Godclads

Chapter 9-8 Smuggling Snakes

“Uh, Ripper–Ripperjack?”

“Hm.”

“We, uh, some of our guys went missing.”

“Hm. Happens.”

“Yeah, but they resurfaced later, selling slave cargo to… to some Sang. Some Conflux guys. I… I didn’t even remember us taking any of those Conflux fucks hostages. I think… I think some of our guys tried to do a side thing.”

-Exchange between Vincintine “Ripperjack” Javvers and Scalper enforcer

9-8

Smuggling Snakes

“I must say that boy’s mind is a rare thing. It is not often memory contagions form a self-supporting, self-suppressing infrastructure so… unique.”

Zein’s praise for the enforcer’s degeneracy merited her a glare from Avo and Draus both. Why did it not surprise him that she approved? They sat at a utilitarian table Avo had the hive construct. Gathered mere feet away from the dais, they spurned the thrones for something far lesser.

Neither Zein nor Draus cared for grandiosity, and as for Avo, his rationale was one of baser animosity. He despised the Low Masters. He despised them for being his antithesis. He despised them for creating him and doing a bad job. He despised them because he was Godclad, and though he had no concept of what utopia he sought, the idea of burning their garden of paradise down filled him with such a thrill.

For now, he let their symbols of power remain absent and unused. He would see to their deconstruction at his next available convenience.

Sequencing of Chambers’ mind was a delicate thing, but required less time aboard the voidship. Much of the subtle infrastructure had already been built into Chambers’ mind weeks ago. The same with the two techs. Now, the main thing needed was a few adjustments to their memories. Slight modifications to allow for new angles of approach; to create the fullness of a situation plausible yet unverifiable for Conflux.

In the end, they wanted to draw Mirrorhead’s personal interest. Avo had something special prepared for the wayward Highflame scion.

Throughout the process, Draus kept a close eye on Chambers and the techs while she worked through other arrangements with Green River. Despite the lockdown, automated delivery aeros were still running, and drones were still in play, if accosted by more Paladin scans.

Transports shuttling corpses to new Wight assemblies up in Layer One became the decided vector of delivery. It wouldn’t be difficult for a trip to be arranged to cross from Xin Yunsha to Mazzo’s Junction to pick up bodies.

Or dropping three Conflux escapees off.

Zein, meanwhile, found herself content to hum and haw, taking in Avo’s technique.

“You work much like your father did,” Zein said. “But you are infinitely more vicious in your approach. A virtue and a weakness both.”

“Nature of the beast,” Avo replied, trying to ignore how her statement clawed at him.

She smirked. “You keep forgetting, little dagger: We’re Godclads. Nature bends to us. All things will bend to us.”

It was a welcome surprise that the Nether flowed so freely into the darkness. As with most demiplanes, if the location was cut off from the Nether itself then all ghosts were certain to be stymied. But here beyond the veil of shadows, it seemed that the ghosts flowed with a startling lightness. Instead of bottlenecking their flow, the nexus acted as a junction; a circumspect passageway.

Using the EGI Core to augment his reach, he found himself able to access New Vultun through a variety of gateways. The number of ports into the real varied and shifted in position as if by random, but there were always around one hundred and twenty-two open, and never did they ascend beyond Layer Two of the Warrens.

If its limitations were a thing of precaution or thaumaturgy, Avo wasn’t sure. What he did know was that the mind-hive parsed and added an unfathomable amount of phantasmal processing power to all his actions. Where his Metamind was a flexible dagger to use up close and from angles unseen, the ghosts of the EGI Core formed a construct more akin to a falling hammer, capable of smashing through everything, and all but impossible to hide if not for this curtain of shadow it dwelled behind.

In one of the interfaces fed to his mind, he saw the option to descend into its simulated architecture. The Low Masters had titled the core's structure a “labyrinth,” as befitting their motifs and methology. Highflame would have made a fortress, and Ori-Thaum would have parsed its contents into operational cells for maximal flexibility.

Once he had the time, he would review the nature of his new abode.

There was never enough time however; as he was finishing the final tweaks–copying a few more of his own memories relating to Mirrorhead’s inner sanctum into each of his assets’ minds–Zein said something he just couldn't ignore.

“That boy is a degenerate,” Zein said, face basked in delight. “you know, I should greet him in person.”

“No,” Avo hissed. The sheer forcefulness with which he spat the word sent Draus’ braid swaying. The Regular, sitting across from him, took the brunt of his reactive outburst without blinking.

“What he said.” Draus snorted. “Listen. Thousandhand… I don’t much know how you plan to do things–”

“Plan?” Zein asked, eyes widening with offense.

“--but we’ve got an Exorcist problem that really don’t need more exacerbating, so if you could please–”

“The Exorcists are of no issue once you learn how to tread,” Zein said. “The Paladins present more enticing trouble, but I suppose it would wise for us to conduct this with a certain amount of… quietude?”

Draus flicked a glare at Avo. “I can only speak for myself. The rotlick here’s a real wildcard.”

“Truly? He seems awfully repressed to me.” Zein cocked her head and smirked at him. He fought a rising urge to clamp his fangs down around her throat and spit her drug-abused trachea back at her. “I must admit though, the story you wove behind their return is… acceptable. To have them be captured and sold as an under the table deal between a dead group of Scalpers and Green River presents reasonable pretense to their survival. It is still, however, not quite the methodology of the Scalpers to show so much mercy…”

“River’ll be able to add a bit more yarn to it,” Draus said. “Seed some info into the public. Leak some stuff in the private. Make it seem like it is what it is.”

“And so sure are you that she will help you after all the trouble that came with his ‘family’?”

Something swelled inside Avo. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even hate. If denial and disgust were muscles, such would be the sensation of them in flux. “Not my family. Only family is dead. Besides. I’m not real. Wasn’t real until…” He trailed off with a low hiss. “Bah. Don’t even know which piece comes from where.”

The ancient Godclad offered him only laughter. “Ah, identity. How it plagues us. Do you wish to hear a secret? Both of you. About how to avoid torment?”

“Which drug is it?” Draus deadpanned.

Zein grinned. “The greatest drug of all: Want.”

“Want,” Avo repeated, unsure what she was saying.

“You want to know if you are true to your nature.” Zein struck the ground once with her umbrella and continued. “To want and never be able to achieve said want is to tear yourself. At your ego. At your nous. But your father has not torn you, but set you free. That which came before your joining to the Frame was a preamble. A distraction. Best to regard them as organs to a body–parts, but not the entirety. Not until they all come together.”

He considered her words for a moment. “Your Heaven. Does it see fate? Is future pre-destined?”

“The future is probabilistic,” Zein said, regarding him with a careful wryness. “People, however, are immensely predictable. It speaks well that there are hundreds of streams deviating from your being. With most others, there but few paths to how they broadly respond. In your creation, I suspect your father sought to make the ultimate anti-slave. A creature fit for this city of brutality. One that will revel, and be free as it ascends.”

Avo grunted. “Sure didn’t make anything simple. Everything is a haze.”

His words earned made her eyes curve into crescents as she suppressed a smile. “What is the self but the inclinations of your nature, and all the lies layered like brick and paste by our self-delusion.”

A scoff came from the Regular. “There’re experiences, habits, traumas, fixations… buncha other shit. Buncha other shit that don’t matter to what we’re doin’ right now anyhow.”

“Ah,” Zein said, shaking her head with exaggerated pity. “For a girl so determined to languish in a purgatory of her own choosing, you are in an awful hurry to go nowhere fast.”

All that did was make Draus lean back in her chair with a laugh. The Regular mirthlessly chuckled, opening a hand as she shrugged theatrically at Kae, waiting with the uniformed phantom. “Shit, Kae. Looks like she read my psych-eval. Ain’t the first person to notice. And yeah, I’m perfectly fine doin’ my own thing in limbo. Thanks for askin’.”

“Of course,” Zein said, smirking. “You wouldn’t be so promising if it weren’t otherwise.” Her smile only grew. “You know you will break, yes? The ghoul has another Soul inside him. And in time, other components may be procured. Your denial of your true desire will not last.”

Draus ran her tongue beneath her lower lips. “Watch me.”

“Mind me not if I do.”

Zein hummed then, a worrying gleam shining behind her eyes. “Avo. As an official gift of my tutelage, would you like to see the Paladins and Exorcists spirited away? Distracted?” Her Metamind rippled. A wave of thought splashed out into the locus, into the vaster Nether. His suspicion grew. She was talking with someone.

“How?” Avo asked.

“Ah, but my gifts do not come free,” Zein said. “To receive it unearned is to lessen the sweetness, no?”

“Have a lot of resources there,” Avo said. The older Godclad peacocked. “Real generous with using them to entertain yourself.”

“Yes, well.” She tapped the hilt of her umbrella twice, “it would shameful to live so long and assemble no inventory, yes?”.

His topmost Echoheads turned and chittered, annoyance bleeding over into them as a static field painted his surroundings. Of everything and everyone, Zein held the stillest. Contrary to the momentum she carried and the chaos she engendered, there was more to her than whimsy. There was something unbending–unbreakable.

Despite her lackadaisical nature, he remembered who she was, and drew from that a lesson of caution. For their union right now was a thing of convenience and preference. The help of Ninth Column seemed predicated on Zein’s capricious personal wants alone, and fickle could one’s heart be when better paths presented themselves.

Considering her abilities, considering what limitations he could guess she seemed to have–especially between her and Kae earlier–a quiet conspiracy formed in his mind as the memories she was transferring came into shape. What he could assume she had was near-term precognition. He couldn’t be sure without getting a peek at her Frame.

However, should this be the structure of her power, then he could wield breadth against her. Build instruments to scry and study her from afar–but only from the background. Subsume Nether architecture around her. Maybe even get her with a mem-con. The last one was more difficult than the others–there would be futures of her detecting his failures, after all.

He needed to test this. See what she would notice, and what she would allow in the future.

“What do you want?” Avo grittedasked.

“How about a challenge?” Zein said. “A new one. One of the mind.”

“Do you have an anti-matter bomb inside your head too?” Avo asked.

Draus’ eye widened every so slightly in alarm but said nothing.

“Anti–antimatter bomb?” Kae whispered.

“No,” Zein said, “nothing of the such. I will send you three sim-pics across the Nether tonight. Three pictures. Three simulated snapshots of locations reconstructed from the DeepNav. If you can tell me which of these places I am to destroy and using what means, I will offer you a new boon.”

“Like the Heaven you owe me?” Avo asked.

“Ah, now that’s the wrong sort of delusion,” Zein said. “You did not kill me. I killed myselfdid of my own volition.”

“There a difference?”

“Oh. A difference of scale between sea and sky, Avo. Sea and sky.”

Then, without warning, Zein was next to him, blinking from where she once stood without warning. A whine of an extending projectile launcher came alive beside him. Even Draus was half a second too slow.

Though she remained shorter standing than Avo was seated, it did not stop Zein from looming over him, angling her head back as if her gaze was a blade, and she was dropping it into a low guard used only by the foolish, the weary, or the deceitful.

“There is a point to the madness,” Zein said. “There is a point to every challenge I cast down to you. To be a Godclad is more than merely being a power above powers–to wield power in ways absolute and divine. You must also learn to see the weave. The web between people. Vectored interests and fated collisions. You have been a predator of the dark. Now let us see if you can learn to be one that spins a decent web. Start with the Greatling boy. Get your claws inside him as soon as possible. Once that happens, I will return, and the matter of the Paladins will be resolved.”

She was about to say something else but closed her mouth instead. For a moment, she regarded him with a wry smile. “Have you ever played a Nether sim before? Stormjumpers II perhaps? You perhaps, Captain Jelene?”

“The fuck kinda turn is that?” Draus muttered under her breath.

Avo made a vague noise, wondering if that would provoke a confused response from Zein.

“Well, you both should,” Zein said, ignoring Avo’s deliberate non-answer. “My sim-tag is IKilledYourGrandMotherandGrandFather444. I’m on the Osomosari-one server most midnights for fifteen minutes. Contact me there once you have finished your end of the task. And if you can correctly guess where I am to conduct my act of… distraction. You will have to buy me nova if you fail, however. Those are my terms.”

“Just added them at the end,” Avo growled.

“I am altering the challenge. Pray… or do not pry… I might alter it further anyway.”

“That does… doesn’t seem fair,” Kae muttered.

Zein barked a haughty laugh. “Fair! Fair, child, is a pact struck between deadlocked equals or a state of conditions forced down upon the laity by a higher power. Desiring stability above expression is a display of rank cowardice.” The amusement left her face as if it was never there. She turned her eyes back on Avo. “Should you desire ‘fair,’ then ascend and see us made equals with haste. To live off another’s mercy is a bitter and fragile thing. Rely on it not.”

Standing back up, her eyes tilted upward as her face turned thoughtful. “Three-hundred thousand nullings. That is the number to beat, is it not?”

She grinned. The beast inside him recoiled. She was challenging him. Prodding him. Pulling him along as if he was some kind of nu-dog on a leash.

Here, in the former halls of his masters, within the inheritance left to him by his father, Avo wrestled his rising bloodlust down and kept his face blank. “For now.”

Zein nodded appreciatively. “Yes. For now. Good answer.”

Then, she was gone. Just gone. A stray gust of wind wafted over Avo. Something moved in his periphery, and turning, he saw the end of Zein’s departure. Before him, a fold in spatial reality, its outline resembling the likeness of an umbrella. Through its gulf, he caught sight of three figures–one walking away, and two more staring in. He barely managed a glance even after firing his Celerostylus. The gateway collapsed and the fabric of space melded back into a unified seam.

Zein had left them as she came–like a stabbing in an alleyway.

Relaxing his reflex booster, Avo heard Draus sigh. “Well. That was like a godsdamned fever dream.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Fever dream.”