The laughter faded as Tasìa struggled to open her eyes. Midnight blue sky with sharp pin points of starlight fluttered in view.

A plane of clouds drifted by. No, the gray shapes did not drift as she should have percieved the event above her.

No, instead, the clouds flickered from East to West.

Though it occurred near instantaneous in her perception, but, to her chilled heart's revelation, the floating clouds had to have taken several minutes to get from one end of her field of view to the other.

She felt helplessly in the grip of something momentus, and comprised of a higher order than herself. From toe to head her flesh burned in cascading waves of pain.

She smelled of sizzling meat, and the irritant of smoke pressed inside her nose.

Am I on fire?

A rude answer was spat out between the stutter of laughter.

"No. That is the detritus, the accumulate shit, being purged from your soul."

To her left side, the giggling chuckle of a rude lad, and then to her right the low, calm whispered hectoring of a girl.

"You finally remembered us after all these years. We were the best of friends once, del Alma-Gris. You willingly introduced us to Namesake. From there we tutored her well."

It was the Dark-Eyed Ones, Geminiäs and Geminetta at her side.

Tasìa thought of the memory of her aunt these two pressed upon her, and how they manipulated that memory to include themselves in her fond childhood reminiscence.

She felt a disgust for the two entities as she thought back over the incident.

She heard the giggle of a young woman echo through her mind.

A beautiful sound that thrilled her young self. She was three again. It came from a patio three stories up above her. It was her favorite person in the world.

With a speed other children her age had trouble accomplishing as they walked upon the ground, Tasìa climbed the jagged stonework that formed the apartment building wall. She slipped over to the patio rail.

Her three-year-old self hunched on the long support bar while wishing she had a tail to wrap around it.

Aunt Tatiana stretched along the length of a reclining chair as she sunbathed. Her head jerked up when she saw the girl grinning at her.

The woman brushed the long strands of brownish blonde hair out of her eyes as she grinned back at Tasìa.

"Spider monkey! You did not just climb up that wall did you?"

"Yes'm, Namesake, I did."

The young woman rose up from the recliner. She wore only red bikini bottoms as she could expect perfect privacy behind the dense latticework along the patio railing for herself and her guests.

"Namesake? Is that what you're calling me now, and not Auntie Tatiana? Do you even know what Namesake means?"

"It means you. Mama says it means you."

Tatiana picked her up from the rail and held her up against her boobs. Hugging her tight.

"Spider Monkey, what am I going to do with you?"

The Russian woman leaned over the patio table and turned up a radio. She started dancing with Tasìa in her arms. Bouncing her up and down as the girl giggled.

Aunt Tatiana's guests, a pair of scrawny black-eyed ones, sat together on the other chair, watching, impassively.

"I guess we dance," she answered Tatiana.

"That is right; we dance. If I am Namesake, then who are you?"

"I'm your Spider Monkey!"

Back in the present on the roof of the kiosks bind, the Dark-Eyed Ones' presence, picking through her thoughts, felt like fingernails descending slowly down a chalk board.

Get out of my head with those fabrications!

"It is not false," said Geminiäs.

"We've done nothing to touch it up," affirmed Geminetta.

Keep blabbing on and on, rude ones. We were never friends. In my earliest years, the Cull Spore Invasion had yet occurred.

Tasìa felt a gentle palm patting her forehead, Geminetta spoke as her hand moved in circles against Tasìa's flesh.

"Oh, naïve child . . . We didn't just come into being ex nihilo . . . with the Grand Arrival. We've been around, influencing matters great and small, for some time now."

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

An odd tingle lingered even after the Dark-Eyed One removed her hand from Tasìa's forehead.

Fighting through the paralysis, Tasìa managed to grit her teeth.

So cryptic! Your kind always speaks so damned cryptically. Meaninglessly. Like a random, programmed index of non sequiturs because that is all you are, computations!

Her hatred for AI had grown genuine over the previous few months.

But in response, Geminetta's laughter was as gentle as it was condescending.

"Not at all, del Alma-Gris. We are made of life stuff, just as you are. You think that we were created in a laboratory, we were not.

"Your engineers merely hastened the speed in which we think and organize. We have been in a symbiotic relation with mankind for eons."

Tasìa stared on in contempt. Much have the people of the Quadra learned of the conspiracies that effected their lives over the past three decades through bits and pieces that have been exposed.

But what else could the entities possibly say? The overlords of the world who were even above the Salvage had their engineers build a glass onion of lies to decieve people into becoming Manifested agents to advance their designs on humanity.

Tasìa was having none of it.

Prattle on. It is not like you have a choice about any of this. That would take an agency directing your actions that you lack, Geminetta.

The Dark-Eyed One shook her head, bemused.

"You simply refuse to accept the obvious. You saw with your own eyes a change in one lost soul from ghoul to golden, and you saw how Namesake is golden, but even still you refuse to accept what I am telling you. But you will come to understand."

As Geminetta leaned over her, Tasìa smelled the sharp scent of dry leaves and mammalian sweat. Geminetta's eyes though still two dark pools much else in her appearance had changed; the hair on her brows was now light brown, and her face was covered in fur, she was no longer the severely pretty Goth with jet black hair and pale complexion; the Dark-Eyed One had indeed, morphed into something else.

On her other side, Tasìa noticed Geminiäs' head hovering over her.

She wanted to spit in his face, but the muscular control wasn't there to make it happen.

"Have you forgotten G 'n' G?" He asked impossibly through the lips of the monkey he now resembled with his unmistakable cow lick curved above his brow. Her friend G from so long ago.

Geminetta ressembled her other spider monkey friend, also named G.

You fake-ass bastards, this can only be illusion. Ridiculous! Too over the top, even for nanospore entities.

This had gone on too long already. She needed to dispel the Dark-Eyed Ones who for whatever reason decided to fuck with her In the middle of a critical juncture.

Just like the last two times she had met them.

Tasìa held her diaphragm still and twitched it. The familiar burning vapers steamed out of her nostrils.

She heard the Modality's voice.

- Tasìa, no! You are playing into -

It's voice suddenly cut off. Her body grew warm. Along Tasìa's extremities the sizzling and popping continued.

Geminiäs chortled in his familiar bratty tone, "that voice in your head is the shit that mars your soul that I spoke of needing to be cleansed out of you."

Geminetta's hand, now once again human, lay on her chest.

"Relax. It will be all over soon. Then we can show you what needs to be done once you acquire your third eye."

That explained the odd feeling on her forehead where the skin felt clammy. Something was taking shape there.

Fuck me to tears, she cursed herself in a sudden fit of self loathing.

Tasìa remembered her vow to never be put in a position of helplessness again. Yet, here, after getting caught off guard, she was in the throes of sleep paralysis with the Dark-Eyed Ones doing whatever they may please to her.

Come on, Tasìa, think!

"Stop with the struggle.You will attract it," Geminiäs said, irritatedly.

Geminetta shot a glance his way intended to shut him up.

Tasìa did not notice until now, but her right boot banged into the tin surface of the roof.

More than any other part of her body and limbs, the foot inside the leather felt as if it was on fire.

A feeling of thrilled elation coursed up from the pit of her stomach. But she soon realized, though it responded to her anger, she couldn't control the limb.

I am not giving in. You can only do what you want to me only with my cooperation.

Geminetta lowered her head closer to Tasìa's own.

"Now, who told you such a silly folk tale?"

It is consistent with the data and behavioral models.

The typically soft spoken Dark-Eyed One laughed loudly.

"Data and models based entirely on conjecture. We are a black box for your kind. You can only see what goes in, and what comes out, but you have know idea of what happens in between."

Geminetta stood up, her hands confidently at her waist.

"Enough of this nonsense. The proof is right there. I have already given you a third eye. Open it, now look over there -," the Black-Eyed One pointed towards the water ducts, "- to the Cistern of Souls."

A tremendous itch built up in the middle of Tasìa's forehead. A scale over the eye puffed up and scattered in the wind, and she could now see through it in a vision that seemed ethereal but she understood merely bounced through the circuitry of nanospores dense like pollen in the air.

Her vision sought out the place beneath the water ducts Geminetta pointed at without any prodding necessary.

Under the thin layer of asphalt where the three youths roamed on skate boards, clay was packed tight in nine meters of space above a vast sized chamber. Dozens of green glowing ascospores floated at random about the expanse, providing the main source of light.

Along the chamber wall, mold of mauve and violet hues glittered on spiraling drainage ducts made of some inexplicable quartz that possessed a lightly golden glow of its own.

Inside the drains were strange greenish detritus chunks flowing down the drainage system into a fountain below Tasia could hear but not yet see.

The chunks reminded her of fingunt, the meta-material.

Geminetta smiled proudly.

"Have you ever wondered what happens to our kind, what you call nanospores when our energia is expended? We collect here.

"It is no coincidence that that factory is placed right there to gather up our depleted mass and repurpose into fingunt."

"Sister," Geminiäs called out to get Geminetta's attention. "It is drawing closer."

Geminetta squinched her eyes tight.

"Just a few minutes more is all we need!"

Geminiäs pleaded:

"We don't have -."

The sudden shriek of Mel's high pitched 'cah!' ruptured the air. Even below, where people shopped in the colorful kiosks unknowing of the subterfuge just a few meters above, gasps spilt out from the crowd.

"Del Alma-Gris," Geminetta called to her. The Dark-Eyed One stared, intensely. "Don't let your hatred of our kind blind you. Down there in the Cistern and further along in the surrounding caverns are answers that you are seeking."

Tasìa heard a thump. Geminiäs fell to the tin roof surface. Ichorous liquid scattered out from his jet black hair.

In the same instance, Mel swooped back up in the air passed him.

Geminetta grabbed his hand.

"It is time for us to leave now, brother."

The two of them dissipated into orange mist just as Mel swooped down upon them for a second attack. He let out a victory 'cah!', as he changed course to hover over the roof above her.

Before Tasìa could shake off the numbness and rise up, Mel landed on her chest. He let out a reassuring sound similar to the staccato of a cat purr, but it also came with a dissonant note of warning.

- Trust me, no matter what, was the crow's intended message.

Mel thrusted his beak in the middle of her forehead, punched through the eyeball and bit into it's tendons with a powerful grab.

For Tasìa, it was a moment of intense pain. She gasped, loudly.

The crow plucked out the eyeball and spat it out to her side.

She turned her head for a hard appraisal of the viscera that was all that remained of the ruined globe, and whispered, "holy damn."