Academician-Archon Isha Ma’Ellat Ar Scylla’s last thought, last feeling, and last moment were one and the same. A psionic lance rippling across the Arcaneum, the corrupted Psi-Link amplifier’s last gasp before her lab’s adjutant overloaded its conceptual matrix and destroyed it. Too late. Daemon-infested servitors had held her off for just long enough that the Enemy had gotten its opening to emulsify her brain.
The eldritch scream had sounded like laughter and tasted of failure. Bittersweet and cloying. Then nothingness.
A black, empty dream that lasted both an eternity and an instant.
Then, sound.
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All at once, Isha went from being dead to thinking and seeing again. Data streams scrolled down the side of her vision, informing her, among many other things, of Beta Lab’s current condition —locked down, inoperable— and telling her how long she’d been in mem-storage —3.333333333333 repeating millennia, very helpful. The fact that she was being projected, still in engram form, meant that an imperial reclamation and purgation team had not arrived after such an —ostensibly— long time. The simple reality of her current existence was enough to tell her that the galaxy she’d known most likely no longer existed. Which meant no Psi-Link, which in turn meant…
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“And, just like that, everything changes, but everything remains the same,” Isha sighed, the ethereal recreation of her voice echoing hollow against the ruins of her lab.
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As her avatar settled on the ground, holo-emitter scripts flickering and sparking as they repaired themselves, Isha waved away the request.
“Yes, adjutant, imperative acknowledged. Continue reinitialization protocol.”
Arguing with the single-minded intelligence while it was in this state was a waste of time.
A waste of time that Wyll indulged in far too often for my tastes. Better to work around the restrictions than run up against them like mindless servitors. Ach. Soldiers.
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Isha winced.
“Lower volume by seventy-five percent,” she ordered, rattling off the commands that would have the adjutant working just the way she liked it, “Limit incremental updates to numerical quarter marks only. Minimize visual and audio clutter and keep all runescripts in dark mode…”
The orders continued, rapid-fire, an almost numericized list of settings she went through whenever she had to change facilities. Thankfully not a frequent occurrence, but a tedious task nonetheless.
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Isha sighed.
“Limit acknowledgement to critical requests only,” she ordered, before muttering to herself, “I can only hope that I won’t have to rebuild the personality profiles from the ground up.”
<< no damage to local storage detected. personality profiles in storage: [ 343 completed. 12 incomplete.] list profile version variants? >>
Another sigh.
“No. Adjutant? Respond only when addressed. When reinitialization is complete, load personality profile…Three-four-two B.”
Isha waited, half expecting another robotic acknowledgement. But no. The empress’s machines followed orders to the letter.
“Small mercies, I suppose.”
With the drudgework complete, Isha turned her attention to her surroundings. The hollowed-out husks of servitors kneeled around the adjutant’s containment tank, as they had when she’d neutralized them. Her corpse, likely still perfectly preserved in her House Scylla multi-purpose script armour, lay as it had in its last moments. A shame that her brain matter was nothing more than a featureless paste, too far gone for reconstruction without infrastructure that was far beyond her ability to manufacture.
Thinking back to those final moments, Isha was forced to recognize the completeness of her failure. She’d been distracted. Hadn’t noticed the intrusion until it was too late. She’d only thought that perhaps she’d found a workaround for… She sighed. What was done, was done. The damage to the facility had been…total. Without outside help, it was unlikely the lab’s adjutant would have ever recovered from the psionic damage it had sustained, let alone recovered enough arca to return to full functionality.
Something had changed.
The source of said change was quite obvious, fortunately. A Project Terra-II subject —a descendant, if the facility’s internal clock was even close to correct— lying in a facsimile parody of Isha’s own corpse, mouth ajar, face covered in silver-streaked blood, still wet.
Isha let out an appreciative sigh at the sheer irony of one of her creations resurrecting her.
A shame the girl had died to accomplish it. Though, in death, she would likely do more good than she ever could have in life.
Already has, in fact.
Isha’s biggest concern on realizing she was an engram was the restrictions Imperial Blackout placed on all biological-adjacent lifeforms in its purview. The girl’s sacrifice had just handed her the perfect solution.
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“Bypass error,” Isha snapped, “Load personality profile as directed.”
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The adjutant’s core containment sank soundlessly into the floor, hiding the mind-bending mass from view and leaving a simple holo-projector behind. The warning red glow of a critical malfunction disappeared, replaced by soft, indirect white. An amorphous blob of purple light hovered above the dark runescript of the holo-projector, shifting occasionally.
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<<[50%].>>
<<[75%].>>
<<[100%].>>
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“Ahem, my deepest apologies, academician. I’m not certain what came over me. It seems I’ve lost quite a bit of time,” the adjutant spoke, assuming the voice and avatar she’d designed a few years before her death.
“In that, we are the same, Byron,” Isha said with a smirk, “And what have I told you about titles and all that nonsense?”
The faceless avatar, dressed in an immaculate 212th millennium academic-style suit complete with fake pins of rank and accomplishment, bowed its head, arms crossed behind its back.
“Apologies, academician, imperial adjutant protocol dictates—”
Isha sighed, relishing the age-old fight she had with all her adjutant profiles.
“Oh, imperial protocol this, imperial protocol that,” she mimicked in the overly self-important, nasally voice she’d given this version of Byron, “You’d think the empress stuck that stick up your ass herself.”
“In reality, academician, it is likely that if any organic-adjacent hard object has been inserted in my not-materially-present posterior, then it is this profile’s designer who is at fault. Academician.”
Isha snorted.
“Brat.”
“I live to serve.”
Isha fixed the adjutant’s avatar with a mock glare.
“Well, in that case, give me an analysis of this Project Terra-II descendant’s makeup, specifically when it comes to genome and engram insertion. I don’t need the ancillary details, just give me a compatibility test, please.”
“At once, academician.”
Trusting Byron to give the task his utmost, Isha conjured a screen with a twitch and began running through manual diagnostics of her lab. Getting it up and running again would be a chore, but with the Atav-Imperial blackout restrictions in place, the adjutant would throw out more errors than anything else. As a holo-emitted engram, her capacity to act was almost just as limited, but there remained tasks that she could accomplish until the girl’s body had been repurposed for her use. Better to locate stress points herself, then—
“Academician?”
Isha turned from her display with a frown.
“Done already?”
“I am afraid this life-form is incompatible in the extreme, academician.”
“What? That’s impossible. Even accounting for drift, her genome should be sitting at around eighty percent inavarian, at least.”
“You are correct, academician, however—”
“It’s the Blackout, isn’t it? Fucking House Atav and their stupid, selfish, idiotic, shortsightedness! And fuck the empress for going along with them. Paranoid lunatics, all of them, roach-forms of the highest calibre, ready to screw us all in the name of—”
“You are incorrect, academician,” Byron interrupted.
That brought Isha up short. Her adjutant personalities did not interrupt her. Not unless something urgent had come up, or they calculated she was about to make a big mistake.
“Under the Waykeeper Edict, I am unable to assist in overwriting the consciousness of a Ward Class lifeform without prior imperial authorization. My sincerest apologies, academician.”
“Ward Class?!” Isha sputtered, “They’re, at best, Citizen-Aspirant Class, meaning, wait— Did you say consciousness?”
“Correct, academician. As for designation, under the Waykeeper Edict, Article—”
“Cease,” she ordered, prompting the adjutant to fall silent. In a blip, Isha disappeared from her original position and reappeared crouched by the girl’s body. Her thoughts raced as fast as the adjutant’s concept matrices allowed, cataloguing damage the adjutant had detected and running possibilities.
Byron was right. Technically. Very technically.
“The pods, are any of them working?”
“Pod four is nominally functional, however, I would caution against—”
“Reroute repair scripts to it and run a secondary diagnostic, then get it running. I need an Ordis-Scylla Swarm Node, I know we had a few in storage, are they still in good condition?”
“Checking now, academician.”
Isha extended her reach across an additional concept matrix, leveraging the precious resource to help her come up with a treatment plan.
“Six hundred standard units of unprogrammed OSSN remain in secure storage, academician. I am unable to assess its condition, but projections of corruption approach null,” Byron reported, “It is unlikely that the ward scripts failed.”
“Unlock secure storage and prepare two SU’s of OSSN for integration with a near novel lifeform,” Isha demanded.
“Apologies, academician, the lab has not been swept for corruption. As such, I must recommend against potentially exposing pristine OSSN to corruption in this way. Moreover, the lifeform’s own swarm node seems to have undergone drastic adaptations and may react poorly to the addition of something so foreign to its baseline.”
Isha paused, mulling over the risks. Letting the girl die and then repurposing her corpse was off the table. It was one thing to use what was available to her. It was another to allow a girl to die and then take her body. Even if she’d been so inclined, the adjutant wouldn’t allow the loophole to the Waykeeper Edict to exist, merely on principle.
The girl’s survival swayed in the balance of Isha’s pragmatism. In the end, the academician decided that the source of information, as well as a potential hand immune to the directives of Imperial Blackout, would serve better than the unused potential of a fortune in Ordis-Scylla Swarm Nodes.
“Do it anyway,” she ordered.
“As you will, academician,” Byron accepted emotionlessly, “Awaiting override code.”
“Alpha-Ur- Scylla-Toth-Ellat-Gadel.”
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The purple letters floated in Isha’s vision for only her to see, along with an unlocking symbol. She slipped her hard-light arms under the girl’s body, absently noting phenotypical similarities between her and Isha’s original biological body.
Wyll always said we were creating children for the first time in millennia. I guess he was right, in a way.
“The pod is ready and waiting, academician, preparing two standard units of OSSN for insertion and integration.”
With the girl in her arms, Isha made a beeline for the medical pods as fast as the emitters allowed her without malfunctioning. The glass and metal device slid open without her prompting, runescripts flickering to life before falling dim according to her preference. Isha slid the girl’s body in, making a quick adjustment to order the pod’s sterilization protocols to leave the crudely scripted prosthesis intact as the girl’s armour melted away into sludge to be disposed of.
Once she was sure the pod was properly working, Isha’s hard-light avatar disappeared as she made the most of the benefits being an engram offered her.
Time blurred past in that particular way it had when she focused on her areas of expertise, only this time completely unhindered by the realities of biological existence. Once the Project Terra-II girl was out of the danger zone, it almost felt…nice. So much of her existence post Scream had been reduced to necessary drudgework and tedium unrelated to the reason she’d been offered the Sach’elcor post.
So when Isha had done all she could for the moment, it was both a victory and a loss. Reappearing as her avatar in conjunction with Byron, she sighed.
“Well done, academician. The patient’s survival projections all approach unity, barring unforeseen issues.”
“Yes, well, only to be expected, considering the one providing treatment,” Isha joked cheekily.
“As you say, academician. However, it occurs that perhaps psychological and psionic rehabilitation may be in order on top of physical treatment,” the adjutant hedged.
Isha frowned and pulled up the girl’s psionic evaluation.
“What in the world…”
“Indeed.”
“No less than three, no, four splinter personalities,” Isha muttered, before landing on another line, “How the fuck do you violate the Safeguard Diktat? It’s hard-set with…”
Realizing the extent of the damage she was dealing with, Isha growled in disgust.
“Fine. As soon as you can, spin up a liminal sequence and…” Isha pursed her lips, “Cut it off and set it in its own walled-off conceptual matrix, please.”
“As you will, academician. The patient is ready for psionic injection now, if you’d like.”
Isha sighed, looking around at the ruins of her lab.
So much work to do.
“Good, send me in,” she ordered.
“Right away, academician.”
It was time to become reacquainted with her greatest creations.