Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns

JB CCXXI: No Gods, Only Man

Rose laughs, taking a step closer. It's a surprisingly joyous note. "Reina was born in the year of our lord, 1210. The Albeigensian Crusade started just the year before, with hidden blades striking down many of their mystical masters and adepts. I wonder if that's a coincidence? So did she. I've seen her memories, and she sometimes wondered if her angel Gabriel had been with a Cathar before he came to her."

"You accept your heresy?" the Man in White asks scornfully.

"The Order of Reason began as heretics. The Union convulses every fifty years as its internal contradictions become too big to manage." Rose still smiles, flashing fangs. "Heretics are how our ideological genepool avoids stagnation. The only kind of life that is perfectly static is dead."

"You use the words we coined as a magic spell." Contempt roils off the Man in White, almost tangible. "Speaking of biology as if it explains..."

"I'm a Progenitor," Rose says. "That's what we do."

Glass breaks underfoot as she advances. Around her, all the broken screens on the machinery flash to light. Ten symbols flicker over broken screens, orbiting around the central emblem of the Technocratic Union. They're the insignia of the nine Chairs of the Invisible College and the Empty Chair, the chair of the Aleph. Plasma arcs from screen to screen, painting the sullied chamber in actinic bright light.

The air shimmers and warps. Things from outside are pushing against the walls of the world. They're trying to get into the little bubble of order and sanity men call Earth. But this is the worst possible place for such an incursion. This is a Technocratic construct. The old gods were forced out beyond the Gauntlet by the actions of the Order of Reason. These new gods, born of the hubris of the Technocratic Union, fair no better.

The mutilated flesh in the tanks twitches and convulses. It was made to hold the form of a limb of Control, and even ruined, it can still be of some use. "You are a fool, Reina," says a severed head, voice bubbling from a ruined throat.

"You think this can stop us?" croaks another corpse, split diagonally. Ruined eyes gouged out by the rage of Piero still track her as she advances. "We cannot die."

"We are natural law. We are the falling apple and the rainbow cast from the prism."

"We are the invisible hand and we are the market."

"We are the dreams of the stars."

"We are mankind. Mankind is us."

"You dare not strike us down. All will be chaos if we are not there to be the guiding hand."

"We are order. We are time. We are."

"Reina!"

"I'm not Reina," Rose says, and her voice sounds like Thorn's. It echoes in this space, gaining a timbre and pitch that it shouldn't have had. "I think she's gone. The man who killed her is dead and so she has realized what you never did. The cycle must turn. The old must step aside so that the young can grow old in their place - or else be cut down. She knew her time was up. You refused that. You are no god, Control. You are a cancer. You are mutated cells, growing and feeding on your host until in time the whole of existence dies under your bulk. And you won't stop. You can't stop. Because your apotheosis is your screaming fear of apoptosis." She has nearly reached the Man in White, and all his words, all his tricks, all his contempt for human weakness in his dread-long life mean nothing.

"We are the Union!" he screams in her face. "You are nothing but an apostate! An infidel!"

"You have been abandoned," Rose says. In the Man in White's augmented vision, she is wreathed in violet light, and a sorrowful tone reverberates in her voice. "Your last follower walked away. What is the Man without his institution? What is a general without an army? What is a king without a nation? The Union is a system. It is not a cult, beholden to false gods and their unjustified decrees." Rose says. She raises her blade, and the edge gleams like a scythe. "There are no gods here." The blade gleams, its patterns splitting the ambient light like a prism. "You won't stop. You can't stop. And so you must be stopped. For the Union." The air smells of summer days and freshly mowed hay. "Before creation; destruction," she says softly. "We burn the fields before we sow next year's harvest."

In the Man in White's augmented vision, he sees Rose through the lens of a war machine. Combat instinct and neural augmentation, some of it identical to Rose's own neural augments and programmed combat instinct, emphasize every movement she makes. Every movement she makes is analyzed to project arcs of possible damage threat, estimate consequences for a billion different combat actions, provide the Man in White-never a supersoldier-the information to keep up with someone born to be a killing machine. In the way the Man in White truly sees the world-with the senses of a young Incarna that once controlled the world and ruled mankind-he sees her ablaze, sees the pattern of ages long past, where the lords of the universe grew cold and cruel and were destroyed in turn. An eternal cycle of usurpation, reflected in the umbral fire surrounding her. The fire does not burn her. It embraces her, and the white heat burns a clear violet. It surrounds her. It wraps her like burning wings and blazes upon her brow like a tiara. The Man in White reels. He fights back-combat programming empowered by his skills in close combat. Skills that had atrophied as a man, but now in the crystal clarity of his apotheosis, have returned to him in full. He strikes at Rose with hands and feet, with planes of coherent force. Each blow is expertly targeted, with the Man in White's skills and the assistance of genetic programming and cybernetic modification. But the Man in White was a spy and scholar in life, not a supersoldier. His instincts are all wrong.

Rose, on the other hand, was literally born a weapon, dedicated to killing enemies of mankind. She spies an opening, a blind spot in the Man in White's vision, striking so fast that everything else seems still. The Man in White's defensive fields are brought up a fraction too slow, his desperate dodge a millisecond late. The field is only partially formed when Rose strikes, and the thaumium blade, shining with the colors of an age long-dead, its edge faintly shimmering with a purple haze, bites deep into the armored bone of the Man in White's ribcage, trapped between the interlocking armored plates that protect his organs. Even with Rose's inhuman strength, borne of advanced bioengineering and hemophage viciousness, the Man in White's dense, hardened flesh can withstand an immense amount of punishment.

Rose is concerned that the Man in White will take advantage of the error, but he staggers back in shock and a little bit of panic. The Man in White's instincts are still unused to the body he inhabits. He still fights like a man, rather than a combat construct. And Rose knows exactly how she will win. Serafina would have been horrified at Rose's tactical decision. Alex and Piero merely concerned. Nature is vicious, deadly, and merciless. How else could evolution work its bloody, optimizing work? But yet, altruism evolved. Because there is no power without sacrifice, no victory without cost. And she exists to bring that victory. She exists to pay that cost. She goes for the blade again, ignoring the Man in White's lethal fields. He's gone for the throat-but it doesn't matter that his field cuts her windpipe. She's converted to running on full hemophage-emulation, their resource rich blood-equivalent circulating through her veins, turning oxygen into a mere convenience. Her spine is doped with Primium and reinforced against the attack, and holds, as she calculated.

And his failed attempt to strike a fatal blow lets her retrieve her blade, leaping out of his body and back into her hand through the kinesis generators in the weapon's hilt. Her head lolls limply on a nearly severed neck. A foolish action for a human swordswoman. Reina would not have done it- But Rose is not a merely human practitioner of the sword's art. Rose, after all, heals like a shapeshifter. A nearly severed neck is a mere inconvenience. As soon as her neck heals enough to give her basic structural integrity, she coughs out some blood, spitting it in his face in an attempt to blind him. It buys her another fraction of a second.

The Man in White brings his fields up again, and slashes at her, opening her abdomen. Rose accepts the double hit as she charges the Man in White, spearing her blade through the Man in White's chest, this time using her full strength. The blow echoes as superhard metal meets superhard bone, and Rose feels the vibration transfer through the blade into her hands, strong enough that a baseline human would suffer fractures from the transmitted force. The blade slams into the Man in White with enough momentum that Rose rams him into one of the facility walls with a bone-shattering thump. Her strike is an echo of an unending cycle of violence, another retelling of how the greater fail to understand, then are usurped by, their lessers. The Man in White is run through, like the dragon-graced generals before him, then their golden lords before that, and then the primordial gods before them.

Her blade is low and to the right of where the Man in White's heart would be, but she knows that the Man in White is not only figuratively heartless. Instead, the organ she sought to damage beyond repair is a small crimson sphere of tissue alien to Earth, the core of alien matter that has allowed him to defend himself and hold himself together, even so damaged by Yinzheng's abandonment. And she can see that the blade has managed to pierce his dermal armoring, his defensive fields, and his reinforced flesh, hitting exactly the target she sought.

His fields go slack, and the Man in White falls limply, his body no longer being held together by his fading spiritual power or its own field capabilities. He topples into one of the craters left by the prior battle, his failing body framed by reflective obsidian and the shattered body parts of those who died in his defense.

"We will be back. And your torment will be prolonged and exquisite, apostate." The Man in White spits, venomously. Rose's response is to take pull her blade in a two-handed grip and raises it above his head. An executioner's mercy.

"But we will be waiting for you." Rose says, almost sympathetically. "And until you understand what you have cast away, what you have sacrificed to gain, you will not prevail. If you neither know your enemy nor yourself, you will be defeated in every battle." She pauses the blade above him, ominously.

"Do you understand the wrath we can bring against those who reject the Divine? Even our lesser messengers control worlds! Do you think your... heretical bleatings of the cycle of death and rebirth will save you? Do you think a pithy quote from The Art of War holds meaning here?"

Rose shifts her grip on the sword, pointing the edge at the Man in White's skull. "No." Rose admits. "But I think our victory has meaning." Exotic organs in her body awaken, preparing the phase disruption field that lets her maim and kill EDEs.

"Do you think something like that will kill a God?" The Man in White asks. "You may have shattered this vessel, but it is a weak, imperfect avatar of divinity. We will remember you, apostate. Reina understood, in her youth, that loyalty to God would be rewarded, and betrayal of His ideals punished. Remember this, when your inevitable fate arrives. There will be no mercy. Not even death can save you."

And then it's time for Rose's sword to speak. The blade falls like a rainbow-hued flash, cutting into the Man in White's skull. Something that should not be able to die does. The fabric of reality seethes in reaction. The few surviving electronics in the vault go haywire for a moment, displaying nonsensical strings of mathematical symbols and academic gibberish. The dead corpses gibber in primordial language of creatures and cultures long dead. And then, a second later, all is still.

In the fused glassy craters left by Piero's duel against a god, Thorn peeks through to the world. But her expression is joyful, ecstatic. "Congratulations!" Thorn says, and there is no malice in it. "You've killed a god. Some cycles need to be repeated, and some gods need to be killed."

Not a god, Rose thinks in response.

"Is there really a difference between powerful inhuman entities and gods?" Thorn asks, throwing a pointed glance at Piero's corpse. "Something so integrated into the system that they become it, with inhuman power and intellect granted by their nature, beyond human comprehension and sanity-is it a mad god or a malfunctioning posthuman? And as you should know already-gods can be killed. Your Union has gotten very efficient at it."

Out of necessity.

"Yes." Thorn says. "But one day, you too might be in that place. These cycles exist. You've been around Maria when she was trying to talk people's ears off about cyclic history, like an over-eager student explaining the new factoid she learned."

And yet, Rose thinks, Alex and Piero were deployed on the same mission, in the same war, and neither of them killed the other. Perhaps these cycles can be changed or stopped.

"Many others have thought the same way. But few ever succeed in breaking the cycle or carving out their own story on their own terms. And many of them end up dying for it." Thorn gestures meaningfully to the room in general, but Rose knows who she refers to.

But nevertheless, two things can be similar while being different. Rose responds. Like me and Reina.

"Perhaps. But what makes you feel that this will be enough?"

Rose shrugs, glancing at her sword, embedded in the Man in White's body. She decides to leave it there. She won't need it now, and so long as there's a sword sticking out of the corpse's head, it will have a hard time becoming a Dragon's Tooth and seeking delayed revenge. Instead, she walks over to Piero's corpse and wrenches the weapon out of his body. She picks him up in her arms, even though he easily weighs as much as Kessler did in his old body. And she carries the fallen body of her brother out, through the blood- and ichor-stained corridors of Izanagi, and finally reaching the outside, breathing in the air that is still heavy with toxic pollen and chemical weapons residue.

A retrieval team is already there to take possession of the corpse, and she sets Piero down on the cracked asphalt of RIKEN. Rose looks at the shattered buildings, the burning hulks of vehicles, the rows and rows of body bags-friendly and enemy-and also at the beauty of the early morning sun.

No victory without sacrifice. No creation without destruction. But sacrifices can be permanent, or they can be temporary.

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[ ] Elsa Naryshkin: Liaison