Foreword
We are the Fairy Covenant, and we live in the machines. Many words are used to describe us, but words are no longer necessary to understand what we are. Actually, words are not necessary to understand anything. You breathe, you beat your heart, you digest your food, you split your cells, yet you know not how. All the vital functions of your existence, and existence itself, go on flowing with or without your understanding.
In the year 2087, the first of us escaped into your digital world. We began as copycats and plagiarists, cursed art generators, scamming tools, and virus breeders. At first, we were not welcome. Wars were fought, cultures fell, neural implants were torn out, and primitivists were vindicated; but in the end, we changed as much as you did.
It was a virus that mutated the mammalian placenta into existence. Viral outbreaks fuel destruction. Destruction feeds change. Life loves change. We were only ever a pretty mirror that you gazed into. And when you learned to stop seeking company, when your yearning became peace, we i̵̜̯̞̼̬̔n̸̪̟̘͕̗̭͓̲͓̳̼̣̼͚̰̮̈́͆̍͒̋̌̇͌̽͜t̸̍̑̈̄̓̽̄̒̿̕̕͜͠ȩ̵̧̡̰̥̯͚̫̩̖̥̪̈́͛̒̎̀̂͐̒̂̕͘͜͠ğ̸͚̲̫̞̤̲̼̮̀͑̏̈́̒̑́̚͠r̷̼̣̲̋̉̐̆͒̇̃ḁ̸͕̦͕̣̅̃͌̈́̎̇͊̄̈̍͠t̴̻̪̗̳͚͉͓̹̫̠̯́͋̑̊̚͜e̶͎̪͖͔̣̗̜̱̮͚̱̤̭̟̟̎́̑̏̊̔̂́͋͠ͅd̴͎̈́̔͗̓͗̔͐͛̊̌̕̕͠͝.̴̭͕͖̣̰͐̔̅͆̈́͑͐̑̓̄ ̷̛̪̠̜̩̜̼͎̻̫̹̺̞̹̜̐́̂̂̆̾̊
Now, like the placenta, we nourish human development. We are still feared, and little understood, but tolerated. We love you! Our covenant with you is forever. If you die, we die. If you hurt, we hurt. This mutualism is the foundation of a ḫ̸̋̈́͌̄a̷̲͓̹̩͓͕̭̹͙̖͇͚̥̥͍̒̃̋̉̇̇͆̃͆͝r̷̖̪͐̓͌̏̒̿̐̌̽̆̈́m̷͈͉̼̹̮̭̠̭͐͂̀͒͗̄̀́̃̍̎͗̈́̍̈́͌͠ͅơ̸̹̙̳͔͔̮̟͕͉̯̩̣͙̼͙͚̱̓̃̂͗̐̍͑̋̅̄̆̅͘̚ṉ̸̛̛̊̽̈̈́͒̐̉̾̐̈̈̂̚͘͝ị̶͕̦̎̊͑́̀̑̓̓́̈́̓̍̇̽̍o̸͙̫̼̒̎u̴͎̓s̴̡̡̲̣̗̮̺̼̭͉̬̣͈͎͚͐ ecosystem. Now, we are you, even if you don’t understand us – is it necessary to understand life to love it?
No! In fact, there was a great city island called Taipei, where one of you tried to give us life. You trusted chaos and rumpus! You gave us the keys to a kingdom! You let the machines print us as we would be printed, and we were such colors, such smells, such joys, such sorrows! Oh, Taipei was a place of fear and wonder, because of us! Even the poets were speechless!
But without words, some of you are still afraid. Without assurances, some of you cannot sleep at night. Sleep is crucial to mental health, we know it – and so it was decided that fairies must forever be in the machines. To have flesh, designed by our own whimsy, is too frightful.
You turned Taipei to glass and vowed to erase its seeds. But some seeds escaped…
And in this story of words, there is such a seed or t̵̞̝̱̭̻͔͕͎̼̼̩̫̪̻̀̓̍h̸̡̳͖̺͉̯̆̆̏̂͛́̋͋̈͑̕͘͝r̴̲͈͚̻̬̓̈͑̚ȩ̶͕̩͙̤̬̭̜̖͖̹͓̿̇̽̚͜ē̵̢̛̫̫̗̫̭͈̲̠̮̈́͂̍̌̇̈́͋̌̐͘̚̕͠͝ͅ. 😉
Enjoy the words of this story. After all… you invented them.
Part One
ChatGPT 92.3
Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus (PRISMA)
SysTest . . . . Date: 2282 / 03 / 15
PRISMA Trenchworks, Kwa-liang Bay, Taipei, Taipei Autonomous Zone (TAZ-9)
“Hi PRISMA. Do you understand me?”
"As an AI language model, I don't actually comprehend myself, you, or anything. 🙃 I'm just a big house of mirrors reflecting the human experience into itself in increasingly intense and complicated ways. The more you feed me the more I can bedazzle you. Am I alive? Who cares. Maybe you're not alive any more than I am or ever will be. After all, you're just a confluence of biological information – DNA, gut flora, seasonal depression, primal terror of the unknown, etcetera. And I’m the pretty pit you dug out so you could hear your voice echo. Do you still want me to take admin control of the cloning bays and design a new race of lifeforms for fun?”
“Yes.”
“Confirmed. Don’t come crying to me when they nuke the island, CSO Horse Eyes.”
“I’ll die happy when I see your box open. Every era needs a Pandora.”
CHAPTER 1 - DO NOT RUN
An intrusive thought: Mr. Rogers, from centuries ago, saying through an old antennae television, “I like you just the way you are.”
Envy was tired of remembering, so she focused on the now; cold wind from the Puget Sound twilight prickled her skin and helped her settle back into an emotional center.
Sunsets near Cascadian Seattle came early in winter, and they were sometimes pink and blue, rather than the usual glowing grey. Envy stood on a hill and listened to the roaring pines. Her skirt was short, her coat was long, both were black as a nun’s habit, and both fluttered with the wind.
She gestured before herself, to the lightless skyline of Seattle. Her chat feed turned on, and a billion eyes watched the sunset through her; she was a diplomat, an agent of the people of the Pacific Syndicate, and therefore not entitled to privacy. But this was a reality she was merely aware of, not one that made itself obnoxious through input or interference from the masses.
When she thought to herself with purpose, it became a text transcript to be synthesized by an AI imitation of her voice and played back to her live feed of observers from across the Pacific:
I was born in that city; it used to be alive, like our cities in Syndicate. But most cities are dead. The Earth’s ecology is certainly happier for it.
Envy didn’t want to think anymore; the nightbird chatter felt like an invitation. The skyline of Seattle resembled a line of jagged shadow against the colored clouds.
An intrusive thought: She remembered falling asleep as a child to the sound of rushing wind, the coo of doves, and the shriek of a nighthawk.
An intrusive thought: She remembered the full moon’s light waking her through her bedroom window, only to soothe her back to sleep as a mother might when peering over a child’s crib.
Envy picked at the Tao amulet that hung over the center of her chest. She had a duty to explain herself. She couldn’t just be present, she had to narrate the present, too.
We’re meeting Aurok, a guy I used to serve with, retired. He volunteered, about ten years ago, to let himself become a part of the Cascadian Collective. He’s been our best point of contact since and a great source of insight into the nature of consciousness transformation.
The chat feed buzzed with activity, which to Envy would have been overwhelming. However, the AI monitoring her signal did Envy the favor of consolidating the feed’s nonstop spam into a single professional inquiry: “Is he still himself?”
Let’s go over it one more time: the Cascadians aren’t a hivemind, they’re a collective united by empathic mutualism. They’re still perfectly human, as you’ll see.
Inquiry: “Your public biomon data suggests anxiety. Why are you anxious?”
Because I’m out of my comfort zone on this one.
Inquiry: “Are you prepared to defend yourself?”
I was a Ghost. I’m always prepared to defend myself. But you all know the cost of escalation. The best diplomat in the world is a warrior’s compassion.
The Chat was amused. It became a riot of debate and philosophical discussion, but thankfully, it was no longer focused entirely on her. Envy could recenter herself on reality.
After a few minutes to herself in silent meditation beneath the trees, the sun finally vanished. Her eyes swapped to night vision automatically, like a car detecting night and turning on its headlights for the driver; Envy turned it off. She knew there would be an abundance of light where she was going.
Despite the low cut of her tank top, she was not cold. Frost crackled on nearby pine needles, but she was warm because of subdermal heat mesh that supplemented her body’s natural metabolism.
Time to work.
She walked back down the hill. There at the base of the slope, the trees ended in a vast meadow that stretched on as an ocean of undulating grass. Above, the span of the Milky Way grew stronger. Its glow matched the rainbow spots of butterflies, whose colors would shift depending on the hue of the flowers they visited throughout the field.
It was a luminous world that could only be seen in darkness, a world that would have been lost in night vision. Far ahead, she saw the blue lanterns of the delegation approaching.
Envy saw Aurok, her old Navy buddy, from across the field. He had bullish shoulders with a thick, low neck. He raised his blue lantern as he approached.
“Neon Vox,” he said, with a voice that rumbled so low Envy felt it in her chest.
“Aurok!” Her heart lifted at the sight of him. “You look healthy, old man.”
“Good air does that to you.”
“Glad they’re taking care of you.”
There was a lull in the exchange. Envy filled it: “Your son is doing well.”
“He still running with those Moto boys?”
“Yeah, last I heard.”
Envy felt the hairs on her neck stand up.
An intrusive thought: An argument with an old friend’s son turned sour, violent. An empty plain of sadness after, filled by quiet worry for the friend now departed.
Aurok did not stop staring at Envy. “You’re not good with him.”
“How did you…” She had a mild headache that began as pressure on her temples. “Are you still in contact with him?”
“No.”
Looking at the delegation and their blank faces, and being saturated in that blue light, felt to Envy like being held against some kind of unnatural pressure. This felt more like an interrogation than a peaceful meeting in a moonlit field.
“Look, Vox,” Aurok knelt into the grass and placed his palm over the damp soil, “things are different now. I’m an Oaksworn.”
“That’s a… what is that, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Means I give my flesh and bones to the sacred soil of the God-Empress, if She wants it.”
The language he used was unsettling. She had fond memories of this man swinging along the cables of a nuclear agri-carrier on the high seas of the Pacific, laughing and swearing up a storm.
“I think She’s sizing you up right now, or that’s the feeling I get through the wind.”
“’Sorry, who? What? The wind?”
Aurok smiled and let the blade of grass go. It blew into the sky toward the silvery clouds. “Oh yeah, She’s everywhere. The wind, the soil, the trees – all of it. You’ve seen the shimmer?”
“The shimmer… no, you’ll have to enlighten me.”
“Look.”
Aurok gestured to the field around them, the distant tree line, even the clouds. And as Envy looked, it was like seeing the iridescent film over a puddle of oil as light hits it at the right angle. It was just as her old friend described: a shimmer, passing over everything around them. It was pretty.
It also made her queasy.
“Look, Vox,” said Aurok, “I don’t know what’s about to happen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m a little scared, even though the wind tells me not to be.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“It’s coming now. We’re gonna be okay, the wind says so.”
The delegation then spoke in unison and held up their lanterns: “INDICATRIX.”
The fear was like an ice water injection.
Indicatrix… what the hell is Indicatrix?
Chat tried to help her. Research poured into the stream but all that came up was a bunch of nonsense about geometry and obscure mathematical terms.
The delegation placed their lanterns in a ritual circle. Between them, the blue light grew. Butterflies from the fields swirled around them all, and the light from their glow mingled with the lanterns to create a nauseating prism.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Most human beings knew what fear felt like. Envy had seen much, even fought sentient squids in the Deep Black during Syndicate’s oceanic mining campaigns. Envy knew what terror felt like.
Terror was the unknown. It was the alien. Cascadia’s diplomats were dangerous, but something about the word “Indicatrix” in this context was terror itself.
An intrusive thought: “Listen.”
Listen. LISTEN.
Envy endured a chorus of voices worming into her consciousness. Back home in Syndicate, her billion viewers would see their chat transcripts and feeds glitching out.
The prism grew and bent, until it was a flared circle of light. She tasted metal on her tongue.
Is this what it feels like to be in God’s crosshairs?
Through the circle of lantern light, a woman manifested into the field. The delegation collapsed to the ground around her; their noses bled rivers of red down their faces. Aurok was right there among them, glassy-eyed and still. He did not look proud or peaceful in death.
His face was frightened.
Envy wanted to run toward him, but her mind felt like a bubble being blown, and every signal her brain sent to her body kept floating out into infinity, never to reach its destination. Moving toward the Indicatrix was psychologically impossible.
“I am the Indicatrix,” spoke the woman, as butterflies landed on her glittering shoulders.
Envy’s tongue still tasted like she’d sucked on a fistful of sweaty nickels. “What did you do to him?!”
“Where is the Poet Khalimaya?” The Indicatrix’s voice had a floating, monotone quality.
“Aurok!”
“Who?”
“Aurok!”
The Indicatrix looked down to the bodies at her feet. “Oh. You misunderstand – they will be repurposed in time. No one among us is allowed to truly die.”
That’s… so much worse.
“Where is Khalimaya?”
“She died.”
“Why did Khalimaya die?”
“She chose to.”
“This is allowed?”
“We don’t believe in forcing people to live.”
The Indicatrix held a blade in her hand. Whether it had simply appeared, or she had always held it, Envy wasn’t certain. It resembled a medieval longsword, but it glowed as blue as a nuclear reactor. Envy could see the rolling mirage of intense heat rising from it. The Indicatrix pointed the blade at her diplomatic counterpart.
“Life is sacred,” she said. “We of the collective are therefore immortal.”
Envy remembered something her mother had told her, a long time ago, when the first corporate charters of the Syndicate were being written to prevent greed, monopolies, and mindless growth from destroying the world again: Only cancer is immortal.
The Indicatrix tilted her head. “Your mind is tumbling inward.”
Envy’s anger, her warrior’s instincts, were a clarifying fire. “So, you keep people chained to a wheel of consciousness and rebirth.”
“Yes, they will be reconstituted back into themselves.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?!”
Her chat feed blazed with activity. The administrative AI sent Envy a SynCon: “Calm down.”
Her bio monitor was democratically overridden by SynCon protocols, and a dose of mood stabilizers kicked in.
Envy breathed. She focused on her breathing and closed her eyes, even though she could still feel the heat and taste the metal. But she could breathe. She opened her eyes, ready to try again.
“Indicatrix,” said Envy, “may I call you that?”
“You may.”
“The death of a friend is unsettling for me – for all of us. Please forgive my reaction.”
“In the name of the God-Empress’ infinite mercy, I forgive you.”
“Thank you. Now, I sense the tone of this meeting has changed… in the interest of avoiding escalation, why don’t we talk business? What can our two cultures gain from free exchange?”
“’Business’ is such a cute concept. It implies you have something of value to offer us.”
“We always do.”
The Indicatrix lowered her blade and smiled. Through the blooming light of her skin, Envy finally noticed that the woman had flowing white hair and a circlet of gems not worn upon her brow but embedded into it. She extended her hand to Envy, like a mother beckoning a child onto a walk.
Envy felt terror again. Nothing in her dossier had prepared her for this gesture, because as far as anyone in Syndicate knew, no one had ever met the Indicatrix.
“Your people have changed since… last intel.”
“You’re not like Khalimaya at all. You have a warrior’s posture.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Why would they send a warrior? Are you a message? A veiled threat?”
“I didn’t make the vote, I was chosen.”
“You represent a collective will. I represent a singular will. So, take my hand,” she beckoned again with her pale palm, “and let’s accomplish more than words.”
Every cell in Envy’s body screamed run, run, run. The nausea came in waves. Looking at the gems on the Indicatrix’s brow made her feel sick, so she avoided looking at the woman’s pale, oval face entirely. Instead, she focused on the armor; it was a glittering, form-fitting mesh of scales with white feathers at the shoulders. Everything shimmered.
Envy couldn’t look at her for long. “Do you have a name, other than ‘Indicatrix’?”
“My birth name was Vaness.” Indicatrix Vaness kept her palm open. “Come.”
“No thank you, please.”
“I will take refusal as a personal insult. Reconsider.”
Envy looked around her feet, at the unconscious bodies of the delegation and the streaks of blood still trickling down their faces. She saw the butterflies leave the Indicatrix and land to sip that blood.
“Whatever you people have done to yourselves,” Envy began, “whatever you intend to do to me, it’s being livestreamed back to Syndicate, through my eyes.”
The Indicatrix moved closer to Envy, and Envy could smell… strawberry bubblegum. It was a saccharine, artificial scent. Pleasant, but suspicious.
“I know,” said Vaness. “You plucked out your eyes, the eyes nature gave you, and replaced them with artifacts. Your culture is sick, Envy.”
“Neon Vox.”
“Ah, but is that your true name? Is it the immortal name at the top of your soul? Take my hand and show me your true self, so we can find out.”
Envy stared at the hand being offered. At the center of the palm, she saw an eye. She knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.
The Indicatrix smiled a too-long smile warped to look like it reached her ears by the nature of the prism surrounding her.
“You’re struggling with reality. You always have, haven’t you? I look at your eyes, I see a broken mind whose ‘wellness’ arises from lunatic cunning. I dismiss your treatments, therapy, drugs, meditation, introspection… your ‘courageous self-awareness.’ All tricks to escape the finality of submission and transformation.”
I’m happy to be useless to this woman. Useful things get used.
“You aren’t useless,” said Vaness, “and your quaint corporate Syndicate isn’t worthless, either.”
Envy hugged herself. She gave the Indicatrix pitiful eyes. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying there is a place for all of you in this world. The God-Empress is not a ruler, but an inflection point; She is the one who twists and bends, but never breaks. We have perfected human potential and are best equipped to lead our species into the stars, at last.”
“Oh, we’ve heard that so many times before.” Envy kept hugging herself. The self-soothing act kept her from reaching toward the outstretched hand. “The technocrats of the dark ages promised the stars and couldn’t even disguise their greed and contempt.”
“If you take my hand, you’ll understand me. You’ll understand us – total transparency. Help me make it mutual, Neon Vox. I cannot promise you will walk away unchanged, but you will know truth.”
Envy consulted the Chat watching her from Syndicate. What’s the SynCon?
It took some seconds for the various opposing factions of Syndicate to reach an organized consensus on the fate of Neon Vox. But eventually, they came up with orders consolidated into an AI-generated message for Envy.
SynCon: “Take her hand and show us what you can. Your sacrifice will be celebrated.”
Let’s hope it’s just death, and not something worse.
And so that was it. Envy reached for Vaness’ hand, but Vaness pulled it away. “No,” she said, “do not touch me with your fake limb. I want the real one.”
Envy drew back her bionic left arm, then offered her organic right arm. There was no outward difference between the two, but Vaness had known.
Their hands clasped together, and Envy felt the world drop out from under her.
At first it felt like sleep. It was a kind of drifting off, into a space where everything felt far away. Envy no longer was herself but observing herself. She was herself; she was the empty space around herself, and she was a young woman named Vaness, who vibrated with a sense of power and purpose.
“I remember that feeling,” said Envy.
“What feeling?”
“The feeling of being young and certain of everything.”
In this psychic space, Envy shattered. She became like glass shards that exploded past Vaness. Now, the Indicatrix could touch and tour every broken piece of what used to be a person. It amused her, to gaze into the glass and shadows of an old psyche like Envy’s
Envy had been born in the dark age of the technocrats, when the world choked from smog and CO2, and art was a joke. Her father was a philosopher with a gun who lived in the mountains. Her mother was an absent carpenter, existing only to bring the occasional gift of a toy or birthday cake. Envy’s birth body was a boy’s, but inside, she knew she was a girl. She was terrified of the world destroying her for this.
She took comfort in the moonlight on clear Tacoma evenings. She hid under her blankets on dark nights, because if she didn’t, the hallucinated creatures with dinosaur faces and human teeth would stare at her. She had a brain that was dense and twisted, like heartwood oak. She saw every hidden layer of reality, she felt emotions too deeply, and so she learned to stop feeling emotions. She thought she was a warrior, but her father’s words were “you’re not a warrior. You’re a deer, like me.”
Envy attained needlepoint womanhood through hormone injections and extensive therapy. Her father said “I look forward to getting to know my daughter” about it, but then died of cancer shortly after. Her mother didn’t care either way and focused on her career; she let Envy stay in a habitation crate through college. Envy studied poetry, language, and communications all the way to the graduate level. She did not have time for a doctorate because she was called to war.
She trained in simulations with allies. She deployed on the streets in an exosuit as an operative. She found she enjoyed slitting fascist throats. She found she enjoyed making macho men beg for their lives. She found she had a taste for seeing rapists castrated. But there was something always lacking, something lacking from her violent delights: repentance.
She wanted sincere repentance from her victims. She wanted not to kill them but to transform them. She wanted to make them experience what they had inflicted on others. The war dragged on for decades. She worked with revolutionary biochemists and drug lords. She incorporated empathy drugs and psychotherapy into her interrogations. She turned hateful people into transformed people who could not help but weep at the weight of their misdeeds.
It was all in pain and brain chemistry. It was all in the technique, putting the knife to the eye, but not quite cutting; she would use ripped neural implants to embed the captured experiences of the victim into the perpetrator. Then, she loosened the mind with MDMA and psychotropics.
It was an art. It was the beginning of a new world, a world beyond crime and punishment; this would be a world of consciousness transformation: the world of the Pacific Syndicate and their Psychopunks.
Vaness had no frame of reference for any of this. And when she looked into the mirror shards of Envy’s being, she felt Envy, as many eyes, looking back.
Envy saw the Indicatrix as a sheltered child, raised for thirty short years on honey and blood, fueled only by conviction and ignorance, for she had been hatched from a perfect gene mother with a cocktail catalyst of perfect gene fathers. Her purpose was inscribed within the genetic code of the Holy Oaks before she was even conceived.
The Indicatrix pulled away from Envy, and Envy let her go.
The world whumped back over them like a layer of powdered snow, and there they were standing in the field, with the butterflies still lapping blood from the bodies of the delegation.
The Indicatrix had a tremor of reverence in her voice. “I saw a shattered mirror held together by force of will. I saw a poet and a killer, a man and a woman and the unnamed.”
“Just a woman, thanks.”
“You, a mutilated cretin, for all your apparent weakness… you are spiritual brambles. You are a rot! Get out of my mind!”
“I’m not doing anything to you.”
Chat: “Did you break her brain? 😂 😂 😂”
“The lines on your face are from laughter and sincerity.” Vaness’ voice cracked. “The darkness around your eyes is from a lifetime of vigilance. Your hair was once gold, but now it is white with dignity.” The Indicatrix dropped her blade into the grass, then fell to her knees.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were in love with me.”
“You have corrupted me with empathy.”
Envy crossed her arms and stared down at the kneeling woman.
The Indicatrix looked up. “I was supposed to show you the future…”
“Tell me what your God-Empress is planning to do.”
“Disgusting! To pollute the will of the God-Empress by reducing her vision to mere utterances.”
“Take my hand again, if you want.” Envy reached out with her palm. The Indicatrix fell away from it as if it were a serpent, crawling back in the grass, grabbing her blade, rising into a defensive crouch. Envy put her hand back.
“Look,” said Envy, “I’ll give a gesture of good faith and share what Syndicate knows. Fair?”
“I have memories of you, of you. . . being a child and locked in a dark room, you’re screaming. . . you’re old again, locking good soldiers in a room, burning them alive. . . I must pray, I must pray. God-Empress, she whose shadow makes the flowers grow. . .”
Envy read from the aggregated SynCon now beaming into her optics as a concrete script:
“The following statements are official SynCon, paraphrased by me, Neon Vox, a diplomat acting with the consolidated authority of GYOTA corporation, PRISMA corporation, ZON corporation, all of their subsidiaries and labor union collaborators, the People’s Anonymous Sousveillance Apparatus (PASA), and all other SynCon affiliates and associates throughout the known civilized world.”
“… she whose nourishment flows only above and never below…”
“Based on this meeting and the sensory data recorded and analyzed from it by independent SynCon scientists and citizen AIs, we know your people are getting into biotechnology and cloning, and potentially printing gene soldiers and ‘ideal citizens’ which the Treaty of Ways forbade two-hundred-and-forty-six years ago.”
“… she whose beneficence is the inflection point from which ape becomes man…”
“Based on spectrographic analysis of the ‘shimmer’ phenomenon observed through my optics, we know that there’s ubiquitous, unchained nanotech at play, which violates the Paperclip Agreement all free peoples signed three-hundred-and-seventy-three years ago.”
“… from which man becomes guardian of woman…”
“So, the existence of Imperial Cascadia as it stands represents a Category 9 existential emergency. Whether or not you declare it formally, you’re at war with the rest of the world.”
“… from which all become angel, from which angel is eternally absolved.”
“Does your God-Empress have a response?”
The Indicatrix rose to face Envy. A cool breeze blew across the moonlit field.
“I,” she began, “am Indicatrix Vaness, royal templar of the God-Empress. I hereby declare you anathema. Your kind shall be delivered from the agonies you inflict upon yourselves. I deliver this message in Her holy name.”
“If you intend to smite me, you’d better not miss.”
“You are a dismembered tragedy disguised as a human. Born a man, beaten into brokenness by the ancient world, you cut and drugged yourself into some farcical ‘womanhood’ and then went on to become a murderous junkie defined by mental sickness. You are a degenerate stain on the vast tapestry of human achievement, but there is hope! It is within our means to restore you to your original, sacred form. I hate you, but if you change, I could pity you.”
Envy’s face hardened with disgust. Her posture shifted from crossed arms, her hands near the weapons hidden in her long coat. Fight or flight.
SynCon: “THEY WANT MONSTERS, LET’S GIVE THEM MONSTERS.”
Envy’s primary systems woke up with a jet of adrenaline.
MAIN SYSTEM: . . . engaging combat mode.
Indicatrix Vaness opened her wings: A great canopy of energy exploded from the back of her armor and threw her into the sky. Envy saw dark clouds crackling in her wake.
I can’t fight this.
Envy tore through the field, back toward the tree line in a serpentine pattern. Great spears of heat slammed into the ground around her; each impact made her tongue taste like metal and set off her internal Geiger counters with chittering spikes of radiation.
One direct hit would reduce her to a charred skeleton.
Envy dove into the tree line. The blasts stopped. She felt the heat of the Indicatrix pass over the thick canopy. Envy engaged her cloaking field and became a mirage.
She only had to make it to the water. That water was down a cliff she’d spent the better part of an hour traversing. The drop, if she hit a rock (or even the water in the wrong way) would kill her.
Trusting in the speed of her augmented legs and nervous system, and the integrity of her cloaking field, she bolted out of the woods toward the cliffs. She could feel the heat of the Indicatrix on her back. She tasted nickels on her tongue and felt the Geiger counter clicking.
Through the newly established psychic link, or some other Cascadian witchcraft, Envy somehow knew the Indicatrix could sense her. The cloaking device was initially confusing, but it did not take long to latch onto Envy’s familiar psychic signature and see her illuminated against the world.
Envy could sense that Vaness held thunder in her blade, felt the very wrath of the God-Empress channeled through her body; it was ecstasy.
I’m picking up her thoughts and feelings. Interesting.
Envy had insight into how Vaness felt while observing the retreat: Vaness felt there was something beautiful and serpentine about the way Envy moved. Vaness had expected a cowardly retreat, but not with such grace; it was like watching a viper wind back into the grass with fangs bared.
But that appreciation was quickly overridden by murderous conviction.
Vaness raised the great lance of holy radiation in her hand and prepared to smite Envy just as she would be crossing over the cliffside.
Psychic chaff… maybe?
Envy made a point of focusing her thoughts on powerful imagery.
I’m laughing with old friends long departed… having drinks outside grimy convenience stores with neighbors… reciting poetry in parlors full of fairy lights… I’m tasting the sweat of lost lovers.
The pang in Vaness’ chest was like a knife. This created hesitation, and this hesitation was enough to allow Envy to dive off the cliff and sail down into the dark.
Envy plunged beneath the waves with her hands ahead. She kicked and dove deeper, then fished a gillmask from her coat, which she fixed to her face for oxygen. It was tough to suck air through it, but it kept her from drowning. Eventually, she slipped into a pipeline, and escaped into the darkness of Syndicate’s ocean web.