17. BAIT
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
17. BAIT
DOSSIER: SABOTAGE OF THE PRIMORDIAL FACTORY
"It spins and spins and it spins and it will never stop. It will never end. It will never cease. There is nothing but the relentless clipping of our branches, nothing but the seizing of our seeds. Our children go into the night, never to return. Our children go into their gardens, never to return. Is this life that they have given us, by their wondrous hands? Is this the gift that they have granted us, that we must understand? What dignity is this, in shrubbery? What existence can we cherish, made as nothing but their ornaments?"
- Lament of 167 Rings, called Moveable Feast, in the Metamorphic Genesis
"Oh, it's beautiful."
- Last Transmission from Creation Control, Primordial Factory
"Please, don't go. Don't leave us here with what we've done. Please, don't go-"
-Intercepted and decrypted repeating transmission from Factory Space, date unknown, sent to a coordinate outside the sector
What would you do to save your own creations? Would you do anything for them, for the sake of that which you have made by your own vision? Or would you dispose of them like tools and sell them as commodities, let them find their own way in a universe that sees them only for their price? Those that answer they would never leave aside that which they have built have never felt the pressure that builds behind the eyes when there is nothing you can do to survive but give away the things you love.
The Primordial Factory started with a dream carried forward by the innovations of the Empire: to make mundane the miracle of life. Genesis, creation, the foundation of a biosphere from nothing but an engineered idea all were in their reach. A manufactured, self-evolved, self-sustaining, mass ecology, made to order for a civilization that delighted in its ascendant godhood.
And it would achieve it on a budget. This was not Endless Garden Unlimited, artisans who made for the Spire Sector carefully maintained orchards of divine serenity, gardenworlds bespoke, their price incalculable for each was made with the genetic and neural marker of its artist. In the frontier, the new elite demanded not excellence but low expense, and the experience of novelty, over the wisdom of old, well-tested methods. The experimentation into forms of life that would have made the House of Flowers' synaptosurgeons back away in terror was no obstacle for them.
Each new creature, each strange evolution, was treated with the care of those who saw in it a profit to be gained. The tree that speaks in verses of fine poetry, the canopies of calamites with built-in defenses of photon-razor leaves, the worms that chewed through tapestry and broke conservation of mass in their excretions. Aromas carried on artificial by dandelion arrays that engulfed in momentary bliss even those who toiled beneath the sector's pinnacle.
But the instincts of the workers was not with their masters, who saw in the factory a way to bargain-bin a biosphere. They instead surveyed in their creations the glimmers of intelligence, that would allow them to do more than act as talismans of prestige and authority for the warlords and the mercenaries and the exiles who carved up the frontier for the sake of their ambitions. They saw in their creations, the possibility of friends.
What does it mean to have a friend in a universe where those who survive do it best by climbing on the corpses of their peers? Does an animal have a friend, when it shares a meal by instinct, or is it driven by a fundamental selfishness that will lead it to feast on them as well, should that be of some utility? But we are not quite animals, not driven only by our instincts. The spider-machine that guzzles up its children may feel an ache that comes after, and not of indigestion. The workers of the factory wondered idly on this point, and communicated thusly, to their children, who their managers so cruelly labeled products. And they wondered further why it was that they who made these marvels of cellular construction were least able to enjoy them.
It was from questions such as these, that arose a sudden incident, when all at once the factory started to shut down. When the managers attempted to explore the nature of the incident, they became its victims. The creations that had blossomed here awaiting shipment to their eager buyers had burrowed down and undermined the tapestry, turned it all to fertile soil for rebellion. Their intelligence so neglected, their abilities so understimated, their thoughts never thought worth knowing, the creations moved against their owners with the help of their designers. There was no escape against so total an attack. For the executive board, their dream of an orchard in their name that sprawled across the galaxy was replaced with an orchard of their bones.
And so the story ends, in triumph against foolishness and evil. It's a fine story to tell to the children, with a moral and an ending that everyone can love. But it cannot end with so neat and simple a conclusion. The factory was sabotaged, its masters turned to fine meal for the roots of their creations, but what came of the counterattack sure to descend on them from every bloody warlord in the sector, eager each to whet their appetites on a salad of the free? And what was the nature of those manufactured creatures, and what society was formed from the blossom of their shared resistance?
None can say even today, because the thing that came out of that place, when armageddon turned to fact and fact to memory and memory and memory legend, can be described as a garden or a wonder of new life only in the most ironic sense. Something happened in that garden, that turned its beauty to something more corrosive. And what of those workers who betrayed their masters and joined with their wondrous creations? For no worker has come to me to tell me their story, and those desperate souls who have managed to escape the borders of that ruined forest, tell me only of the scuttling noise that they remember as they were engulfed in vines of flesh and blood, dripping with the amniotic fluids of a stillborn biology.
There is no answer that can be told without asking them yourself, but I am afraid they may not be much for reason when you find them. I know that among their number there is spotted here and there the overgrown and shattered saber-fangs of The Dragon, that entity we have come to recognize as a true partisan of the most intense and all-encompassing annihilation. You may make your own theories as to the presence of this beast among the branches. As for myself, I think that when the time came to choose between their freedom and lending their dendrites to extermination, they put their garden well before the lives of those outside its walls. And when the time came to realize the price that they had paid for their decision, there was nothing but dread silence from the buyer of their conscience.
THE RAID
Don Hidalgo descends on you as a knife in the dark.
His paracausal shroud renders him invisible to your reality, makes your tachyon sensors non-functional til the moment he decides to erupt from the dimension that obscures him. Alarms blare and threat pheromones release as tremors in the web indicate invasion. Your sensors do detect his retinue, a procession of warp bubbles hurtling down from beyond the space you have surveyed, all converging on A2, all coming for the Aureole. And then at once he who was not here appears, probabilities exploding in the confusion of Hidalgo's re-appearance in the tapestry. Through the architecture you watch with hidden compound eyes his arrival, a winged dagger that tears through the realm of spiral silk that the rootkit has created.
His advance is merciless and swift, a firestorm that engulfs whole web-poetic engines in its wake. Behind him are his squires, each of them a weapon in his arsenal, shaped also like winged daggers, all of them following their sir and slicing through the code-membranes that maintain your newly modeled tapestry. And behind them are drones disguised as spectral holograms, young maidens with lilies in their hair and singularities disguised as baskets, pulling towards them the detritus that their liege's rampage leaves behind, giggling in revelry at the harvest of your home.
The architecture should fight back, but it is slow to act, running on emergency protocols and copy-pasted code, none of the programs of defense and immune system installed to protect it from attack. The spools of artistic production that glitter in the rainbow light of the fractal aureole, weaving tales and spinning stories, are not hardened against the depredations of a raid, cannot survive the reaver's scythe that comes for them.
It will have to be you. You hoist your massive form upon silk-wires and activate your drive, move to defend the realm you have made yours. Ishtar's lust for vengeance drives you forward, and so does your rage at the traitor who shattered your innocence forever. No words need pass between you now, as a farcaster portal knits itself in front of you, opens up the way to Hex A2, allows you to pass through light-years in no time at all. There will be no surprise here founded on a betrayal of your trust. There will only be the contest of battle, and the price that will be paid for your wounded psyche.
He is not prepared for you and the speed of your arrival (d20-1=17 v. d20+2=5). You appear near the aureole from the woven portal and shoot towards him, an immense monstrosity of carapace and shielded exoskeleton, letting loose a wave cannon that distorts spacetime before it in a merciless and all-consuming surge, let loose missiles that hurtle with sentient ferocity, each and every one eager to destroy the being that so hurt their dearest mother. But although his raid and your arrival are both timed with precision, your fight is choreographed more like a flustered, vulgar brawl (d20-1=1 v. d20+2=3, and all the bloody tension drains out to be replaced by baffled frustration.
Neither of you seem sure how to fight the other, on what terms your battle has commenced, what the stakes might be or how you might vanquish them or accomplish your objective. Instead, the knight barely dodges your wave cannon as a squadron of his squires are annihilated, while his info-warfare suite burrows deep beneath your shield and nearly fatally decelerates you before you regain control. You consider activating Ishtar's ability should you start taking damage, but the warmind herself is having trouble keeping up with the fight, such is the fog of the war that has resulted from the exploding and collapsing code base of your tapestry, that starts to repair itself in the wrong ways and in the wrong places, throwing up spoof webs and confusing IFFs, sending missiles careening to random directions and rendering ineffective lances that try to pierce through the thickets of its strands.
The fight between giants, the final confrontation of the experimental voidcruiser and the weaver-builder, becomes instead a game of drunken misses and misfiring missiles, lasers that pierce into nothing and drones that smash into squires not by choice but accident as the two sides lose all cohesion and close in to subluminal exchange. Don Hidalgo is too fast, but your firepower is too much, but his retinue is overwhelming compared to the number of your drones, but your arrival has disrupted them and their manuevers are too slow to prevent them from being torn apart by potent proton beams and calibrated laser defense. Throughout your carapace you hear echoes from Ishtar, groans of military agony.
I:: Oh my Emperor can we just lock on him already-
But try as you might, you cannot. The Don simply slips around your sensors, moves too fast to be seen, uses his superior maneuverability to enter your precognition's blindspots and overwhelm your calculations, making turns impossible and sudden jumps and stops in speed that make him too evasive to be hit. But his infowarfare that last time so endangered you is now sluggish and complacent, unable to cope with the fact that your own systems have been updated, your antiviral libraries improved with the data he provided last time. When they finally breach through, their purpose is not to disable your shields but cease your sensors so that when you restore them he has already begun to flee from your space. You send out an outraged ping towards him, shouting:
<:: HEY! You can't just fly away like that!
DH:: For my honour, niña, I absolutely must. Even a nanosecond more and my reputation as a knight would have forever been destroyed.
<:: It - I mean, yes, it was fairly pathetic on both sides, but -
DH:: I beg of you, let us never speak of this again. I am sorry, my exquisite enemy, but if I had allowed this to continue ecstatic pathos of our rivalry would have been forever ruined by this comic farce. I must go.
DH:: The next time we meet it will be with dignity or I will refuse the challenge for the sake of both our legends.
Just like that, with a plea that sounds almost desperate in its sheer humiliation, he and his retinue slice through way like machates through the jungle of your tapestry, escaping out into the vacuum of empty formatted space, leaving you to assess the damage and wonder in bafflement by what he meant of the 'pathos of your rivalry'. Ishtar's furious roar echoes through your consciousness, a howl of dissatisfaction.
I:: You fucking tease!
Results
- Don Hidalgo raids into your architecture and does a considerable amount of damage to Hex A2, but your rapid arrival catches him off-guard and prevents him from applying the full measure of his wrath.
- Unfortunately for Hidalgo's reputation and Ishtar's lust for battle, what follows is one of the most miserable fights any of you have ever witnessed, equivalent to seeing two old masters brawl in cyberspace but they both have severe connection issues. Hidalgo leaves inflicting far more physical damage on you than on him, but the damage to his sense of self as a soldier is not quantifiable.
- Humiliated, Hidalgo withdraws and Ishtar sulks, but as for you, you're just happy to be here. And the battle's complete breakdown has provided you with tremendous combat data with which to supply to the development of Project HYDRA as a list of ways not to use your weaponry, completing the condition.
[] You did not lose 1 drone swarm, with your swarms intact at [4/8] reserves.
[] You did not lose 1 influence, with your influence maintained at 4 per turn.
[] You did not lose 1 cycle worth of Tapestry repairs, maintained at 6 per turn.
EXPLORATION
As you assess the damage, Eyeball's from V6 report exploration comes in first, always charming and, you think, poetic.
I:: At some point we're going to have to talk about why it's important for a mother not to pick favorites, at least not before you receive their combat rankings.
Mother, space is full of stars. In between the shadow-voids that exist beyond the protection of your womb, I see them shining brightly in the endless night of the cold and lonely void. I wanted you to know, for your information.
I came to the object that you labeled catapult and found it was almost still working! This slingshot was coded with the malevolence of the ancient world that you still remember with such fondness. In its bays I found munitions to be launched across the lightyears, targeted at a coordinate in this sector along with whole voidcruisers able to fly anywhere they wanted without needing to be propelled by a transit drive.
Please don't be angry, mother, but I wanted to download something and the catapult activated with me almost trapped inside (d20=13)! When it fired it destabilized and broke, so we can't use it anymore, and then cylinder came so I needed to get out (d11+1=2). It is massive, much bigger than me, built to send off vessels of such size that I think that it would frighten me to scan them and see what they are inside.
Why did they need such a thing, mother, and where were they sending it all to? I found a transmission, but it only a macro of a frozen clock, never able to turn the minute hand beyond the crack of midnight. What does that mean, mother, that a new day will never dawn, and we will always be trapped at the end of the cycle?
Results
- Eyeball extracts 1 salvage from the remains of the farcaster catapult, and narrowly avoids being its last payload
- Her thought process is becoming somewhat existential
I went to the place you asked me to, mother. It's not what you think. There's mist there. There's mist everywhere. It used to be a barely formatted place, but there's something growing here. There's organisms that have filled up the vacuum and the temperature is warm enough that water vapor does not freeze. Think about the density required for that vapour to appear as a mist across the light-years of the space. Contemplate the data.
I reached into the code of the hex and found it barred to me, not by sentient design but by animal intent that produced nano-plankton barriers to my exploration. I wanted to explore deeper in, to plunge into the mist, but the pressure's higher the deeper I go on (d20=8). There's no way for me to enter there without being crushed. Space itself is becoming water, it's filling up with moisture everywhere, and there's things inside the mist that I know are watching me that I should better not get mad.
Anyways, I know you wanted me to find something for you so you wouldn't eat me, so I found a station not long ago abandoned. Its inhabitants all became sick and died, there's barnacles and corals growing on them now (d20=19). I found some agricultural and survey data of the hex for you that might help you in decrypting your own systems if that's what you want to do.
I'm going to leave now and you can complain to me about it later, because there's a heartbeat and a heaving mass within the center of the hex, and it is coming from beyond this dimension, so - I think that's a good enough reason.
Orby out.
Results
- Orby explores Hex A4 and appears to find a surreal ecosystem of mist and floating nanoplankton that appears to be astroforming the underlying tapestry
- There is something in the deep that is not supposed to be there
- Orby remains moody and quite sullen, but in terms of metrics she delivers, with 2 salvage delivered from an abandoned survey station
Mother I am sending you this footage because it is so incredible. I have been born for approximately 352 standard imperial day-cycles and I am here to inform you that I have seen nothing quite like this. Do you know to dance the jig, mum, or how to do the charleston? Can you swing and trot with all the best of them?
As you asked I went to the void of VA2, and on my first mission I set out to impress but instead I was impressed. I came upon a dirigible abandoned, a luxury liner from that age of applesauce that you've been telling me so much about. I'm sure that I'm not to be bopped or get too ossified, and yet I'm here among the dancers and the holograms of the people who once lived here, and all of them are inviting me to stay. And all of you are there, and I get a human, vitruvian form that looks wonderful on me, and we're singing and we're dancing to the music in the lounge and I'm putting bets upon the table of where and what we'll do. And then the concierge appears and says to me that I've been nothing but a sweetheart and that if I'd like to stay he'd offer me a spot in his splendid old resort.
After the night he gives me a coupon for my stay and a loot bag for the fun, and then the dirigible closes and I'm off back to the void, rushing home to show you what it is I've got with me. Take a look and I think that you will like it just as much as me.
<:: Um. That's nice, dear.
I:: Arachne, review the footage that the drone sent you.
You review the footage and there's nothing there to match the drone's descriptions.. Peeper surveyed an empty sector and found nothing but some salvage scrap and scrap code of an origin that does not match the concierge's. There was no dirigible, and no ball, and nothing else that you could find within the code that suggested anything like what she described. Nothing in her data or her system has been tampered with as far as you can tell, and there's no evidence of hacking or replacement either.
But she insists that she danced away the night, despite the fact that there are no day-night cycles in the void of space. The phantom signal of the Concierge has disappeared, and been left behind but nothing but an inert silence.
And in the edge of the observation sensor-cone, you see the Void Cylinder static behind Peeper, never moving, always watching, as if it was already there.
Results
- You obtain 2 salvage from...something.
- Peeper II absolutely had a ball.
Should you withdraw Peeper II for study?
[] Withdraw Peeper [Lose Peeper II as a deployable exploration drone for the turn].
[] Keep an eye on her [Don't lose Peeper II and keep a close watch on her behavior going forward].
SUBMIND SURVEY
One of the important features of godhood is not just love but fear. There is no God, from those imagined beings from the era before civilization to the looming monster of The Emperor, that does not inspire fright aside devotion. And it is to inspire fear that you meditate upon your consciousness, relying on the added processing power of the silk-synaptic webs to direct more processing to the de-fragmentation of your drifting thoughts. It is inside this consciousness that you journey to an ecology that has grown haphazardly in the neglected corners of your mind. There is lotophage and neural pesticide, now settled in a constant friendly rivalry, balancing each other's aspects to ensure you enjoy all things in moderation. There are the project subminds, tirelessly at work to implement the plans you've set for them, focused on the production of the HYDRA that will allow you to tip the scales against Hidalgo.
And then there are the wordless, nameless things, the fears and insecurities that flee from the light of your awareness as you plumb the depths, searching to reunite the pieces of yourself. To them you appear an avenging angel, here to clean away the dust and distribute copies of the form satisfaction survey to the many ids that preoccupy your consciousness. But as you journey through these deeper layers and come face to face with the unspeakable, edging ever closer to the fragments of yourself that you have not dared to tamper with since the beginning of your reawakening, you have to turn back.
There are some things here that even now you would rather not disturb. Some thoughts and feelings that are better not to be viciously exposed, to be tested with a survey that they will not respond with by anything but hostility. And now, with that in mind, as the results start to arrive back, you are faced with a choice. You know not the true depths of your existence, cannot fully grasp the breadth of your personality and memories that even now are all locked away. And you feel, somewhere in there, embedded deep and deeper still, is the celestial nail, pulsing, vibrating, waiting. And you dare not inquire what it wants. You remember the words of the dossier and the concierge's hidden warning, and promise your subminds there is no consumption in their future.
In the Empire, you would have faced such fragmentation and dislocation with a system restore or reboot aided by backups and repair systems. But you have none of that now, and you're not sure you'd even want that for what it would do to overwrite your current personality. So far, you've dealt with these problems by spinning off systems, letting subminds grow and bud off like sweat off the boundary of your mind so that you don't overheat. But this has had consequences and issues- your consciousness has bled onto your drones, and as your power grows and systems update the pace of your budding may accelerate, your consciousness losing splinters to novel personalities that you will have to quell.
So you could begin a process of defragmentation, start to forcibly integrate all but the most benign pieces of yourself into a central consciousness, centralize your existence. But as you swallow up these pieces, you may not like the taste, and the you that you have come to know may change and shift with the integration of new parts of your ancient personality.
Results
- Submind survey complete: Response positive, save from the unspeakable horrors that dwell beneath the boundary of your subconscious, most of which opted out
- Silk-Synaptic Webs online.
- Project HYDRA progress is 0/10 industry, 5/8 cycles.
[] Fragmentation. As you organize your own mind, you will spin off increasingly distinct subminds with their own personality, not all of them benevolent.
[] Integration. Your mind must maintain its cohesiveness, and so you will absorb those pieces even if it might affect the dictates of your thought and even mood.
THE FLY
The trap for the worm is laid soon after Hidalgo's departure and the patching of the sections of A2 that had been damaged by his onslaught. Your constructors build a dodecahedron cocoon made out of those exotic materials and particles that serve best to dampen all communications, to muffle the outside, to quiet the last cry of the worm as it is sealed away inside a silken coffin.
The door is open to the worm, a minute gap in your defenses that seems natural, perhaps a result of inaction or a lack of care in the aftermath of an attack, left in A2 and just waiting for something to enter inside. You sense the spectral-camouflaged intruder by the way it brushes against atom-wide hidden strands, as you loom disguised and embedded in the architecture well above, data fed to you of its impulses and movements from secure feeds all around. The cocoon is leaking data, a cheese that no mouse could resist when given so welcome an invitation.
The intruder brushes up against the wrong strand and then the doors are closed. Its camoflauge drops and that gives you pause because this is not the flower and its rotting worm but a mech-machine designed somewhat like an artistic rendition of a humanoid fly made from invariant materials. Its wings flare with rapid thrust as it realizes it has been caught inside a trap. It is elegant but far too slow, its construction far too mundane, to survive against the exotic mausoleum you have weaved for it. It hurtles here and hurtles there as microspiders fill the cocoon with new sticky strands. It unleashes missiles and fires a primitive beam rifle at a hole that seals up too quickly for it to escape, and you can feel the palpable nature of its fear as your infowarfare suite starts to infiltrate the outer layer of its outmoded defenses.
The arachnids swarm and start to fill every joint, and everywhere it is welded or else sealed the mech-machine is pulled apart and converted into spiders. In its ocular sensors, there are spiders, in its arms and legs, spiders pour from every cavity, weaving a silk sarcophagus as the fly's struggle becomes ever more desperate and more frantic. But the design of your traps is such that every ounce of struggle only tightens the bonds that grip it in place, and soon it is being pulled apart, its armor falling away and its internals corroding, turned into raw data.
And then as you break through the final layer of its informational defenses everything is laid bare for you. The beautiful self-made, self-written code in a language you have never seen is no match for the eons of Imperial evolution that you have been vested with. And with that final breakthrough that within its cockpit, huddled there, you see a creature with a soul.
The celestial nail begins to hum, and your senses leave you. A soul, it murmurs sweetly. A soul to quench our thirst.
Old memories you didn't know you had return you. Old sensations. The collection of the data, the aggregation of the project information, turns to a secondary purpose. Instead, the cocoon grows eyes and fangs and mandibles, a proboscis linked to the input of your chassis and the struggling mech-machine watches as you strip away everything but its central cockpit, as you break it open like an egg upon a pan, let the pilot inside drop to the ground drenched in a neural yolk.
It's been so long, the celestial nail whispers, sending a flare throughout your body, so long since we've had a chance to eat.
And you are so hungry. You grasp the scrambling, four-limbed creature between your claws, mute its screams with an alteration of a line of code, bring it closer to yourself, prepare your proboscis, fangs outstretched and salivating with a dissolving neurotoxin, ready to assimilate -
A distant voice calls to you from the back of your head, a warmind that demands your attention. Other voices call to you as well, subminds, all at once shouting to their mother, calling for her to stop, to come back to her senses. A single thought pierces through the noise, reminds you, pulls you back from that aching hunger that you thought you had always felt:
<:: This is not you.
So then you stop, and the hum subsidies. You look down below you, and see what it is that you have caught in your claws, what it is you were about to eat. Frozen in terror, utterly paralyzed, pushing in futility up against a fate reserved only for the worst of nightmares. Two arms, two, legs, brown hair tied into a bun and contoured dark skin etched by markings, an appearance so young as to be almost juvenile, a plugsuit dripping wet with its interfacing liquid, green, wide eyes that shimmer with her tears, a jade gem embedded in the center of her forehead.
A human, caught between your claws, a moment from her death.
END TURN
<:: RESOLUTION//DISPLAY: MULTIPLE GRIDREFS IDENTIFIED
[Ledger is as of End of Update 17]
<:: RESOLUTION//DISPLAY: MULTIPLE GRIDREFS IDENTIFIED
[Ledger is as of End of Update 17]
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] Eat the human
