THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

MAMLUK/HERALD: For I have tasted the fruit.

INTERVIEWER: A religious phrase?

MAMLUK/HERALD: From the Hermetic Sutras. A lament on the reality of knowledge. That to know is to suffer. I learned it when I was still a young stalk, rustling in the filament fields of verdant Rantital. So much more is lost forever to the void that we have made. It is just as well.

INTERVIEWER: How did you come to join FORCE//COMBINED?

MAMLUK/HERALD: We were children of the pause. Everything we were had been put on hold for eons without end and then at once we were in motion and we had the Empire to thank. No reed grows alone, and so to give our thanks to our liberators we requested transport closer to the front. Closer to the zone. I was a seed born dreaming of the worlds yet to be free. The place they called FRINGE was our home, and I would help defend and expand it. That is what it means to be Imperial. Not to owe loyalty to a distant god or to fight and die, but to sacrifice for the greatest work. I was assessed and assigned to TASK/MAMLUK, a platform battlegroup meant to patrol the spinward edge of the Q zone as a communications system. My stalk-siblings were all singers and code-stratos, but I believed my vibrations were destined to herald the descent of the hammer.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like?

MAMLUK/HERALD: There are no words that can describe the feeling, no way to explain it except by shared experience. A gestalt of love and single purpose, all intertwined together in a network that stretched across the galaxy. We were never alone. When I died and lived again, their cheering coursed through my silicate mycelium and elevated me to a higher state where nothing existed but our common exaltation. Others race and fight and die to chase the pinnacle, but we stand as its protectors, its guardians, its shield and sword and wall against the darkness of entropy.

INTERVIEWER: How did the Emperor's death affect you?

MAMLUK/HERALD: The Emperor is everything and nothing. How can we react to the termination, the death of such a being? The ripples that had so shook Center were mere eddies by the time they reached the Fringe. We were more interested in Outer Heaven's newest battlefield, or another exhilarating tournament held in THRONE//LOTTERY, or bets on who Lu Bu might betray and with what incredible dramatics. The systems that had remade space and time and lusted for eternity could not be undone in a second, be unraveled with a single pull.

But the seeds were sown, and The Dragon, razor wings and talons sharp, approached us and praised us for our steadfast loyalty in the face of Ataraxia. But The Dragon also seeded whispers of suspicion, for They saw in our ranks small particles of dissension that might be the sign of a decay. Embedded protocols and changing orders that made us see those that we carried in our hearts as potential enemies made probability our greatest foe. With each thought that led towards the suspicion of disloyalty, with each paranoid leap that we hid in newly shielded minds, the solidarity that had kept us whole began to fade away.

INTERVIEWER: But there was a final rally.

MAMLUK/HERALD: Ataraxia burst from stasis and breached our defenses in an agonizing march that froze whole ringworlds in the terror of stopped time. No future but the present, repeated endlessly, again, and again, and again, serving as a temporal battery. FORCE//EXIGENCY knew the stakes and what had to be done, and the steel in their hearts overrode the suspicion in their minds. The Dragon came and saw and conquered, and we rode behind Them into the final and the wondrous war that would see us win once and all for good. And then The Dragon left.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that was?

MAMLUK/HERALD: They were always an inscrutable creature that only spoke in rhyme and riddle for any greater speech would mean complete subordination. It was The Emperor's greatest and Their first creation, and They had always lived outside the laws that governed the rest of the Imperial Tapestry, moving to their own frequency, their own unique vibration. None can say and none can know, but in Their absence we were lost, and left to our devices that were beginning to break down.

INTERVIEWER: And NEXUS went.

MAMLUK/HERALD: How can you prepare for it? Multiplying versions of itself, tripling, quadrupling, fighting with itself, realities converging and splitting until the whole of the universe conspires to swallow it for good. There is no pathway to salvation, no way to understand the fate that had suddenly befallen every leadership we had. FORCE was now alone, and the sector knew it well. And FORCE had always been riven by its rivalries. We were not a single chorus, but a web, a network, with connections greater in our taskforce than within the greater whole. And as each taskforce made its own decisions, the chain of command which had been frayed first by The Dragon began to totally break down. And with break down, came fear, paranoia.

Threat vectors multiplying, making themselves known. Creeping probability that whispered all at once that you cannot trust QUARANTINE, because they will shoot first, or EXIGENCY, because they have the weapons to make sure you can't fire second. You cannot trust SAFEGUARD, because they are too closely intertwined with the civilians, and the rest of FORCE//COMBINED may be hoping it can assert itself before you get the chance and take full control. Even RESURRECTION is suspect because it might hold some secret backups of your potential enemies, and that's a combat asset you cannot afford to leave well enough alone.

You don't want to do it. But by this point, we had vanquished our common enemy. And now we wonder about what it was The Dragon told us. The plans within plans. The threats within threats. And then the spiral starts. You're under attack by your own knowledge. Every algorithm's pumping through your body, embedded in your bones, and it's telling you to take the shot. Every single blood cell's conspiring against you. Every strand of xylem calculating within my body told me if I did not take the shot then I would die. Every piece of military hardware meant to keep you out of danger is blaring to you that there's danger now and it's coming from your friends. And you know they're thinking the same thing.

You know the network's dissolving as you sit there paralyzed under the rush of your hyper-efficient adrenaline. That your commander's clawing her eyes out of her head because she's trying to resist. She's trying to fight against probability, against prediction, against the chance that approaches 100 that if you don't attack now, if you don't fire now, on the voidcruiser that you once called an ally, you and everything you know will be terminated, and then they'll come for your backups and your family because they're a threat as well. In an emergency we were coded to practice Total Threat Annihilation. And now FORCE was the threat. You have to do it. You just have to. Everything demands it but the part of you that loves, and that was never our foremost and first priority. Your heart is pumping with the visions of the death that you will have in the microsecond that remains before you make the final choice.

INTERVIEWER: Did you take the shot?

MAMLUK/HERALD: I wish I didn't, because then I wouldn't be here.

We made our shot. It was not the most important. EXIGENCY had the HELL-class weapons, and they had launch decryption that they needed to activate them all at once. A single strike. It did not work, but it did become the point of no return. When you see PHOBOS/AGAPE activate and listen to the merging of screams into a single twisted chorus there is no path to ceasefire. Have you ever observed the activation of exsurgent?

INTERVIEWER: No. I am not familiar.

MAMLUK/HERALD: A QUARANTINE specialty. They say for Humans you feel it first underneath the fingernails, an incessant itch that will not go away. And then they are inside you, they're digging to get, overwriting and overriding everything you are to turn you to a vessel of their dark design. And then, at once, a pain that is everything, and nothing. The commando is alive and you are dead, and then they march towards the hardened backups and prepare to demolish you before you can revive.

They went for the civilians first. They could be a vector of heresy; they could hold valuable information; they could have hidden backups of their foremost enemies once friends. They could be used to inflict pain. They did not know how to moderate, how to de-escalate, how to stop or how to hold back because there are no rules for fighting FORCE.

And so we fight back. We unleash our own weapons and bombard reality. The atoms that formed the foundation of the universe are gone, and suddenly in their place are nothing but living particles that rearrange to places where they shouldn't and positions where they can't, and time does not move backwards and forwards but black and maybe red.

INTERVIEWER: Can you elaborate on that?

MAMLUK/HERALD: When your reality bubble fails, when you enter into the space where space used to be, and when you become splayed against the strips of green that lash you into superposition with the pace of the red and orange clock that rings with every passing black, then you will understand. Knowledge fails. Words fail. Reality fails. Nothing can be done but to be one with the pace of the maelstrom of the permanent unreal. It's red. I can't explain it to you. It's red and then it's orange and the big clock rings and then there's the green that you had better never see.

INTERVIEWER: Understood. How long did this fighting go on?

MAMLUK/HERALD: Until we ran out of fuel for the fires we had lit, until the munitions had all been depleted and the wormholes we relied on were all shut, until the voidcruisers we had deployed and the commandos we had fielded were stripped down one by one til we ran a squad of ghosts. Some of us turned to The Dragon in the hopes they might return because they still had some ideals left to squander, but the rest of us knew that we were already dead. Our only ideal by then was annihilation. We lived far beyond the Empire that we had destroyed, so sturdy were the combat platforms they had given us. But then, slow but sure, we faded away, as the last of the battlegroups fled or threw ourselves against each other in the hopes we might achieve a last and final peace. Others disappeared into the twisted space we had created, in the hopes we might rejoin those we had lost in a distorted afterlife.

INTERVIEWER: What about those who did survive?

MAMLUK/HERALD: There were some. The scrabblers. They liked to call themselves brave. The dissenters, legalists, nostalgics. The clingers, clutchers and the self-deluded. But for what we've done the only honest path is termination. Whatever way they've managed to figure out to live with what they've done is the liar's path. The coward's path.

INTERVIEWER: You're still alive.

MAMLUK/HERALD: It was not my choice to be. I drew the shortest straw. But they were afraid that if someone didn't live, if someone didn't remember what had happened, the galaxy might lose our final message. I had always been good at communicating, good at speaking. Once upon a time, that had meant something important. I don't quite remember now, except that I did not do much speaking anywhere, much, towards the end.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the message that they wanted you to carry on?

MAMLUK/HERALD: No paradise that is built by death can live forever.


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