Chapter 110: Wisdom of a Goddess
Yuzhou's seized findings from anonymous VoidNet Delver, Zenkarn; since been assassinated by [Redacted]
There's a pattern here, in the words. They all lead back to The Source, to the Hybrids, to the Founder Gene, to The Sin, and to... The Eclipse. I can't make sense of them. They're shifting like living things, amoebas, always consuming and always spreading, yet their information is kept from the public.
I've identified a reason for this is that entity, Amaterasu. I do not know what she is, but ancient is perhaps the most fitting word for her. I've heard tales of cults in the East worshipping her, of a final guardian who keeps The Allseeing away from us. Hidden behind the veil that is the FIREWALL.A veil is all it is, light still filters through, and the Allseeing makes sense of it. What does she really do? I know she's been watching me in my delves, in the abyss, only endless void and fire greet you besides the rogue MALware. It is here where the whispers are both the clearest and the most maddening force you can explore... if they don't explore you first. I question which thoughts are my own, and how much I must have... been broken and pieced together. In their echoes, I hear thunderous omens rattling, they're all concentrated in a city built on a web of lies.
On New California. A city built between two Titans, a city harboring a legacy of both the Eastern and Western Coast of Northern America. Lies, lies, lies...! They don't know what's coming for them, what they've invited into their walls!Subject-K. Mikail Almajali. And the most fearsome of them all, the one who will-
Ripley and…?
I hadn’t died, at least, I don’t think I did. But I had lost all connection to my physical body, I was formless, a consciousness devoid of any physical vessel to latch onto… without that safety tether, I felt naked, vulnerable and so… alone.
Was this how Twilight felt? How the Personas existed as?
My instincts urged me to find a vessel, my Warp Tendency screaming at me to do so even more, drawing me about the neverending darkness as a pulsing mass of thought…
“Hello, Ripley.” A voice, female and heavenly, called to me. It streamed from behind where I was focusing my consciousness, but something in that serene voice was wrong. Like it had been designed too perfectly, like it lacked a human error only perceptible to our subconscious.
Turning back, what I saw was not human. It was fire, yes, in every which way to my vision. But it wasn’t. There was an unfathomable depth and density to the light, like an abyss of light which never ran out and streamed endlessly from lightyears away without losing intensity.
That fire wreathed and arced in ways that maddened my human mind, twisting my consciousness to even be able to grasp what it could be. Until finally, it began to ebb back it’s corruptive influence on my psyche. Except, not really, rather I had the innate knowing that this being was simply pulling a curtain on their power to keep it from driving me insane.
“What are you?” I finally managed to think out.
The formless flame didn’t respond, rather it beckoned me. I stepped forward, somehow managing to form a leg, and then my second, before a torso, arms and head formed.
Then when I blinked, I was back somewhere I never wanted to go again. The Toxin Club’s office, where the MALignant that had sourced my Implant first awoke.
It was clean, spotless, no sign of Shaun or Lucille. But there was one figure sitting there, the Yuzhou woman whose eyes were masked behind a thick visor, who spoke too perfectly and emoted without flaw.
Ms. Himiko… and if I was right about my suspicions right now — an artificial intelligence. An Emulator of intellect… an Emulect like the Personas…
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But at the same time, so much more. “What the hell did you do to me?”
“Oh nothing much.” Her tone was pleasing, annoyingly so. “I connected our consciousness together, it was so much easier with that Protocol of yours.”
It was easy to assume she meant Consciousness Link, the new Database Protocol that had apparently been reconfigured due to the intricacies of my Implant. A Source-Touched Implant. It became so much easier to contemplate that idea, whatever it was, here than in the physical world. “Okay, but why?”
“I wanted to talk to you, Ripley Donovick.” She motioned to the seat in front of her, it had been where Shaun sat all that time ago. “It’s remarkable how you’ve grown since I last saw you. You and Diana, both. I seek to discuss it.”
I scowled as I took the seat, my body didn’t feel like it even had the choice to refuse. “Do you hide in all of the boxes of your super secret organic-matter-destroying nanoswarms?”
“No.” She let out a chuckle that only unnerved me. “Only the ones I know you’ll open.”
“Oh please, so much stuff went wrong today, how could you have known it would be me who would connect to the box and not R0N1N or Mirage?”
She eased in my direction, her mouth a fine and straight line except for when her lips moved. “You underestimate the predictive power of a nearly five-hundred year old mind, child. I’m older than even The Allseeing… even The Dogwhistler pales in comparison to me — especially considering she’s /——————/… oh, no reaction?”
“No reaction to what?” I scowled.
She leaned into the couch, and for a second I thought I saw her lip twitch. “It’s none of your concern, it’s clear that I can in fact be wrong about certain things, especially when it comes to… the matters of your Implant and it’s origins.”
“You mean with The Uncaged, with Mr. R?”
“Those are some dangerous words to be knowing when you’ve only had an Implant for three months. Even if that’s not what I know him as…”
“Well, I’ve been busy.”
“I’m well aware.”
“So then what do you not know? What is it about my Implant that’s got everyone around me so stumped?”
She paused… not answering me immediately. “Not all Implants are built equally, even among the same grade.”
”You mean because it’s Source-Touched.” I deduced, to which she tilted her head slightly.
“Oh my, you’ve come to know about some very dangerous things now, Ripley… Yes, it is Source-Touched, but it is the nature of the Source itself that makes it so valuable.”
“Don’t play coy… I know my Implant is unique.”
“It’s not just unique, it’s… a key.”
“To what?”
“To The Source of Everything.”
My body trembled hearing those words, there was something profound in what she had just uttered, but it was like my mind was already trying to forget what she had said… my lips refused to speak more on that particular topic.
“Just… what even is a Source? The Source?”
“Think of it as… a profound understanding of a certain quality of existence. Whether or inorganic, it encompasses all… so naturally, in the hands of higher thinking beings, it has been fractured so it can be… wielded.”
I chewed my tongue, she had said something odd. “Why did you say… higher thinking beings and not just humanity.”
“Child, where did your Implant come from?”
“Where…? From a MALignant, the same one that was birthed-“ I stopped speaking, my voice leading me to an understanding. My Implant had come from the MAL as all Implants had, therefore… this Source, had to originate from them. Or at least, some access to it. But how would you know which Implants would be Source-Touched or not… unless, it depended on which MAL it came from.
Naturally, my mind came to the conclusion of the strongest and most feared MAL in existence. I muttered, my eyes wide. “The MALtitans…”
The Allseeing of the Net.
The Typhoon of the Pacific.
The Infinite of the West.
The Mother of the North.
The Terror of the East.
“Correct…” Ms. Himiko smiled, goosebumps raising over my skin. “They can spread minute aspects from their Shards of the Source among their lesser kind, which in turn spawn Implants that retain a Fragment of that power. These Source-Touched MAL can spread far and wide with all levels of strength, often times dying like any other MAL does during the swarm… but they are the origin of what many BUG Adapters know as Unique Features. Or in the case of SIM Adapters, Deviant Mutations.”
“So then if these Source-Touched Implants are already out there, what makes mine and Diana’s different?”
“Because it has come from The Titan in which no Source-Touched MAL or Implant have ever come from.” She stared at me behind her visor, but the holes in my chest spoke to her intensity. “The Infinite.”
Her words stuck into me like a sword… I had an Implant touched by a Titan.
The Titan… responsible for the destruction of The Floridian Gulf. The Titan most people knew was coming for New California next.
The Titan of infinite possibilities…
And for once, I think I knew what my Implant was coded for.
To Change.