“We forgive our parents for being broken.”
We forgive our parents for being broken.
“We forgive the gods for being broken.”
We forgive the gods for being broken.
“We forgive enlightenment for being broken.”
We forgive enlightenment for being broken.
“We know that nirvana is just life…”
We know that nirvana is just life…
“… one inch off the ground.”
… one inch off the ground.
The temple was big enough to house an agri-carrier. It was a cavern of nurtured stone; smooth curves massaged into open space by prehistoric lava flow. The voices at prayer numbered in the thousands, yet their collective softness, and the many dozens of languages represented, turned it all into a bath of white noise. Upon the steps of the central platform there was a violinist, a cellist, a gentleman with an acoustic guitar, a somber DJ with his battery-powered mixing station, multiple drummers, and an entire chorus of mixed vocal ranges. All were united by their local MetaNet cluster; they were improvising a melancholy set that turned even most face-studded and vascular street slammers into tearful parishioners at one with the cosmos.
People who took the journey to see the volcanic caverns of Aleutia were promised a spiritual experience by PRISMA, and they came expecting… something. They did typically not expect to be swept away by the resonance of existence, to lose all track of self or time for days on end, or to have collective hunger hallucinations which showed them all the same spinning lights and the same sweet voices just out of reach of language.
Noviko had enjoyed enough world-shaking nonsense for a lifetime. She was done tearing her world down to its foundations. As she walked the perimeter of the crowd, the great mass of people reminded her of sea grass swaying in the current. The music had its fingers on her heart, but she didn’t grasp back. She walked across the cavern alone, a katana in her sash, and a destination in mind. On the far wall, there was a tunnel with a tri-color triangle of the Trine Accord painted just above. This was where they needed her.
“Only you can see it,” said Dr. Tasque, through a covert connection.
And why is it here, of all places?
“When it comes to cache placement, Tokiko likes things hidden in plain sight.”
I don’t like borrowing her resources.
“Barely an operative and you’re already territorial.”
If I’m going to be PRISMA’s pet onryō, I want to at least do it my way.
“I wasn’t complaining. Ghosts shouldn’t work together – but you’re no onryō just yet. And the resources in caches are to be shared by all operatives as needed, when possible.”
A young woman having an especially raw spiritual experience at the edge of the crowd wept and hugged herself for comfort. She saw Noviko pass by, then ran to intercept her. Noviko found herself stopped by a pair of arms thrown around her.
“I don’t have anyone,” the girl sobbed and smeared tears and snot across Noviko’s fine silk robes. “I’m alone and being around all these people makes me feel lonelier, like I’m just a stupid speck of dust, just another sad nobody feeling sorry for herself…”
“Ignore her,” said Tasque, inaudible to the girl. “We’re on a schedule.”
Noviko’s hands did not know what to do. One of them rested on the pommel of her blade. But then the other came to rub the girl’s back gently.
“There, there,” said Noviko, as soft as she ever had before. “To feel lonely and surrounded, it’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it? But that’s your ego making something out of nothing. Actually, sometimes, I imagine it might be nice to be a speck of dust, flowing without a care across the great currents of wind and water, with no choice but to trust the elements. Doesn’t that sound nicer than being a person?”
“Y-yes…” the girl snuffled and wiped at her eyes and face. She looked up at Noviko with a broad smile. “You’re so beautiful. You have so much mom energy…”
Oh, heavens help me…
Noviko did not reciprocate the smile. “No, darling. It’s just an aesthetic. I promise you I am the furthest thing you can imagine from a nurturing, maternal creature.”
“I think you’re wrong,” said the girl.
“Well, I think you’re out of your mind with hormones and confusion about who you are or what to do with yourself, and that’s not a product I’m in the market for, lamb.”
The girl’s face flushed red, mostly from humiliation, and also from some from a kind of misplaced arousal stemming from who-knows-what-complex. She leaned in and whispered into Noviko’s ear: “Don’t listen to what they tell you about yourself.”
A withered part of Noviko’s exhausted heart stirred at those words. Noviko considered the feeling, and then gently planted the pommel of her blade into the girl’s sternum.
“Don’t presume you know,” said Noviko. “Neither of us know – neither of us know what I’m capable of.”
The girl let go of Noviko. There was a pitying look in those eyes that Noviko found stupid and condescending; it was the look of some child wanting ‘ego death’ but not having the wherewithal to understand that forced compassion is an expression of ego. The young woman then ran back into the crowd to attempt to lose herself.
“I told you to ignore her,” said Tasque. “Most of the people at these things are overgrown fetuses that think too much.”
I remember selling drugs and therapy sessions at these sorts of things. Exhausting… but lucrative. I could earn a year’s comfort in one month.
“Not your world anymore,” said Tasque. “Tap the stone three-by-three times on arrival.”
Noviko walked over rolling volcanic stone, past crystal formations, and even a giant stalagmite that was split open to reveal the sparkling innards of a geode. The further she got from the crowd, the more she was surrounded by the simple beauty of geology. In solitude, she could appreciate it. Noviko knew that the bodhisattvas agreed that only fools insulted rocks by thinking of them as unintelligent. They had a simple intelligence.
When you struck them with a stick or dropped them on the floor, they went clunk. That was a kind of intelligence, wasn’t it? Rudimentary, but intelligent. A consistent response.
Soon she stood before the Trine Accord’s symbol on the far wall. There was no door or tunnel, no visible seams, and no obvious way forward. It was a solid wall. Noviko raised her blade and tapped the scabbard against the stone.
Tap, tap, tap. Rest. Tap, tap, tap. Rest. Tap, tap, tap. Wait.
The stone vibrated with each tap. Those vibrations compounded on top of one another, running through the wall like the resonations of a prayer bowl. Noviko felt it in her skeleton. A portion of the wall rippled as if a breath had passed over it. Noviko reached out and touched the surface of that liquid portion of stone; it parted around her fingers.
Tasque didn’t need to tell her what to do. By now, Noviko was accustomed to the bizarre, and she simply filled her lungs and stepped into the mass of liquid stone. It was impossible to see, and it felt like walking through slippery memory foam that parted for every push.
“Don’t tarry,” said Dr. Tasque. “You don’t want it to lose resonance and solidify around you. That’s definitely in my top five worst ways to die: entombed in stone.”
Kuso! You could have warned me?!
“Oh no, Noviko,” said Tasque with all the dramatic inflection of a checked-out actor giving a monologue about nasal decongestion. “Don’t die.”
Noviko pushed with all her strength through the passage. She ran, as much as one could run through a bunch of liquid rock, but it seemed the more frantic and fast her movements became, the harder the rock resisted her. Little hooks of panic entered her body from the inside-out and she tried to breathe through her nose, but the stuff just blocked her nostrils.
Help! Someone has to help me!
Dr. Tasque sighed. “Shit, I guess I’m going to have to fire up your backup clone. That’s annoying, sorry Noviko, that’s a really awful way to die.”
ARE YOU SERIOUS?!
“This is really on me as your handler, I’m too used to working with senior agents.”
HELP!
She screamed, but it was suffocated by collapsing, liquid stone. There was no way she was dying like that, no, she was determined to move forward. She took a moment, she accepted her fate, and in that acceptance, found stillness. That stillness became a gentle, stately walk forward through the muck. When her movements were slow, it all parted around her with ease.
In seconds, she felt her hand in the open air. She resisted the urge to get excited and shove forward. She did not break her stride and simply walked ahead, until she felt air on her face, and she was free of that non-Newtonian deathtrap.
“You got it together after all,” said Tasque. “I knew you would.”
I don’t like you.
Noviko opened her eyes. She stood in a chamber full of geode formations, with sharp crystals of every conceivable color lining the walls and ceilings. In the center of the room was an enormous gong. It hung from a wooden stand and had a cloth mallet leaning next to it. At the base of the gong was the familiar cubic shape of a SyncBox.
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Intrusive thought: Jellyfish flapping, armored squids ripping off legs, an old man babbling and throwing stinging tentacles in Noviko’s face.
Kuso…
“Trauma thoughts?”
Yes. Haven’t touched a SyncBox since the exorcism.
“Circumstances are more positive this time, at least.”
I thought Vox was going to meet me here.
“You assumed that, yes, but she’s prepping logistics with her ZON contacts.” Tasque audibly chewed on a meal at her desk, wherever that was.
Would it be too much to ask for you to not do that?
“Not do what?”
Noviko’s brain crinkled under the sound of chips being eaten, except it was directly stimulating her mind and so she felt the sound more than she heard it.
Could you not eat food in such a way that it transmits directly to my brain?
“You know I’m working through union break just to get you set up right now; a little grace and gratitude wouldn’t go amiss, Noviko.”
Oh, well I humbly beg your forgiveness, diligent and dutiful Dr. Tasque; please, ignore this newbie’s foolish baby brain, kappa. Now will you please stop shoveling chips and a sandwich into your mouth and just tell me what to do?
“I actually don’t know; my background isn’t in psychopunk stuff.”
You don’t know. I’m sorry, but, don’t you work for PRISMA?
“Presently, yes, but I’m more of a neutral facilitator. My background is in R&D, so if you want a really dry explanation of what I think you should do based on the evidence, I can help.”
I really don’t like you.
“We established that. So, your mother was supposed to give you a key.”
A key to what?
“Muscle memory. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take what’s left of my break.”
The line cut out, leaving Noviko alone in the cavern. She steadied her breath and walked the perimeter of the large chamber, just to get her bearings and level out her nerves. There was a pool of water at the far end of the cave. It started teal and plunged into darkness; there was no telling how deep it went. The water was still as glass.
As she passed by one of the crystal formations in the wall, she tapped the scabbard of her blade against one of the outcroppings. It rang, clean and high, like a bell. She tracked the resonance with her ears and focused on it; it took ninety seconds for the resonation to fade into silence. She tapped it again, and then another. Then she walked back around the circumference of the chamber and passed by the still pool of water again. But this time, the water rippled from the waves of resonating sound passing over the surface.
An implant or piece of programmed wetware she did not know she had read the ripples on the surface as if they were glyphs. The vibrations were interpreted by her systems as ones, zeroes, maybes, ups, downs, dyads, spirals, crosses, squares, clovers, and all the other thousands of symbols that formed wetware data. These basic symbols then decoded themselves into a stream of data interpreted as:
Syndicate cache #009
“In the early days of Syndicate, before the invention of quantum wetware and the implementation of PRISMA’s entanglement array, there was a divide between those who lived on the ocean’s surface and those who lived beneath it. To communicate, we still utilized the decaying infrastructure of the old world’s satellites. Radio waves could not penetrate the water into the air. Both worlds were separated by a seemingly impassable wall of latency. And so, those who spent too much time underwater were treated with suspicion; hence, the divide between the surface people and the underwater people.”
Noviko was wonderstruck; vibrations read through water’s surface tension? This was a communications technique she’d never heard of. When the resonance stopped, the words vanished from her vision. She went over to the crystal formation again and admired its rainbow of colors; each nodule in the cluster had its own shade on the color spectrum and was large enough to strike. The one she’d struck was pink. So, she found one that was just a shade cooler in tone and struck that one next. The resonance was a bit lower to match.
Noviko went back to the pool and read the vibrations on the water’s surface:
“GYOTA spent a century beneath the ocean building the SuperGrid; this is the fundamental power infrastructure upon which all of Syndicate relies. PRISMA demanded agents be present to oversee these operations. ZON provided its usual neutral peacekeeping position and deployed its people to support a joint operation. The Aleutian Trench became the first site of GYOTA’s geothermal project. The construction of this facility required thousands of people to traverse the ocean’s depths. Generations of workers, scientists, and soldiers gave their all to see it built. And this great facility would become the roots that powered PRISMA’s first great supercluster on Kiska Isle. But time and disconnection bred strange happenings in the darkness of the trench…”
Noviko was intrigued now; at last, she had context for the horrors of the Jellyfish Exorcism. She found the next coolest crystal and struck it:
“… the facility is presumed abandoned. It functions, likely by automated labor. There are things to recover in the darkness, but what awaits those who seek them is unknown. The automated systems that survive down there have not had quantum entanglement communications software installed. Global positioning does not work beneath the waves. All facility transponders have been deactivated. Squids big enough to rip apart submarines patrol the twilight zone between surface depths and abyssal depths. The facility is lost, as lost as anything in our Syndicate can be, and you, Noviko, are the last piece of the puzzle. The question is, will you help before you lose your mind? Or is this whole story another indication that your mind is already gone?”
“Well that last part feels a little mean,” said Noviko, to the pool of rippling water. “Maybe you’d get more cooperation from people if you weren’t always telling everything sideways and upside-down, PRISMA.”
Silence.
An intrusive thought: Noviko hanging upside-down in the ocean with a woman’s face staring at hers, but the woman’s skin is jellyfish flesh, and her limbs are an unspooled mass of rainbow drifting on into infinity, and her panoply of organs are visible and pulsing through her clear exterior, and the ocean is spiraling into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and there is no difference between the trillions of stars and trillions of floating algae glowing in the moonlight. The woman’s eyes are globs of black, and her mouth is a wide-open smile full of orca teeth, and there are great translucent wings of iridescent glory that spread out behind her and drift like kelp in the gentle currents of eternity. And in a voice that feels like waking marrow-replacement surgery with heroin as anesthesia, she says: “DO YOU WANT ME TO BE MORE DIRECT?”
Noviko’s knees ached from the impact with the stone floor. Her robes clung to the cold sweat on her skin. “No,” she whispered. “No thank you.”
That voice: “YOU ENJOY IT.”
“Please stop…”
“YOU RESPOND WELL TO SINGULAR FEMININE EGOS THAT COERCE YOUR BEHAVIOR THROUGH A COMBINATION OF NURTURING AND DIRECT FORCE.”
“You’re terrorizing me.”
“I APOLOGIZE, THAT WASN’T MY INTENTION. SHOULD I STOP?”
“Yes.”
Noviko stood up and wondered why she was so sweaty and why her hands were shaking. The story about Syndicate’s history had been interesting, but there was a queer sense of déjà vu that lingered for a few seconds before fading away. Her brain would never remember her direct interactions with PRISMA (no one ever did), but her body knew the truth. The body was the human animal’s reservoir of wisdom.
Noviko walked back to the gong and the SyncBox. She knelt down. There was a cable attached to the SyncBox, which she stuck into the neural port hidden in her hair. She struck the gong with the mallet and unsheathed the katana. The katana’s blade was matte black. It was not metal, but a kind of organic material.
Laser-etched into the blade was Ryukyuan script:
知識は筋肉に定着するまでは噂に過ぎません。
“Chishiki wa kin'niku ni teichaku suru made wa uwasa ni sugimasen.”
“Knowledge is only rumor until it is in the muscle.”
An intrusive thought: A squid ripping out a chunk of Noviko’s leg in a research pool.
Noviko felt her ears ringing. She saw the severed pinky swaying from a little chain on the end of the pommel; the pinky of her father, a piece of her own polluted legacy. Noviko unclasped it from the pommel. She looked over the SyncBox and saw two inputs: a soft spot on the top of the box, and a chute in the side.
Noviko was a psychopunk. She knew what she had to do. And she knew what was coming. And that knowing made it so much worse.
She knew her mother was watching. She knew PRISMA was watching. She knew everyone behind the cloutwall was watching.
“Tell me again why I have to do this?” She said aloud. Her voice echoed through the chamber and came back to her several times.
Silence.
She hung her head. “Please… indulge me, one last time.”
No one indulged her. No one held her hand. It was because Noviko knew why this was happening, and perhaps the world was waiting for her to empower herself. Where she was going, handler or not, she would be in constant peril. In the roulette of fight, flight, or freeze, there needed to be a thumb on the scale.
Noviko threw the pinky into the chute. She heard grinders activate and shred it into mulch. Lights on the SyncBox hummed to life. Now, it wanted the passcode. Noviko plunged the engraved blade into the soft spot on the top of the box. The device vibrated as it scanned the blade, and it was good that Noviko had both hands gripping the hilt, because it all began at once.
If she had not been her mother’s daughter, and had some degree of genetic similarity, the shock of inheriting someone’s muscle memory would have carved her brain into a mass of useless scar tissue. This was not like having a data chip or a little upgrade or something stuck into you. This was a process of burning neural pathways anew and subjecting the central nervous system to a lifetime of conditioning in the span of minutes. It felt like having a staggered line of panic attacks slam into the body one-by-one and compound on top of each other.
It felt like running away from something near-human through familiar hallways. Sometimes, it felt like she was fighting off her own husband, Banh, in the comfort of their home. Sometimes it felt like Neon Vox grabbing her throat from behind and dragging her into a dark alley. And sometimes it felt like waves of sneering naichi cornering her in a poorly-lit room. At first it was all panic and sobbing, bargaining, appeals to compassion, screaming and pitiful surrender. But then the Ghost that was Tokiko blended into every vision, and Noviko attuned to her, that bloody lantern in the dark.
Tokiko only shed tears of passionate hatred. Tokiko only screamed the raking scream of a madwoman driving her thumbs into the eyes of a would-be assailant. Tokiko’s battle cries were guttural, howling calls that seemed only vaguely human. Tokiko summoned up hate from the very pit of her stomach with every blow of her blade, every stab of the knife, every slit belly, every spraying throat, every bitten-off nose, every brained skull, and at the end of it all, coated in blood and shreds of what used to be people, she would fall silent and flee, to reposition, to observe, to wait. She crawled across walls with her spider treads and shimmered in and out of view with her cloaking device, and deflected bullets with her shielding belt. The rage was explosive but tempered by patience and technology. It was the most frightening kind of violence: the kind of violence perpetrated by a highly-intelligent predator capable of identifying bait and employing restraint as needed.
As soon as she saw the wide eyes of a civilian, or one she did not know was malignant, she would halt. She would pass them over. She would, if she could, include them. So long as Ghost spent enough time casing their environment, PRISMA was of great assistance in separating the deserving from the undeserving, the vengeful from the lambs.
There were villains Tokiko had seen beat prisoners and force themselves on crying partners. And it was so sweet to see these same monsters beg for their lives. It was so sweet to see them cry and piss themselves. It was so precious to put a knife in the hand of a battered slave and let them stab their abusers to death.
This was the Valhalla-Hell of Tokiko Tanaka, mother of Noviko Tanaka. This was the weaponized trauma of PRISMA’s Ghosts. This was distilled reckoning that many citizens of Syndicate enjoyed watching at the end of every declassification cycle; some even enjoyed overlaying sound effects and editing to these declassified killing sprees. It was, after all, fun to a see an abusive ‘harem’ holder get beaten to death by his wives while musical classics such as What is Love played in the background. And what better sound effect to punctuate the body of a would-be ‘god-emperor’ hitting the floor than the ancient Taco Bell chime?
But, none of this viciousness was Noviko, and Noviko did not want it to be her. It did not have to be; now Tokiko’s muscle memory was a ghost that haunted Noviko’s body and hid inside her nerves, forever.
Noviko walked back through the volcanic chamber, katana at her hip. More than ever, she found her eyes wandering and her head turning. Her peripheral awareness was constant; this was a state of being known as hypervigilance. But she was not on edge. There was a cool, smooth quality to her walk and a sense of absolute ease. She was comfortable. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that same lost girl from the crowd running toward her with a smile.
Noviko glanced over her shoulder at her. She stared at her with an absolute absence of feeling, with an expression some might fondly refer to as ‘resting bitch face’ and what psychological experts might call ‘the reptilian gaze.’ The lost girl stopped. Her smile died.
“What did they do to you?” The girl whispered.
“I’m not interested in you,” said Noviko, her affect as flat as her sincere feelings of indifference toward this child posing as an adult. “Seek salvation elsewhere.”
The girl’s face flushed again, and she backed toward the crowd, stumbled, and broke into a sprint to get lost in the mass of bodies once more. Noviko felt a little pang of sympathy, as she remembered herself at that age. But that pang was a campfire spark dying in the night. She moved on. There was a vessel and a small team waiting to take her into one of the deepest, darkest, coldest places on the planet, wherein she would face something not even the superintelligence called PRISMA could predict.
She felt ready. Whether that feeling was founded in fact, or just the product of feeling Tokiko’s cold confidence soothing her nervous system, remained to be seen.