we?”
I nodded, “Yes. But I do have one question that’s just killing me.”
“Which is?”
“What’s with the lock thing?”
***
Taera sighed dramatically. I didn’t understand why, but we were standing near the cargo locks, watching 6 different drone loaders moving supplies into the soon-to-be-launched ship. A dwarf, a goblin, that green girl, a purple-haired weeb that would have stopped traffic in a good way, the elf, and a baseline bald man who looked like he could have moved the heavy stacks without bothering with a drone, just using the rolling muscles in his chest to intimidate them into moving.
“Sometimes I despair of humanity. We have lost so much,” she said dramatically, again, but then about 90% of what she said and did could have that applied to it. She was… endlessly dramatic. I’d have appreciated it more if I weren’t aware that she would cut my throat just as dramatically if she thought it would help her in some way.
I looked at her curiously. “If you are flirting with me, I don’t get it.”
She chuckled, “Oh, it's just since the diaspora. We have lost everything. Our language, our culture… it was all washed away when we discovered the system. What language are we speaking right now?”
“System standard?”
She shook her head, “No, it’s a phoeneticized version of English merged with Russian. Possibly the worst language ever created. Very descriptive, but complicated, kludgy, and comprised of words stolen from a hundred other languages. There were other languages that could have been picked. Spanish is a thousand times simpler, Chinese was nearly as kludgy, with incomprehensible dialects, but their written language is a true art form. German, we wouldn’t even need separate languages for magical and technological affinity descriptions. It was ugly, but you could say have a beautiful day and it would sound like you were cursing their mother.”
“But the first interstellar ship was crewed by an American and Russian mixed crew… that’s where we found the system, and now it’s the default everywhere. We don’t even have words for genetic mixes that were NOT crafted by careful genegineers. Kim, the chief engineer? She is almost pure-blooded Korean, with the recessives screened out of course, and now that word doesn’t even have meaning, she’s just human. A culture lost forever.”
I shrugged, “And now humanity has occupied stars so numerous no one even has an accurate count. And I’ve seen how dwarves and duergar fight… they are almost identical, genetically, with one small tweak to their vitamin needs, and yet they war whenever they can. Goblins and elves on most worlds where they cohabitate can barely tolerate each other, and even Roisin, when she was with goblins that looked almost exactly like her, was called ‘the alien’. Imagine if everyone thought of themselves as different races. We can barely keep from killing each other over differences of opinion about jokes, let alone considering each other different kinds of human.”
She nodded. “There is wisdom in what you say, at least. Wisdom that belies your age. You are right. They killed each other over the tiniest differences, and yet, when massive differences almost ripped the world apart, even the most courageous refused to fight, assuming that laws would stop bullets, rules would stop monsters, and customs were stronger than knives and bombs. Someone falsifies an election? Well, next time we vote the bastards out! That will fix it!”
“But I still miss it. Just with English and Russian alone, there were a million possible expressions just for a penis. Purple helmeted warrior. Meat log. Dill pickle. Sausage fest. Now, every good curse is replaced with scrot. Scrot this, scrot that. Do you even know what scrot meant, originally?”
I smiled, “Enlighten me, oh fountain of endless wisdom. I will count your blessings as I count the wrinkles under your eyes.”
She snickered, “And you wonder why I want to be a real girl. I’d boink your brains out for that. That’s a euphemism, by the way.”
I nodded, “I figured. If you’d even get anything out of it.”
She laughed, “I’ve done that before. Survival was much more difficult long ago, sometimes I had to indulge in… boring and messy behavior just to see the next sunrise. But scrot was originally short for scrotum.”
“Thank you, oh mistress.” I coughed a little as a fresh jolt of pain blew through my muscles. “You will forever alter how I see cursing in a humorous direction. You give a giant pile of scrot entirely new meaning.”
“The reason I brought it up is because I have the most perfect expression for you right this moment, but to you, it will be meaningless, as only half of the terms even exist in system standard, and the other half don’t have the same impact.”
“Try me.”
“You are a giant, steaming pile of dumbass, 60 pounds of blind-as-a-bat stupid shoved into a ten-pound bag.”