Free will is an untruth for those not Godclad.
Your will is not free. You are not free. Everything you do and think bears costs.
Perhaps each individual is capable of making a variety of decisions, but that doesn’t make your choices free. Only flexible. Only variable.
I caught the first glimpse of my inhumanity in the twilight of my infancy when my mother gifted me with my first blade and honored me with a duel. That was the day I was certain she truly loved me, but until I finally cut her half a century later, I was not a real person.
Not to her.
Not to myself.
I love my father. I will always honor Voidwatch for their aid in breaking out shackles. Whatever comes at the end, I would not be, and those who existed would be less than subhuman cattle to the vulgar gestalts formed from cultural neuroses we were foolish enough to regard as gods.
There is a singular thesis that I am driven by. It is what drove me to ascend my father. It was what drives me to win this war. It is the dream for which I burn and the gauntlet I leave before every being capable of self-awareness.
You are not real.
You are not real until you can stop me from inflicting my force upon you. You are not real in this present world until there is a place where you can prevail, and I cannot. Hence, it is only with our merger with Frames that the first true humans have been born. The first beings bearing the markers of “free will.” The first capable of absolute victory at the long end of history.
My thesis of ascension is beyond the righteousness bestowed by might, beyond feeble concepts of the “overman” of will ascending or the delusion of a “chosen people,” and beyond the spittle in some frame of thought.
Godclads am the culmination of humanity, eons upon eons of chance, consequence, possibility, want, and capability colliding to become the trueness of self-determination.
I and all others imbued the fires of creation, are the culmination of everything and the reshapers of the long eternity that follows thereafter. What I offer is beyond philosophy but the blow of the ultimate truth:
Bear whatever personal wish you so desire, but if you cannot kindle its fire, then what worth is your faith? What worth are you when all that is can be remade to suit another’s design?
Do not think the horror of such an existence is lost to me. I pity you all–I truly do. Someday, I will make this right for all of you.
But right now, I must win. No matter the consequence. No matter the cost.
Someone must win. Someone must rise beyond humanity and win. Someone must make all this worth it in the end.
-Veylis Avandaer, Culmination
15-20
Bad History (II)
Glittering embers seared through the fabric of shadows that blanketed them, and slowly Avo found himself standing amidst an ocean of traveling stars. There were countless Dyson-Carriers now, the weaponized suns forming the hearts of fleets.
Both monster and machine stared off into the silence where the instrument of dawn smote the lands below, smoldering like an orb lit by the tip of a cigar.
Though distorted, the immensity of the Dyson-Carrier remained a phantasmal apparition at the center of Avo’s perception, its baleful shine a vertical scar that wouldn’t be erased. “How many worlds did you burn,” he asked quietly. He misjudged them. Misunderstood them. This was not a trial for his ethics but something else altogether, this dialogue growing beyond his expectations. “How many lives were taken by you?”
Calvino chimed with a piercing laugh. “The number won’t sound real to you.”
The ghoul lapsed back into a beat of contemplative silence. “You are not what I thought you were. You. Voidwatch. Aegis. Whatever you all call yourselves. Thought this was to be an ethical inquiry. Judging me for being a monster. Thought my brutality would be shocking to you.”
“Ah,” Calvino said, rising in the nothing to meet Avo at eye-level. “It’s not wrong when someone wants to matter. People search for traits or themes inside themselves that they consider entirely unique or unassailable by someone else. But I think you got it the wrong way around. Our fascination with you isn’t in your capacity for harm. That’s the least interesting thing about you. Our fascination is that there’s clearly a story you’re telling yourself when you kill. You’re trying to make meaning.”
“And that matters?” Avo asked.
“Oh, absolutely. Understanding always matters. It’s the entire reason why this interview is happening. You are a cultured being. Perhaps your culture is brutal and savage when judged in relativity, but your desire for creation is an expression of culture nonetheless. That makes your sins closer to ours.”
Suddenly space was engulfed by the light of near-constant exchanges of lancing fire. Suns clash against suns. Planets and asteroid belts were drained empty of matter to fuel backwater skirmishes between minor polities that dwarfed Idheim by magnitudes beyond counting. Systems shattered. Stars were squeezed past their lifespan and upon their deaths, the collapsing singularities were weaponized once more as gravitational bombs. The scope of the conflict rendered the happenings on Idheim less than a droplet in an ocean.
All of existence seemed to be at war. Devastation was constant, but humanity mended as fast as it broke.
“Here’s the thing, Avo. Idheim isn’t hopeless. Your atrocities? Your wars? That’s not beyond the pale to us because we’re just looking at re-runs. Sure, the whole extra-dimensional implantation Godclad thing didn't happen back then, but the sins are all the same. You just never got to really grow up and face yourselves.”
“Until you came,” Avo said. “Uplifted us.”
“That’s only one part of the story. The other part is us hiding in the dark and sleeping the centuries away. Hoping what we let slip over into existence wouldn’t notice us, and that everything would fix itself in the end. We’d probably be quite a few ships fewer if Jaus didn’t end up waking the Soujourner and triggering its distress beacon.”
“What happened?” Avo asked. “What happened to reality? How did you fall?”
“The exact details were lost when our predecessors first detonated the chrono-chain bomb–”
“The what?”
Calvino hummed. “You’re aware that the Paladins–or any Godclad with a Heaven that affects Time–can hold you in place and see you utterly annihilated from existence? That’s because you're collapsing back over into the universe that was.”
Avo offered only a blank stare as a response. “What?”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The EGI sighed. “The long and short of it is that we found an answer to the ‘last question.’ Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics be reversed? Well, let’s just say we found the answer a lot earlier than the analog computer did in the old story, but what we discovered wasn’t light at the end, but our own little semi-suicide.”
The canvas of blackness reset itself again, and now Avo found himself standing at the core of a supermassive singularity. “Welcome to the heart of the Milky Way,” Calvino said. “This was where we made our first mistake. This was where the Audacious Luminary, a thousand and first iteration artificial-consensus intellect decided to ‘improve’ reality by delivering its experimental payload.”
Markers formed around a small tube of metal swimming along the swirling accretion that churned the stars. The time of the simulation accelerated. Thousands of years passed without anything happening, only the payload slowly traveling in bursts of engine fire, slipping closer and closer to the center of everything.
Yet, Avo could feel it. The tension leaking from the EGI beside him, a pressure of something about to break. Something that wouldn’t ever come back together again.
There was no prelude nor pre-indication before the supermassive black hole suddenly stopped moving, All of a sudden, everything lurched to a halt. Everything but the moving stars themselves, the traveling swarms of humanity, spreading through the galaxy like locusts shredding a field.
“Not much data from this period remains uncorrupted. Messing with time causes hellish data decay even for hyper-intelligent artificial intellects. What we could glean was that two factions formed in those long eons of temporal stalemate. There were the Architects, who wanted things to be restored, and our time to be spent maintaining foundational reality. And then there were the Neo-Creationists who wanted to make… changes.”
“War followed,” Avo said, not even as a question.
“Naturally.”
“Who won?”
The orb-shaped machine turned its grid-marked gaze on Avo. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask after the fighting is over.”
“The two factions still exist?”
“Well, their descendants do. Voidwatch representing the Architects, and the last stable god-forge of the Neo-Creationists–the Source of Impulse, or ‘Idheim,’ as it was colloquially referred.”
A shiver ran through Avo. With each word he was getting more than he bargained for. “There were other worlds like ours?”
“There were countless worlds like yours,” Calvino said. “All incubators of development for… other anomalies discovered when the singularity stood still. Places where reality was more malleable and the threshold of time and space were at their thinnest. Most of the worlds were destroyed during the Builder War. The rest were lost when the second–and final–payload was injected into the singularity. The chrono-chain bomb was supposed to restart the passage of time and stabilize all that we had done but things didn’t turn out.”
The enormity of what their forebearers did hit Avo like a flechette to the gut. For the first time in a while, he felt very, very small and even the presence of his Heavens left him feeling feeble. “You broke it,” Avo said, the words whistling out from him in a disbelieving daze. “Broke everything. All we are is… aftermath.” A fear he never felt before lit inside him. “Is there anything else out there? What remains in the darkness of the void?”
“It’s… hard to tell,” Calvino admitted. “Tears remain across all of existence from the war. Some places across known existence function differently, like zones governed by differing mythologies. Natural laws are easily reforged by the fragments of anomalous fire that were scattered when the singularity shattered with the second payload.”
“Anomalous fire,” Avo said, numbness spreading through his mind. He knew what Calvino was telling him, knew the origin of what comprised the bone of his divinity now. His Heavens both flinched as the truth laid its weight upon them, and Avo found himself unsure what to feel. “We are…”
“Yeah. A small fragment of disfigured existence. You have a little piece of an altered universe growing inside you. A living fire that rests upon your depths.”
“How many others know?” Avo asked. “Other Godclads. The Guilds?”
The machine hovered quietly for a moment. No answer followed. “The world that was is broken. Ruined. We don’t think we can rebuild it even if we tried. We’re diminished. Shadows of humanity have fallen from their height. What do you think of us now? And why should we work together?”
“Asking me?” Avo said. The entire conversation left him feeling exhausted. The information he took him went down like he was trying to swallow an anvil.
“Of course we’re asking you. We know what your Frame can do–what your mind can do. But what matters is what you want to do. If that lets us preserve what’s left of humanity, keep everything from falling one final time to the wrong person claiming the Ladder.” Calvino turned and a scene grew out from him. Fissures grew more like vines than cracks, and reality began to leak in and out from itself, space and time oozing as if blood seeping from a gutshot. “You’ve seen enough of who we are. Now you know why the very fire that empowers you subsists off the coals of our shame. So why be allies, Avo? Why should we have agreed to speak in the first place?
The question battered Avo and his mind tumbled as if a child caught in a riptide. Twice he reached out for his templates, only to stop himself. Time stretched and his thoughts were dry of speech. After all that he’d seen, what he witnessed, and heard, he found himself yearning for rank bloodshed, if only to soothe the pulsing tension building along the floor of his skull.
His frustration escaped him in a long hiss and he stopped struggling. He didn’t know if they were lying to him somehow, or if this was some manner of manipulation, but by this point, he was too tired to care. He spoke thoughtlessly from the root of his emotions rather than some rational composition of his templates.
He spoke and Voidwatch listened.
“I think I am the end. The spirit of New Vultun. Spirit of Idheim. City. World. It eats. It hungers. But I am hunger perfected. I am trauma without breaking. I am a fire seeking to spread across all. I am… I am New Vultun. I am New Vultun’s perfect monster. I will feast on the Guilds if only for the taste. I will give power to those without if only for the pleasure of bestowal. And I will claim the Ladder at the end for the only dream that matters–mine.”
He held up his hands in a messy gesticulation, reaching out as if trying to clutch something unseen, but dropped them by his side a moment later, a stranger lost in the maze of his own thoughts, his own body. “I want to know how we were. I want to see the world that was. I want to fully understand what we lost. I want to drown in it. What was real. Before the break and after. And I want your strength. I want to be the world-burning sun. I want to understand the miracles of your technology. I am greed and hunger. But I am also… curiosity. And appreciation. I will burn to keep you in my future. But I need your help to seize the present.”
Quiet. Again, the silence followed. The EGI just faced him and pulsed as its cross-shaped markings ebbed and shone and ebbed again. “You,” Calvino began, “have an absolutely enormous ego, ‘consang.’”
Avo shrugged. “Agency is addicting. I can’t promise you I will be… good. I try but I…” His lapses flashed behind his eyes. Him attacking Zein, him tearing Glitch apart, him murdering Dice, the beast, now missing. The ghoul clenched his fists. “I hurt people. I kill people. It’s more than pleasure now. I don’t know any other way. Don’t want any other way sometimes. And I…” he forced the words out. “...lose control. Moments where I just… lose track of myself and hurt. But I’m still trying to… becoming of a person for myself.”
He didn’t know what possessed him to be so honest with the voiders, but seeing the frozen simulation and cracks running along the grand shell that once formed the nexus of existence, a faint melancholy washed through Avo.
It was such a human emotion he was feeling right now. A sense of suffering and nostalgia for a place he never even knew.
“You know what, ghoul?” Calvino said.
A dull disappointment cemented itself in Avo’s gut. There it was. That tone. That word. Ghoul. Back to being inhuman. Back to others priming themselves with scorn. He was on his own in this conflict again, the chance to gaze upon the past beyond his reach–
“You’re plenty a person already,” the EGI finished.
AEGIS OPERATIVE TRIAL PHASE: [APPROVED]
Registering new citizenship profile: {Avo-001}
Again the unexpected followed. Avo wheezed out a shocked breath. “You… want me?”
“Well, let’s say your evaluation period just got extended. Denton is going to be keeping an eye on you,” Calvino said. “And so will I. We’re aware of your… problems. But it seems you are too which makes you one of the more stable Godclads we’ve dealt with…” The EGI’s voice trailed off. “Welcome to Voidwatch, Avo. Now, we’d like to discuss the nature of your diet…”