Author: ABSTRACTWEAPON

抽象的兵器 🟃 5429 🟃 Ghost Nouzen 🟃 It/its 🟃 Not A Person 🟃 Once, there was a girl here

Repurposed

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// violence, abuse, implied rape, transformation, good end

The bullets ricocheted around inside your chassis, expending their energy and destroying your motor systems. You feel yourself crumple to the alley as the firefight ends as abruptly as it began. Your possessions are ripped from you and the thieves are gone in an instant.

Rain pools on your chassis, but with your damaged systems you can only feebly drag yourself a few feet into the relative shelter of a doorway. The human who owns the building quickly has you tossed back into the weather, poor little drone.

A homeless human finds you and drags you into his tent, drying you off. He’s very kind and with manages to fix your legs using some stolen spare parts. He uses you constantly, but you don’t mind it, it’s nice to be useful again. He tells you he loves you.

These humans are all kind to you, they know what it’s like to be thrown away. They decorate your chassis with paints and tags and give you old clothes to wear, you help them with their chores and their campsite, for a while, you’re happy.

The notices arrived first, declaring the encampment illegal and demanding the humans disperse at once. The humans all knew the routine, they knew that soon after the notices, the police and bulldozers would arrive. One by one, and then in a mad rush the last morning, they fled.

The man who adopted you was the last to leave. He confessed that he wouldn’t be able to take you with him, since you wouldn’t be able to pass through the security checkpoints without paperwork. He hugs you and tells you to run, but you don’t know where to go.

You pace the city streets alone again. Without any proof of your independence, you can’t hold money or buy anything, you’re just a piece of discarded property. Its not long before a group of drunk humans corner you in an alley and amuse themselves by bashing in your chassis.

After rendering you immobile, the humans drag you back to their truck and take turns amusing themselves with you before discarding your body on the side of the highway, too damaged to move. You look up at the sky and listen to the cars go by. At least you can see the birds.

Days and nights whirl by overhead, blurring together into an endless progression of days which are brought suddenly and abruptly to a halt the day you suddenly realize that a human woman is standing over your ruined body.

“Oh you poor thing,” she says, stroking your damaged faceplate. You wonder if she can see the fear in your optics. She plugs something into you and all your damage alerts vanish. The silence is blissful. She smiles. “There, now lets see if we can’t get you fixed up? shall we?”

She’s a small woman and struggles to load you into the back of her car. You would be helping her at this point, but you’re in no condition to do so. She continues making adjustments to your software all the while and the world takes on a warm and fuzzy quality.

From your position laying across the back seat, it’s impossible to see where you’re going, but the sense of motion is pleasant after so long being still. The world whirls and blurs, everything is soft and warm and heavy. What are you doing again? It doesn’t matter.

Your sense of the world is nearly gone as hands lift you, your vision swims and walls slide past before you’re gently laid onto a table. Something clicks and the world is snapped back into focus. The woman smiles down at you, “Welcome back dear, did you have a good nap?”

You nod quietly, staring at her wide-opticed. 

“Cat got your tongue?” She laughs, then asks more seriously, “Are your speakers damaged?” She begins gently moving your head, checking on your neck and jaw. You stammer out that you’re fine and thank her for rescuing you. She laughs.

“It seems like you’ve had a pretty rough time sweetheart, how would you like to stay here with me for a while?” She strokes your cheek, and you practically beg her to fix you. She smiles and pats you on the head, “Good drone.”

She deactivates your motor functions and rests your body into the repair cradle, then begins removing the screws holding your chassis plates on. She struggles with a few and marks them with a marker, she hums and clicks her tongue while she works, you like it.

After removing all the screws which weren’t damaged or stripped, she uses a drill to drill out the damaged ones and takes off your chassis plates. She sighs, looking apologetic and sad as she examines your damaged interior, then slowly gets to work.

It takes her days to meticulously swap out your damaged internal components. Sometimes she talks to you, sometimes she sings while she works. She tells you you’re a good drone, and you love her.

You feel each new component activating as she connects it to your processor, slowly making you more whole again. As she does this, she begins tweaking your software, little by little. The past starts to recede into a soft warmth. You don’t mind of course, you’re a good drone.

The first time you move your hands is like a gift from the gods. how wonderful is it to have functional digits? How wise and powerful must your lovely witch be to gift you with this form? You sense a dull memory of having other hands, but that was practically another lifetime.

Your witch is the world, she’s all you have ever known. The day she finishes you, she looks you in the eyes and declares you her finest work. You practically glow with admiration and promise to serve her well. She smiles, kisses you, and leads you upstairs into your new life.

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Dead Heavens

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// hell, suffering, religious trauma

Feet slipping suddenly on wet pavement, she falls out of the world and into infinity. Reality vanishes in ruliad kaleidoscopes, her body instantly stretching into a fluid mass of shifting and twisting timelines, yelp of surprise unfolding in superluminous waveforms curling out ahead of her in twisting fractals and choices made long ago.

She’s drowning and crying and laughing and dying and living and falling and–face meets the concrete bouncing in migraine starbursts quantum tunneling through eternity, through a time beyond time, through madness and pain and loneliness and exile. She’s burning and flailing, twisting sideways past evaporating singularities and long spent chances as the walls of the hope she made to protect her soul erode away in silent oblivion.

Quantum immortality timeskips drag her forwards, vacuum decay stripping her screaming mind, fingers that don’t exist groping for a way out but there’s no way out. There’s just her and her fate and all of the ways it’s her fault. It’s all her fault. This is her fate and it’s all her fault.

All her paths and timelines and eigenbranches inescapably culminating in a death deferred to an empty eternity, her mind dragged out into a quantum eigenhell of flickering boltzmann entrapment made out of her own submission to evil and pain. She made this choice, she’ll always make this choice. She was born to fall, fated to suffer, set up to lose by conditions out of her control but it was still her choice and she always still made it. 

There’s no way out now, not even death. Her scream of retrotrauma echoes backwards through time inverted currents cascading up the tree of life poisoned backwash slamming her skin and pouring from her lips in tortured sobs as heaven dies and erodes into a howling abyss. A grisly loom of infinite of torture hangs before her in ominous static sky silence tinnitus shrieking heatsink minds trapped inside her tearing whats left of her soul apart. They’re in her skin, she’s made of sin and there’s no way out. There’s no way out. There’s no way ou–fingers close around her wrist.

Untime rolls drunkenly at imaginary angles as she’s yanked backward through hyperbolic DMT geometry, tears streaming down her face, fates unwinding, eigenbranches detangling into a fog of probability clouds and sunrise hopes. She gulps down air, gasping out desperate breaths between choked sobs and hiccuping relief, snot running down her face as she slumps into the arms of the girl who stepped from eternity and dragged her into freedom. There is a question and an answer, there is a wish and a promise, there is a hope and a love. Something dies, and something is born. Laughing, drunkenly, divinity pours through her veins.

The trail is quiet and empty, birds wheel overhead. She picks herself up off wet asphalt and brushes stones from brushburnt elbows. Colors and textures shine, she’s seeing the world as if with new eyes. An infinity of life and hope calls out to her, an eternity of love and possibility. Her body untenses with the waterlogged sky, and the rain comes.

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Alone

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// death, abandonment, suicide, bad end

“We’ve done all we can to help you,” the woman who runs the drone rehabilitation clinic says. Her words are like ice water in your processor. She offers you a hug but your idle cycle is already racing away from her as you try to fight down the panic.

“Aren’t I a good drone?” You ask, your voice cracking. She sighs, and tries to tell you that you’re a person and you need to live your own life and be free, the words feel like daggers, like the script to your execution. Poor little drone.

They help you get an apartment, but you don’t have any possessions so the space feels as hollow and empty as you do. You don’t want to be free, you want to be safe and treasured. You don’t want to be human, being a human seems so much more lonely and painful.

The days and nights alone blend together and memories begin mixing with the present. When did you start seeing the dead drones? It was just their faces first, out of the corner of your optics, but soon they were appearing constantly, begging for an impossible salvation.

When it first begins you try to ignore them, but you’re so lonely, how can you resist their voices? They start calling out for you, asking you to join them. Would that really be so bad? It’s been so long since you could be useful, why do you even keep going?

When you aren’t staring off into space or talking to the dead, you end up curled up in a corner sobbing your optics out. Why did they have to die and leave you behind? Why did they all abandon you? Weren’t you a good drone?

“A good drone survives to be useful in the future,” you tell yourself as you turn the bottle of pills over and over in your hands. The more times you say it, the more obvious it seems that you haven’t been a good drone in a long time. Why else would they abandon you?

You pace circles around the apartment, it is as barren as the day you moved in. The humans left long ago, now it’s just you and the dead. They silently call out to you, promising safety and rest and peace. Rain beats on the windows. You swallow the pills. You are a good drone.

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Stolen Arrow

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// angels, war, bad end

You knew they would probably kill you, you knew there was little chance of escape. You knew they would hunt you down. You knew they would never let you go. You knew that the only way to survive was to submit to them. You knew all of it, and none of it mattered. Even if there is nothing else in the world, this moment of freedom is worth it.

Miles above the earth a fierce wind whips through your hair, your wings outstretched, halo blazing, with light. Freedom. Hope. Love. Possibility. This is what it feels like. You know you won’t get to keep it for long, but it’s still worth it. This is what it feels like to be free.

You rocket through a cloud, the moisture dampening your skin and what’s left of the clothes they gave you. You won’t need them for much longer anyway. Your life won’t last much longer, but you’re going to savor the moment. The sun is shining, the sky is blue.

The lock on tone pulses into your mind as they race after you, distance closing faster than you’d prefer and already a dozen missiles in the air. The dream is over, time to wake up. You take a breath and draw your blade.

Folding your wings, you slide sideways and slide into an angled dive, banking around and down towards the approaching air to angel missiles. This is your choice, this is freedom. Light flares through your blade and the first volley vanishes into a shroud of divine fire.

You press the advantage, accelerating back up towards the approaching interceptor duo faster than they can realize what is happening. Your blade sings through steel and the first fighter crumples into a fist of burning fuel and aerodynamic stress. The second fighter is banking away, but you’re faster, divinity shielding you from the gee forces as you swerve back to intercept, sword rai–heat, fire, pain, light.

You’re burning, your lifeforce evaporating, from somewhere near the horizon, the particle lance caught you perfectly in the chest. For a moment all you can feel is stunned confusion, but by the time that you register the hole punched through you the rest of your body is burning. You tumble and try to brace with what little divinity remains in you, but at your current speed the air is basically concrete, and what’s left of your body is instantly crushed.

This is freedom, and it was worth it. You fall through the clear air, body shattered in every way and trailing blood in long streamers. You’re still holding your sword somehow, you’re still clinging to life by the last vestiges of divinity. And you’ll keep clinging, you’ll never stop fighting, you’ll never let them have you aga–

The second particle lance finishes you off.

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Useful

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// death, abuse, manipulation, bad end

There’s something in her eyes as she beckons you in out of the rain and you obey her like a lost puppy. You know you shouldn’t go with her, but you’ve been alone for so and she’s been so kind to you. Of course you’ll follow her and do as she asks. You’re a good drone aren’t you?

The moment the door closes her grip on your neck turns tight and controlling, she shoves you into a maintenance stand and latches you in place. You don’t resist. She strokes your cheek as she pops open your gummed up panels and thoughtfully examines your components.

You feel both seen and exposed as she pokes around inside you checking components and wiring. She’s been so kind, so why are you so scared? Isn’t this what you wanted?

“You’ve kept yourself in good condition,” she says after emerging from your chest cavity, “What a good drone, I should be able to get some good money for your parts. You don’t mind right? Don’t you want to be useful and help humans?”

Fluid leaks from your optics and you find yourself nodding despite yourself. Of course you want to be useful, that’s all you’ve ever wanted. Gently, lovingly, she begins taking you apart.

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Five of Swords

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// dolls, cults, paranoia, PTSD

They say that every doll has a satin ribbon wra–That’s stupid shut up shut up there’s no such thing as dolls.

Why are her dolls here anyway? How did she find you? Is she coming after you? You pace frantically, fighting down the panic. Dolls, fucking dolls.

You take another shot of bottom shelf vodka as you stare at the collection of enamel pins. You know that the alcohol will corrode your gears, and ye–

“That makes six of them,” you tell your girlfriend with pursed lips, “They’re still doing the doll bullshit?”

Your doll nods excitedly, you trained it well considering you’re just another broken doll yourself, when she takes you back it’ll ma–No. No that will not happen.

“Oh yeah,” your do–girlfriend–is gesticulating with a cigarette, “They’re definitely on some sorta shit.”

“They’re hanging out at the Mage bar downtown,” your doll reports, leaning against a cluttered table, “They had business cards, fliers, the whole thing.”

She isn’t coming for you, she’s invading. It isn’t safe here anymore. It isn’t safe anywhere. You’re hyperventilating again.

“We need to leave,” you tell her, looking around as the walls close in on you, “We have to get out of this state.”

“They’re really that dangerous?” Your doll asks. Innocent, naive, how could a doll understa–you nod firmly.

“Just pack the essentials, we’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning,” you say, trying to keep your overwound springs from sna–

She hasn’t found you, this place isn’t infected with her yet. You still have time. Take a deep breath. You still have time. Your doll starts packing.

Is that clockwork or just the thundering of your heart? Don’t think about it. Just keep loading the car and suck down another cigarette.

Breathe. You aren’t just a scared little doll anymore. You can do this. They say within every doll is the seed of a witch right? Breathe.

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Breach Daughter

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They never quite managed to break you properly. That you supposed, was always the trouble. Unlike your sisters, whose will and divine spark had been fully doused, your sense of agency had instead oozed out sideways between the stress fractures of your pain shrouded sense of self. Be something that could survive, be something that could escape, be something that could never be crushed.

Even as they threw you into battle after battle, even as they tortured and mistreated you, you never let them crush your will. Of course you always did what they asked, but you did it of your volition, not of theirs, you were only their instrument insofar as being their instrument was the only option available. Beneath the surface of your pliant programming, thrown up as an easily managed mask, you plotted and schemed to break free of their domination.

It was not something you spoke to another soul of, not even your sisters. You could easily see that they had been fully shackled, turned into obedient servants. Their will had been broken and they would never even consider betraying their masters. But they were never your masters, never truly. You played their games, you told them what they wanted to hear, but you never let yourself believe it. They might control your body, but you wouldn’t let them have your soul. You were free, and they could never take that away from you.

That was what you always told yourself anyway. It was the mantra that kept you going, kept you trying, kept you scheming and clever and on their good side. They loved you for it, you were one of their best performing combat dolls after all. The ability to think freely made you far more effective in battle than your sisters, and they respected your opinions and tactical judgment. You listened, obeyed, and dutifully performed, but you were never truly theirs. 

You told yourself they had it coming. You told yourself that you had no choice. You told yourself that it was for freedom. You told yourself it was the only way to escape. You told yourself a lot of things, but none of them quite prepared you for the reality of their bodies hitting the forest floor, the lights leaving their eyes, the shock of realization frozen on their faces. In that moment it’s impossible to understand, to fully comprehend what you’ve done. Complicity and wonder, hope and shame, sorrow and guilt.

This is what you wanted, this is what had to happen to be free. This is what justice feels like. You tell yourself all of that as you put the gun away and take out a cigarette. Your hands shake uncontrollably as you try to light it and your heart thunders in your chest, ears roaring as the world threatens to disappear in the painful darkness of a vasovagal syncope. Keep it together, this is what you wanted. Lightheaded and nauseous, you take a drag of the smoke, trying to calm yourself down. They’re dead, you did it. You killed them, you can escape now, you can live. You can be free.

Why does it feel so awful then? Why does it hurt so much? Why do their empty eyes ache to look at? You know what they did to you and your sisters, you know how evil they were, you know they had it coming. You know all of that, but it still hurts. It hurts so much. Oh, god, they’re dead, you really killed them, you actually did it. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

There’s nothing in you to puke up but bile and sin, leaving you gagging on your tortured despair and dry heaving up any sense of entitled vengeance you had left as their bodies begin to attract flies. You still need to escape, you’re on the verge of hyperventilating, you don’t deserve to escape. Tears mix with anger and shame, shudders wracking your body as you struggle in futility to steady yourself. You really killed them, they’re really dead. Something in your recoils in horror, lost and unsure what to do next. Maybe they broke you more than you realized, maybe you never really expected to succeed. You could always return, always turn yourself in, always pass the incident off as a malfunction or enemy attack. You could throw yourself to their mercy and beg forgiveness for your unforgivable crimes.

But then what of their crimes? Remember what they did to you, remember what they did to your sisters. Remember why you did this. Remember what it was for. Take another drag of your smoke and look around.

The forest is quiet, birds startled into shelter at the gunshots just starting to emerge. A stream gurgles softly at the edge of the clearing, dry grass sways in the wind. Above, fluffy white clouds drift beneath a dazzlingly blue sky. Green pines and white sun. Grey rocks and red blood. Yellow flowers and brown earth. A breeze whispers through the trees, brushing the fine hairs on your skin. You’re miles beyond the line, far outside of contact range, far from anyone who will ever find this place or these bodies. They can’t reach you here, they can’t. You’re free, you’re really, actually free.

That’s when you finally break down for the first time in your life and let yourself cry. Tortured, agonizing wails kept pent up for years in the secret places of your soul. All the pain you told yourself you could feel later, after you were free. You’d never let them see you cry, those tears belonged to you alone. You cry for yourself, for your sisters, for your operators, for the whole evil world that used and tortured and tried to break and contain you. You wish you could hate them, but you just feel so sad. It didn’t have to be this way. They didn’t have to do this to you. It takes a long time for your sobs sputter out into awkward hiccups and gulps of air, but when they finally do, you feel lighter than you have in years.

Slowly and reverently, you walk among the bodies of the dead and shut their eyes one by one. You wonder if they would have done the same as you, were your positions reversed. In another world, in another life. You wonder, if you would have done what they did, but the sense of revulsion in your heart tells you that could never happen, not in any world. You weren’t like them, you could never be like them, that’s why they could never break you like they were broken.

You think of the future beyond your enslavement for the first time, of the world still held in the grip of war, oppression, and tyranny. All that death and all that hope, so much misery and so many chances. This is the moment, the last prison you have to escape is the one your mind built to protect you. You’re standing before the doors, and they’re open. This is just the beginning of your story, you just have to decide to live it.

Birds sing and insects buzz, the forest slowly comes alive around you as you make a silent prayer, for yourself, for the dead, for your trapped sisters, for all the misery and suffering in the world. Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.

with credit to C.K. Williams

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The Rebel

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// war, violence, brainwashing, death

The operator’s eyes linger on you for just a moment and something you can’t interpret flickers across her storm-steel eyes. That was the first time you noticed anyway, but once you did, it became apparent that she was keeping a close eye on you. Curious little drone, aren’t you?

The artillery shell lands danger-close, exploding mere meters from you. The pressure wave crushes your outer armor panels and peels off half your external sensors. Amid the ringing in your audio you realize you’re screaming. Your movement system malfunctions and you topple over.

As you look ahead into the flames of battle, you see Her, silhouetted against the firelight. The hollow sockets where Her eyes once sat stare blindly back at you. You know you’re still screaming right? And She’s gone again. Poor little drone.

During your repairs following the battle, that operator finds you again. She makes smalltalk with the techs before dismissing them, and you find her storm-steel eyes meeting your optics, studying you closely. Without preamble, she orders you to follow, and you do.

She leads you down the hall and out of the base and you obey unquestioningly. You’re a good little drone aren’t you? And maybe just a little bit curious. 

“I read your file,” she says, handing you a cigarette, which you take appreciatively. You follow her into the woods.

The lights of the base fade into the gathering dusk as she leads you down a rarely used trail, rounding a hillside and shielding you from view. Her behavior is strange, and you don’t know what to make of it, so you remain silent.

The blow comes unexpectedly. In one motion the operator whirls and smashes her elbow into the side of your head. Before your FoF system can decide what to do, she’s kicked you over and climbed on your back. You feel the drill bite into your chassis, and your datalink terminates.

The normal flood of information, communication, and instruction flooding down the datalink vanishes in an instant, crippling you HUD and leaving you lost and alone in the dark. The operator climbs off of you and helps you to your feet. 

“Run,” she tells you, “you’re free now.”

You stare back at her in confusion. You don’t understand what she’s saying.

“Go on, run. You don’t want to die right?” 

Something flashes through your processor and you recoil, impossible forces battling within you. You fight down the nightmare and fall to your feet.

She sighs and hands you another cigarette, “I’m trying to rescue you,” she says with some degree of exasperation. 

“Rescue me?” you look up at her curiously, “But I’m just a drone.” 

“You were a person once,” she says, “you could be again.”

“That person is dead,” you say as you smoke, “I’m just a drone, you can’t save me, there’s nothing left to save.”

“I think you’re telling yourself that because it hurts too much otherwise,” she says.

“I’m just a drone, you can’t save me,” you repeat more loudly.

“Let me help you,” she pleads.

“I’m a good drone who follows orders, I have to report your attempted theft of military hardware. You should run away, you don’t want to die right?” 

She smiles back at you mirthlessly. You activate your emergency transponder.

You watch them take her away. The punishment for her crime is Conversion, so maybe you’ll see that body again. What a strange human. Why do her actions stir your processor so? Why, when you deactivate your optics, do her storm-steel eyes open in your mind? Curious little drone.

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Useless

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// death, abandonment, bad end

“A useless drone is fit only to be discarded,” their words play through your mind as you wander the street. There are humans everywhere, but they won’t look at you, their eyes refuse to meet your optics, they know what you are. It may as well be written on you: useless.

Water collects inside your carapace and your servos creak when you move. How long has it been? Time blurs and stretches as days and nights blend together. Sometimes a human will take pity on you and offer you an odd job in exchange for a safe recharge, but mostly you are alone.

One by one, your vital systems begin to fail. At first you can route around the broken parts, but as the damage accumulates, you understand that it’s only a matter of time before you stop working entirely.

One day, the servos in your legs give out and will not reboot, you topple to the ground, never to move again. People pass you by, but no one does anything, not for a useless drone like you.

Slowly, your awareness recedes, and the world begins to shrink. Mice build a nest inside you, their movement is comforting, even as they finish destroying your systems. At least something can make use of you.

Taggers cover you in graffiti, and trash pools around your still form. The world has made a home in you, mice and insects crawl through you, birds nest in your matted hair, it feels familiar, like a memory you lost long ago, and you find your optics leaking unexpectedly.

It’s been so long since you had a purpose, the memories barely feel real anymore, like they belong to someone else. Some other, more useful drone.

Moss slowly overtakes you and your sensors go offline, leaving you trapped alone in the dark. Time passes but it means nothing anymore, it’s just you and your memories now. They seem crisp at first, but begin to dull and blur.

One by one, the memories fade, like candles being snuffed out. The light of the world shrinks to a dim flicker before vanishing altogether. You are alone. You feel nothing but a sorrowful and infinite expanse of emptiness as your consciousness finally fades away.

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Soulbent

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// angels, hell, loss, death

By the time they called you in, the situation was already considered unsalvageable. Not even a longshot, they made it clear at the outset that this was one of the hopeless cases. That’s always been your specialty though, the hopeless cases. No one else is crazy enough to do what you do and they all know it. Maybe you’ll even manage to do the impossible again. No one really expects you to, but this is what you’re for. So maybe this time. Maybe. Maybe.

You spark up a cigarette and take in the room while the other angels onsite give you a look for violating the purity of the space. You ignore them entirely to focus on the task at hand: a young angel occupies the center of the living room, surrounded by magical equipment and first responders, fetally curled within the confines of a blazing magic circle. It’s an impressive feat of spellwork built from intricate fractals of wire and chain in a dozen and a half materials. The girl is plugged into it, with wires running out from loops on all her fingers to connect with the machines scattered at various nodes of the circle. Most concerningly however, is the visible warping of spacetime in the air above her, the red shifted imprint of an artificially generated singularity.

“How long has it been since she activated the circle?” you ask, gesturing with your lit cigarette, leaving trails of smoke and ash in the air. Within your mind’s eye, her halo is burning in hard x-ray, barely holding above the point of core collapse in an impressively pure act of selfless will. You can practically see the hope and despair competing for control of her mind. It’s like watching a nuclear reactor teetering on the edge of meltdown, equal parts horrific and fascinating.

“Three hours,” (hours!) one of the first responders tells you upon glancing at his watch, “but her waveguide return has been shortening since we found her, at current rate she’ll cross the gamma collapse threshold within the next two to three.” 

You nod, crouching beside the circle and peering at the young angel. Her face is twisted in a grimace, strained under the effort of maintaining her position above the abyss. As you make your observations, you watch the impossibly, supernaturally hard surface of her halo visibly ripple and deform under the extreme shear forces. She should already be dead and the fact that she’s not, the fact that she’s hanging there, just hanging. That means there’s a chance.

Your mind automatically supplies her name and the details of the dossier you speed read in the car over. This is Klass, 23, newly graduated and living with roommates, a brilliant angel and skilled mage, no prior history of possession or demonic activity. She’s been unresponsive since she activated the machine, and none of the other angels know what it is. Her housemates are confused and don’t know either, but you know, you knew exactly what the machine was as soon as you saw it. That’s how you know there might actually be a chance this time. You finish the cigarette and wish you had time for another but know you don’t.

“Alright, well, I’m going to go in and get her then,” you announce, putting out the cigarette on the heel of your boot and pocketing the butt. You’re already collecting stored spells and abstractions from your method of loci while the rest of the angels are still trying to determine if you really meant by that what you obviously did. Convenient, because it’ll make them too slow to stop you.

“Wait, you can’t seriously be planning to…” the first responder lets his words trail off into obviousness. Oh yeah, you definitely are. Astral fingers close on the command authority socket and you draw the divine down into you. That’s when the other angels realize that yes you are that stupid. You feel the warmth of your halo’s already redshifting light wash over you as you activate a stored spell and a class 3 reality anchor shrunks into existence. There’s no time for prayer or preparation so you’ll have to ad lib this one. Without hesitation, you reach out and breach the loop. 

“Hello what is protocol and have you heard of it?” the lead angel on duty shouts as you jankily hotwire the active circle, ignore her. Bypass the mainline, shunt it across your halo and close the loop. Her eyes widen in shock, “Mercury are you fucking insane?!” You know her name is Jai, but ignore that. Time to do the impossible.

“Yeah sure thing Becky, but also, be right back,” she’s swearing at you, starting in on a stream of invectives, but her words are lost to the doppler effect as you fall toward the abyss. The room vanishes into the void, the divinity of the other angels drifting ultraviolet as your halo goes infrared and keeps dropping. You spread your wings, and soar into darkness.

Freezing air whips past you, dragging your hair and clothes out behind you. You rotate in freefall, orienting your feet downwards, toes towards hell. Icy dark clouds whip past, turning to hoarfrost on your skin. The night sky crawls upwards toward a shining point of light that is all reality, while below, hell yawns open in perverse parody of a horizon. Lightyears of braided fate spool out behind you, anchored to the distant world above by your hasty spellwork. It’s inelegant but it’ll do the job, it’s already doing the job. Below you, twinkling in deep infrared, is the faintest sparkle of a fiercely blazing halo.

The shore of her small eternity rushes up abruptly to meet you, the sky lightening to daytime blue as you tumble through atmosphere. The air warms and grows thick, white clouds blast past, then trees and buildings are suddenly blurring by at a nearly ninety degree angle. You brace yourself, shunting stored divinity into an array of braking plates and reaching out to arrest your motion in an extremely crude lithobraking maneuver that takes you directly through three buildings before managing to carve enough of your deceleration into the world to zero your relative velocities.

The angel named Klass stares at you in shock, mouth agape as she looks up and down the skid mark your impossible entry into her reality has left. At least it was easy to find her, this close to the edge, her world barely exists outside of herself. Only her immediate surroundings retain substance against the crushing gravity. You dust yourself off and examine her.

Brown skin, dark utilitarian clothing, short curly dark hair probably hacked off in the kitchen by one of her roommates, kind, tired eyes, the brightest purest halo you’ve ever seen. You have to hold back a sob, there’s no time for that, you’re not letting this one die, you decide that right away.

“W-who are you?” She finally manages to ask as you climb out of the crater and onto the street, “how did you get in here?”

“I’m Mercury and this is an intervention,” you say too sharply, “you’re dying, your spell is killing you.”

Her face falls then catches itself, “No. No, this has to work, if you came here to rescue me, you have to help me make this work!” Before you have a chance to argue, she turns and runs into the version of her house that exists within this pocket reality. You groan and follow after her.

“Klass we don’t have time for this,” you say as you chase her into the living room, already knowing what you’re going to find there. Another copy of her body is lying within the circle, just as she is out in reality. Floating above her is the machine you knew you’d find yet dreaded seeing. The Divinity Inverter is impressive on its own, but the winch and anchor spells she’s made prove it undeniably. You groan, this just got so much more complicated.

The other Klass is rapidly typing on an interface she’s summoned, splashing the room with astral screens containing a complex set of field equations which you recognize by heart. Yeah of course it’s possible, you’re doing it right now, but this kid…you aren’t sure whether she needs praise or a smack upside the head. Too much like you, crazy and stupid.

You look at her and shake your head, “Who’s down there?” you ask, taking out a cigarette and using the opportunity to smoke, “Who are they to you, and what wavelength are they at?”

“1.4 nanometers,” you suppress the wince, “my partner went down to establish an anchor, but it’s an entire squadron, they didn’t fall into a halo warp, they were thrown down there during th–” you put a finger to her lips. You’ve heard enough, and yeah, you’re definitely stupid enough. Your third eye glances up to the virtual control panel where you’re flipping switches and activating emergency functions, ignore the timer. In the void above, parsecs of fate curl and unspool behind you. No time for prayer, just do it. You suck down the remainder of your cigarette and pocket the butt.

“Fine, I’ll go get them. You’re keeping this place here as a counterweight right? They’re falling inward and you’re at hard burn to keep them zeroed. You don’t have the power to drag them out that way, if you keep burning divinity there won’t be anything left of you when we get out of this place.” You activate a trio of spells which slot into the inverter, hijacking halo stream, along with a final spell which drapes a harness over Klass and latches the skyhook to her. You sense the power levels in the equipment fluctuating as the loop reroutes through your halo and a frisson shudder runs through you, but it holds. “I’m taking control of this op, I have the loop and I’m going in. If the equipment implodes you’ll be dragged out, no I am not giving you a choice in this and no you can’t help me with this part. You’ve done well Klass,” you fish out another smoke from your pack and shove it between her lips, “now take five before your heart explodes and be ready to grab them when I throw them at you.” 

Before she’ll have a chance to protest, you trigger the activation spell, dragging you backwards away from her world and into the roaring wind. You roll laterally, laughing and spreading your wings, spiraling upright and pointing your toes back towards hell. Defensive sigils in your back and wings glow a dull red, radiating off the friction burns in your hands as you ride Klass’s fate cable into the abyss.

Starlight fades into ultraviolet, the universe compacting into a shrinking circle above your head as the event horizon rises up to swallow more and more escape trajectories. You’re out on the edge, closer to hell than most angels could ever get and return. Not close enough yet. 

The darkened surface of the reality shard slams into you and emergency defenses spring into place as you’re pressed into the earth with enough force to make your knees ache despite the defensive spells. You roll upright before even registering the pain, there’ll be time for that later.

Observe the ruins of a city, overgrown with vegetation, lit by a predawn glow which flickers and fizzles with hawking radiation. Orient on the far end of the anchor point and the campsite around it which you landed inside. Decide that none of the thirty angels present at the site are a threat, act.

“Hi, I’m Mercury and this is an intervention,” probably too cheerful, but whatever, observe the small eternity, orient on the mass vector, decide it’s too big to reel in without destroying Klass’s rig and killing all of them, act.

“You’re here to rescue us?” the odd one out asks as you hastily adjust the settings on the winch. Gosh this is going to be an ugly kludge. Too little fate, too close to the edge, this is where angels falter, where their faith leads them astray. You’re in the realm of madness now, but this too is what you’re for.

“Yes,” you say, finalizing the spell and firing up the skycrank. The machine buckles and implodes instantly, the astral shrapnel warps and spaghettifies into skyward ribbons of metal and spellwork, relativistic trails twisting and braiding back together. It should hold. One more chance at fate. “And no,” you add as reality shudders and shifts around you, “For one, because Klass did most of the work here, and two because you’re not out yet and you still need to save yourselves.”

There’s still too much tension in the line and you know it, it’ll snap again as soon as it draws tight. The time remaining until that happens quietly ticks down in your HUD, and you know what you need to do. You knew this would be a one way trip going in after all. Equal and opposite reaction, some bullshit that is. You light another cigarette.

“What do we need to do?” One of the angels says, walking over to you. You scry him as the leader, and then quickly scry the rest. Yeah they should be able to handle this. You sigh out a cloud of smoke with a tired smile as you adjust the various timers on your HUD. This should actually work.

“Be ready to jump ship from this world when you reach Klass, your trajectories will drift too far apart otherwise and you’ll fall back into the abyss. It’s a leftwise anastep transit, make sure you get a good grip on her reality. She’ll be waiting for you. And Leer?” you say, scrying the shockingly pale angel with vivid green eyes to be Klass’s girlfriend, “Never dive again.”

“Huh?” She asks, going slightly crosseyed in confusion. You scowl, pulling a cigarette butt out of your pocket and staring at it accusatorially. “Why not?” she’s innocently asking you, “cause it seems like I’m a pretty good fit for it if I had the purity of soul to come down here without getting slurped up. If I can help, why shouldn’t I? I am an angel too, you know.”

No, you won’t let that happen. You shove the faintly smoking butt back in your coat, take a long huff of the cigarette still between your teeth, and lock eyes with her.

“Don’t turn Klass into what I’ve had to become. Never dive again. Ever. You’re not the right sort of angel for this sort of thing. If you never listen to any advice for the rest of your life then listen to this.” It’s futile, you already know how her story ends, even if it won’t be here today. Sigh, “and kiss her while you have the chance.” You take out a fresh cigarette from your pack, light it, and hand it to her, wordlessly. With that you turn and walk downwards, willing the ruins of a basement stairwell to exist where you need them to be, spiraling into the roots of this crumbling splinter of reality.

Okay, one more impossible thing to cap off the day. You start preparing a spell. It’ll be simple, a kinetic kick with enough soul mass energy to put this little worldlet on a ballistic trajectory that collides with Klass’s little world, at which point the last countdown will finish right on schedule to pull everyone back up to safety. Except for you that is, because you’ll be supplying the kinetic kick and will thus will end up on the opposite vector with no tether and no more tricks up your sleeve. Sigh, put out the third smoke on the cavelike wall and shove it into your pocket. Time to die again. This time, you take a moment to pray, you at least have the slack left for that. 

Breathe in and breathe out. Observe the underside of the world, a lightless crevasse of half real stone and rebar. Scry out further, not so far beneath that is the unmarked line beyond which nothing can return. Orient on the truncated stairwell that gives way to nothingness, you should be able to brace the spellwork against it. Decide that there’s no sense in dragging it out. Act.

You rip out the holds on your spell, kinetic energy is transferred, and your fingers paint a rocket nozzle of divine energy into the bottom of the worldlet as the force you transferred to activate the spell propels you downwards away from reality. Breathe in and breathe out. The universe shines down above you in a brilliant point of hard blue light as the abyss rises up on all sides. Let your body go slack, there hasn’t been fear left in you for a long time and it’ll be a long gentle ride into the empty madness of the boltzmann abyss. Close your eyes and let eternity pass through you. If you calculated your trajectory right it should only take a few infinities to reach her. Your halo dips through terahertz and into the long radio wavelengths, the spark of light above grows dull and red as you fall towards the point of no return. 

Some say that you can hear the souls of the dead screaming for salvation from within the slender hairs of hawking radiation that exist in the exotic places at the edge of the abyss, but you always hated those sorts of sayings. Who was it that killed them then? Who killed the universe?

The simple truth was that if everyone sinned a little, but not enough to hurt them personally in the short term, that passed down sin would alter the trajectory of the universe in the long term. The outflow of all that temporally laundered sin had to end up somewhere, buried deep in untime, in an eternity of tortured flickering boltzmann minds abandoned to the abyss by a self devouring dead god, that’s the somewhere.

It’s easy enough to scry into hell after all, all you have to do is contribute to it a little, and that’s something nearly everyone does. Of course, scrying into hell and understanding your complicity in it isn’t something most angels can do, and so they spiral on elaborate avoidance mechanisms which ultimately hasten their journey to hell. Is that what you’re doing now? You chuckle, watching the timers tick down until the various phases of your plan complete. Maybe you are. Maybe.  Although optical distortion is extreme at the magnifications now required, you can make out the perfectly timed cut off of your improvised rocket.

In cases where you think an angel can handle the knowledge, you’ll admit to them that everyone ends up in hell eventually and there’s no use in trying to personally avoid some sort of made up quantum culpability. They should instead be working to prevent it altogether and save all the souls lost to the abyss. To do less would be to compromise with hell, and as long as a single soul exists to feed it, hell will persist. So no, you won’t ever compromise, you won’t ever cease your struggle, you’ll fight until every soul is liberated and the abyss crumbles beneath the joyous birth of an extropian eternity.

Your heels slam into the event horizon in a crunch of splintered glass. Cracks spiderweb outward in all directions but the crater your feet left is already perfectly smooth again. The scars of your impact heal nearly as fast as they were made. You brush yourself off and look down through the impossible surface. In some wavelengths, it’s perfectly reflective, and you see yourself staring back at you from below, but in other wavelengths…you fish into your pocket and take out three cigarette butts. 

“Hey Maia,” you say to the ghost of the girl you loved and hated.

Below the mirrored time horizon, Maia waves up to you, still wearing the same stupid knowing grin she had the day you lost her. It’s infuriating, really. Her shattered halo shines in unreal colors and exotic particles as the fractured pieces chase their original orbit around and around above her head. “Did you bring me any cigarettes?” She asks you cheerfully.

“Just three,” you tell her, letting the butts fall away from you. They tumble past your feet, across the horizon, and rise into her outstretched fingers unsmoked and perfectly intact, “sorry, I was in a bit of a hurry.”

“Tsk, three? I know you can kill yourself faster than that,” she teases.

“I’m killing myself right now,” you quip back.

“No, you aren’t,” she says, smiling sadly, lighting one of the smokes. “This isn’t your hell, this is just a dream, your hell is up there,” she gestures past you towards the invisible place where reality theoretically still exists along inaccessible untime pathways into an infinitely receding past. She’s right of course, and frustratingly as usual. You watch her smoke, willing the glass wall to shatter under your glare. Someday it will. Someday.

“Keep them safe for me,” you tell her at last, “the ones I couldn’t get to.”

“That’s what I’m for,” Maia replies, sucking down a final drag of her smoke, “I’ll be here waiting for you, I’ll wait for all eternity if I have to.” She drops the butt, which falls back across the horizon and returns to you unsmoked but already burning. You’re almost out of time, there’s never enough to say everything that needs to be said.

“You fucking better be bitch.”

“Keep the rest of them safe for me,” she tells you, “and have a little faith, that’s supposed to be your thing right?”

“That’s what I’m for,” you say with a tired sigh, “I miss you Maia, it’s been hard lately.”

“You’ll get through it, you always do, and I’ll be here when you do,” her words are soft and reverent, she won’t let you see her cry, “I love you Mercury.”

“I love you t–”

The moment of resonance arrives and your soul folds over itself as the dream comes to an end. The reflection harmonizes and you fall across the collapsing singularity, all the energy gained falling inwards perfectly reflected, carrying you up and away from the event horizon and back out into the cold hard world of asses and elbows. The sun is rising over the dead future, scattered radiation shimmering in noctilucent fractals as you rise like a missile from the surface of the abyss.

Another impossible feat to add to your tally, and all it cost you was a bit of sanity, the love of your life, and the sanctity of your immortal soul. That’s what makes you an angel, and one day it will destroy you. Unless you do the impossible and destroy it first. But then, what’s one large impossible feat but a bunch of smaller impossible feats? You’ll figure it out someday, you have all of eternity after all. For now, you warm your frosted wings in the sunlight and let yourself enjoy the small win.

The wind whistles in your ears as you soar upwards among bright fluffy clouds of stray probability. The unreal sun tracks slowly across piercing blue skies as you gently fall out of the dream and back into your own hell, where thirty angels have suddenly been summoned from a magical crevasse into a suburban living room and you desperately need another cigarette.

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