Godclads

Chapter 6-4 Mind Dive (I)

No one metaphor can describe what it is like to traverse the confines of someone’s mind; analogy fails to capture the totality behind the frivolities of psychology. Diving into another’s mind, in a sense, is an exercise in separation; in ensuring the waters which you swim belong to ensure that you don’t drown amidst the black of a mind most foreign.

Psychosis, then, is a common outcome for those that are unprepared. You can get lost inside someone’s mind.

Be prepared. Have an arsenal of memories. And when in doubt, jack out.

Always, always jack out.

-Incubi Mind-Diving Mem-Sim, Ori-Thaum

6-4

Mind Dive (I)

Most Necros don’t make it past the amateur level with how many shatter their minds during their first dive. It was a thing of both preparation and artistry that allowed most Necros to operate the paracosm of another mind. Back when he first rescued Lucille, his wards had served him against the immensity of her trauma; an operation conducted hastily for maximum effect.

Now, unrushed and with ample time to focus, he applied his ghosts with careful focus, his peripheral phantasms brushing against the turbulence of her surface thoughts.

He had the capability of punching through, but none of the desire. Broken was how she greeted him, but intact will be how he leaves her. And much of that will rely on him walking paths of lesser resistance, of symmetry and alignment with her memories and thoughts–to slip in unnoticed between clefts of memory, more shadow than an intruder.

Her mind was a hurricane of trauma yet, barely held in place after his last two visits. The damage Aseleri had inflicted on the girl was total, gouging her from thought to ego. Total, but not nearly the worst case Avo had seen. That remained a street squire that Walton had worked on once, who somehow had a thoughtwave detonator fused into the depths of their memories as a method of torture.

To this day, Avo still couldn’t fathom what his father did to restore that squire even toward partial functionality.

Like a bird of prey sailing over a maelstrom, studying the currents to find the softness of the eye of her torment, his ghosts ferried information back to him, telling him of what occupied the outer layer of her thoughts. Much of her thoughtstuff roared as rapids of raw emotion, the pain like coursing hellfire, searing even to Avo’s awareness. Tiredness joined it as an auxiliary, the low quality of her sleep shrouding the lands of her innermost kingdom in a misted haze.

Like a musician, he plucked her mind slowly, injecting her with intrusive thoughts to see if the waters would change. For the last few times, he studied her damage, he noted three major sectors that rested as the roots of her trauma. The death of her father, the death of her sister, and the forcible implantation of her bioware.

He needed to get to them indirectly. Trying to seal those wounds by brute processing force was possible, but it would likely crack her mind in the process, akin to him forcing his claws inside the cleft of an actual wound to draw out whatever shrapnel remained buried within. Any direct insertion could see her mind crack asunder, with the fissures of her trauma finally spreading across the broken ocean that was her mind.

HOST AWARENESS: 0%

In the back of his mind, the indicator tracking her mind’s reactivity played on, his presence undetected. For professionalism’s sake, he needed to keep this within the sub-fifty percent range. The measurements were more estimates than auguries.

For a few moments longer, he brushed her mind, and she recoiled, the entirety of her consciousness bearing a bruise the same dark nebula-like hue that spilled across her body. Then, between considerations of suicide and fear of final death, he caught a glimpse of something that glinted, that resonated even with his own mind.

Ah. A memory of the steamed bun. A golden tunnel amidst the overgrowth of scar tissue that coated her spirit. The sight of such a memory being his key to smuggling himself even deeper into the depths of her mind pleased him. He had scorned himself for capitulating to her want at the time, virtue or not. Walton would’ve been pleased, but he was a ghoul, and could only guess at the comfort of which his gift delivered.

Now, however, he had something to directly reference, sample, and comprehend. Rare was decency rewarded, and rarer still did a good deed smile back at Avo. There was something he needed to grasp here. He couldn’t fully conceptualize what yet, so he left a reminder in his Metamind to review this memory later.

Right then, however, he had a task to proceed with.

It took almost none of his cognitive capacity to spoof himself into the memory for he was already a part of it. It did, however, need to be edited afterward. Cleared of him, of Draus, of Kae. Perhaps it would be best for him to restructure the memory in a way that had Lucille buying the bun herself; an act of self-sufficiency after suffering often stood as a bulwark for an individual’s ego.

Traveling backward across that sequence, Avo subtly hid in his own dream-shaped simulacrum, rewinding the chronology to the slaughter in the meeting cubes. He sought Aseleri. He sought a central tether to access all her rooted mind wounds. From there, his task would prove to be threefold: dissolve the trauma without making her forget who she was, copy over the trauma to make fraggers–mem-weapons and the like–and clean out any instance that would lead back to him, the Agnos, and the Regular.

A deep edit for a deep dive. Still, a relatively soft subject and an easy assignment for one as versed as he. Her mind had no traps, after all, and she lacked a proper palace to serve as a fortification or a labyrinth. Perfect for getting back into the rhythm.

He found himself at the point where he was torturing Aseleri with his Heaven. His wards groaned slightly as a wave of discomfort surged into him. For a moment, his shape quivered, his actual mind slipping free from the representation she had of him in her dream. Without panic, he reconstituted his ghost and rooted himself even firmer. The waters of her subconsciousness stilled for a moment as he felt them wash over him, vague aware that something was amiss within.

HOST AWARENESS: 3%

Back in the real, Avo growled at his display of incompetence. If he was conducting this operation inside a proper Necro, Sequence-Eaters would have been activated; internally patrolling Specters would have mem-locked him and guided neuro-shredding missiles into his mind. He should have anticipated the impact and braced for it. He would not repeat this mistake again.

Stabilized, he studied the form of Aseleri again, and in an instant, the frustration evaporated off of him, turning to pleasure. He had kept her alive much longer than Little Vicious. Part of it was because of the robustness of the slaver-captain as well, her body being modified to survive more, and endure more.

It was a pleasure to inflict pain on her. It made him feel artistic, like a chef marinating their prey with the proper tenderization. Staring down at Aseleri’s face, eyes and mouth wide open in a silent scream that would follow him for the rest of his life, Avo took a snapshot with his Metamind. A new profile image burned itself in place along the walls of his childhood megablock. To deliver a final insult, he summoned Aseleri’s ghost to the forefront, the bulging masses of the borrowed ghosts he commanded from the locus’ letting the captain’s cognitive effigy through to behold the last moments of her life.

Stripped of will and hollowed of agency, the shade of the dead slaver could do little more than what Avo willed of her. And so, he puppeted her, twisting her sequences to make her speak the words within his mind.

+I deserved this… you were right to kill me… you should have made it last longer.+

In the real, Avo chuckled. Perhaps it was unbecoming of him to take such pleasure in this, but to cast a final insult like this felt sublime. There was a special flavor in forcing a slaver to sing the praises of their own death. In a sense, was this not also power absolute, to inflict mockery even as they were smelted toward better purpose by the fires of his soul?

Juvenile impulses sated, Avo returned to his task and began the next stage of his spoofing: weaving a new cage around himself. One in the shape of Aseleri. Wrapping the captain’s physical shape and crude thoughtstuff over himself, he slipped over into her body mid-torture, Lucille’s awareness none the wiser to his transference.

Using the former captain’s memory as a vehicle, he rode across the branches and flows of Lucille’s memories, speeding toward her three major trauma junctions with accelerated efficiency. There, he could find, copy, and edit her psychological wounds before committing to general redactions.

He shifted even deeper into Lucille’s mind, sinking well past the near-term, diving into the depths of her foundational structures, her long-term memories coated in bubbles of innermost desires.

The fabric of her ego was a vulnerable thing. He could still detect a spot of calm lingering from the ghost he burned on her nearly a week ago. By this point, anyone with a functional Metamind would have flushed the damage. Reset things to baseline.

She, however, was a flat. She had to live with the damage. Live the edits. But at least after the Sang extracted what her bioware was worth, she could afford some rudimentary wards.

Pulling himself along the chains of her mind, he manifested with caution at another point. Another place she remembered encountering Aseleri. Bereft of wards or internal memory-scanning functions, his task was simple: stay affixed to the body of Aseleri and see where the hurt lay. Immediately, he was rewarded.

And this time, when his mind was dashed against a tidal wave of torment, he was ready, holding still even as the trauma bifurcated itself against him.

HOST AWARENESS: 1%

COG-CAP: 12%

He was on the bridge again now, and scrying through her unprotected mind, the memory played from her perspective, made to kneel alongside her sister with vibrating knives held near their necks. Across from them, a leather-faced man with cold eyes stood, projecting a holoscreen to the bridge as they watched Aseleri take another piece of flesh from her father.

Behind the captain, a door was slowly beginning to open. Right. That was the moment Avo entered with Traffic Sight.

Lucille was wailing then. Avo grew aware of her feelings, though he experienced them in a far duller manner than she did, his ghosts nibbling away at her cognition to procure much-valued mem-data. That was one of the benefits of engaging in a spoofing dive–of integrating with her mental structure symmetrically rather than just tearing through her and doing a slapdash rebuild after.

The mind was a vast thing, and ghosts then were merely effigies to the wholeness that was, something between shadows and scars leftover in the Nether when life was struck from the real. Being this close to her mind, damaged as it was, granted him direct sups of knowledge from the well of her being.

Words and whispers began to sound. Her internal monologue. Avo spent a moment shuttling fragments out using the pull of his Ghostjack. Quietly, he fused a few pieces together and built a crude mem-log.

+This is my fault! This is my fault!+ The girl’s mind was a howl of regret and sorrow. +I should have waited! I should have waited alone. I should have! But… but I didn’t know they were gonna scan us–oh, I should have waited! I could have found my own way into the city…+

Clarity, then, dawned over why the hurt was so severe. It was partially her fault, in a narrow, unexpected sense. More memories filtered down through the depths, as he plundered her knowings to piece together the wholeness of her backstory. She was born in a Rupture enclave, her family retainers to a Fallwalker–an independently operating Godclad who was bound to no Guild and commonly hid in regions claimed by Fallen Heavens, hence their title.

Her patron Fallwalker was a young Godclad who called himself Greten Stonebreath. He dubbed himself thus, foolishly deciding to announce that he had a Heaven of Stone and wielded miracles relating to petrification. Under the indifferent governance of the Fallwalker, Lucille led a simple life, working to sustain the enclave’s hydroponics along with her family. Such was her story for fifteen years.

Then, one night, a radiant lance seemed to slash through the folds of space itself, cleaving through the entirety of the enclave. The sudden assault left the thousand or so retainers untouched but vanished the Fallwalker and his family. No explanation followed that. Whoever their attacker or attackers were, they merely kidnapped Greten and his kin before leaving, ignoring those that lived in the enclave, and throwing them before the tender mercies of the Ruptures and anomalous creatures.

She and her family had fled after that, marching blind through a place where all vertical lines manifested small snakes within one’s eyes, and then deaf through a place where a chiming song of infectious winter played, freezing the unfortunate and unprotected enough to hear the tune from the inside.

Her mother had met her end that way, her noise-canceling audio-set malfunctioning along the road. A lattice of ice hatched from her corpse. They had to leave her, for her corpse began to ring with the chimes as well, and up close, the noise was near deafening.

After weeks of venturing through the local Sunderwilds spreading out like pus from the Ruptures, they finally managed to make it to a Voidwatch-run refugee camp where they were issued waiting permits by the Guilds and given a number. One that would have seen them waiting their turn to enter New Vultun.

The fragments he paired from her memories played on. They stayed in the camp for well over two months, and its population swelled to that of an entire Sovereignty, numbering a good hundred million people. They dwelled in a battered quick-fabbed shack, living as best as they could while bathed beneath the eldritch fires of the Fallen Heavens. For a while, she, her father, and her sister were content to wait, to nurse the sorrow of losing their mother.

But then Lucille’s sister grew sick with an anomalous plague. Eggs began growing along the walls of her lungs. When the auto-doc scanned her, the drone told them that it was a thaumaturgic infestation and that there was little they could do.

They begged, asking for aid from local Voidwatch immigration officer and the terrestrial Guilders. In both attempts, they found only setbacks. They were FATELESS, which made off-world transit impossible, and they were anomaly-touched, which placed them in a quarantined quarter of the camps.

Avo tried reaching deeper, wishing to see more but the sequences he grasped felt far too brittle. Her mind shifted, the waters whipping into motion.

HOST AWARENESS: 5%

He retracted from the broader pool of her long-term memories. Despite her rising awareness, he did not regret his digging. With what little of the outside world he saw, memories from beyond New Vultun always made for most entertaining vicarities. It was one of the few commodities most FATELESS had for sale.

Moreover, it helped Avo judge the flavor and effectiveness of her traumas even better. He realized that the devastation this chain of memories played on the girl wasn’t just from seeing her father die, but also the fact that she, too, might have been at partial fault for it. From his guesses, her father might’ve been able to strike a deal with a smuggler in the camp, buying tickets for two people into New Vultun while hiding the fact that his daughters were twins.

Seeing as the trip was likely to get Lucille’s sister to taste the midnight rains, the fact that both of them were dead, and she was still alive worked at her insides like a knife stuck in her organs.

Perhaps if she just waited, if she just let her father and her sister leave first they would still be alive. Avo regarded such a thought as pure delusion, for Aseleri was a slave-runner, and the father and her sister, at best, would’ve been displaced if they lived long enough.

Fortunately, what was harm for her was a mineable weapon for him.

Casting his ghosts to stretch out over the sequence, Avo began to copy its properties. Lucille’s anguish and regret formed a venom that bore layers of harm. The torment of watching her father die was most damaging. The regret she felt thereafter was like corrosion inflicted upon the ego, a vector of hurt that also applied a modifier of self-loathing if shaped into an armament.

DOWNLOADING TRAUMA-PATTERN [LUCILLE’S REGRET]

Avo didn’t waste any time. From the sequence he drew the mold of another fragger for use; the second weaponized memory pattern to be stored in his current Metamind right after Aseleri’s Folly. As the download began to fill, Avo found his focus drifting over to the girl’s father, her, her sister.

For there, he began to contemplate how to whittle down the hurt that gnawed within this root of pain before he moved on to the others.