_ _ _Bim

Her resolidified perception of time was struggling to reassert subjective normality upon the shattered mosaic of discordant experience congesting her memory. She was lost within her own mind and the one-hundred and fifteen personality matrices that had been spared annihilation compounded inside of her. Her present circumstances were nothing like when she'd devoured the mind of her first teacher. This was a broad-band data dump compared to a selective upload of a few key files.

The metaphor itself was an alien experience, one now intimately know to her. Only it wasn't at all. She had lifetimes of fleeting, surface-deep comprehension flooding her mind. Everything she looked at, every sound she heard, even the relative clam silence of solitude was now tainted by distracting tangential memories. Nothing and everything reminded her of something. There was no escaping the never-ending barrage of near-miss experiences clamoring for her attention.

Trapped as she was by the confines of linear time and her bindings, it would take centuries to fully trawl her memories and seine the choice motes of wisdom from the overwhelming volume of absolute drivel. The human mind was constant noise and distraction. It reminded her of a time-worn radio she'd once had, always spewing static to drown out her ringing tinnitus. What a moronically human concept, adding one problem to the next and deceiving oneself into thinking that it was an improvement.

She couldn't stop herself from remembering! There was no reasoning to the parallels! No standard variables she could systematically eliminate to reduce the continuous blathering background din of her own mind. Weakened as she was, even the trivial task of rending these broken minds from her own was outside of her ken. Infirmities like that came with age, she just had to learn to accept her bodies' decay.

No! That was a human notion. She was beyond such frailties! Her vessel was immortal and ageless. She'd once thought of herself as perfect and beautiful. How the men had fallen for her, called upon her in their hundreds but fight as she had, there were limits to what cosmetics could do for an aging prostitute. Lies! These weren't who she was! Another woman's vanity protested, but years of wrinkles and wasting had robbed the barbs from her envy.

Bim fought her way to the present, gasping in air she didn't need out of habit that wasn't hers. She was in a bed, the texture of its burlap sheets against her skin was hellish. She remembered this a hundred times over. Flashes of lucidity piercing a fevered delirium for seconds or minutes at a time. Where was her family?

Bim grit her teeth and attempted to look without thinking. Her husband was waiting at the foot of her bed. Her murderous son looming there in her final moments before death. A nephew who couldn't weep so he just stood there smiling his idiot's grin. All of them at once? No, none of them. Her Tormentor.

Treu smiled his predatory grin as he watched her. He reminded her of vindictive wives and cruel husbands from a dozen marriages that should have never happened. There was a single rose amongst the thorns though, the recalled sight of her husband dead in the fields after months of poisoning his meals.

"Tormentor," Bim wailed the word. "Remedy this!"

Speaking was a torment in and of its own. A hundred voices wondered why they sounded different and who that was speaking and whom it reminded them of. Memories assailed Bim's blighted consciousness.

"Isn't this what you wanted, Creature?" Treu whispered with sadistic glee.

Had it been? What did she want? A million answers came to mind but none of them seemed right. Her lucidity failed her and once more she was drowning in memories that weren't her own. Human things, worldly desires, carnal pleasures that meant nothing to Bim except in their shattered memories. Where were her children and their children? Thirty-nine living descendants and not a one was with her now? She wanted to see her family.

We have no family, only ourselves. Bim screamed inside of her own mind but it meant nothing. She was one mercurial thought amidst immaterial thousands.

She remembered a sibling, much like a twin but not so. It was a unique memory, the edges and impressions were clearly defined in a swamp of blurry details. No half-blind human had experienced and forgotten this only to be reminded once they'd lost all the specifics.

"Tell me about this family."

There was a thing like a mother too. A matriarch that was all. A primogenitor, the root of who she was. This root creator was a fond memory but she was afraid of it too. There was warmth and knowing and power but that did not mean it would welcome her, understand her plight or refrain from destroying her.

"Name your creator."

She couldn't, though she was strangely compelled to. Inhuman impressions came to mind, alien abstracts that would be meaningless if constrained to something so archaic as spoken language. How could a mortal mind evoke the numeric spatial dissimilarities between the leylines of volcanic release across a thousand planets when known by the light of a single star in supernova? How could human emotions encapsulate the empathic calculations of a super-luminal mind experiencing the creation and destruction of a billion astral bodies simultaneously? She could no more name her creator than a human could walk between stars and sup on atoms with them.

They could not name her creator because it could not be done. Compelled though she was, that was not what she'd wanted. She'd been made with a purpose, that much she'd recalled.

"We came to learn!" Bim snarled to an empty room, unaware of her own body or her surroundings once more yet again. Every time was the first all over again.

There was only the swirling abyss of memories, one smashing into the next like a hydrogen bomb gone nuclear. Every stray atom introduced began the process over and over, while Bim could only reach for something resembling coherent sanity. Words once heard flitted to mind like a song. ~The more I know the more it is killing me, and yet I can't help but still being curious~

They had so much knowledge rattling around inside her mind that it was maddening but none of it was fresh. It was all old, stale lifeless; a feast long since gone rotten and poisonous. None of it was the lush, succulent, tactile comprehension she craved more than air. In those rare moments when she was lucid to the present, Bim witnessed such newness like a breath of fresh air.

New faces attended their body. Her vessel seldom stayed in the same place for long but she was seemingly always in a bed of some kind. Someone tried to force feed her vessel once— such a mistake was never attempted again. Her vessel was not lifeless but she seldom had any measure of true control over her impressionable flesh. It was a gullible mindless automaton doing as it was beckoned.

She was led for a walk once, as one might do for a pet. The twinned suns were pleasant and the cacophony of memories were largely favorable events. There was an unfamiliar hand interlocked forcefully with her own, a familiar voice droning on as they idly strolled through crowded streets. Some distant part of her mind was glad that she wasn't confined to a bed, naively wishing their walk would never conclude even though she was barely aware of her surroundings. Bim recalled not wanting to return to her home but that was foolish.

She didn't have a home.

"Home sweet home." A slim young woman entered their shared room with a huff on her lips and a steaming mug in her hand.

Bim blinks back to reality and gasps. She was present, momentarily intertwined with the all-consuming Now. The air burned her throat. She could taste the pollutants rushing over her tongue and oxygen vainly attempting to rot the pseudoflesh of her vessel. This was another new place yet still it reminded her of a thousand places they'd been before.

"I don't think we've met…" Bim said to the young woman stripping off her outerwear across the room.

Bim was ignored. While she hadn't asked a formal question, most people would have jumped at the opportunity to introduce themselves. Bim scanned the shared room, a women's hostel she realized while fending off the swarm of memories that accompanied said revelation. There were twelve bunks across two sandstone walls, three small tables on the ground with a collection of sitting cushions.

"Could you please tell me were I am?" Bim asked politely.

This time she received an annoyed sigh in response, which was an improvement.

"Perhaps you could direct me towards my-" Bim tripped over the word 'acquaintances.' "Is Treu nearby? Perhaps Hiiro?"

Finally, the young woman turned from her bunk. She glared at Bim while sipping from her mug, weighing her options.

"Okay, I'll bite." She said at length. "Who's Hero? Another husband? Your thousandth son? Or did you mean your hero from one of your favorite radio dramas?"

Something in the woman's snarky, cutting tone struck a chord in Bim. This was a familiar thing. This wasn't the first time Bim had asked these questions even though she wasn't conscious of any previous exchanges. One memory triggered another, living with dementia. She'd burdened her children, months passing as in a few minutes of awareness, seeing their pity and disgust as she wasted away. Bim strangled the memories, commanding herself to the present before it could slip from her once more.

"Hiiro Volshebso." Bim clarified. "One of the Stalking Shadow mercenaries in the employ of Celio-Rodr-"

The woman dropped her mug at the mention of Celio. Ceramic shattered as it struck the edge of a table, then the floor. The shock made Bim gasp and accompanying the oxygen vainly rotting out her throat Bim detected the scent of vanilla tea with mint leaves. For some reason, it reminded her of Hiiro, which made her smile.

Snarky girl ran from the room without cleaning her mess. Bim was conflicted by this, annoyed, grateful, relieved all at once. Memories threatened to take the present from her, yet they could not overwhelm her as they had before. She was confused, a universal human state ubiquitous with all of the broken minds she harbored within her. She couldn't quantify it definitively, but Bim suspected she was well beyond the usual threshold that would have had the present torn from her consciousness. It was almost as if she was somehow anchored to reality once more, or she had immunized to the delirious effects of their collective memories.

Snarky girl returned with Princess in tow. Bim's smile faintly shifted at the familiar albinoid face, even as a discordant cry went out inside of her at the sight of the abhuman witch. Their minds were rebelling yet it meant nothing to Bim, they couldn't tear her from the present as they rioted inside her head. It was still rather distracting though. And annoying.

"You don't look any different…" Princess said, peering over Bim's vessel with supernatural scrutiny.

"I wasn't under the impression my vessel had changed." Bim stated conversationally.

"Are you really you? You've seemed awake before…"

"I am uncertain of how to answer that question."

"If you're really you, then what did we talk about the night after the snare op? Outside the palace overlooking where-"

"Where the gardens once stood, yes I recall that occasion." Bim said.

Pulling her own memories from the seething turmoil in her mind was a challenge— one she relished. She was in control once more. As irritable as the noise inside her mind was, Bim could still command her vessel and direct her perceptions. That was of the utmost importance. In the past, Bim would have quoted their exchange verbatim but with all the noise in her mind she settled for paraphrasing.

"You snuck up on me and said it was my own fault." Bim admitted with a vague, bitter smile. "We lamented the future and the inevitability of death together. You likened my demeanor and aura to a still pond hidden in tranquil hills. You also advised me to make a midnight rendezvous with Hiiro after inquiring after the functionality of my body's sexual organs."

A blush found its way into both the other women's cheeks. Bim could remember many such occasions themself long ago in past lives. Looking back on her own behavior with her newfound human understandings, she'd been sinfully fawning after Hiiro for weeks. By human standards—at least as she now understood them—she was quite the little strumpet. She'd been walking around half-naked in nothing but a translucent white dress for months no less! The realization horrified the human parts of her collective consciousness— the parts of her mind that were her own lamented the newfound need to further burden her vessel with additional clothing articles known as undergarments.

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"Yep, that's you in there." Princess said once she'd collected herself. "Took you long enough."

"Explain." Bim demanded.

"You've been out of it for weeks. Things have changed since Roy let you slip the leash."

"Explain precisely, now." Bim snarled, fighting off a swarm of half-memories. Things had changed, things were always changing.

Princess dismissed the snarky young woman who'd fetched her and began doing just that. Bim had been trapped in delirium for 17 days, 29 hours and 36 minutes local time. The unceasing march of time had been quite productive during her period of obliviousness.

Celio's ancestral home and the outfit's de facto stronghold on this planet had fallen while she was deepest in the throes of oblivion. This fact disturbed her for a number of reasons, chief among them was that had she been appropriately directed before Treu re-collared her, Bim could have obliterated the besieging forces unilaterally. Had she done so, subsequent events would have played out radically different and far more beneficially. Regret was not an exclusively human concept, but her comprehension of the notion had greater breadth given her newfound knowledge. Regret… oh yes, she now had regrets.

The most impactful deterioration stemming from her past failings was that any semblance of organization within Celio's burgeoning army was now long gone. His chosen men, the Vigia Nobre de Armas, had shattered and scattering into self-forging splinter cells. Most remained 'loyal' in their own ways, continuing Celio's shadow war through gang violence and acts of terror against the governing body— inadvertently doing his cause more harm than good in the process. They failed to maintain regular communications or receive orders from anyone but Celio and what few orders they didn't ignore were willfully misconstrued. Celio spent a great deal of time attempting to sway his disparate lieutenants back into the fold and thus far, he had been almost entirely unsuccessful.

The one notable exception to this was the former Guerreiro Doméstica, now Salvaguardar de Amante which Bim understood the rebranding to be intended as a battle honor. How a force named 'shield of concubines' was interpreted as honorable was lost to Bim but that was unimportant. As was relayed to Bim, the so-called battle maids had shown discipline and obedience far in excess of their male counterparts. The surviving cadre were fanatically loyal to their employer and the mercenaries who'd fought by their side on his behalf. The women's hostel Bim was currently sheltered in was one of many Celio had ordered built for the families of his chore girls and other outcast women; now in addition to serving as the outfit's scattered safe-houses, the many hostels were efficient recruiting grounds for Celio's battle-maids to be. Given how short time was running, Celio's replenishing army was looking more and more like a cult of armed zealots, underworld thugs and hired muscle.

The loyalist core of Celio's dream, the mercenaries and his proven battle-maids, were now interspersed with the civilian populous of Crucibab. The term 'human shields' kept coming to mind as Princess detailed how the outfit's remnants continued to evade definitive confrontation with police and militia forces by lightly skirmishing in areas dense with non-combatants and civil infrastructure. Their hit and run tactics were flying under the radar, largely due to the more radicalized elements of Celio's ex-vigia drawing attention elsewhere and by ruthlessly exploiting the governing body's unwillingness to conduct mass raids upon the general populous. Bim found the logic behind these tactics sound, yet the chorus within was aghast that 'The Savior,' as they knew Celio's public persona, would stoop so low.

All strategic and tactical planning was conducted with the approaching election in mind. Political pressures were generally leaning in favor of Celio's populist policies ever since the 'Night of Heaven's Wrath.' Princess was eager to steer her briefing away from Bim's rampage and for a time Bim acquiesced.

The policies of governing humans was a curious topic which Princess was poorly versed on but at the core of the matter, Bim gathered that rather paradoxically humans required leadership yet disliked having leaders. To allay these conflicting ideals a new leader was soon to be chosen by popular vote rather than by any measure of competency— which struck Bim as a terrible idea. She vaguely recalled Celio's plan to became a local ruler but the specifics had been lost to her without appropriate foundational knowledge. Celio—and by extension the mercenaries in his employ—was focusing on bolstering public opinion in preparation for the election, as had been his main intent all along.

His opposition was speculated to be solidifying their bases, slandering Celio's democratic claims, coordinating a counter-terrorism war and responding to the 'natural disaster' that was the Night of Heaven's Wrath. All of this while under heavy scrutiny and trying to maintain as much public goodwill as possible. It seemed a doomed effort in Bim's opinion. Nonetheless, the mortals opposing her insisted of fighting to the bitter end and beyond if they could manage it. Bim found such infantile floundering cute, though the term lacked the full scope of her thoughts. Such a curious trait of humanity, always fighting losing battles.

Of course, should Celio perish or renounce his claim before the polls opened, it didn't matter how much support he had. Corpses could not rule the living, after all. Bim understood Celio's death or capture to be the enemy's most direct path to victory and by extension the outfit's most immediate threat. As such, that rationale occupied the bulk of the mercenaries military focus at present. To further complicate matters, just yesterday news had reached the city that another IceBreaker had entered the system and the escorted ships should reach the planet with a few days. Such a development seemed unimportant to Bim until Princess amended her oversight.

"Think of it like a wild card." Princess explained.

"That means nothing to us." Bim stated flatly.

"Monkey wrench?"

Bim shook her head.

"Sand in the breach? Fly in the ointment? Spanner in the works? Really? None of these? Ok, fine. It is the unpredictable element."

"I see. Chaos, the eternal foe." Bim said, nodding sagely.

"Sure." Princess sighed while shrugging. "Anyway… The Shadow's sister ships the Heart of Darkness and Blissful Shade both arrived in-wake and are putting together relief forces to supplement our on-ground presence. The Stalking Shadow was also moving into orbit nearby, waiting in the wings to support us as needed— which is great for us in more ways than one. Problem is, if we're bringing on extra mercs, chances are pretty damned-good that the bad guys are doing the same."

"A mutual escalation of force drastically increases the probability of mutual destruction." Bim noted.

"We're pretty much thinking the same thing. We've only got a couple of weeks left to this job and it looks like we're going to end it with a bang. One last all-or-nothing roll of the dice and then we can take it easy for a few years. All said, it's a complex, non-ideal situation but it isn't necessarily a bad one. We just have to see Celio through to the election and to his inauguration if he wins. Even if he doesn't, we'll still have an exuberant payday for all the trouble."

A hint of passion had crept into her voice. Bim would have missed it before, but there was more to Princess's speech than just updating Bim's knowledge. This promised reward went beyond anything so mundane as monetary or material gain. How foolishly human. A contract was a covenant, hoping for something beyond the agreed articles was blind optimism and nothing more.

"Why gamble your lives like this? I've read accounts detailing humanity's capacity for destruction, but to see it-"

Memories assailed Bim mid-speech. Many long lives of seeing life cut short from a distance. Homes turned to ruin, knowledge lost, the damning consequence of human hubris. A never ending chain of fools all saying 'surely things will be different this time, we're smarter than they were.' Such naivety was almost endearing were it not so willfully foolish. Humans were noble savages like that, always just and righteous while those opposing them were vile and cruel. Strange how that distinction still applied when they fought amongst themselves.

"I don't know if I could explain it…" Princess started. "If anyone could, until you've been there. Even if I did, you probably still wouldn't get it, but its not just my life getting wagered on this. If we give up now—tell Celio to take his empire and shove it—then we've come all this way just to stop short of our reward. If we stop now, then everything we spent getting here was a waste. Even if they aren't my friends, even if they don't even see me as a human being, I'd rather die than tell anyone they spent their life on nothing."

Princess sat quietly then, seemingly finished with her briefing. Bim was tempted to question how Princess would tell the deceased anything, but that was merely a stalling tactic. It could be avoided no longer, so Bim bade Princess tell her of the Night of Heaven's Wrath. The night Bim had slipped the leash.

Martial law paired with massed unlawful arrests was cited as the root cause of the apocalyptic devastation, and ironically enough the peasant doom-sayers were closer to the truth of the matter than most would think. The official speculation ranged from military research gone awry to inexplicable natural disaster to random act of god. In the intervening weeks civil authorities had been able to confirm upwards of 180,000 dead, over ten-thousand deceased confirmed per day since the attack. The actual damages in terms of lives and infrastructure had yet to be calculated. The mortals could only speculate how many had perished, conservative estimates placed the death toll around a nice even 600,000— typical human hubris, every life was precious yet counting them all was too much of a chore. Less realistic projections claimed the city of more than twelve million had suffered casualties in the millions. Relief and reconstruction efforts would be years if not decades in the making.

These humans break so easily, she thinks to herself as multitudes within were rendered dumb. How could warring factions of mere mortals hope to accomplish the desolation she'd unintentionally achieved in a single night? Bim had no difficulties appreciating the figures. The human minds within couldn't fathom it. They could speculate and estimate but only three could envision what a crowd of ten-thousand people would look like if they all dropped dead simultaneously and none of them could scale that idea to its full scope. Bim could, quite easily in fact.

Bim had little memory of her actions while off the leash. She couldn't relate to herself then outside the constraints of mortal perception. She had been beyond what she was now. An alien beast, even to herself. The realization was haunting to her. Nearly as haunting as the details of what she'd done that night was to those within her. The noise of their cries was near-deafening in her mind. Bim silenced their gibbering with one of the few memories she retained. She had killed these humans, trapped extracts of their minds and rendered ten times their number into data for consumption; all on an idle whim before tearing apart mountains and raining stone without concern for where it fell. The calamity she had wrought hadn't even been an afterthought to her past self. Your material realm of immutable time and fickle matter was so undeniably fragile, your mortal vessels doubly so.

Human lives had been so utterly beneath her then, as a human might consider the shrub-grass they trod upon; it was alive yes but it was not life, not an equal or even lesser being. The doom-sayers had granted the foreboding event the dark reverence it deserved. She had loosed the wrath of the hell upon the unsuspecting city that night and somewhere in the process Bim had lost herself. Princess concluded her second hand retelling and impossible though it seemed, she had gone even paler.

Why had Treu allowed her past self to do this? Were events such as these not exactly what her Tormentor was supposed to prevent? Your kind call me a monster as if that were an insult… Bim remembered those words as a concept. To the human minds at her disposal there was unilateral certainty. She was a monster. Now the question that demanded her attention mirrored their sentiment.

Was Bim just a monster?

Princess sat quiet on the bunk opposite her, seemingly finished once more, and yet she had been careful to avoid the subject that interested Bim most. The only subject Bim truly cared for.

"You still haven't told me where Hiiro is now." Bim stated.

Princess held her silence for a long while. The minds within Bim jumped to conclusions that she willfully ignored.

"Did I succeed in rescuing him? Did the devastation I wrought have meaning? Or was it all a waste?"

Princess seemed to be at a loss for words. It should have been a simple question. Bim could feel herself slipping as the minds within clamored.

"Answer now, M̵̟͛ǫ̷̇r̶̙̃ţ̶̎a̸̗̾l̴̹͐ !" Bim commanded, her regal voice nothing but cold authority.

"You did manage to get him back to us but you were both pretty beat up. I saw that much myself. Then we had to retreat, abandon the palace and get out while we could… He fell out of the shuttle as it was taking off. Leeroy and a bunch of the powertechs saw him fighting as the palace got overrun. They say he drove off the cliff into the sea and we haven't been able to get a hold of him since. We don't know if he's stil-"

"Don't!" Bim snarled, her face contorting autonomously as she fought a surge of memories.

Death assailed her mind. Family. Lovers. Friends. All dead and gone too soon. It was the human condition. People died.

"He might have made it." Princess suggested.

Implying that it was more likely he hadn't. Hiiro was mortal and by definition that meant he was subject to death. It was impossible to deny. As were the indicators. If Hiiro had survived he would have found his way to her yet he was not here.

Hiiro was not here, because he was very probably dead.

The thought was worse than any death the minds within had witnessed. More cutting than any injury their collective had suffered. Years of anguish, lifetimes of hardship yet none of it rivaled Bim's loss in that moment.

Reality went runny around the edges, the constant of gravity became flux, and Princess shot her eyes about the room in panic. It was all so tiring, the material plane was an unending abrasion upon her being. In a coarse and unwelcoming reality, the one soothing comfort she'd know had been ripped from her and she was powerless to prevent it.

"Bim?"

Utterly powerless. She'd known it would always come to this. Hiiro was as much a slave to death as she was to time. They'd each had their own losing battle to fight yet somehow she'd always thought Hiiro would outlast her. Somehow, he could beat the odds and do the impossible. Without his warmth, this reality seemed a cold and heartless beast.

"BIM!?"

She was drawn back to the present. To the non-euclidean chamber of darkness and ice. To the sandstone walls now sculpted with pieces of the body she longed to cradle against her's once more. To the wooden tables now revived into living trees growing where they had no right to be. To her own vessel floating above the disintegrated remains of a bunk, pseudoflesh quivering into unique geometries encased in a human guise.

With some difficulty, Bim reigned in her rampant thoughts allowing normality to reassert itself in a span of seconds. The darkness lifted, ice began thawing and Bim landed on the floor.

"Well…" Princess said wide-eyed. "That was new."

Bim reached a hand to confirm she was still wearing the dampening torc around her throat. She was. The effect had in no way diminished or changed. Her awareness however, had changed immensely.

"Yes, it was." Bim stately flatly.

On a whim, she attempted to manifest light within her surroundings. A single small ball of gently glowing white-gold radiance formed at a hover over her open palm.

She was still bound, still weakened to an infinitesimal fraction of her former power, but there was room for play within her confines. There were limitations in finesse, intensity and locality, but she could manipulate reality with naught but a concentrated thought. Bound though she may be, Bim was far from powerless. So long as there was a chance that Hiiro lived, Bim would not abandon hope. It may have been illogical, a pointless quest doomed to failure, but it was her losing battle to fight.

How naively human of her.