Godclads

Chapter 6-8 Cages

The obfuscation of spyware is a delicate act; it is akin to making a fluid computational machine. Something non-newtonian, so to speak, if we are to continue viewing the mind through the metaphorical lens of being an ocean.

But the mind is not an ocean. That is merely an analogy--a mental aid made to assist in the grasping of the construct's true gnosis. With truth to the mind's function, the nature of a thought is as individual and elemental as any domain in our current age.

As such, the disguising of any circumspect phantasmics must take advantage of the fixed nature of long-term memories, the fluidity of thoughts; the evanescence of whims; intrusive suggestions triggered by external, internal, or chronological stimuli.

Ultimately, the rules and rigidity of each mind are invariable. You will have to be as much an artist as you are a practitioner to properly mask yourself beneath the waves.

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

6-8

Cages

It was a special privilege to hold the leash to your own desires. Everyone was bound to something, chained by nature or want. With the beast nested in his depths, Avo knew this better than most. This was why the moment he claimed his glut of ghosts, he went about completing that which was long missing in his mind.

Within his palace, grand columns of voluminosity ran wide and high, caging the megablock of his youth in a cage of light. Each bar was made from a mix of memories, some fused like alloys, others interwoven like strings or wires.

The sequences flowed and circulated across each column as if veins coursing with blood, and its crest, over its ceiling, phantoms played moments from Lucille's Regret. Flashes of Aseleri executing the girl's father ran in a loop, the surging pulse of despair and self-loathing supercharging other memories of a like nature, with other perpendicular and tangential memories attached by other junctions or shared emotions injected down into the soil of mind, greeting the chaotic waters of his basest instincts like a diluting cocktail against the encroach of his savagery.

Avo tuned his phantasmic with care. He couldn't overdose himself on secondhand emotions--that way lay insanity. Too much and he would lose his sense of self. Be drowned in a tide of sensations and desires that never belonged to him. Too little and the beast will push on through all the same. What he needed from the phantasmic was for it to match and cancel his impulses exactly. See that his mind remained his while his baser proclivities were smelted into silence.

[MORALITY INJECTOR] COG-CAP: 20 SEQUENCES (BASELINE)

STRUCTURE: “A RESPLENDENT CAGE WITH A CINEMA PROJECTION OF PAST HAPPENINGS PLAYING ACROSS THE SKY"

FUNCTION: ALLOWS THE USER TO NULLIFY SPECIFICALLY ENCODED IMPULSES WITH COUNTER-EMOTIONAL DOSES OF MEMORY.

As a test, he called upon Aseleri's ghosts and looked upon her last memory. The one that was her death; an instance he had savored most fondly. The moment flowed then, her death unfolding like an edited vicarity in his mind. He felt her fear, her despair, the mind-shattering of her flesh coming apart from the inside, and the near-sweetness of death before he drained her Metamind and Essence dry.

The beast was an easy creature to seduce into bloodlust. Fooled by the cheap meal and thinking nothing of how it already knew these flavors, it emerged in force, the ground of his palace rumbling as if it was built upon the throat of a leviathan. Yet, just as it was about to rise up and stain the air with its flavor, the Morality Injector plunged its panacea deep.

Like matter and antimatter, the flash of white basked the entirety of his palace in a haze. For seconds, thoughts slipped from Avo's grasp as he tried to collect himself. At once, he felt a clashing urge. One to hurt, the other to be ashamed of hurting.

When he finally mastered himself again, he settled back upon his Injector and adjusted his "potion" again. There was something off in the mixture. It had fragmented his wants instead of dissolving them. It took a very specific symmetry of memories to achieve the effect he desired.

Two hours more he labored, and twice more he fired his phantasmic. The first lacked sufficient impulse. The second was close, but still caused detonations in his train of thought. Finally, he managed the right combination of constructs. He knew it when no reactive blast followed. And quieter still, he could hear the beast inside him choking on a lungful of foreign emotion.

Good. It was working. Now he only needed to watch his counter-mem dosage over time. The beast was exponentially more bloodthirsty than when he was still living in the Undercroft. For good reason too. He had left it starved. Atrophied. Withered for years.

Until his descent down into the Maw fed its gluttonous appetite to new extremes.

A faint worry hatched from a newly watered seed in his mind. Considering what was demanded of his Soul, the thaums and ghosts he reaped were now in competition. He knew not if the beast had an upper limit, but he had more than a feeling that should he end up slaughtering the requisite number of people his Soul needed to climb the Spheres, he might end up needing more ghosts for stability than thaums for power.

Part of him was disquieted. A substantial part more was intrigued. The beast was blunted, but not severed, and Avo himself would be chambering his thoughts with delusion if he didn't admit that his newfound power had also offered him greater heights of satisfaction atop even the thrill that was claimed.

Immortality offered freedom. And godhood offered self-determination. Both came as a joined package in the form of his Liminal Frame. And through it, Avo felt more aware of himself than he ever had been, more "person" than he ever was.

The time he lived since Walton's death had been rote. Routine, almost. He did dives and lived by the ethics and habits instilled in him from a time when his father was still alive. He moved regularly. He operated his living expenses and masked his status of ownership under shell companies and LLCs. He avoided attention. He practiced his art.

It was a life. Better than what was offered to the vast majority. Better than he deserved, by all accounts. That didn't change the fact that he was still living the life of prey, scurrying like an aratnid beneath the eyes of the Guilds every time a policy was changed or a major happening was underway. That didn't change that he lived to react and plan to prevent rather than act and build upon.

When he was in the Tiers, he had something. Now that he had fallen, his appetites wanted much, much more.

It was a special privilege to control your own fate. It was pure power to hold dominion over the fabric of reality itself.

A moment of quietude visited Avo. He looked around at his palace, its shape and contours made more concrete by the recent influx of ghosts. His phantasmics shone bright, their scenes playing on in junctions outside his megablock. His old home was, however, outdated. A sanctuary of nostalgia constructed as a placeholder during a trying time. But he wouldn't demolish it. No. It would serve a new purpose--an entryway to a grander structure. A labyrinth.

But that was for later. When the final preparations were well underway and he could work without being interrupted.

For now, he had a few prisoners to see about, and some spyware to infect their minds with.

EXITING META-DIVE

Resurfacing into his flesh, Avo awoke on the couch, basked in the neon gleam of the holovision spraying useless adverts at him. Across the room, he could hear Kae's screaming heartbeat, hear her muttering gibberish with each passing instant. A side effect of her implant, he supposed. Couldn't be whatever was afflicting her mind considering how much damage it did. Words wouldn't flow from a conflagration that could melt thought.

Shaking his post-dive shivers, Avo activated his Auto-Seance and lined up a sequence of encoded memories. +Draus. I'm done. Time to have our conversation with the subjects.+

Across the link, he felt a flicker of expectant delight rush through from the Regular. +Took you long enough. So. Can I trust you to stop wantin' to eat every other critter we see 'round these parts now?+

+Can I trust you not to hit our prisoners?+

+Depends. And anyway, you didn't answer my question.+

+Depends. How nice does the nu-pet smell?+

***

Chambers, Janand, and the tech that Avo continued to have no desire to learn the name of were stashed in a powered storage unit parked in the district's aerodocks located on its far periphery, pointed in the direction of Nu-Scarrowbur. They were left sealed inside a powered cargo unit on some kind of life-support system.

The choice to keep them in such a place was simple. Mostly drones. Minimal Sang. Reduce the chances that the Dragon-Curse would notice three "males" and tear their blood from their orifices.

Corpses were hard to question for non-Necros, and ghosts made for terrible mules without a physical anchor.

Adhering to "maximum operational security," Draus took the aerovec while Avo found himself using public transit. Something about it all being more natural, and "him having the longer legs." Seeing how the six-mile journey was eating into his time, he felt it righteous to accuse Draus of being lazy when next he saw her.

Clearly, she had lost all pride in being a Regular if she was afraid of a little physical activity.

Additionally, this wouldn't be a matter if he had the appropriate Hell for his Galeslither. Probably would've made it there faster than Draus could, judging by how fast the golem went and its intangibility. Now there was something he and Kae could see about remedying.

By the time he got to the docks, the artificial sky was already kindling the piercing yellow of dawn into the soft orange flames of late afternoon. Outside the gate, he found a line of parked aerovecs--including the vehicle that Draus had supposedly taken--but the Regular was nowhere to be seen.

"What took you?" Draus said, her voice suddenly sounding from behind. She spoke like she had a mouthful of food. As Avo hissed in annoyance, he sniffed.

And found himself tasting the flavor of a steamed bun.

His stomach growled. He growled. The beast growled. His Morality Injector dosed it with a dozen memories, recollections of being stuffed after a feast.

"Lazy," Avo said.

"Hm?" Draus asked, eyebrows raised. She swallowed what was left of her bun as she walked upward toward him. The incline of the road gave him even more of a height advantage over her than he normally possessed, making his near-eight feet of height seem like nine and her six and a half look closer to a flat six.

Still, she smacked her lips a few times and breathed in quietly, and mock contentment. "What was that you said just now?"

"You're lazy. Don't like walking."

She looked down at her legs, frowning as if there was something wrong with them. Wordlessly, she gesticulated at her limbs and threw her hands up, as if asking Avo to clarify.

Strangely, something Chambers' said rang back to him in that instant. Something about using all his words.

Avo opened his mouth to complain.

Draus pulled a plastic bag filled with six more buns out from the veil of her coat and handed it to Avo. Across the plastic covering, the same dancing bear Avo saw the other day battled tigers and dragons, proclaiming that only one could rule the mountain.

"Come on, rotlick," she said, walking past him, "let's see if your exercise-lovin' ass can chew, whine, and talk at the same like a Regular."

The aerodocks was the very definition of sensory overload. Guidance drones wailed sirens and painted stacks of hissing storage slots. Three holographic thresholds lined the vehicle and container tonnages based on verticality. The heaviest deliveries were installed at the very bottom first before other cargo lined the top like bricks.

Chittering bugs and multi-eyed birds stood perched--a biological surveillance apparatus on top of the mechanical. Things here played to a far more biomechanical make. Unlike the biomancy-heavy stylings that flavored the district, the joining of flesh and metal was much like an open hand toward mutual cooperation with the rest of the city.

Walking between warning projections lining what counted as a safe distance from a yet clamped piece of cargo, Avo followed Draus toward the corner of the docks. Their container unit was Z-099, placed right next to the local warehouse.

"You got the mem-key?" Avo asked.

"River's old fashioned." Draus held up what looked to be a key in the shape of a centipede. No. It was also a centipede. Sometimes, the Sang's artistry with biology struck him as a maniacal obsession. That, at least, was something he could respect.

A thin line of crimson displayed the words "LOCKED" greeted them upon arrival. A slot that looked like it could fit someone's finger--or an insect--extended upon sensing nearby motion. Draus put her bug key in and the slot snapped shut.

Avo heard a very distinct crunch. He grimaced. "That supposed to happen?"

"Probably," Draus said. "It's reading the bioform's genome as a key. Only the Sang can make 'em an' all that."

As if on cue. The door flashed green, the red fading in an instant. A large "UNLOCKED" burst across Avo's vision as the door hissed and a warm gush of air ran over his skin.

Inside, lit by a large ring of light, their three test subjects were left cocooned in what looked to be mounds of flesh. Beneath the light, the outlines of their bodies bobbed up and down. Gazing over the interior with his Heaven, Avo felt the exo-organs pump, mend, and clean the blood of the three prisoners on a nigh-constant basis.

Say one thing for the Sang, say they're good at keeping your prisoners in prime condition.

The one that held Chambers wasn't hard to find, with the enforcer's mass and height being obvious. Up close, the exo-organ's texture looked like something between a tongue and a scab. The centermost section resembled that of a half-collapsed fan, its surface scrunched inward, clenching the internal contents tight.

Tilting her head up at Avo, Draus grinned. "You wanna be the first one he sees? Or should I?"

Avo considered it for a moment. "No. Both. Makes it worse. You broke his limbs. I threatened to eat him."

Draus chuckled now. Roughly, she hammered her fist down against the organ. Inside, the enforcer jolted awake, his mind's accretion spinning to full awareness. The Sang had left his wards intact. He didn't blame them. The thing wasn't worth the effort of extraction.

At the Regular's percussive command, the organ sloshed and--stickily--opened up. Strands of mucus broke and spilled down as it bloomed, unveiling its contents like a flower.

"Agh! Fuck! My motherfucking eyes! Who the fuck--" Inside, a meat-festooned Chambers, looking much like an infant coated in the juices of a womb, stared out at Avo and Draus, his snarl fizzling out into a low note of hopelessness. "--fuuuuuuuccccckkk. Jaus. Fucking Jaus. Come on. Come the fuck on. Give me a godsdamned break."

Draus smiled as sweetly as she could. She really didn't have the face for it. "Say you had one, consang," Draus said, licking her teeth. "Let you go to sleep after our conversation last time. Like to carry on where we left off."