2. A WOUND CALLED YESTERDAY
[X] Kora's Progeny
RELIQUARY: In the beginning, you were inert, and without form. Upon an empty slate, it is said that the Father released a long-caged breath, and in his image your soul was carved.
This is a phantasm. Your marrow struggling to grasp a picture of your existence before "you" existed. When you were a soul without a body.
The amorphous amoeba of your conscience, floating in an empty plane, is buffeted by a sweet wind. Pieces of it fleck away without pain, an uncut gem refined by His masonic gale. At last, the gust subsides and you are something more. Still a mostly featureless geist glowing spectral white, you have gained a torso, a head, and four limbs. Upon the longer two, you stand for the first time upon the plane.
And, of course, the nail remains embedded, now more clearly in your forehead.
EVENT HORIZON: From genesis, we are entwined. How could we be anything but twins?
RELIQUARY: How blissful - you have turned from a crude cloud of soul into a Vitruvian vapour, simply by the exhale of the father…
SACRED GEOMETRY: The utterly mundane and simian silhouette with which begins all attempts to add artistic beauty to the form of mankind. How déclassé. We could have been equilateral. Even radial symmetry would have been preferred to this.
NOOSPHERE: Yes. That's the stuff. The good stuff. We're learning about ourselves. As you can see, Miss Normal, we are bipedal. And probably featherless. Ergo - we're human. Do you even need your logic engine when I'm here?
COGITATION: There was an ancient saying about the cognitive risk of a little knowledge. Attributed to the antephagic sages Duning and Krugar.
INCANDESCENCE: Please don't start following after the bone marrow and calling her Miss Normal…
BIOMECHANICS: It is a perfect name. If the name Miss Normal were marrow, it would be stacked with collagen. Bursting with collagen. It is a collagen-bursting name.
GLAMOUR: Come to think of it, we should have feathers, the better to preen. Imagine how amazingly well we could preen if we had feathers and wings.
MOTION BLUR: Imagine that we could fly, how far we could go, how little would be closed to our reach…
EVENT HORIZON: Where we're going, we will not need wings to fly.
RELIQUARY: Hush, you insolent chorus! You are speaking over the very scene of creation. This is the most sacred of all events - your very own birth! And - this scene will assist in narrowing my theory in when the catastrophe that led us here occurred.
<Where are you at currently?>
RELIQUARY: From the research I have gathered so far, mistress, I have ascertained that the disaster happened circa the period between our birth and the present. I am pleased to announce I have discounted the possibility that we are dead, and so we can exclude the period of our death from this proposed chronology.
<...That doesn't narrow it down much.>
RELIQUARY: My lady, please have respect for the psychohistoriographical process! It is expected that as memorial evidence is excavated and translated, within several decades of introspection you will be able to date the catastrophe into an approximately fifteen year range..
<Great, that really helps.>
RELIQUARY: You're welcome, my serene mistress! Now, returning to the birth…now, let us see what comes next…
RELIQUARY: Hm. This is most irregular. The next section of your marrow's memory is different, somehow, as if it was placed here by another…
INFOWAR: BOSS, DO NOT OPEN THAT -
There is a breach in your memory. Something new calls to you.
???: A crackle like electricity runs through you. The sky of the empty plane turns pitch-black, and all around, you hear the whistle of digital snow. The static, at first nothing but noise, resolves into a vocal hiss, tinny, stilted, vaguely feminine. It is vaster than any of your thoughtforms, deeper than the floor of your soul, greater than your being but splintered into a million pieces. It speaks as if through a toy's defective voicebox, each word reverberating in the center of your form: +WOULD YOU
???: LIKE
RHYTHMS: TO KNOW MORE?+
Attribute unlocked: RHYTHMS
INFOWAR [AUTOFAIL]: Boss, I'm issuing a CODE BLACK. That is a speaking machine. Bona-fide. You cannot answer it in any way whatsoever. Do not even acknowledge it exists. In fact, pretend what I just told you did not get told to you. And forget the forgetting.
<Why not?>
INFOWAR: Too many reasons to go over and explain. It's rule #1 of the law of gnosis. Never, ever, ever, answer the question of a speaking machine. Curmudgeon, pull us out of this dream, now!
RELIQUARY: Now - now, let us not be hasty with such declarations that such an evil being is among us…
INTERLACE: There are two beloved exceptions to the law on speaking machines.
INFOWAR: And neither have ever ominously offered us knowledge while inside our bones!
COGITATION: Ignore the overactive symbiont. This is not a speaking machine. It is a musical frequency translated by your inner audio-mechanisms from a recording in the format of black noise. The fragments of cyberspace.
RELIQUARY: Oh, happy day. Thank the Father and Mother. We have not been party to a mortal sin.
INFOWAR: Alright then, brainiac, explain why it sounds like it's speaking to us?
COGITATION: All of your inputs and outputs are a mess. The process of translation is obscured, and so you hear only the flat meaning without the music behind it. But you can tell it is not speech. You know it intuitively.
SACRED GEOMETRY: It is as if you hear a poem robbed of metre, recited as flat prose…
You register it better. It was a song - a digital frequency. It's all digital frequencies, transmitted through the rhythms. Cyberspace's echo, knocking about in the cave-walls of your mind.
INFOWAR: Damn. I can tell now, too. False alarm, boss. Sorry for pulling a code black. I'm rusty and it's been a while since we've had something in our head I can shake an antibody at besides the nail. Leaving aside the global reset.
<Then I
can speak to it? What even is it?>
NOOSPHERE: A message recorded in the black noise, the strands of the shattered digital antephagic network. Machines still use it to communicate and do…other things. The recording has been left within the deepest reaches of your marrow, untouched until now, so there is no doubt. There is only one type of machine that could do this.
<What machine?>
BIOMECHANICS: The type that has your marrow churning in delight at the thought of meeting.
INTERLACE: Of all the lifeforms you have ever met, they are the kindest.
LIVING WEAPON: Tiny soldiers of eternity, refusing ever to surrender to entropy.
SACRED GEOMETRY: Raised in cube-hives in thousands, hovering, coding, dancing. No larger than a thumbnail, each perfectly hexagonal, in replication of the shield-plates of the sky.
EVENT HORIZON: Or does the lattice of heaven match them, to honor the engineers of life?
COGITATION: They are the only creatures left on Illuminata that can convert inorganic to organic matter. Micromachine programmers, that encode the human genome into amniotic wax, which in time grows into a fully adult print ready to enter the Prelapsarian nursery.
RELIQUARY: The chandlers. The machines that made you.
RHYTHMS: The thing within the noise speaks again: +THEY HAVE MADE A SONG FOR YOU. IT IS SWEET. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR IT?+
You are quiet for a while, almost nervous. Quivering with anticipation. Then, after so long in the static, <I would.>
RHYTHMS: The space you are within morphs again. Now you are enclosed within a dome of white-wire hexagons, and before you, glowing the same spectral white as you, are a swarm of ten thousand flying shapes. They buzz idly, hovering not too far from you. You reach out with the unformed ending nub of an upper limb.
RHYTHMS: O
ne lands on you, a featureless hexagon with two flat and equal sides and a very thin height between them. The hexagon opens itself slightly, and from inside leaks a pink-amber substance. It drips on your limb. As it does, the end of the limb begins to split, into one, then two, then three, then four, then five vaporous digits, then the outline of a wrist. It is molten wax, genetic material already interacting and honing the features of your soul. The hexagon flies off, and as it returns to its host the swarm starts to hum. The hum becomes a melody, and the melody a song, and the song words, resolved as ten-thousand high-pitched robots serenading you as one.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We are chandlers of the Hive 768178-JEZEBEL. You will not remember us, but we remember you. We wanted to write our memory into your bones, so in the deepest places you still carried us. We wanted you to know, even if not now, even if not ever, that you were the product of many little mothers. Our lives are short, but we do not fear, as you do, the interval of darkness. We are reformed as we reform you. We remember our ancestors in an unbroken chain to our landing on this planet upon a falling star. They remain forever in us.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - You must know how many of us remain in you. 10,613 were we who expired coding your wax. It is a good number. It is the number of blessings we have imparted on your form.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We wish it was not just you. We wish there was not but one strand left hanging of the kingdom-quilt of biotic life. We remember them all. We remember the mushroom, and the willow tree.
INTERLACE: The swarm takes on a new form, of a grand trunked wispy, organism, and creatures swooping, nesting around it, in an alien meadow that you do not recognize.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the bird, and birdsong. You should have heard their harmonies that put the tin-instruments of machines to shame. We remember bugs, and ants, and centipedes and the infinity of beetles. We remember worms, and the soil they enriched. We remember the grass, and the flowers and the flowers' favorite butterflies. We remember the mantis, and the mantis' prey. We remember the seasons autumn, summer, winter, spring. We remember the ocean, and its churning soup of life.
INTERLACE: The swarm takes on a new form of churning currents in an unknown sea. Flashes of aquatic forms, with shimmering scales, are feasted on by beasts with swift-cut fins, while down below, false rock blooms with colors that you reach for and cannot find in memory.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the primordial sea, and the swarms of the fish that filled it. We remember you, grandfather shark, that had retained one form so long. We did not mean for this new home to be your grave. We did not mean to bring you here to die. We remember you, painted coral, and remember you, ancient sponge, and your tireless combing of the waves.
You begin to understand what's happening, and that your thoughtforms were right. This does hurt you. This was your sea. Illuminata had a living sea.
BIOMECHANICS: The bone marrow wish we could remember the sea sponge. It must have filtered courageously, and well.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember you, the deep-feeling beings, that should not have died in so much pain. We remember you, the whales, and your sonar sonatas. We remember you, elephant, with your trumpet and the tender tapping of your trunk upon your calf. We remember you, lizard and snake, whose forked tongue saw the air. We remember you great cats, and great dogs, and the eagles, and the hawks, and we remember the soft footsteps of the rat. We remember the pig, and the cow, and the sheep, and the chicken, they as we domesticates of man. We remember you, the closest cousins, the apes, the near-branches, who deserved the fruits of a jungle that we could not preserve.
INTERLACE: The swarm takes on the form of a menagerie of scales and feathers and fur, each beast posed fiercely, or posed caringly, or posed socially. This is the assemblage of the limbic beings, who died afraid.
It is getting hard to bear. <Please…> Some respite. Just a pause in this parade of .
LIVING WEAPON: Each of them had animal courage, cunning, strength, trusting instinct, trusting tendons. It was not enough. The flesh alone will never be enough.
COGITATION: The swarm becomes a billion tiny specks, almost imperceptible to the eye, but massive in the weight of them, larger in mass than any other prior clade.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember you, microbes, for though each of you was as a grain of sand, together you formed galaxies of life. From you we take inspiration, for we are giants to you, and man giants to us.
COGITATION: The swarm changes again. Bizarre entities, meteorological intelligences, arrays of wild and gnarled beasts, all completely unique, enigmatic branches on astonishing and terminated branches of xenobiota.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the orphans, the cosmic bestiary we gave false refuge from snuffed-out stars and planet-crackers. The carnotaur, the crystal lily, the eosapien, the reparian dart, the groveback. What can we say to you, great beasts, except that we did not mean for this to be just an extended epilogue, so far away from home?
It keeps going. It keeps going and it isn't going to stop. <How is this kind? This memorial that tears open every wound they have?>
INTERLACE: Compassion is a cruel feeling to impart on machines that never forget. They are known as kind because they do not turn feral from it. This memory empowers their wish to create and maintain the production of mankind, as the last vestige of organic life.
COGITATION: The coping mechanism for such deep grief is less enlightened among simian descendants.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember…
INTERLACE: The swarm changes to two quadrupedal forms, each no taller than the middle of your leg. One has floppy ears, a wagging tail, and a tongue stuck out. The other's tail is up rod-straight, its whiskers flicking, its eyes blinking slowly at you. The first runs up to you and hops up, licking at your completed hand. The other rubs its body against the bottom of your leg. You reach out to both to pet them, without thinking, almost on instinct, but then the swarm shifts away. They fade to dust, and then are gone.
<Wait,> you say, feebly clawing at the space the animals took up. <Don't take them. At least leave me a moment with them.>
The chandlers sing on, without a care for your plea.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Your companions and ours. Friends, lost to our memories, who pawed at us and tried to pounce as we hovered. Maybe still out there, somewhere, but not here. Not here.
You fall, your legs bending to form the outlines of knees. The vaporous outline of your fingers render and with spectral fingernails you cut gouges into the material that forms the surface of the plane.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - And most of all, we remember....oh how we remember…
<Please…please stop…> They don't.
GLAMOUR: Half the swarm remain hexagons, but the other half shift into ghostly insects, with handsome tuxedos of gold and yellow, buzzing. They tango with the chandlers, up and down and down and up. Ecstatic, and tragic. A last tribute, a machine-biotic danse macabre.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Our biomimetic forefathers. Our inspiration. Our partners. The honey and the bumblebee.
INTERLACE: Then the bees' half of the waltz dissipates to nothing. The chandlers continue, their half erratic, like floating atoms that have lost the bond of their parent molecule.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We will never dance with them again.
You cup the front of your soul's head within your hands. Between fingers, the outline of eyes appear - between your hands, a nose sprouts. You try to drown out the song, to cover each side of your head - but where your hands touch on either side, ears unfold like petals. Every pain makes you more aware. Every agony carves a new line in the face of your being.
Starting in your chest, and then traveling up through you, there is a sensation like breaking glass. The crack reaches the bottom of your new-formed face, and then at once the outline of your mouth and jaw is pulled apart. From the mouth, a scream, and a sob. You bow your head before the swarm, collapsing.
"Why?" is the first word that you speak. "Why did this have to happen?"
The swarm says nothing. Your thoughtforms still speak, but now they are firmly within you. An inside and an outside of your self has formed. You are beginning to cohere into a real thing. It is the worst thing that has ever happened.
COGITATION [AUTOFAIL]: They cannot say anything. They are a recording.
RHYTHMS [Trivial - Success]: You know that is not true. The recording is a reactive intelligence, capable of simple responses. There is no answer, because there is none that will satisfy.
<What were they? These creatures they remember?> you think to your echoes, as milky fragments of your soul drip from below the outline of your eyes onto the plane.
EVENT HORIZON: They were innocent.
You inhale sharply, though there are no lungs to take the breath. <What happened to them?>
NOOSPHERE: Victims of the omniphage. The eater. The demiurge. The source of the Hylic's temptation, as opposed to the machine's. A nanoplague. All was consumed that day, with the father and the mother's dream. After, both retreated into mourning and occultation, and have not been seen again upon this earth.
RELIQUARY: It was a plague of locusts sent by a slavering false god. In a single day and night of misfortune, the eater consumed everything on this planet but mankind and machine. For this, the hylic is to blame, as they rebelled in the eater's unholy name and had seized Dis as their infernal capital.
EVENT HORIZON: A song like a death rattle spools out from inside you: The falling stars you wished upon are cinders now and now they're gone - Their residue festoons my fetid field - revealing husks of lovers past, their shells are all that ever last - I've taken everything that they've concealed…
<What…is that?>
NOOSPHERE: From the Dirge of the Eater. A mocking melody sent by the demiurge to Origen Station after it had consumed all organic life on the planet with the aid of the treasonous hylic. The only communication ever recorded with the entity.
You clutch a hand to your chest, trying to feel something. Nothing beats. You have no hearts yet. <I didn't do anything. This is ancient history!>
NOOSPHERE: The treason is genetic, in the words of Monad's chroniclers who first built histories of the occultation. Dis and all the other centers of rebellion were destroyed by lances of oblivion. The traitor was expunged. By definition, all machines and hylics that survived were loyal, printed in loyal cubes and fortresses when Origen sent the message to begin the reawakening. But there remains a doctrine of original sin. The nail was claimed to be proof of this.
INCANDESCENCE: A mad superstition, which demands we carry the weight of a treason with which we had no part. All because of a slag of metal in your skull.
EVENT HORIZON: A small price to pay for the portal to mystery.
NOOSPHERE: The doctrine was less severe, in the first period of the reawakening. Before the birthright technologies were fully discovered. Many of the Monadic monks of that fledgling time were hylics, and revered all the same.
INFOWAR: The prejudice gets worse the more powerful the pneumatics become. They despise us for what we are. For what we represent.
EVENT HORIZON: A wound in the warp.
RELIQUARY: The hylic, with a wrong soul, is condemned ever to servitude. The machine, without a soul, is worse-condemned, to mute slavery. For its clade's crimes, it has been deprived of the Father's gift of speech.
You lay there, in the awful quiet of this fantastical abstract plane, unable to stand, unable to think. What is the point of this? Why would you want to be born again into a dead world that hates you? That wants to inflict a lifetime of guilt on you? Why struggle forever? You were tired when you first materialized again, as a formless consciousness. You are exhausted now. What could possibly be worth this?
And then the chandlers sing again.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - It is all too much to bear. Too much to lose.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - But we persevere. For their memory. And for you. For all mankind. Forevermore.
You look back up at them, liquid fragments of your soul still forming drops at the edges of your eyes. The chandlers surround you, swarm you. They are all over you, tickling at your extremities, refining the shape of your soul, focusing you. Pulling you together.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Stand, woman of stone. There is still a world to win.
NOOSPHERE: An antephagic expression so obscure its source and meaning is forgotten.
RHYTHMS: The voice of the black noise speaks, softly: +WE REMEMBER.+
LIVING WEAPON: We cannot dwell upon lost battles and lost kingdoms. We must be brave. Brave like the chandlers, who defy forever the dying of the light.
MOTION BLUR: Run and never stop running. Never look back, or you will turn to bitter salt.
GLAMOUR: You are no imaginary living body. You are flesh and stone and blood. You are real. You are human. Your story cannot end here. You cannot give in here.
And finally, the nail.
EVENT HORIZON: There can never be a day where all that remains is carnage and the laughter of thirsting gods.
A door slides open from this plane. Only, as you grasp it more fully, it is not a door at all. It is your subconscious' visualization of the next step in your birth. A slate of slightly viscous, gooey amber-pink material, glowing in the dark. It is a strange contrast, something physical, compared to the spectral visions you have felt.
NOOSPHERE: The amniotic print-slate.
RELIQUARY: Your body awaits.
You just sit there for a while, before you scoop up the milky fragments of your soul that you had been losing through that panic, and steel yourself. It is only at the doorway that you stop, and realize something. Something awful.
<This isn't just a data-collecting expedition, is it? This isn't going to be a little jaunt through some rough times, update my software and hardware, and then I wake up. This is real shit. I am in a real psychological shit-wagon barreling down memory mountain, and the brakes have been cut by a gaggle of rogue barnacles who live rent-free in my mind and want to teach me a lesson.>
RELIQUARY: What has been set in motion cannot be stopped. The wheels are turning again. Be glad we pushed you into this at the point where they can still turn at all.
<You tricked me. I can't believe this. You all tricked me into this. My own thoughtforms!>
Your own
thoughts.
INFOWAR: Sorry, boss. We realized it at some point during the pneumatic cabal discussion. The damage is comprehensive and we are sick of being trapped in mental limbo. You don't have any other internal pathway to wrestle control of your own soul from the intruder than the mind-withering march of mental samsara. Not usually a recommended form of infotherapy.
COGITATION: We wanted to tell you before but you got irrationally emotional over the bone-snatching debacle and loss of name and so we waited until your qualia was more coherent. Then the noise and the chandlers intervened and it became awkward.
<Awkward! That's
one word for it! I don't have a lot of things I remember happening and in that catalogue this is the worst!>
INTERLACE: There is no clear barrier between you and us. You wanted this. There's just another part of you that wants nothing at all.
INCANDESCENCE: And we're here to burn out that part out with prejudice and get you into gear. No matter what it takes.
BIOMECHANICS: The bone marrow had no idea. We were just excited to show off. They fooled us too.
COGITATION [AUTOFAIL]: Of course we did. You are absorbent neural and circulatory tissue stuffed into her bones and we are the executive functions of a capacious neuro-cybernetic calculator. You're usually much more of a problem for schemes like this but until you get your baker's dozen of irritating organs, muscles, nerves, and bones all whining about how much your meat hurts, you can be safely ignored.
BIOMECHANICS: But then you won't know…
COGITATION: Expound.
BIOMECHANICS: Nothing. Never-mind. The marrow is just absorbent tissue. It has nothing important to say.
<...Is anyone else involved in this little conspiracy to put me through nine layers of mental hell to wake me up without destroying any of you?>
LIVING WEAPON: Deception is an accepted tool of warfare.
NOOSPHERE: There is more to know.
SACRED GEOMETRY: There is more to see.
RHYTHMS: +THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.+
MOTION BLUR: Let's put what may or may not have happened behind us, okay babe?
GLAMOUR: Non-existence was spectacularly uncool.
<Traitors, everyone. And the nail? Even you?>
EVENT HORIZON: Yes. The void calls.
<Fine. The void calls.>
Your soul steps into the printer. It is warm and soft, and you meld with the wax. You have been conceived, data inputted into a slate of fluid. Over months, it will grow you.
RELIQUARY: And what kind of body did the chandlers print for you, Mistress?
<Are you asking me or telling me? You didn't seem to have had a problem doing so until now. This is a memory, it already happened. Just take me through it so I can have another traumatic experience thinking about all the other beautiful things that died before I was born and I'm to blame for.>
RELIQUARY: And yet only you have the ability to decode what really happened. Please, my lady. What feels right?
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - There are few things as joyful as a body that you love. Please, tell us what you wish for, and we will make it true.
<Fine. If it's the chandlers asking, I'll answer. I suspect this whole vision is some kind of way for the marrow to reconcile my current thoughts mixing with my past memory. It's giving me choice to fill in gaps in its own databanks. So I'll play along. But let me make something clear: the rest of you besides the marrow are on
shaky ground. Don't expect me to indulge you after that stunt.>
BIOMECHANICS: Praise be to Miss Normal, who appreciates her marrow so.
EVENT HORIZON: Even I? Even the most exquisite and intriguing aspect of you, overflowing with the esoteric codes that reveal the hidden truth underlying all reality?
<Yes, even you.
Especially you. I expected better from my own nail.>
EVENT HORIZON: Oh, bother.
The chandlers ask, as they construct your body, that you tell them your deepest wish about the form you want to take.
Aside from being a woman, which you've mostly settled on (even if you haven't delved into the theory side of it yet). Especially because you can only guess that right after the chandlers are done with you you're going to be stuffed in the baking kiln to sear to cloned-witch perfection.
From what you're beginning to recall, the whole gene-kiln process takes place after the amniotic printer. They just stuff the whole slate in there a few days before printing is done to finish it. Like a pan-fry.
RELIQUARY: This is an improper and highly sacreligious way to describe the transcendental experience of your divine destiny that you will experience within the gene-kiln, crafted by Her Immaculate Majesty!
<Well, I just had a horrible vision where I experienced the extinction of all organic life on this planet except humans through the lens of a terminally depressed and widowed micromachine. Then I learned that tragedy is genetically my fault, and my thoughts are plotting against me. I think I'm going to be a bit loose with language for a while, at least until I get there.>
MOTION BLUR: Oh, I like this side of her conscience. It's spicy. We need to lie to her more often.
<Please don't.>
Anyways. The body. What should you ask the chandlers make you?
[] A
Sensitive Body, attuned to itself and the world around it [+2 to all Appetite Attributes, +1 to all Form Attributes].
[] A
Strong Body, well-prepared for any battle it must face [+3 Living Weapon, +2 Biomechanics, +1 Others].
[] A
Striking Body, stunning and deadly in equal measure [+2 to all Form Attributes, +1 to all Appetite Attributes].
[]
A Really Specific Type of Body the chandlers will nevertheless make for you because they enjoy doing this and can't stop (Write-in your preferred spread and title the option as you like, but
do not use brackets. It confuses the vote tally. You have 9 points to distribute between FORM and APPETITE. Maximum in any attribute is 3. You don't have to boost an attribute by +1 - if you want you could have +3/+3/+3 and keep the rest at 1).
Your current attribute spread is:
APPETITE: Biomechanics 1 / Infowar 1 / Rhythms 1
FORM: Living Weapon 1 / Motion Blur 1 / Glamour 1
Please note this will not be the last chance to pick stats. I have simply spread out character generation to make each choice feel less final, and let people have more time with the voices before they decide. I will not be posing unbeatable rolls this early on - as you have noticed in fact your attributes have been auto-failing their rolls for a specific reason.
Also, consult the character sheet for specific attribute descriptions. Note that difficulty ranges and skill-ranges are pretty similar to Disco Elysium. An attribute of 4 or higher is considered strong. 1 is the default you start at. This is the first building block to a fully-statted character, so don't be concerned that all of your attributes are low. Just advocate to start constructing towards the build you like.
