“You don’t know my friends. They will come for me!“ — written transcript from Episode#6, Winged, of Icarus Clone

Synth stood for synthetic. As in, not real. Grown in the vats of Level 1, made to alleviate the strain of resources as the Arcology Accommodation took root in that early phase of the war against the Host when people still had high hopes. Later, a common place feature of mankind’s new brave future.

Oh, there was always a black market for the real deal, but when the greater quantity of a substance or material could be created by an Administrator, there was less need.

Not to mention what a senior Proxy could do to an arcology’s economy, unbound by scruples.

To Martin’s eye, the brown bar that rested on a table he had scrounged from Level 3—it was proper chocolate. Cocoa even.

Berenice stared at the sweet, frowning slightly. She fiddled with the buttons on her overall, a dark grey thing with red stars. Oddly stylish.

He patted his own sweater, hand knitted by an old lady back in Camp Sala. Then, he wasn’t one to remark one another person’s clothes.

If that was proper chocolate, then Sonnentag had gone beyond and above.

Calix stared at it, too. She wore a suit today, black shirt with darker jacket and no tie. The old-fashioned clothing made her look some villain from a period drama. Something starting with an m?

Martin cleared his throat. He had sat through meetings with crime bosses, in rooms with blood-spattered sofas—and those meetings had possessed a sunnier atmosphere than this.

“It’s real,” Berenice said. Her eyes darted to Calix, then back.

“Oh, I know.”

The conversation died a still death as seconds and then minutes passed.

“Where did you get it, Berenice?”

He had to do something, otherwise the two of them would remain at bitter ends forever. That was dangerous, for while they remained cocooned in the safety-net of the Tutelage for now, they wouldn’t alway be so.

Eventually they’d graduate, go their own different ways and by then it’d be too late. That was in the future, yes, and there was a fair amount of time before that end, but Martin knew the slow dance of grievances.

Of friendships that had warped in the dark.

Sonnentag shrugged.”I know a guy, you know?”

In the background, on the screen set before the couch, a newsreporter was giving a monologue about a forward-sweep in Northern Sweden. The camera panned over a series of broken hills.

He pointed, did Martin. “That’ll be us before long.”

“Hardly,” Sonnentag retorted.

“Maybe in a fifty years from now,” Calix whistled.

There was a moment when the two of them looked at each other.

“The schedule for the Tutelage did mention live-exercises,” Berenice Sonnentag said, twirling a strand of dark hair between hardbitten fingers.

“Wait, you actually remember the schedule?”

Martin, had uh, momentarily blanketed out when Sviratham covered that portion.

Sonnentag stared at them. “You don’t.”

“I wasn’t listening.”

“But you could download it.”

Calix, still part of the conversation, though not active, snorted. Her eyes moved from the screen to Sonnentag.

“Not everyone has time to check the schedule.”

“Yeah?”

Martin felt the tension mount—there was mockery in Calix’s tone and Berenice didn’t have a funny bone in her body. And that start had been so promising.

He got up, moving through the hallway to the door, in quick order retreating back before the recalcitrant friends— and they would be friends if Martin Soleri had anything to say of the matter— could open their mouths to further aggravate the issue.

No kingmaker, Martin, nor friendmaker, but he knew a thing or two about diversion. You set up one your lieutenants with some extra powder, and then you told the police about it. As they arrested a kingpin, you took over a contested area.

“Hey! I was watching that!”

“Well, Calix, you’re watching my jacket now.”

Berenice shrugged.”I don’t recognise the brand. Where did you buy it?”

“You don’t recognise the House of R’s newest jacket? Have you been living under a rock?”

Now both Martin and Berenice stared at Calix. “I’m a filthy provincial, remember? We’ve got knock-offs in the camp, yeah, but fashion was never my thing.”

Berenice raised her hands, both palms up. The gesture seemed to cover her up, protect her entire body. “I’m poor.”

“So was I, didn’t stop me.”

“I-“

Martin, on seeing Berenice puff up like a bird, elbowed her gently.

“I like my overalls.”

Calix gave the overalls a glance. Condescension was writ large in the way her eyes slid off Berenice’s form, her lips forming a flat road.

Come on, Calix.

“That’s a interesting blend of colors, Sonnentag.”

_____

A couple of odd hours later spent, or wasted on trying to patching that relation, depending on one’s view— Martin hung above the Skyline habitat.

What must I look like to the rest of the denizens of the Vänern Arcology?

Ghost in white, hanging above silhouetted sky, a pregnant moon beaming over him like a halo.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

The perpetually cold air sharpened him, made his thoughts more clear.

His eyes tracked a herd of deers. Drones? The attempt to reconcile Isla Calix and Berenice Sonnentag hadn’t been a complete disaster. Nor had it been a success either.

He would have to get back to that. Time, yes that was it. They’d need time, and then everything would be fine. Yeah, that sounded hollow to him even.

He generated an exoauric technique, pulling the ambient light around one finger and wrote a message on the air.

Hey Moyomoto

How are things? hanging

I passed survived my Examination of Worth. Me and two others got chased by a big huge Regial beneath a mountain in a habitat here in Vänern Arcology. Have you been there?

Raja Sviratham is the instructor of the Tutelage of 20‘95. He’s hard, hard and fair, but I guess that’s what it takes teach young Proxies.

We’ve had a couple of fighting bouts, try-outs meant to prepare us for the Crown Championship and a lesson module of ethics. It feels as if they, or he is moulding us.

Anyhow, I wanted to thank you. If not for you, I wouldn’t be where I am.

He stared at the glowing text, dismissing the crossed over word and focusing his will to open a window on inside of his helmet, copying the text as he did.

He hovered over the send-button. Sviratham had recently impressed on him that there were always eyes watching. Then, there was nothing incriminating here. Nothing he hadn’t said out loud.

Besides…

This—the mandatory schooling for emancipation privileges had covered rhetoric, though not as much as for one born in the arcology. But even so, he could tell that the message was meandering. Did it matter? It wasn't an essay about the erosion of the World Premier’s authority, but a personal message.

He sent it.

And so he hung above the white earth, just…being.

Snow began to fall from the sky.

At first, ephemeral.

Then thicker flurries.

In the end, a corridor of stuff.

He let his shoulders drop, the exoauric holding him aloft and Martin Soleri simply…was. Sviratham’s lectures on the unconscious nature of the Field came to mind. That the Field, the Proxy and the Chassis were a trinity, and to dismiss one was to dismiss the whole.

Between the Examination, the bouts, that ethics-module and the near-ambush he had never really tried to enjoy himself. Oh, he had gone drinking with the Dep, no, the forerunners.

Seen a demonstration.

He had shopped with Calix.

Met the Administrator twice.

But he hadn’t taken time to relax, to put his feet on the ground. How long had it been since he met Chiyo Moyomoto in the Reception Hall? A month, something like that?

Had it only been that short amount of time since he had seen the illusion of a deviathan manifest, been reminded of his past as he entered the Vänern Arcology? He remembered clutching the lanyard tight, a worry and a hope warring in the hollow of his center.

He tried to put a word on it—the feeling in his chest. A wonder that begot more. But what?

When, and he did not delude himself into thinking that his and the rest of 2095-13’s Tutelage would be bound to the arcology, when they left it, who would he leave it as?

Already he had found the beginnings of an answer, decided to be another person. That first step had begun as Sara the forerunner led him out and beyond Sala, but he had taken more steps. Beneath the Mountain in the Verdant habitat, and then as Somchai Saolirin, Ronja Somaronov and Isla Calix cut him to the bone.

The conceits he carried, the truths too close to be seen—they had been revealed to him and he hadn’t liked it. Liked the person he was, what he had become.

He thought of injustice. Of his desire to punish the people in the camp that had stepped on him. Broke his spine, his fingers. He had sat on synth-pavement, crying, hurting, promising himself that one day he would have the power to retaliate, all while believing that such a day would never come.

Now he had it. He could teleport from the arcology back to the camp. He’d just need a sliver of Field. The bullets would bounce of the armor of his Chassis. The traps, he would just float over. He could see through the walls, enact his fantasy of vengeance ten thousand times.

They’d come for him. Oh, there’d be punishment. Solzhenitsyn’s fate had shown Martin that, and a deeper facet of the war on the Host. They’d punish him, but eventually they’d let him back in the fold.

So, what stayed his hand?

That sentiment, a coal beneath the fire that was his conviction. What was it?

He snapped a hand out, and the telltale swirl of distorted atmosphere manifested along a gradient as he floated. The space settled, ready to be torn. He thrust a palm out, dismissing the exoauric.

The nascent portal imploded, air surging to fill it.

Snow fell, and a wind moved the outer layers of his Chassis. He dropped down, feet crunching on the snow. Why would people born to this ever leave it?

He stopped beneath a tree…a fir? He stopped under the fir.

Why?

It echoed, that lone word. Why? It wasn’t right. That was the reason. But what he felt…he knew that to avenge himself on the camp was wrong. But inside his heart, there was fire. A seething nest of spiders.

There were Proxies out there that could plunge the mind. Endoaurics never understood by science, that could reveal the inner workings of the mind. He resorted to find one such Proxy.

_____

The color of his fury always surprised him. His despair, his depression was black—that made sense to Martin.

He had begun to summon other emotions, for as Sviratham had declared, and later born out, endoaurics cost little in Hierachy of Power. Nobody knew why.

He could feel the tug on his Field, like a child cloying for attention. The battle-cell was empty. There was nobody to see. He didn’t need to know why endoaurics pulled less on his Field, only that they did. And what endoaurics revealed…

He held his hands up.

A seven-pointed star, a prayer made real strobed. Pink. Why was his fury pink?!

He made a fist and kindled the emotion, stoking it until his face began to throb, until his heart felt as it would race outwards. He strained.

Then, only then did he detonate it.

Shards, petals really, shot outward.

One flew by his face, gouging the ground as it did.

The anger evaporated, spent.

It was only as he knelt by it, that he felt copper trickle into his mouth. Huh. He hadn’t felt the wound. That was sharp.

“Pink?”

He wheeeled around, startled by the word. The voice struck a chord, but not quite close enough to place. Where had he heard it before?

“I always figured you for a more somber type.”

Martin spun a black web around himself, layering a wall of force on top it which rapidly expanded outwards.

The surge of motion broke beyond ten metres, dispersed beyond fifteen. Still, he maintained the endoauric.

“Come out!”

He waited. Time seemed seep between the cracks of his knuckles, evaporating like dew of the morning.

“Here,” the voice said with sibilant hiss, a huge mouth dispelling air above his left shoulder.

Martin Soleri chuckled. His shoulders dropped.

“Very funny, Somchai.”

The serpentine Chassis slithered past him, turning chalk white as it did. Was that a feature of Saolirin’s Chassis? Scales meant to absorb the visible spectrum?

He lay on side then, did Somchai.”You didn’t hear me?”

“Hear you?”

“I have been working on combining aurics. An exoauric for teleportation and a little something to cover my entry.”

Martin paused. There were advanced exoaurics that allowed Proxies to recall their memories. Not a single figment, but one’s whole history. Then, he didn’t want remember everything that had everything happened to him. He focused his will, recalling a need, a great need and he thought of his practise in the cell.

The Field around him flickered— and he saw himself entering the cell. He summoned shards of despair, cycling through what he thought as happiness, a pulsing red excitement. He wrought lightning, the real kind, not the one born of his emotions.

The sharp nasal scent of ozone lingered over the area.

He centered himself in the middle of the cell, and recalled every instance of anger he could summon. An official in the camp stamping on his hands. Staring at a couple of Three:ers on a lark through the mud, their unlined faces. Sitting in his container— for that was the great truth of the camps. When made, in the beginning of the war, they, the architects of the Arcology Accommodation had picked old shipping containers and welded them anew.

He sat on his bed, and thought of a bat, and blood. The things circumstance had forced him to do.

Then pink anger.

He breathed back, back in the shuddering now. The helmet of cloth on his head was dismissed and he drew oxygen, bountiful oxygen from the cell. Great heaving gasps wracked his body and he sat down, face cradled in the hollow made by his hands.

Subjective emotions recalled in an objective instant. The forearm of his Chassis frosted over, and through it he saw a black man with bloodshot eyes.

The anger…the anger that he had dismissed, it was still in him.

“Martin?”

“I…tried to recall events.”

“I figured,” Somchai said, human voice at odds with his serpentine appearance.”What did you do? I lost you there.

“I tried to go through the memories, all of my memories since I entered the cell…”

The great snake nodded.”In an single instant? That would do it. I urge you to be careful. The Field can heal a lot of things, but fuck up your brain too much and you’ll only get pieces back.”

Martin groaned, his limbs in a sprawl.”No messing around with the brain, got it.”

“I’m serious here, Soleri. Even seniors only touch the mind in shallow ways. An accelerated perception, some remote drone-control perhaps.”

If even the likes of Raja Sviratham could be said to avoid a specific auric…he made a vow to avoid the mind.

Rather than continue in that vein, he switched the subject.

“That’s some Chassis you got there. Does the thing you do with the light come prepacketed?”

Somchai unfurled, stretching out to his full length. He preened under the praise. Still, the dimensions of his Chassis sure was something else. He could kill a man merely by sitting on him. The combination of tail and forelimbs meant that he’d with force of a speeding tram, as Martin knew all too well.

Why hadn’t he gotten a Chassis like that?

“It does, but I had to work it out. Some of the Proxies back home claimed that the exoaurics that manipulate light will be less of a effort with my Field in this Chassis.”

Martin thought back on their fight.”Don’t I believe it,” he muttered.

“And yours?”

Light burst in a cresting wave, revealing Somchai in his dramatic glory. Skin like teak, short-cropped hair—a recent addition that, and brown smiling eyes.

Martin stared down at his Chassis. He thought of the color of Raja Sviratham’s gauntlet, and the similarity of the burning light he favored.

Viktor had used feathers, and his Chassi was more of a shroud than actual armor.

Calix used a technique with red light. Her Chassis had some red on it. Also, before the Ennas Dilemma, hadn’t she used a beam-weapon that manifested between her horns?

“There…is there some sort of affinity when it comes to Chassis?”

His comment elicited a certain expression; brows furrowed, mouth agape.

“I forget sometimes,” Somchai said, voice apologetic.

“Forget what?”

“That you’re…that you’re not used to Chassis.”

That you weren’t born in a arcology.

“What about the Chassis?”

Martin bulled on. If he were to summon an endoauric right now, it’d be pink.

That pause hadn’t been on purpose. Somchai was no Chevalier.

“It’s something of a great betting game in most arcologies. Some property of the Host from which the Chassis is made, it is transfered. Then, add a Proxy to operate it…”

A snake’s head sprouted from Somchai’s left hand. A bisected tongue went out, moving by its own volition.”My Chassis was harvested from the corpse of Regial of the Low variety. It specialised in hunting, hence the camouflage.”

“What, it came with a specification?”

Somchai made a noise.”My father, he’s a traditionalist.”

“What-“

—into the Thai Proxy’s brown eyes Martin fell, seeing something akin to what he himself felt. A succession of bad days, hardening into years, becoming routine, something disgusting and all too much familiar.

“I hunted it down and killed it.”

Martin stared. They had covered the early warfare of the Devastation in great detail. The Americans had unloaded increasingly more destructive weapons on the Host, winning some battles but losing more ground with each ‘victory’. The length of time it had taken them to unleash nuclear warfare, history taught, had been months.

But that was the thing. The Field allowed for some Regials to continue march on. So now, on top their usual suites of abilities, these Regials glowed in dark. Each step they took poisoned the land.

You didn’t need a Field to kill a member of the Host: the Americans had proven the truth of that statement up to the Battle of the West. Only…as Calix too had shown. It was hard. You needed skill, a certain cunning and really, some sort of vast force.

“There are records, you know,” Saolirin Somchai mused, as Martin shook his head.

“Records?”

“Of all gathered Chassis. Officially gathered Chassis, that is.”

What did that mean?

“I could show you.”

“I…”Martin tugged at the white cloth of his Chassis. It had no give, yet it had cushioned blows that would have dented steel. How much did he know about it? He wore it all the time, but what did he really know about it?

“Lead the way,” Martin said. Somchai wasn’t looking, nor did Martin feel it, but all the same, a pink crown manifested around his brown eyes as he was led out.