Godclads

Chapter 9-5 The Stolen Thrones (II)

My dearest Uncle Vincentine:

Again, you’re a piece of shit.

I told you this last we spoke, but I would like to do it again in case you forget and start developing a positive self-regard.

I requested seven days of leave for your matter and I will see it resolved in seven days. Coincidentally the four members of my cadre have also requested a period away from duties.

The Longeyes surprisingly approved.

Whatever you’re involved in has them intrigued.

I recommend that I encounter my mother in the best of care unless you wish for me to break your other arm. You should tell her I’m coming. Don’t forget this time. You've failed her enough for one life.

Now, before I arrive, send me what you have on this “Mirrorhead.” It has been some time since I faced a Clad of Guild Highflame. I wish to know my prey.

-Reva Javvers, Bloodthane of Stormtree

The Stolen Thrones (II)

The spawning pools did not strike Avo as something comparable to the EGI Core. Few things could compare to the wonder of yesteryear struggling on for eons, still emitting enough natural power to boil a portion of the city. However, something equally ponderous burdened him as the architecture around them shifted again, the nexus shuttling them through the labyrinths of the SCS George Washington.

All through his travel, the weight of his father’s atrocities dwelled on him. Even devoid of the capacity for true empathy, Avo did pity those who dwelled within this ship. The cosmic injustice of their suffering was a thing more absurd than it was tragic to him. Imagine awakening after spending eons trying to outlast a nightmare, only to be cast into another.

The ghouls were always meant to be instruments; their fates deemed them beasts pre-broken to fit the groove of brutality and whatever other desires the Hungers and Low Masters deigned.

But the crew of the George Washington? What great transgression were they born under? What a miserable fate for so random an encounter.

In his infancy, Avo would have never considered such a thing. Never fixated on the fate of another beyond if they offered him nourishment. Now, even past his time with Walton, concept of self set free from shattered chains, it was a yearning for meaning that subsumed him.

The crew of the voidship met hell and torment through no fault of their own. No choice. All of this was injust circumstance upon circumstance.

And in that, Avo thought he could taste the bitterness behind their hollowed lives.

Walton looked regretful, but the younger man he was in ancient memory struck Avo as a weak creature, someone lesser that teased the beast itself. He felt the monster inside him yearn to taste the flesh of his father’s former self as if he was but meat instead of lord.

There was a liberation to such a desire. And a philosophical dread.

How fickle were the bindings of familial piety? Was this a continuation of the node’s actions? Of Walton’s desire to see the chains between him and Avo broken? To free him from anything they shared, all toward the end of undoing the Low Masters. His claws dug into the oddly yielding railing of the speeding platform.

“Avo,” Kae asked. Her voice was thin. Uncertain. He noticed her then as he had not noticed her before. A mouse among wolves, her presence was the only to kindle the flames of his bloodlust. “Do you… uh… do you think you can… fix them?”

She was asking about the trapped crew. The ones used as patchwork machinery–phantasmal scaffolding enmeshed to the crippled coldtech. Their pain lingered, but came as faint echoes of dreamers where still wakeful minds would offer the fullness of screams.

How strange it was that she stood among them, shielded by the unshaken wall of Draus and Zein watching the bulkhead modules fly by. Perhaps this was empathy, then. She thought the crew her bedfellows in pain despite their differences. To him, she seemed their inverse. It was the Nether that she was broken in, and it was coldtech that kept her standing.

“Don’t know,” Avo said, genuinely unsure. It would take time for him to review the damage. Time that would be devoted to many other things before that. Still, it was something worth considering. What shape would the mind of a freed ancient be?

Kae’s worried fidgeting pulled him back to the present.

“Only one out of all of us,” Avo said.

She blinked. “What?”

“You,” he continued as she looked up at him. “I thought my father was good. But it was a lie. Too much of him was a lie.”

Empathy. It lay naked across her face when his words finally caught up with her. He found himself more unnerved by the fact she cared so much. He looked to Draus, to Zein–their attentions sweeping the structure itself, poking Walton’s frozen form still seated on the throne.

“I’m not… not a good person,” Kae said. “I-if that’s what you’re saying… I did something. I did something… I can’t remember. I should have died. W-would have without… Draus.”

He offered her nothing but a grunt in return. Perhaps she needed empathy also, but he hadn’t the strength nor the want to fake it. Her damage had always captured his fascination, but watching her struggle he realized she was joined with him in mystery. The fullness of her past was lost to her as well.

“We’ll discover it in time,” Avo said. “Once I take the flame from your mind.”

That sparked a flash of joy in her eyes. A smile spread across her face. “I-it would be nice to… to think clearly again.”

The blue uniformed phantom gestured above them, the stack of ghosts flickering.

ARRIVING AT CLONING POOLS

Unlike the EGI Core, they drifted below the cloning pools as if entering the tunnel of an aquarium. The apses above them went transparent, the domes clearing as Avo looked up, gazing into a roiling haze. The “pool” seemed more fog-like than liquid, perpetually clenched in an onslaught of stormstuff.

+Before the… betrayal,+ Walton said, his formerly frozen form animated again, +we were planning to grow an army here. As I mentioned, the full use of the ship still escaped us. Even with access to the core. The damage was too severe and our understanding of science was…+

He laughed. +We still don’t understand the science. Maybe only Voidwatch can run this thing properly. Or the No-Dragons, thanks to their dedication. Regardless, we did what we could and tried to make ourselves new warriors. Slaves. Anything to serve Noloth.+ Avo had never seen his father seem sheepish, but today, Walton was offering him a great many firsts. +You should tell the nanos to clear up. You’ll understand.+

Dread made him hesitate, but what else could he do. With command sent, the miasmic swarm ceased its constant crawl. The murkiness vanished and at the center of the pool was a tower some fifty stories. Countless cells dotted its sides as strange fluids seemed to churn through unseen pipes.

+One-hundred-and-sixty-four cloning cells,+ the hive said, offering him a detailed answer. +Previous bioform fabrications completed. Production space available. Warning: licenses for class-I sophancy and uplifting categories are missing and therefore cannot be undertaken. Warning: central core damage. Unable to access neural transfer options directly. Please send a hyperwave communique to your nearest Sol Central admin for assistance.+

Through the dozen or so sensors in the room, he zoomed in until he found himself looking upon the interior of each cell. Anticipation clenched tight inside him, body tightening as if expecting a fated blow.

The blow never came. What he saw within the translucence were not ghouls. Not obviously anyway. Yet, he still found himself unable to regard the creatures behind the shielding as humans. Baseliners anyway.

They were too thin and elongated, fingers long and milk-white. Their bodies had a moon-hued membrane, and there, the first semblance of similarity struck him. Like his old skin, he could see past the outer layer. Thin strands of tendon and sinew were exposed, but instead of eel-like cords the musculature was a strange web dotted with nodules, a few of which even emerged from the skin. Casts of resin-thick scabs lined their eyes and other orifices. Behind them, strange flesh-like wings expanded outward in thin tassels.

+The crew called these the “helios,”+ Walton explained. +You might be able to consider them your parent design. Or at least your primary template anyway. Don’t have the licenses to make the pool print any other template so we worked with what we had. And then we used all the active modifications in the gene clinic to do the rest.+

At the mention of the gene clinic, its location flashed in Avo’s mind just below the spine of the cloning pools. Each cell of the pool was capable of flushing its “products” down through a network of tubes running within, dumping a clone into a specialized grafting station dedicated to the remodification of gene structures. Unlike the fog filling the cloning pools, the clinic was no more than a ten-meter by ten-meter tank filled with shimmering fluid.

+I know you’re wondering it,+ Walton said. +And yeah, if you got something you want to add to yourself, you can go in there too. But I recommend you test what you’re doing before you start. I’ve… made a few mistakes with some of my nodes before. Decided to keep myself mostly natural after that. But that didn’t spare the helios.+

A new memory flashed into place, this moment of Walton’s recollection less ancient in time. He stood as four now, each of them bifurcated from the other, their stances and demeanors betraying different inclinations and virtues. Gathered in the same place where Avo and company now stood, the Low Masters watched as they released one of the helios from its cell.

Holding itself up on long unsteady limbs unused to bearing weight in an environment with gravity, the bioform watched as the bridge extended over to it. Like an infant, it cooed with a slightly wet tone as it slowly crawled through the drifting fog toward the Low Masters.

Minutes later, it had a hand against the transparent material of the pool, looking down from its near eight feet of height down upon the ones that had woken it, a pet greeting a master.

If only it could comprehend what was to come.

+A helio is a bit like a nu-dog; a simple child,+ Walton explained. +Without the proper licensing or clearance, that’s the best we could do. There was enough human in it to understand us. Voidwatch might consider it a subspecies sheathe from what I understand of them. Again, it wasn’t their fault. You–they never asked for this. For what we did. They didn’t have the capacity to resist–something was missing from their minds, it left them unable to comprehend violence.+

The memory shifted ahead to the helio shrieking. The notes it sang came gurgled and high, with a pained sibilance that Avo had heard too often in his brothers. The Low Masters had forced ghosts into its mind to see what they could discover, the roughness of their intrusion mangling its already brittle sense of self.

The helio lasted a few seconds longer before its thoughtstuff shattered entirely, cognition winking out and crumpling before the Low Masters’ efforts.

+They will serve,+ one of them said. +They have the capacity. Our lords might just find some relief in them.+

Another scoffed. +Yeah. Aren’t going to be much use in a fight though.+

+That can be changed,+ the first said, looking down at the gene clinic option. +Natures can be remolded.+

A coldness filled him. Slaves. All the Low Masters knew was slavery–to steal slaves from other people, to make slaves of free people. He remembered Walton stabbing the girl again and again, driven to folly instead of reason each time. The scene of the crew fused like a slapdash dreamer farm to the EGI Core returned to him. Now this.

This was pathetic.

The man he called father knew better. Had done better.

But at the behest of a most undeserving master, he succumbed to being less than a worm.

How could the ghouls have ever been true terrors if they were crafted by hands so unworthy, wills so feeble?

“There is more than one way to be in chains,” the Woundshaper said.

Emotions clashed within Avo. He gnashed his teeth together. He wanted to tear into someone. Hurt something. That was what his biology understood. Yet, beholding the currently unmoving forms of the helios–the creatures meant to serve as his mold, he succumbed to nobler desires instead. “I wanted him to be who I dreamed he was,” Avo said. The taste of truth was bitter, but through his newly obtained power and discoveries, they came without fear. “I wanted something more than feeling. Something higher to believe in.”

Turning his attention to the module that was the gene clinic, lines of mem-data spilled across his feed, telling him how much “material” was left for use. Things relating to alloys or functional nanites were missing. Genetic modifications likewise were limited to a few options–mostly enhancements made for surviving in space like flatulence propulsions for travel through the void and dermal-thermal crystallines for heat.

Then, a few select options came up, marked for favored use. Claws. Enhancements to hearing. Night vision. Digitigrade legs. Prehensile claws. “Omniskein musculature.” Several others drifted through his mind, each piece carving the towering humanoid more into shape, more into being a ghoul. The final item on the enhancement list was not described, the functions of which were redacted. Error lines dotted its sides, leaving only its name read.

+Category-3 Haemophage,+ the hive said. +Cellular reconstructor.+

WARNING: THE USE OF THIS MODIFICATION WILL PRESENT SEVERE RISK TO UNPROTECTED ECOSYSTEMS; ANY DESTABILIZATION IS AGAINST SOL CENTRAL CHARTER AND WILL RESULT IN A FORMAL INVESTIGATION IN BOTH THE ADMIN AND THE EGI. IF FOUND GUILTY, ALL PARTIES WILL BE ASSIGNED TO REHABILITATION

Avo blinked. Admin and the EGI? A single person and the ship itself were to be charged? What manner of society did this vessel originate from?

Walton shivered. +By now you should have seen what we did to these… things. Yeah. Every one of the helios goes through that. Hungers might tell you that your form is designed to be “slave-shaped” or something like that. They tell you that, know that they’re lying. Your body is the way it is because this is what we got. Had some success over the years changing your brothers with biomancy but those were special cases. This is our standard. All it takes for this to run is some organic components is all. Fed it to the cloud in the cloning pools and you got what you need.+

A brief lull came over Walton. +We tried putting other things in the pool before. It takes matter apart. I think it's a bit like one of the Voidwatch deconstructor swarms, except more toward factory use.+ He contemplated his words. Something popped underneath his coat. The rash was killing him. +I think they suspected we had this ship. Suspected it from the moment they realized the nature of your design. If you ever find an angle, you should try talking to one of Voidwatch’s governors. The ship’s yours so… if you can get it back to them without the Hungers noticing or stopping you, that might be something they want. I can’t rightly say how they’ll react to you. They never did like Noloth much. Not since the Hungers had us attack those ships of theirs.+

“Ah,” Zein said, nodding as if she was recalling a fond incident from her past. “Yes. The alloy embargo of ‘44. The Nolothi managed to cripple a few Voidwatch humanitarian vessels, killing much of the “citizenry” they were attempting to extract.” She smirked. “I must say, I remember what came after most fondly. It was a rare thing, to see all eight of the Guilds working in tandem. The devastation they wrought on your father’s people was sublime.”

She barked a laugh. “And the Hungers must’ve thought they had a chance. What hubris. But hubris is unbefitting of those unblessed by divinity.”

+They’re still not ghouls yet,+ Walton continued. +Not really. Something about them comes out missing. I think it’s related to damage inflicted on the core. Or something within the system that doesn’t allow neurology to be transferred. But the Hungers… they have a way about shaping a mind… seeding something that’s more than ghost but less-less than a person.+ He drew in a breath. Something was nudging itself under the fabric of his coat. He looked down. He smirked. +Well, Avo. Looks like you have a sister.+ He looked down again. +Had.+

Zein snorted a light note of amusement through her nose.

“Somethin’ ‘bout the air, Thousandhand?” Draus asked.

Zein cocked her head at the Regular. “The ghoul’s feelings are intact. Don’t you worry, girl.”

“My ma and pa called me girl. They’re dead. You call me Draus.”

+The Low Masters–Noloth… they still have other facilities under them. Other instruments. But this was their sanctuary. It’s someplace where we could all hide away from the topsiders. Plan our next moves. Strike from the darkness. And now, I’ve stolen it from them, and I will it to you.+

Walton straightened himself and sighed. +I wish I named you something else. Avo. I took that name from my son. My dead son. Through all this, my hope had been that I could bring him back in another world. In the eternal city promised to me. But I’ve lived for too long. Lived. Not existed. I’ve seen the world and you know what, my loss isn’t a good enough excuse anymore. Neither was my cowardice.+

Stepping forward, Avo faced his father as the man coughed. He reached out, as if to grasp the man, but his claws halted inches away. Walton wasn’t there. Walton was dead. This was but a shadow; an echo.

+It is with another atrocity that you were born,+ Walton said, staring through Avo. +All the dreams and thoughts and ghosts. Once, they could only exist in a locus. Linger within the crystallized puddles of time. But with the Hungers trapped, the world finds an engine for the Nether to keep growing. But with it comes nightmares. Pain. Suffering. And through us, they pour it into the bioforms, and we mold it into shape, into you.+

And for the first time, a shiver of determination surged through Walton. +Listen to me: I didn’t catch the rash on accident. I know you never asked, but you know how I was. I could have never–I got it because its canons would blind the Hungers and stop them from looking through me. It gave me a chance to alter my Helix, to prepare and plan this.+

“Why,” Avo asked. His Echoheads chittered and rattled, his frustration bleeding over into them as agitation. One of the cracked against the ground as he demanded, “What are you saying?”

Walton swallowed. +The memories you had as a ghoulling. That was a collection. I didn’t… I harvested the experiences from all your previous selves. The idea came to me the first time I saw you, dying in that playground. It stayed with me after that instance of you died, but I plucked the memories from you. From there I… I took other things from people I knew. Apprentices I taught the art to. Stole sequences from other ghouls–the ones that exhibited the most control. And then, finally, I poured all that I had… all that I could into you. And added some parts of me as well, just so there would still be something left of me after I’m gone.+

Suddenly, the man who had been his father seemed so small. One could accept horror, but it seemed they could not turn from it. Not fully. +You are my greatest work. My instrument of hope. My well wishes. You are the new shape of my dreams. The day I perfected you and finally brought you back up the Tiers with me, to that block, that day when the nukes fell and you asked to learn the art from me properly. That was when I knew I made a new life. Something more than just a monster meant to serve as an instrument of vengeance; a dumping pit for traumatic bandwidth.+

+The Hungers… they don’t grow. They don’t learn all they do is eat and hate and cling to the past. They are stagnation incarnate–a city refusing to change its ideals, to transform and face the truth or the future. And for so long, I was the same. But in living… in building you, I think I finally breathed life into something that mattered.+

Walton swallowed. +There was a myth. A myth I found while diving through this very ship. It was of a god that breathed fire into clay. And was punished for it by other gods. Punished because it taught the clay how to perform the same art. I see how you suffered for us. All of you. It shouldn’t be this way. I should have been a better father. I was never a better father. But…+ He steeled himself. +You can be what I never was. You have all I consider virtuous. To seek a higher path than rank cruelty, but I kept the monster inside you. Made it stronger even, because I never want you to mistake the nature of this city, this world.+

+New Vultun wants to eat you, Avo. The Godclads want to eat you. The darkness between the stars, the things that lurk in the Ruptures… We live in a world of monsters. Man isn’t enough. Never enough. But you are beyond pain. You have the potential for cruelty and gnosis both. You are my cure for this city, for this unending war.+

More pustules opened. A loud screech came muffled from within Walton’s right thigh. He took a step forward. Avo took a step back. +I don’t know what future you’ll bring. If you’ll even succeed. If all my desires will bear fruit or wither on the vine. But I don’t care about that anymore. I just want one thing, and that’s for you to see all the colors that life can bring.+

A sound came from beyond the memory. Walton froze. +I think that’s all the time I might have. The Hungers. The Low Masters. Their operations are hidden in the EGI. You have the advantage. You can take from them without them seeing you coming. Use Thousandhand. End the mistake of my parting.+ He drew in a breath. +Be who you want to be. Never let this city, this world bend you from what you choose. We have been denied too long. That’s all I ask.+

And with a final nod, he took a step back. +Goodbye, Avo. I… ah. It is as it goes. Nevermind me. Do what you will.+

With a final step back, Walton’s leg gave out from beneath him and he tumbled down and the ghosts dissolved, the phantoms unraveling. Silence reigned. Avo stared at a void inside him expanding.

A hunger grew. A hunger grew greater than ever. For memories. Experience. Wholeness. Totality.

A light breath unsheathed itself from Zein. “I suppose with that passed, we should move on to more meaningful matters. Congratulations, little dagger, you have an ancient voidship. Now, let us talk about the war it's going to help us fight.”