[Log 3.10.2]

[Ozymandias v2]

Eventually, as we came closer to the chaos of the main road, the Vizier and I pressed ourselves against the wall and crept forward. The stone was warm to the touch, but I couldn’t tell if it had been warmed by the sun, or if the interior was on fire. The closer we came to the crowd, the louder the sounds of jumbled screaming grew, until I could barely hear myself think.

A few meters before the alley ended, Zephyro poked my shoulder, made eye contact and after he was sure I was watching, raised his hand with two fingers held up. He pointed at his eyes, then twitched his fingers toward the other side of the crowd. I could barely make out the opening of another alley between the jostling crush of panicked people.

I was about to tell Zephyro I was ready to go when the screaming crescendoed. Something—no, someone—exploded in the middle of the crowd, cyan energy showering wailing women and crying men alike. Then another explosion drowned out the screams with the sound of crackling static. Then another. I turned to look at Zephyro for an explanation, but when I saw his expression, I thought better of it.

His jaw was set, his eyes glazed over. But there was a tremble on his lips and moisture collected in the corners of his eyes. I’d seen that look a lot when I had worked as an executive consultant at a company that went under. Also, of course, around the table on that last night at Advance’s pinnacle.

You must flee, Sam.

Another explosion crashed through my thoughts and left me disoriented for a second. I was losing it. I couldn’t afford that. And neither could Zephyro.

I snapped my fingers in front of his face to get his attention, then held up my hand, motioning for him to stay while I went to check for threats.

I crept towards the corner and stuck my head out, surveying the chaos. The crowd had thinned out dramatically, but still, people died in showers of sparks. To the right, towards the city boundaries, a few stragglers tried to hurry along, but two large Ferals —a Wolf made of jagged plastic and something that looked like a snake on LSD— were tearing at their heels. As I watched, the plastic wolf grabbed a young man by the leg. It shook its wailing prey, smashing him into the street over and over until the man exploded into a cascade of blue cubes. Some of them immediately vanished, but most were absorbed by the Feral. Suddenly, it grew larger, and long, black cables sprouted from its back, arcing red light so bright it left an afterimage on my irises. It set its feet, then it howled, like a giant sheet of plastic being torn asunder. The snake circled around it once, hissed a discordant guitar solo, then wrapped itself around a young woman and squeezed. I forced myself to look away and for a way through the mess.

The crowd was thinning fast. I didn’t know if they had all fled inside or if they just died. I hoped for the former. The houses here looked expensive and sturdy. Maybe they could hide…

Another of Zephyro’s people, deep within the crowd and far away from the ferals, screamed and burst apart. Someone’s destroying them in the real world. They didn’t stop to salvage the outskirts like Zephyro predicted…

The wolf and snake both lunged for the sparks that didn’t immediately vanish, snapping at each other in a fight to reach their prize first.

I shook myself. If we wanted to make it, now was the time, and we needed to be fast. I motioned for Zephyro to hurry, nodding my head toward the other side. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded back and we got moving, dashing into the street and through the rapidly dwindling throng of people.

I got shoved and pulled and even received several hits as people tried to move past me. At some point, I snapped, but when I turned to the last idiot who’d shoved me to tell him to fucking watch it, I was facing a small child, his large eyes wide in horror and fear.

“You’re the Sultana…” he said, and before I could reply, he glitched, distorted, and screamed at something I couldn’t see.

Then he died.

Blue sparks showered me like electric gore, got into my mouth and eyes, and sunk into my skin.

{INCOMING LOGIC - 32 LB}

{Available Logic: 32 LB}

{Hello.}

{Who do you want to be?}

The information wasn’t hammered into my brain like before. Instead, a soft voice spoke them into my very being. It felt familiar, almost like—. A sudden, faint sound, resonated gently, deep inside me. Before my mind’s eye, the kid exploded again. No. Oh no.

Another fleeing citizen bumped into me, but I hardly reacted. I just stood there as the last bits of blue absorbed into my core, still remembering the horrified look on the kid’s face. I noticed Zephyro was screaming at me and didn’t resist as he pulled me into the shaded alley. He dragged me along, stumbling. I just let it happen, barely making an effort to stay on my feet until we finally made it around a corner, and out of sight.

Zephyro looked at me, stricken, but all I could think about was the kid. He screamed in my head, over and over, his voice mixing with that faint sound echoing deep inside my soul, like a bell both struck once and echoing for all eternity, and being struck over and over.

I giggled.

It was my Wish. There was no room for doubt anymore. Logic was my Wish. I started laughing, not stopping even as Zephyro recoiled, not even as the moment the kid died in front of me replayed over and over in my head and I started sobbing. I must have looked absolutely insane, crying from shock, disgust, horror, and grief, and laughing at the same time. And to be honest, I felt insane. The death of the kid had been so very real. It had broken something inside me, and now all the bullshit I had been holding back came pouring out. My Republic. My people. My friends. All gone, except for Chris, who had been mentally crippled somehow. The grief and loss were almost killing me, and at the same time, Zephyro and his people were expecting me to… to what? Sit around and be pretty? Save them? And over all that, my Wish tolled, eternal and uncaring, just like on that first day on the clearing. It was bizarre. It tore at my insides. It made me act like a lunatic. It made Zephyro pull away from me as if I had suddenly grown a second head. It made me so fucking angry.

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“WHAT?” I yelled, spreading my arms and taking a step toward Zephyro in a challenge.

He took another step back, a hand on his sword. “Sultana…” his voice had an uncertain tremble in it, but no malice. It took the wind out of my sails a little, to be honest.

My arms dropped to my side and I leaned against the wall, sliding down to slump on the floor, even though I knew we had to keep moving, had to keep going. This is why I liked anger. Anger keeps you moving, it doesn’t make you collapse in a dusty alleyway while rampaging mutant-wolf-machines are trying to kill you.

To my surprise, Zephyro sat next to me. He opened his palm and the screen zipped into the air again, still showing his dying city’s past. Monsters started to break into houses, pulling screaming villagers onto the street to devour them. There were no soldiers left.

“Zephyro—” I began, cleared my throat, and tried again. “When we talked before, you said you couldn’t replace your warriors, but… Why didn’t you take their Lo—their Blessing?” The city fell into ruin in front of me. The similarity to my last weeks in Advance’s Pinnacle was staggering. It hurt to watch, to be reminded, but I couldn’t avert my eyes.

I never watched Breaking Bad. I simply didn’t have the time. But over after-work atone startup or another, my colleagues had begun discussing the series at length. All agreed that that one episode that quoted some really old poem was hands down the best one. One nerdy guy had recited the entire thing. It had been kinda cute at first, but I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head since.

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair…’

It kept popping up whenever I got hired to save one ailing enterprise or another. More often on Tobes. Far too often. And now, here.

Zephyro took a while to answer, studying his burning kingdom as if the blazing streets wrote out a story only he could understand. Rationally, I knew he was just an AI, but I had started to think of him as a real person, and a ruler of real people. I watched them struggle to keep the flames under control, and the view zoomed toward them, allowing me to see their pained grimaces, their sweat pearling on their skin, and their tears, staining their clothes gray with ash. Zephyro grimaced as he was forced to watch several children get trapped in a burning building over and over again, the memory glitching as if to torment him forever. His entire kingdom was turning to ash, his entire purpose in life was doomed, and yet he said he had one last duty, one last thing he could—no must—try.

“I think I know how you feel, if that helps,” I heard myself say. I believed it, to my surprise. I wasn’t surprised I understood his feelings, but that I actually believed he had feelings. It’s true artificial intelligence, I thought. He can’t just solve problems and execute actions, like a machine. He has emotions and motivations. He makes decisions and paves his own way, just like humans do.

Like I did.

“I told you before, Sultana. To take more of Your Blessing than is allotted is a grave sin.” He chuckled, and I recognized the faint tint of madness staining it like milk in coffee. “What you just did… By our laws, if you were one of us, one of my citizens, I should strike you down and let your essence dissipate into the wind. It does not matter that your taking Kareem-13’s essence was an accident. Not to us. But you aren’t one of us. You are the Sultana, and so…” he sighed.

“…And so it is different. Kareem-13 has returned to you. You giveth and you taketh, and glory be to You.” He shook his head, eyes half-closed in frustration.

“Since the beginning, I have treated you like one of mine; a child newly born, confused, and in need of protection. By doing so, I fear I have given an insult most grave. For you are not one of mine, and you clearly are not a child. I will always protect you, for that is my duty, but you aren’t the same as the other people I swore to protect.

“You are the Sultana. You are Samantha, the one the records call the Torchbearer. Your symbol adorns all the walls of my domain in the Real. You are the one who breathed life into all of us, and the one who built the walls of my Domain. I have seen the records, Sultana. Your might is beyond ken, mortal and immortal alike.

“If you want to fight, Sultana, then I will let you fight. But you must remember that should you die here, all my work and all my People’s deaths have been for nothing.”

I let my head fall against the wall behind me with a thunk. Seconds passed, measured in screams and the rumbling of falling towers.

“I get it. I mean, don’t you think I dealt with the same issues, all those damn insecurities when I was a leader? I know how …enticing it is. The idea of protecting people from their own mistakes. Micro-managing, concrete rules, strict laws, they’re all the same. The thought of being able to take complete control of a situation is so, so tempting. If all KPIs are measured, nothing will ever go wrong… or so we imagine. We believe that if we just tell people what to do often enough, and in enough detail, they won’t get hurt. But it’s impossible. Believe me, I tried…” I scoffed, shaking my head.

“Fuck, I tried hard. But not only will you only ever think you are in control, people will also push against any and all boundaries you put in place for their safety. It’s infuriating, but I guess it’s what makes people, people. As a leader, the more you push back, the more it hurts for them, for you, for everyone.” Look how well you know these ideas. Who would you be if you lived them?

I grimaced. Those fucking memories again. I eyed Zephyro and found him regarding me like a… well like a prophet.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said, turning away and scratching the side of my head. “I’m nothing like the stories.”

“Oh Sultana, I noticed that none of the stories could ever do you justice.”

I grumbled quietly at the joking undertone. Smug bastard.

“Anyway…” I continued. “The main point is you can’t think of everything. You can’t think for ten, twenty, let alone a hundred people. You can’t do everything alone, and you need to stop acting as if you could. If you don’t see the enemy coming and they get me, the mission is fucked. If you die because I cannot help defend your blind spots, the mission is also fucked.” I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and pushed myself to my feet.

I extended a hand to Zephyro. “So stop it. Tell me how I can actually help.”

He looked up at me, then his hand grabbed mine. The leather on the inside of his gauntlet was soft, but his grip was tight. “As you command, Sultana.”