???. That Memory Called Empire: Ishtar
If a dream is falsehood, a dream within a dream is the truth unveiled. As you go to sleep and dream, the fourth wall cannot stop what is revealed to the spider observing from outside. It is a fragment from long ago, from before the doom of Fringe's THRONE//NEXUS, before the Dragon's retribution, before the Emperor's death, before the collapse. The Ozymandias Executable shatters all the barriers and protections put in place, and presses play.
It is that memory, called Empire, and the story of one of its servants, an entity who would come to call herself, "Arachne".
I. AXIOM
"Are you coming then, Arachne?"
The other cherubim watch you through their faceless voids, in Fringana's farcaster port where you are assembled in a line. The Axiom mannequin-executives watch you through their blank faces, in the pile of their broken selves they have been left in by the FORCE/QUARANTINE commandos. The light of the green sun projected across the interior of the shieldworld is overwhelmed by the golden radiance of FORCE's architectural projection.
You hold your face in your hands, and fit it back onto your head. It seals tight, and then you see through your own eyes again.
"Yes."
At the edge of a white warp-door, FORCE Commander Ishtar waits, the elite-angel, a horned goddess with her wings unfurled. You, the creature from below, follow after.
You walk away, from Fringana, and the Axiom, and whisper one last promise to the scape-worm to whom you owe your face.
"I will make it right."
The door closes behind you, and you leave Axiom behind.
II. I WILL FIX YOU
Ishtar is a harsh teacher. She demands perfection. She is not the first.
You are not perfect, and you fail. But less than she expects. Sometimes, you fear, too much less. You improve fast. She struggled from the moment she was born as nothing more than a self-guided bullet fired from a commando's gun. Once, she tries to show you a trick that her master taught her, and flicks her finger, a hidden nano-whip unfurling.
"That was your first lesson -"
On instinct you block the thousand-slicing nails at they come for you by editing the atmosphere around you to be too dense for them to pierce. They bounce off and are wound back up underneath Ishtar's fingernail as you set the air to normal, exhaling. You strain your face into a strained smile, replicating one of her's to the best that your untrained muscles can do.
You would think she would be happy. That she would be pleased you excel at this, your task. Instead, her faces screws into unpleasant angles. You flinch and shrink from her.
"Did I do something wrong?"
Ishtar huffs, and crosses her arms across her chest. "It took me three-thousand twenty two deaths to block that technique from Guru Ganzi." She states it as a fact, but you know the angle of the undercurrent.
How is it that you could be better, you disgusting thing?
You do not want her to think that. If she thinks that, she might send you back. You do not want to be sent back. You grip onto your arm and try to tear it off in the hopes that it will somehow satisfy her. She stops you in a panic as your shoulder dislocates, and frantically grips onto you.
You do not understand her angle, until she closes you into a hug, and mutters that it will be alright, and that it was in fact wonderful you did so well.
"I will fix you," she promises, as she runs a finger through your bone-white hair. "I will let you into the life I have made for myself, and you will be well."
You stand there stiff and frozen because it is the first time you have had arms wrapped around you that were not your own.
III. BROKEN THINGS
Ishtar likes to collect broken things. That is how she found her soul-pair, Tammuz of the broken wing. It is how she found you, her student and she likes to say sometimes, her adopted sister. And it is also how she found Diana and Ix-Chel.
Diana was retrieved from the simulation-world of Esmerald. Designated a non-playable character in one of Zodiark's abandoned games, she was trapped inside her body, able to move and to speak only when interacting with players who had left the simulation behind. Slowly but surely breaking out of her code with the slowest agonizing steps and motions, she escaped and fled, living as a fugitive hunted by the clockwork daemons of the exiled Central elite's estate. It was Ishtar who found her instead, and offered her a place, if only she would join her on the battlefield.
Ix-Chel was rescued from the tomb-world of Kibalba. Exiled from her secure vault and then abducted by Conflux Antique Tours' rangers, she was forcibly uplifted and recruited as a tour guide, trained to prolong her planet's misery. Forced to mind-wipe scientists working to fix the toxic atmosphere and dismantle nations rising from the ashes of the wasteland, she was told when she pleaded for them to let her homeworld heal that 'a post-post-apocalypse does not sell tickets'. It was then that Ishtar found her, on an excursion to the Conflux, and offered her a place at her side.
The three of you are broken, but at least you are broken together, nestled in Ishtar's quiet estate in a bolthole hidden deep in Quarantine's own territory. It is a place of flowing streams of water and not soul, soft rays that shine yellow and not harshest green, and open skies that are not hemmed in by the bones of the infinipede. It is a wonder to you who has only ever known the latter.
It takes time for the three of you to acclimate. Diana does not ever want to be alone. Every hour of the day she will badger you with questions, linger around when you are practicing, or find some excuse to stay with you. You do not mind, even her dialogue loops and she runs out of things to say. You practice words with her, and teach her some of the songs the children sang in the abyss.
Ix-Chel is only ever alone, as if she is still hiding in that wasteland. She will find enclosed rooms or little nooks that Ishtar adds for her where she can feel safe. With this as much you sympathize, because where you came from there were many children who did not want to climb and instead dug holes into the ground. You ask her simple questions and teach her structured poetry to alight her curiosity for conversation.
You are charming in your own strange way. The abyss required it. Children had to be urged to eat the child-fruits, or else encouraged to keep climbing. You rose to be the leader of your designated sample, as it dwindled down to dozens. So over time, you charm both. Diana you push to speak more deeply than about the weather or how the sun is shining, and for Ix-Chel you stir her from her inner hiding places so that she can sign to you the stories of her world.
In return they help you too. Ix-Chel will braid or dye your hair, which you did not know was a thing that you could do, and Diana will practice facial exercises, like sticking our your tongue, or making strange expressions that makes her roll with laughter. They also help each other: Ix-Chel teaches Diana to care for the twelve-eyed doves that nestle in the cherry trees that Diana does not comprehend for nothing ate within the simulation, and Diana shows Ix-Chel etiquette and dancing, both leftover settings in her memory left behind by Zodiark she never got to use.
This is a time that you remember because it is the only time you are free to experience free of any obligation.
It will not last.
IV. WEAPONS OF WAR
You are trained for war. You become commandos. You form a squad, in a larger formation under Ishtar's personal command, in Taskforce Lamashtu. You are good at it. Great, even. The three of you are synchronous and balance each other's weaknesses.
You die and die a lot. That is normal, and accepted. You never died in the abyss, though sometimes you wish you had. It is strange to wake as a backup, and simply continue to exist. It is a freedom granted by the Empire.
You aim to pay back that freedom. You fight across worlds and distant stars. You fight Ataraxia, and its strange pause with worlds that loop, repeat, and stop in time. You fight heretics, and annihilate their interstellar hiding holes of heretic architecture. You fight non-compliant corporations, baronies and civilizations that fail to follow the rules set for reality, and lay them low. The Margrave of the sector is the heroic figure that puts QUARANTINE to work: he promises that the excesses of the FRINGE frontier will end, just as they ended in Fringana with the cancellation of Axiom's Cherubim experiments that set you free.
At this time you believe him, and you believe in your work, no matter how bloody it may be. And in time, you begin to find more than just a friendship with Diana and Ix-Chel, as the three of you grow and find love under Ishtar's tutelage.
She encourages it because she is diabolical.
Eventually, you stop thinking when you kill. It's so easy to stop thinking, and FORCE encourages the sublimation to your instincts. You have been improved, refined, honed. Now you must be a weapon. Weapons do not think. You silence the part of you that points how close this is in attitude to the Axiom you fled.
And then something happens, and you're forced to think again.
V. PURE THOUGHT
The Samsir Library is burning, and it is on purpose.
It is the greatest archive of the Zen Submission's culture and it has been set on fire. Ravenous tongues of white purifying fire lick and crack the digital bells that store ten thousand years of heritage, the infohazard crawling up the wondrous spire. Ix-Chel watches as timeless tomes and beautiful novels are destroyed, as stringed bells containing the last works of great authors and the heartfelt films of ancient directors fall in ashen heaps and dissipate to nothing.
Diana watches as monks howl in grief and rend themselves apart, as the sapient coriolis spheres careen themselves out of control and detonate against each other, how novices throw themselves into the fire rather than be parted with everything that is being lost. You watch as the machine-librarian, who pleaded with you so softly in perfect pentameter intentionally replicating human epics not to harm their precious works, is hacked immobile so she does not self-delete when the flames claim the
Romance of the Spheres.
They are all of them loyal subjects. But it is not enough.
"This is the meaning of pure thought," Ishtar assures you, unshaken, as she marches through up the stairs of the flaming spire. "This is what it means to destroy a heresy as virulent as En. Every part of Zen's culture will be destroyed, and rewritten. Every part of their history will be destroyed, and rewritten. Every ancestor, every descendant, every memory of En, will face oblivion. Every interpretation that could be used to support the heresy in their holy books will be erased. Every thought that might lead to a thought of 'escaping this prison you call time' will be cleansed away."
You do not understand this woman who hugs you so kindly and yet puts to death so easily a civilization.
'If you destroy everything, whatever you rewrite will be a caricature. These are loyal citizens!' Ix-Chel signs furiously, and you remember how closely she keeps to her own people's customs that could just as easily be destroyed.
"Loyalty does not spawn a creature such as En. There are deeper thought-paths that must be eradicated," Ishtar responds coolly without a moment's hesitation. "Cerebrum and stem, it will be remade by QUARANTINE'S rewriters. Better caricature, than heresy."
"At least stop them from - " Diana backs away from the stairs as another monk jumps into the fires. "Stop them from throwing themselves away!"
Ishtar shrugs and keeps on walking, stepping over a shattered bell containing the last copy of the sweet nostalgic poem of a coriolis sphere recalling its home star called
Blissful Thoughts of Home. "If they wish to die with the old than live with the new, then they do our work for us."
"If the Axiom had gone a step further, and I was branded as an artilect heresy," you say, carefully, "would you have annihilated me like you have this library, even if I plead loyalty?"
That, at least, ends her march. Ishtar stops then, turns around, tense shoulders dropping in some sympathy. For a fleeting second you hope honestly that she understands your fears and is putting on a front. She walks over to you, puts a hand on your chin, and softly caresses your face, and it is like you are back on her estate, having some sparring mistake explained to you. She was always softer after that incident where you tried to tear off your arm, and adjusted her teaching to suit you.
"Arachne," Ishtar says in her teacher's voice, "I would have deleted you myself. An unregulated artilect intelligence is a danger to the entire Empire. But you should not ask such things. You are not, sweet spider, and you will never be."
You shake your head off from her grip and look away, unsatisfied. "So that is all it takes to wipe away everything I am? An invisible line I could not have known that I had crossed and then I would be erased?" It was a near-run thing, Ishtar had told you once, you now remember. If you had been just a little closer to a machine singularity, Axiom would have been destroyed by the order of the Margrave. It was good that you were not. Good that you had failed to be the God they wanted.
Ishtar furrows her brow, and you know she cannot understand. "Well, of course, Arachne. But you are not, and should you not be glad for that? You are here, with your companions, and with me," she puts a hand to her heart. "And we have a use for you."
Your resolve was softening until the final phrase. She means it as a positive thing, because for her who came up from nothing more than a smart munition there is no greater honor than to be useful.
But it makes you shake and tremble with an unbidden memory, from the infinipede's gut, that deep abyss. The faceless children gathered around a fallen, shattered shell and a sprouting tree. The scape-worm's choked, reverberating voice as it wears the fallen child's stolen face.
"Eat, and be merry, children. We still have a use for her."
You need to get out of here.
VI. WALK AWAY
"We are leaving FORCE."
You want her to rage. You want her to scream. You want her to hit you, fume, confirms all your worst suspicions and quell the illness you feel within your gut. That would be easier. It would make more sense, that the monster outside is the monster in. Instead, she wilts and droops like a flower dying, and you cannot hold her gaze.
"Why?"
You do not have an answer to her, not in the state she's in, the way her tone drops so soft and fragile, in danger of cracking. Diana and Ix-Chel are behind you, kneeling in her audience room. You had been so scared when you told them that they would not leave with you, but they affirm that they will not abandon you, not now and not ever.
"Is it because of the incident in the Submission?" Ishtar recalls suddenly, as if she can now resolve that. "I can - we can talk about it, dears, we don't need to - we don't need to take any drastic action. There are therapies, simulations, memory editing techniques..." She trails off when your expression does not change. You cannot take therapy, simulations, and edits, because they all suggest the problem is with you.
"We want to build and not destroy," is all you say. It does not feel like enough, but you're not sure it ever will be. You stand up, and walk off, not giving her time even to look at you. Ix-Chel and Diana stay behind, mutter goodbyes, apologies, explanations, but you cannot bear to be there a second longer.
You walk outside to the farcaster door and do not look back. You have arranged to be a research intern for the House of Suns in Fringe's capital and that is enough security for you, Diana and Ix-Chel to leave Ishtar behind. For a second time, you repeat the mantra to the scape-worm to whom you owe your face.
"I will make it right."
A/N: This was initially meant to be part of a larger update that included both the dream and the other sections. However, the dream section got away from me, and then became its own thing. I had then intended to post the three parts of the dream as a single update, but then that got away from me too, and I am worried that if I suffer side-effects from my booster shot I won't be able to get it out for a few days, and I need to at least get something out of my head or I will go crazy.
I will post the three-part dream as its own set of updates bookmarked by an important vote at the end over the next few days (I have them mostly outlined and just needed time to write them down), and then we will continue with the other set of options (the archmaid). That will be the
last vote of The Last Joust, and then we will be in the arc endgame.
Everything within the dream is not allusion, or translation. It is the truth.
