Godclads

Chapter 6-5 Mind Dive (II)

How much damage does a thought fragger do? What kind of question is that? This ain’t arithmetic, consang. What cracks my jaw might just bounce off yours. As for how much damage they deal to your wards, well, that’s more a matter of how they’re built.

You got something like a… memory of being set on fire, right? That shit can mess the both of us up. We don’t like that. But a pyromaniac–natural or conditioned by phantasmics–might see that as a duck sees water.

Heh.

Same thing with wards. Are the ghosts simulating a hurricane? A flood or a natural disaster? Yeah, throwing human-scale traumas doesn’t get through, though they’ll still crack the mind behind the wards plenty if you can smuggle them in. It's how my Necros used to explain it to me anyway. Hells. They’d probably explain it better to you than I ever could. Well, if any of them were still alive maybe.

The point is, you have to treat phantasmics and mem-weapons like things of relativity. It’s not a gunfight like it is in the real. The Nethers about trying to slip in through someone’s cracks after you dump a bunch of cog-missiles on them, and even during the bombardment.

Fragging up a mind is part art and part psycho-engineering. It’s the reason why there really ain’t that many true Necros. It takes a very particular person to face the darkness, most fucked up shit you can find inside someone’s ego, and go: “Yeah, I think I can build something real nova with this.”

-Quail Tavers, New Vultun Sunrise Interview

6-5

Mind Dive (II)

Mending a mind from the inside was one part sleight of hand and three parts subversive architectural reconstruction. Recovery wasn't the right world for Lucille. Much as she wanted her personality to remain intact, the world that encapsulated her interior was already warped by the blows she had taken. Life had treated her cruelly, and so the shape of her mind gave what it could in capitulation.

But when she witnessed her sister die on the grafter station next to hers, an indelible hurt buried itself inside her so deep that every memory to do with her sister, and her father came afire when Avo interfaced with them. They were like new nerve endings to a pain supreme.

Piloting the vessel that was Aseleri from one memory to the next, his Metamind groaned as the trauma battered his protective cage. The hurt was all personal, all individual, so the asymmetry played to his benefit. A recollection made to manifest in the shape of storms feared not the torments of a single girl, torturous as they were.

COG-CAP: 16%

Haste, however, was still wise. Ineffective didn't mean impotent. Beyond the analogous shapes and abilities that phantasmics granted, they were still born of individual minds in quintessence; people remembered, and most people suffered from the chains of empathy. So too did their ghosts share in such a setback.

Avo did not suffer such a disadvantage. He wasn't the most intuitive when it came to augmentative measures or designing mem-sims or vicarities made to appeal. But trauma enticed him on a primal and philosophical level. Watching a mind fissure, burn, scatter, shatter, or outright dissolve in various stages of ego-fragmentation was pure artistry to him; to deliver hurt on a scale so deep that the body remained, but the mind that mantled found themselves dismembered of shape. When he still possessed his old Metamind, he had a catalog of mental snapshots he took of broken minds.

He used to bring them up while he fed, his satisfaction and pleasure being nourished in tandem. One of the few joys he found not so many others got to experience in life.

It was through this that Avo also knew how best to ward against afflictions, to bridge the fractured sequences that remained.

He made to edit the memory then, pulling resources from his own cognitive library, considering how he could alter the sequence of her father's death and clip the sting of her pain.

To outright remove his demise would drive her into insanity. Having a sea of grief inside oneself without a node to center it around could do that to a person. So the exercise became something in micro-deceptions. A smaller tweak. One that lessened the hurt--or transmuted it to another emotion.

For a near hour longer, Avo studied the webbed expanse of her nearby memories. Clouds of threaded guilt sprang out from the sequence like it was a seed, the infection spreading and feeding into the other major roots of her trauma. It would take him at least a week to prune them all, but pruning was most inefficient.

No, a pillar sequence could work to his advantage. He only needed to change a few things.

Shuttling Aseleri's sequences into the forefront of his mind, he filtered through all the snuff data she had stored within her Metamind and plucked out the parts she remembered of the father.

Streklov. Osjan Streklov. Born in Pronghurst, on the periphery of Kosgan. Lineage was of thaum-slaves, meant to breed and be fed to the gods as a sacrifice. Was about fifty-one at the time of death. Augmentations minimal. his experience was primarily as a farmer out in the Winnow--a narrow landbridge that extended from the Nolothi continent to the scintillating, star-carved shores of Kosgan.

What Aseleri knew of the man came from the information he gave them. All other data remained out of her reach, something that belonged to the city.

Or Avo, should he be the one to perform the ritualistic act of slaughter, feeding his frame.

Regardless, he had enough of Lucille's father that he thought himself able to smuggle and overwrite the tail end of this traumatic sequence. His Ghostjack crackled upon command, burning the mem-data of the current memories he was suffused in over into one of his ghosts.

Using said ghost, a rebuild was prepared. The father would still die. Aseleri would remain a monster. But besides those eventualities, Avo would make a single change. A thing centered around the idea of choice.

Something that the girl sorely lacked.

Again, one part sleight of hand and three parts subversive reconstruction. He planted another suggestion into her mind, pliable without wards or phantasmics, and she began to dream. His prompts ran vague, something along the lines of her mother, her family, lost in a time of happiness.

In the ocean of her mind, a new swirl came together beneath the waves, forming a window of light and slaughter. Through the looking glass, the vague contours of four people greeted Avo's mind with a breath of warm air. In fields of ever-spiraling fungi, Lucille stood with her family watching as their patron, the Fallwalker made rocks the size of small mountains dance an opera around them while holographic fireworks expanded across the fissured firmament.

A speck within Avo, taken with interest, wanted to watch for a moment. The rest of him snatched the straying strand of focus and committed to his work. This was not his dream, and she would only be distracted by the dream for so long. Soon or later, the suggestion would wear off and her mind would grow harder to influence.

He seized the now, and he began to forge his divergence.

In his paired memory, he stripped the fear from her father's face; the feebleness. A sense of determination, then, was bestowed upon the man, an expression of fatalistic defiance not found in life. The impending nature of his death could mask the potential personality divergence. More importantly, using another planted suggestion as a mental relaxant, she had good odds of accepting the overwrite without question.

The harder part came with scripting the man's defiance. Avo had other artifacts he could pull from his library of memories. People struggling over guns; actual fights; defiant last words. If traumas were where he felt himself capable, then empathy was where he faltered.

The concepts were known to him. He had sampled more than his fair share of emotions. The difficulty he faced was in instinctive grasp, chasing feelings with simulated thoughts remained a task of great strain, and so, the bulk of Avo's hour was spent scrying at various memories she had of her father and trying to simulate that using the Locus' ghosts.

By the end, he had something of demonstrable value, though by no means his best work. A pale shadow of what Walton was capable of, anyhow, but pale shadow was a fitting metaphor for both Avo and the false memory he just crafted when compared to his father.

It took a special mind to be a Necrojack. It took a special mind among those to be one that still retained hold of virtue and decency.

Under the cover of Lucille's festive dream, Avo timed his overwrite, letting his Metamind run the process. He prepared his suggestion as the counter ran down. Things needed to happen in sync; like a sudden lull in her mind rather than a sequence of memories vanishing and reappearing.

The timer elapsed. Whipping like synaptic lashes, his ghost rooted themselves in her mind and inverted memories. Hers would be stored in one of his ghosts. His would replace that which he took.

The scene played again, with Aseleri asking him to choose between his two daughters. Avo took the special liberty of editing his own appearance toward the end as well. He would save her other impressions of him, Draus, and Kae to be cleared later. He'd plug in a mix of Scalpers and mercenaries he killed in their place. Keep their identities a mystery as well. Blend the designs of their rigs to obfuscate who they were. Treat them as street squires.

For now, he let the memory play again and surveyed his work.

“Again, Mr. Streklov, the eldest or the youngest? We signed a debt contract for two. I currently count three people in your family. I might be a no-good useless drunk piece of shit long past her heyday, but I can still do arithme–” Avo ordered Aseleri to halt here in the memory, keeping everything as much the same as he could.

As the door to the bridge opened, only Traffic Sight--full name Kasava Yully--approached, face sweat-soaked and afire with nervousness.

And on cue with Yully's approach, Avo altered the memory.

Where Osjan Streklov died on his knees in actuality, here, rewoven as truth into Lucille's mind was a father who raged against the end. Lacking augments and skill, the man made an attempt to grab Aseleri's gun, twice his size thought she was.

At the instant of his motion, Avo watched his memory puppet speak, the words coming as best as Avo could imagine them.

"Girls! It's not your fault! I love--"

And memory required veracity to stay solid, and so, the statement went unfinished as the reflex-boosted Aseleri blurred into motion, palming the man's skull in her hand and firing her implanted gun.

Streklov's head bloomed apart as Avo remembered it did. Lucille screamed. Her sister screamed. The waters of mind shuddered around him ever so subtly.

HOST AWARENESS: 6%

Her wakefulness was back up a bit. Still acceptable parameters.

Examining the root again, Avo considered his next steps. Her emotions and pain were still raw, but he had blunted the fires of her self-loathing with her "father's" engineered words.

Her emotions still roared like towering tides thrown into a rage, falling like clenched fists on the face of a battered sea. But a change had taken effect, and one to his desired advantage.

Her sorrow remained. But that which she used to gnaw at herself in hate was now shuttled over to Aseleri, building blocks added to an already staggering monument of hate.

Back in the real, Avo smiled. The beast whispered to him that he was doing a good job, that he should bite off the girl's fingers to celebrate. He ignored the overfed creature and continued with his work. If he did this fast and efficiently, he would finish before Lucille stopped dreaming.

Following the traffic of hatred and trauma with Aseleri as his primary vehicle still, he found himself positioned behind another holoscreen. Behind him, a vast swath of amorphous space swirled like a miasma in lines of missing mem-data. Lucille knew not what Aseleri's personal chambers looked like and dared not to imagine.

Nearer to Lucille, however, was a scene of horror. Body locked in mag-clasped manacles, she hovered at the heart of a concentric grav-projector--a grafting station cruder than that which was afforded to Avo. Across the room, her sister was trapped much the same way, face pale and swollen, beaten where Lucille wasn't.

It appeared to Avo then the miracle-sick twin must've been the struggler in the family--Lucille the relative coward. Commendable, though ultimately worthless. He let the memory play on and watched as Aseleri pushed her ghosts into their minds roughly.

For the first time, Avo winced. The rest of the pain meant little to him, but he knew why the two girls screamed while their minds were shredded so. The Low Masters were no gentler in issuing their commands. And Aseleri doubtlessly wanted to farm them for vicarities to sell.

Again, the slaver didn't know the value of that which she possessed, using her Ghostjack as little more than mindware for snuff films and edits.

But she didn't stop there. Instead, she Ghost-Linked their minds, bridging their emotion, and their thoughts. For a moment, Avo was confused, but the moment didn't last.

The beast hissed with delight at what it was about to see. Above the emotion, however, Avo felt his scorn rising.

It was a common technique in snuff circles. Some called it the mingling. The act was simple. Find two or more people that cared for one another and forcibly link their minds. Once they were synced in thought and emotion, deliver them upon the precipice of pain with each serving as witness and host both.

What followed was trauma, purer and greater than any single mind could muster. What followed was exponential pain of a cataclysmic variety.

A blast of pain enveloped Avo's mind. The beast within him cackled with euphoric jubilance. A dozen micro-drones took beam and scalpel to the body of Lucille and her sister. Much like Avo's surgery, there were no anesthetics or pain inhibitors involved. Unlike his, they needed it.

No longer did he think Bright-Wealth's words an exaggeration. Screams that could follow one into their dreams indeed. Screams ineffable in magnitude, descriptions insufficient to package the sheer devastation it inflicted.

Screams worth a million imps.

DOWNLOADING TRAUMA-PATTERN [LUCILLE’S AGONY]; [SECONDHAND FATALITY]

He had something harsh enough to overload wards now if Lucille's pain meant anything. Hard flowed the waters of virtue when vileness paid dividends so.

The horror played for an eternity of three minutes. Across the link, it felt like the sisters were clasping hands, trying not to let go of each other, their shared affection as strengthened as the pain was.

But where resolve was steel, the flesh was wanting, and on the cusp of the third minute, one end of the link just dissolved.

Eyes misted and mind raw with agony, a drone had to draw Lucille back by her hair, forcing her to look upon the stilled corpse of her half-flayed sister. She made a noise then. It was a scream. It was less than human, less than even the whine of a nu-dog.

Aseleri had taken her past the threshold of hurt she could fathom. Numbness became Lucille, and her thoughts drowned in a blank canvas as she suddenly began wondering why her father was missing, why her sister wasn't moving, and where her mother was. Even the endless stream of ghosts he drew from the locus was coming apart against the totality of her despair.

Avo felt his wards shudder. And begin to crack.

COG-CAP: 88%

"Ah, hells," Aseleri said, sounding more annoyed than anything. "Hope you aren't broken. Still gotta sell you, you know."

With a thought, Avo jacked out. He jacked out and took a second to think. Looking down at the girl, he saw turbulence in her expression. The dream would only last for so long. But he needed to consider how to approach this.

He had hoped the sister's death and her implantation were separate roots. Instead, the inflamed sequence was conjoined; overlapping. This would take more than a spoofed memory. Far more. Moreover, Avo was wrong about Lucille. If she was a coward, insanity would have devoured her then.

Reaching into his own Metamind, he watched as even the ghost he copied the memory sequence over to writhed, lightning bolts of trauma running through its wisp-like structure.

Glancing at Lucille again, Avo felt his focus sharpen. She was proving to be more challenging to fix -- and more valuable a resource -- than he thought. One that would take more than a few spoofs.

Thinking, his thoughts shifted back over to Aseleri. The girl couldn't kill the slaver. Not even after all that had been done to her. An even stranger reaction after what was inflicted on her, but most minds were unique in shape and reaction.

Then, a thought came to Avo. One of chronological reinterpretations and a grander falsehood to wave.

What if he added another link to the sequence? What if it also allowed him to censor her mind at the same time?

What if, instead of dying mid-graft, he gave her sister an encore worth remembering? See Aseleri dead in the same instant? Begin by weakening the trauma and tweaking her past?

A new plan began to grow in Avo's mind. He dove back in.