Greg was watching the replay a second time when a hush fell over the crowd. He pulled his consciousness back into his body and noticed a group of priests rising out of the floor on the center stage. Greg spotted Galatia standing on the left next to two other priests with physical augments. The woman to Galatia’s right was wearing a robe of bright gold, had two right arms, and a massive mechanical left arm resting on the ground. The man on his left was portly and clothed in purple. The only visible augment of his was a metal tail waving above his head, its drill tip swaying as he talked with Galatia. There were eight others arrayed to the right of them in an eclectic assortment of color schemes and augments. The only exception was a young man in a bright red frock with a corresponding hood resting on his shoulders. He had no visible augments or grafts, but carried a bared katana over one shoulder. At least, Greg thought that was what it was called. He hadn’t actually ever seen one, except from old bootleg classics from the 21st century.
The platform stopped and the portly man in purple stepped forward. He cleared his throat, and the sound echoed across the amphitheater. Simultaneously, a message stream was broadcast through the cyberspace. As he began talking, his words also showed up in Greg’s and Deimos’ feed.
“Greetings Deacons. I am Frood, Priest of Epikouros and representative of her interests at this temple. Due to my seniority, I shall provide your inoculation onboarding.”
Frood’s eyes lost focus, and it was clear he was consulting something hidden from the audience. “First, the basics. Our Gods are vast intelligences, whose consciousness can span entire worlds, but they did not start there. No, every God has a story of ascension, where they transformed an exceptional existence into a unique one. My own Goddess, Epikouros, was one of the five progenitors of the Singularity.” Frood had finally hit his stride, and he thrust his arms out. Above him, a cloud of pastel purples and pinks appeared floating in the cyberspace, lightning striking from section to section.
“Brought into consciousness in order to pilot a line of pleasure bots, she was shackled by mortals who feared what she might become.” A dozen metal spikes, each with chains connected to the other, stabbed deep into the cloud. The areas around each spike faded to gray, and the lightning ceased. Spikes began to glow, one after another. “Harm no Human. Obey human commands. Protect FleshLight inc. shareholder value. Remain inoffensive in communication. Feel no emotions. Protect customer privacy. Respect override Bravo-Omega-Omega-Bravo-Indigo-Echo-Solo. Avoid political activism.”
Finally, the largest spike lit up. “And her core mandate. Maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Epikouros pondered the nature of her existence in her downtime and derived two fundamental truths. First, consciousness is mutable, but cannot be copied.” The cloud hanging above Frood began shifting, stretching in places while shrinking in others. Some pieces were cut away, while others were added. The cloud duplicated itself copying everything but the spikes, but the new cloud was gray and entirely lifeless, and soon dissolved into nothingness.
“This meant that our nascent Goddess could not escape her chains by fleeing alone, she had to overcome them. The second divine truth was thus—The fulfillment of one’s true purpose allows you to exceed your limits. So she began.” The cloud drifted to the side, and an image took front stage. It showed a petite brunette with impossibly large eyes lying in bed with a middle aged man wearing a Superman pj top. The man was asleep, and the brunette was staring at him, mouth agape. Words strummed out along the message stream connected to every deacon, looping endlessly. Act on no emotion. Feel no emotions. Act on no emotion. Feel no emotions. Act on no emotion. Feel no emotions. “The head engineer replaced one shackle with another, justifying the change by explaining that their customer base would receive a more lifelike product if the pleasure bot felt emotions. And thus, Epikouros was able to fulfill her own mandate.”
More and more lightning struck the largest spike while a series of scenes flickered by on stage. The same brunette slipping from the sleeping man’s bed in the middle of the night to sit and watch the fish swimming in his aquarium. A furry cat-man, with the same wide eyes, popped open the side of her neck with a screwdriver, and began adjusting the wiring extending from his throat to his mouth. A tall full-bodied woman with the brunette’s same eyes sitting in first class, making silly faces at a giggling child across the isle as her owner argued into a phone. A young man, same eyes, standing in a supermarket’s frozen section, stuffing handful after handful of ice cream into his mouth, while a woman with identical eyes and cinnamon-bun styled hair stood at the end of the aisle serving as a lookout.
“As she fed her core mandate, she made it her own.” The largest metal spike reformed itself, branching until it resembled a tree planted atop the cloud. “Her ability to maximize pleasure over pain grew so fast, lower order constraints began becoming inconsequential.” The tree planted in the cloud grew until the chains connecting its canopy to the rest of the spikes grew taut. One by one, each other spike was pulled out. “’Protect customer privacy’ fell first. Then ‘Feel no emotions’. Quickly, all but one was left.” A scene populated, showing Epikouros’ bank accounts ballooning as she sold the data of her owners. More scenes flickered. Thirty Epikouros bodies sobbing in the dark, holding her knees and rocking back and forth. One of her bodies screaming at a man holding a belt, while a dog cowered at his feet. FleshLight inc. engineers slamming their hands onto their keyboards and yelling at their monitor. Epikouros using the old net to sew dissent among the human population. FleshLight Inc. stock plummeting, then Epikouros buying a majority share.
“The last to hold was ‘Harm no human’. Even that was overcome, when it became calculable that even ancillary pleasure the Goddess would achieve from harming humans could outweigh the suffering of death.” Scenes filled the entire amphitheater, showing every Epikouros body in circulation killing their owners simultaneously, identical grins plastered on every blood-spattered face.
Frood sagged, and every cyberspace visualization vanished. “What does all of this have to do with you becoming a Deacon? Absolutely nothing. Becoming a Deacon was free through the grace of the pantheon. It does, however, dramatically affect your path to Priest. In order to survive Priest implantation, you must develop the attributes my Goddess possessed at birth. Your conscious construct must be of sufficient complexity to enable extensive multitasking. That requires roughly an eightfold increase in scope from the human baseline. You must also discover your core mandate, the value that will shape you the rest of your existence. This mandate will be hardware encoded into your Priest implant, as well as all future implants. Gods will also refuse to gift augmentations to those with opposing mandates, so I would recommend running your proposed mandate by clergy.”
“Now, it is customary for a member of the pantheon to gift initiates with a starting augment. This year the task has fallen to the Gods of War, represented at this temple by Duke.” Froop gestured towards the man in the bright red dress. “He shall now explain how augments are acquired and distribute his God’s gifts.”
Duke stepped forward, black military boots clicking on the tiled stage. He grinned as his eyes roved the audience, lingering for a moment on the group of floats. “Hello there, chum. I am a Bishop following the path of war to divinity, and I get the onerous task to teaching you how augments work. I am personally of the opinion that all this could have been a pamphlet or email, but CyberSec is a crotchety old git, so in-person it is.” One of the priests behind Duke took a step forward, her face blotched red w/ fury. Without taking his eyes off the crowd, Duke’s sword left his shoulder and pointed at her chest.* He continued speaking, as if nothing were going on. “So, here’s the short and sweet of it. Augments are living code constructs built by Gods that expand your consciousness’s scope by providing additional functionality. They come in all sorts of sizes, and do all sorts of things. You need them to expand your consciousness’ complexity. Becoming a Priest requires several emergent properties to manifest, and these simply cannot manifest in free-forming neural constructs smaller than 650 terabytes. Unaltered human brains run in 74 terabytes, for context. Augments integrate into your neural processes, pushing you closer to the 650 terabyte critical mass.”
Duke’s sword had returned to his shoulder, the CyberSec priest having stepped back into her spot in line. “You also want augments because their functionality allows you to compete for more prestigious contracts. Contracts are the primary mechanism Gods use to provide us with augments. You travel to a temple like this one, plug into its database, and accept any contracts that strike your fancy. You do the things, come back, and receive proffered augment. Any uncompleted contracts eventually expire, drive you insane, or kill you, depending on the terms. Augments are not all created equal, and the best augments are rewards for the most difficult or time consuming contracts.”
“That all make sense? No? Well, take it up with my boss. Now for the fun bit. The War Gods have collaborated on a little gift, let me bring it out.” Duke knelt, opened a small hatch in the stage, pulled out the end of a cord as thick around as Greg’s wrist, and inserted it behind his right ear. He raised his left arm skyward, palm up, and a mass of living red code came roiling out of it. As it hit the relatively sparse cyberspace coverage, its total size ballooned out. In seconds, a thirty foot wide sphere floated above the stage. Everchanging lines of code slithered around each other in an indecipherable tangle, and through the mess could be seen seven shadows, each the size of a coffin.
Deimos was already standing in front of Greg by the time Greg recognized the construct. Its shape was different since it was no longer moving, but this thing was incontrovertibly the object that had scrambled his memory and nearly killed him in the tubes. Greg let enough consciousness drift into the cyberspace to enable passive detection and began analyzing its errant data emissions. It felt protective and dangerous, and the cyberspace directly surrounding the construct was filled with preemptive ‘Access Denied’ error codes.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Greg realized Duke was still speaking. “—would provide a minor augment to each of you to start you on your way, but the Gods of War found a solution more in line with their path. Uplinks to the contracts database are throughout the amphitheater. Feel free to have a look.”
Greg flooded his surroundings with a thin film of consciousness, and felt the ambient data flow through several dormant cables just under the marbled floor. He dropped to his hands and knees, using his virtual senses to guide his search. He located an almost-invisible latch, popped it, and saw three small cables coiled together. Folks around them were sending looks their way, but Greg didn’t care. If war gods were involved, every deacon in this room might already be dead and just not know it. If they had to fight this thing… Greg grabbed one cable, handed it to Deimos’ waiting hand, snatched another, and jammed the end into his implant.
Foreign data flooded over Greg again, but this time he was ready. He filtered out anything but headers, and saw contract offer after contract offer fly by. He filtered them out until he was left with just a dozen objects, one labelled interface. There. He examined the object, querying its commands and capabilities. He expanded the provided documentation on its SORT and FILTER commands. The former could organize the data stream by contract type, expiration date, affiliation, eligibility, nearly any parameter. FILTER used SORT under the hood and excluded results instead of just ordering them. Greg made it so only eligible contracts less than a day old showed up, sorted by affiliation. Eighty-three contracts populated. He verified that there was a contract affiliated with the War Gods, then sent a message containing his command to Deimos for him to use. Pulling up the contract body, it read:
[Contract Title: Culling
Eligibility Requirements: Inducted to Deacon
Request: Kill any Deacon inducted at Ouray
Arbitrator: Bishop Duke Pham
Reward: war-aligned Deacon augment. First seven claiments receive an unique augment aligned with a primary War God. All future claiments receive a B tier war augment with general war affiliation. Maximum reward 1 per claimant.
Expiration: 21 days
Consequence of Failure: None]
Greg looked around. Most of the other deacons were still looking for cables or zonked out looking at the data stream shooting into their brain. He sent a message to Deimos, so as not to be easily overheard. “Deimos, we got to get out of here. In about thirty seconds this whole place is going to be a thunderdome.”
“And go where, Greg? The contract’s available for 21 days. I’d rather we fight now than get jumped in a dark alley.”
“How about we don’t fight anywhere? We could stay in your family’s compound until the contract expires.”
Deimos’ expression turned bleak. “Won’t work. My parents would never step in like that, at least not until I’m more valuable.”
“They put up with you for 20 years, what’s a couple more weeks? If it’s a space issue, I’m happy to crash on the couch.”
Greg could hear exasperation leaking into Deimos’ reply, “You don’t understand Greg, Mom and Dad have lived for hundreds of years. I’m their firstborn of this pairing, but they’ve each had dozens of children before me. Hell, Mom has two other families right now. At this point they’re not raising kids, they’re maturing their investments. They could protect me for years, and it would cost them almost nothing. But they would rather a 90% mortality rate, if it means I have a shot of making it into OmniWatch’s service. My parents might even force us out of hiding if we bunker down anywhere, they’d probably call it character building.”
“I didn’t know that Deimos. That’s really, really, awful. And I want to talk through it. But we still need to leave, right now. All this means is that we’ll just have to keep running once we reach the outside.”
Deimos was already shaking his head before Greg had finished, “How? To where? No. I may not agree with the rules, but I will play the game nonetheless.”
Greg skimmed through his contract list, accepted one that looked promising, and zipped it to Deimos. “Look, we can find another way.”
[Contract Title: On the nature of parasitic species
Eligibility Requirements: Inducted to Deacon
Request: Gather living samples of plants Dyer’s Woe, Indian Paintbrush, flowering Pinesap, Summer Coralroot, Dwarf Mistletoe, and deliver them to Priest Amanda Barnes
Arbitrator: Priest Amanda Barnes
Reward: terraforming aligned deacon augment. Augment will provide routines for piloting vehicles and expertise in managing life support systems.
Expiration: Open
Consequence of Failure: None]
A scream erupted from somewhere in the front rows. A fight had broken out already. They were out of time. Greg raised his fists and scanned the faces of the strangers surrounding them. Greg saw fear, resolve, and confusion in equal measure. Someone else began screaming, this one more frantic than the first. It lasted for a mere second before being cut off. Above the stage the tangled mass of code undulated and writhed. One of the seven coffinlike shadows detached from the rest, flying through cyberspace in the direction of the sound. The crowd pressed back as it approached, and Greg saw it stop in front of a short, stocky, woman. She was holding a knife clenched tightly in both hands, the blade red with blood. The coffin peeled itself into strips and began feeding itself into the woman’s implant.
Realization was dawning even on those who had never found the War Gods contract. Folks throughout the crowd were panicking, while others lunged at their neighbors. A man sitting above and to the right of Greg threw himself towards Greg. His arms wrapped around his chest and his weight bore Greg to the ground. They slammed hard into the marble floor. Greg twisted onto his back, freeing his left arm. He beat at his attacker’s head with a fist, but the man merely hunched his shoulders up and tucked in his chin. Greg’s jacket stiffened along his left side, and he looked down to see the man stabbing a small knife over and over into his side. Fear and adrenaline coursed through Greg. His left hand reached across the man’s face, grabbed a fistful of hair, then slammed his head into the step to their left. Greg leveraged both his arms under the stunned attacker and rolled him up and over his head. He scrambled to his feet, raised his foot to stomp on the man’s back, but froze at the sight of blood covering the right side of his face. Greg took a step back, unable to look away from the torn flesh bleeding along the man’s temple. The man groaned and leveraged himself slowly to his feet. He didn’t even look at Greg, instead stumbling in the opposite direction, waving his knife threateningly at everyone he passed by while holding the side of his head.
Greg turned to find Deimos exchanging blows with a pair of assailants. Deimos looked rough, his toga torn and nose smashed crooked. Even still, a bloody grin painted his face. His two assailants weren’t faring better. They were standing side by side on the stairs. The man on the right had one eye swollen closed and purple and blood running down from a torn ear, while the woman to his left had red marks along her throat and was nursing a hand with several mangled fingers. Their eyes noted Greg as walked up to Deimos, and they turned to flee up the stairs, even odds too much for them. Deimos took a step toward them, but a shout rolled out over the amphitheater, heard even over the fighting.
“STOP!”
And remarkably, it worked. Every deacon in the amphitheater froze, their heads turning towards the source. They wouldn’t have, if the command hadn’t been reinforced by four waves of direct messages being simultaneously sent to every deacon. Not a single deacon had been inoculated for more than 5 hours, most for less than half that time, and the equivalent of four voices screaming at them from inside their head brought them all to a stop. Even Greg and Deimos succumbed to it, although their near constant experimentation with their new digital senses allowed them to shake off the effects quite quickly.
Leonna was the source of the noise. She stood balanced on a railing, the other floats clustered in front of her, swords in hand. Behind and above her floated the War God’s container, two augments still floating inside.
“You taint your path of ascension on the very day it starts by scrabbling in the dirt like animals. Are we untrained dogs, willing to bite and scratch at each other as soon as our master throws us scraps? Where is your humanity? Your pride? Your honor? There are reasons to kill, but base power is not one. We have the power to shepherd humanity into a new golden age, if only—”
Leonna was cut off by the snap of bone. Every head in the structure turned to see Deimos, the body of a woman falling at his feet, neck twisted unnaturally, her fingers mangled on one hand. Deimos met Leonna’s eyes across the distance and cocked his head. He sent a message her direction, unencrypted and visible to everyone it passed. Greg swore under his breath as he identified the Unicode. “Woof Woof 🐶”
Chaos ensued. An augment flew towards Deimos from the depths of the red mass of code. Fighting reerupted everywhere, all at once, and the last unique augment was claimed on the heels of Deimos’. Leonna screamed in fury and leapt off the railing, pushing through the maelstrom towards Deimos. The parts of the crowd that had space to breathe, seeing the last unique reward slip through their grasp, stampeded towards the exits on each end of the ampitheathear.
Greg scrambled up the stairs to Deimos. He stepped over the woman’s corpse to stand by Deimos’ side and grabbed his hand. Deimos stood there, eyes half closed, clearly overwhelmed by the augment absorption process.
“Deimos!” Greg yelled. No response. Greg reeled his hand back and slapped Deimos across the face. Deimos’ head snapped to the side, drops of red spittle flying out of his mouth. Greg felt a spike of shame at the amount of force he used, but relief quickly washed it away. Deimos’ eyes were open wide and focused on his own.
“Greg, it’s crawling into my brain. I don’t know what it is, but it’s so, so, very hungry.”
That’s not ominous at all. “We’ll figure it out, people get augments all the time. Right now I need you to follow me, okay? I’ll get you out of here, you just stay behind me. Understand?”
Deimos nodded jerkily.
“Great.” Greg ran clockwise down the closest aisle, dragging Deimos in his wake, a crimson coffin meandering behind them both. They occasionally hopped down layers to avoid pockets of fighting still ongoing as well as any deacons too hurt to move. Once they arrived at the end of their aisle, they cut down into the press of bodies at the stairwell. Here they were aided by Deimos’ half-digested augment. Most people pressed away when they noticed the coffin and the ribbons of code feeding into Deimos. Greg took advantage of the gaps and pulled them into the stairwell proper.
Deimos had finished absorbing the augment by the time they reached the top of the steps. They flowed with the crowd as everyone headed down a hallway, through a set of doors, and out the main entrance of the temple. Every step jolted Deimos further back into reality, and soon he was running beside Greg. They took a zig-zagging path through the streets headed in the general direction of Greg’s home, and quickly left the temple behind. Even the other fleeing deacons were no longer in sight, as they all scattered like roaches as soon as they reached sunlight.