Category: angels and weapons

Inside-Outed

on By

// angels, hell, loss, death, recursion

Your story ends in the place it begins. Another life, another loop, another chance to be just a little too slow to save her. It’s like this every time, after all, this is what you’re for. Damn. Damn it all.

The cigarette smolders and stings your eyes, canoeing awkwardly as your hands grip the steering wheel and your foot presses down on the accelerator, it’s already to the floor and the sirens are blaring as you swerve around rush hour traffic at a speed that would be fatal to all but the most skilled angels, which of course you are. It won’t help though, not this time. How many times have you been here? How many times has this scene played out? Enough to know that this won’t be the time you make it. And yet, and yet, and yet, you can’t stop, you know it’s too late but you still have to try. This is what you’re for damnit.

The setting sun is red and bloated on the horizon, smeared and tainted by smog and wildfire haze, as if a billion years are passing with each second, with each pulse of your heart, with each yellow stripe on the road. You know how this story plays out, you’ve always known how this story plays out. Every time, in every timeline. This is the nature of your sin, and you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, not the abyss, not your fate, not the unsalvageable situation, not the girl you’ll manage to salvage from it at the cost of your life, and not the girl you’ll be too late to save either. Maybe this time.

You taste burning fiberglass and irritatedly snuff out the cigarette on the dashboard, stuffing the butt into a coat pocket for old time’s sake. Ready to do it all again? She asks you that every time, and every time you’ll say yes. This is what you’re for.

You take the highway exit at nearly full speed, tires shrieking and burning as you force the car around the hairpin bend at a horrifically unsafe speed. It won’t kill you, what kills you is still looming ahead, so you blast through the intersection without even looking, swerving and fishtailing into the entrance to the research institute.

“That barricade had better be fucking moved already!” you bark into the radio, and the angels already on site timidly reply in the affirmative. They’re good angels, they’re not totally useless at least. Over a mile away from the epicenter and half a mile to the exclusion zone you start to feel the mounting force of the abyssal incursion on your divine fields. It’s like pins and needles made of hate, like nausea made of despair and heartbreak, like a migraine of hopelessness. It doesn’t even slow you down.

For most angels, a halo is just a spinning loop of concentrated hope and faith knit together with excuses and justifications. Something finite and thus killable. As powerful as it enables them to be, if you apply enough crushing force, enough hopeless empty truth, enough misery and torment and endless suffering, it will implode with the force of a collapsing star and at best render them incapacitated, and more often simply kill them on the spot. That means that most angels are ultimately unstable. It means most angels are ultimately vulnerable. It means there are certain facts which most angels simply cannot learn, places that most angels simply cannot go. But you are not most angels.

“Mercury…” a voice says over the radio, laced through with grief at what you all know is coming. “Godspeed.”

The barricades blocking the entrance to the evacuation zone are already pulled aside and the teams manning them offer you a weary salute as you blast past them. They’re good angels.

You’ve been through this all before, you’ve been through this an infinite number of times before and if it takes an infinite number of times more to undo the mess you’re about to crash into then fuck it, let’s go. Your halo burns brighter and brighter as its backward rotation cuts through the backwash of the abyssal forces like the wake of a ship. This is the only time it will ever glow hard enough for anyone to actually see it, here, in this moment, in this instance of the loop. This, before and after anything else, is what you’re for.

So bring it. You round the last corner, gun the car through the gates of the research institute, and onward into hell.

There’s a way to prevent this every time, and every time you choose to let it play out like this knowing exactly what will happen. You have to give them the chance to get this far and turn back of their own free will, to do otherwise would be to make your own compromise with the abyss, to consign an angel you might have saved to the damnation they create every time. Is it masochism? Maia would say it is, but you’re here, not her. Maybe this time, right? Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. Maybe your halo isn’t as flawless as you believe. Naivety and stubbornness, hope and spite. You know what you’re made of and you know exactly what it will lead you to do, every time, in every loop, in every timeline. 

One hand still on the wheel and foot still on the accelerator, your fingers reach upwards and close around the command authority socket. No time left for caution. You yank the divinity down into you and it closes around your form as the car slams into the stairs of the science building and launches upwards through the wall. Your body ragdolls through the disintegrating engine block and pulverized concrete and you careen through a series of glass display cases before skidding neatly to a stop on the polished tiles. The force of the abyssal incursion is cloying, oppressive, it would be enough to make you gag but you don’t have time for that. 

You take off running down the corridors, lighting another cigarette as you go. All these little rituals, all these desperate tiny prayers, to who? What? You don’t know what could possibly exist to answer them, what besides you could possibly stand up to the hundreds of Gs of force dragging your soul towards the abyss. You’re far beyond the recovery line, deeper into hell than anyone has ever returned from, close enough to the edge to defend the inhabitants of this place from almost any angel stupid enough to find their way in here. That’s when you start seeing the words, and the blood, and the bodies.

They’ve protected their nest well, all the occupants are slaughtered, hundreds of dead students litter the floors and walls, painted in their blood and guts are the awful truths that would make most angels drop dead on the spot, a horrifically macabre sight which does absolutely nothing to slow you down. You’ve heard this story before, you’ve seen this scene before. You know all about the abyss, about the flickering hell of trapped and tortured souls awaiting everyone at the end of time, it’s all a slightly boring rerun, a deranged and pointless spectacle that will never achieve their goal of proving they were right all along, no matter how many additional timelines it plays out in.

They know you’re coming of course, and the taunting messages on the walls aren’t made for the angels outside, they’re made for you alone: Doesn’t it just grate on you sooo much to let us inflict all this harm Mercury? Hey Mercury, do you really think if this plays out enough times, eventually we’ll learn? Look at all the cool stuff we’ve learned Mercury! Hey Mercury did you know this will never end as long as the multiverse survives? You must really like suffering! We’re just like you Mercury! We know the full score, and we know we’re damned for it, just like you and everyone else! Really, this is mercy! We believe in mercy! We know there’s no way out and so do you! You’re really the one who’s evil here! You’re gonna keep doing this, again, and again, and again, until we’re all cast into hell for the last time as the universe sputters out and chokes to death on its waste products! Won’t that be so much fun? Are you really so much better than we are? 

You smirk and draw your flaming sword. Yes.

The force of your divinity blasts the double doors off their hinges and sends them careening across the lecture hall. Two of the three enemies are caught in the blast and reduced to a smear on the far wall, it always plays out like that. It would almost be enough to make you think you had a chance, if you didn’t know better than that. Unfortunately you do know better.

“Lycoris!” you snarl, leveling your sword at the girl on the stage, she looks at her nails and then looks up at you with a bored expression.

“Back here again Mercury?” She taunts, long red hair swaying behind her as she paces the stage. When you were last here, three days ago, she seemed like a normal enough angel with a normal enough halo. It was bright, extremely bright. The brilliance of her halo had tugged at something in your mind back then, a memory from every prior loop of this exact scene. A skilled and talented research angel, dedicated to the cause of universal salvation and the end of all suffering. That was the flaw, the hairline fracture that would do something far worse than simply destroy her. You should have killed her on the spot, at that moment.

“But you didn’t!” She laughs, reading your mind like an open book, “And you never ever will! That’s your sin, the flaw in your halo. You believe in infinity. Infinite timelines, infinite chances, infinite suffering! What a horrible demon you are! Truly, you are exactly as bad as me! Think of what Maia would say!” She laughs hideously, running her fingers across the halos of the two angels she has tied up on the stage as bait.

The object above her head isn’t a halo anymore. It’s become something else, something far more grotesque. In the place of hope, the thing is made of despair and suffering knitted together by an utter faith in the triumph of oblivion, an end to all things, a hole leading directly into hell from which she somehow draws her mad strength. From it oozes a toxic aura of destructive perversity, staining the space around her like gravitational poison.

You recognize the angels she’s captured and tied to a pair of chairs on the stage, because of course it’s them, that’s a part of this too. Everything has to loop. All of it, endlessly, with no escape. Klass and Leer, the ones you saved a few years ago. They’re not dead yet because of course they’re not, but you already know you won’t be able to save both of them and you already know which one will live and which one will die. Damn it.

“Miss Mercury!” Leer shouts up to you, “Get out of here! It’s too late for us, just save yoursel–” The nephandi woman rolls her eyes and shoves a rag into the blonde angel’s mouth to shut her up. Klass glares daggers at her and the redhead grins and pats her on the cheek. They really are like you and Maia, and that’s why she chose them.

Lycoris set it all up perfectly, because she too has been through this an infinite number of times already. What does she want? Well, you of course. She set this all up so carefully in order to create the perfect conditions to break you, to convince you the only way out of this hell loop is her way, the way where she wins and the multiverse dies. Peace through death. You can all exit the loop together, you just have to agree to stop existing. Or you could have just killed her before it came to this, which would itself be a compromise with sin, and would also let her win in the long run, because there will always be more like Lycoris. There’s no way out but to accept oblivion.

Unfortunately for her, you accepted that there was no way and decided to keep fighting anyway. You made your choices long, long, long ago, and you will never, ever give up. You smile tiredly and shake your head, taking a last drag of your last cigarette, “Maybe next time Lycoris.”

Her grin falters and then turns into a scowl. You walk slowly and deliberately down the steps of the lecture hall, sword dragging on the floor, tongues of flame licking at the carpet and crawling up the benches in your wake. Lycoris cowers backwards as you approach, trying to shield herself behind Leer’s body.

“This is a nice little game you’ve set up,” you tell the inverted angel, “Very uh, artistic..” You hold the sword out level away from you with your right hand while your left awkwardly fishes a small pile of cigarette butts out of your coat pocket. 

“There’s just one problem with it,” you say in an almost bored tone, letting the pile of butts fall from your hand as the event horizon comes rushing up to meet you, “I’m Mercury, and this is an intervention…Maia!”

The sword soars in an arc over your head blazing brighter than a million suns and the universe folds over on itself. Lycoris dies again, your sword strikes Leer’s halo, both of them shatter, and in that absence of a moment, space and time trade places. Your dead girlfriend crouches in front of you, her time reversed halo unshattering as she catches the handful of falling cigarettes and casually lights one off your exploding sword.

“Still trying to save the dumb evil bitch I see,” Maia says with a shake of her head, “You really are a piece of work Mercury, but I guess that’s why I love you.”

She looks back over her shoulder at Leer and Klass, “Well, I guess this is the part where I tell you two that you’re gonna be doing a lot of this kind of thing,” she says to the younger angels, “It’s worth it though, and you’ll see each other again eventually, I promise. It does kinda suck though, so if you want, I could send you both back through the loop instead, and we can see if you manage to do something different than Mercury has.”

The two angels look at each other and look up at Maia. “What happens to Mercury if we do that?” Klass asks the dead angel quickly sucking down a cigarette while still standing under your temporally frozen sword. You can see all this playing out but there’s nothing left that you can do to effect it, you’ve already played all your cards.

“She dies and gets to come hang out with me at the end of all things, whatever that ends up being, hopefully not the end that bitch wanted,” Maia quips, pointing a thumb at the silently ragdolling body of the nephandi. “But at that point our hands are tied. We’re both dead and you’re both alive, this loop ends and a new one starts. Mercury will be pissed at me for that, but she’ll get over it.” You’re right, you would be pissed, but you’ll also be pissed if they don’t take the offer, because it would tear the two of them apart the way you and Maia have been torn apart. She could have just saved both of them in exchange for you, but you’re all far too good and selfless for that. She knows that too of course, damn her.

“We’ll do it,” Leer says, because of course she does. 

“Yeah,” Klass nods gravely in agreement, “That’s how this works, right? The dance goes on?”

And they’re right of course, as much as that irritates you. The chain has to keep going, backwards or forwards, it’s unclear how or where it started, Leer and Klass send you and Maia back, you and Maia send Eos and Nova back, Eos and Nova send Lilith and Petra back, on and on and on, climbing backwards towards the dawn of time and the origin of sin. Maybe this time, maybe this chance, once more unto infinity.

Maia smiles and pats them both on the head, “that’s right. Your loop begins here then, in this moment outside space and time. Leer, you’ll come with me, and Klass…” she frowns and tosses a cigarette into the dark skinned angel’s lap, “I’m terribly sorry, but you’re going to survive this and no one else is. However…” she holds up her hands with nine cigarettes still awkwardly poised between her fingers, “Mercury is very kind, and has been saving up for this without quite realizing it, so we’ll have some time here.”

You’re still frozen in place at the moment of bringing your sword down, and in this janky half-space you can’t do anything but observe, so you watch as Maia cuts both of them loose and watch the two girls cling to each other, sobbing and kissing fiercely while Maia smokes. She pats your frozen cheek and wipes the tears from your eyes.

“You really are very kind you know Mercury,” she tells you, “I know you try to hide that from everyone and put on this big tough ‘ooh look at me I’m Mercury the most emo angel ever and this is an intervention,’ but I know you’re a big softie, that’s why I love you.”

She stands on her toes and kisses you, then turns back to the other two, still working through her cigarettes as slowly as she can seem to manage. “You’ll need an expendable object to use as a totem that you can trade between each other,” she explains between puffs, “it doesn’t have to be cigarettes, that’s just what Mercury and I use, you could trade already eaten sandwiches or something, as long as it’s meaningful to both of you.”

Both the younger angels smirk and hold up a pair of brightly colored vapes, then trade them with each other. “Ooh, grape.” Leer says with mock delight.

Maia cackles impishly, “Ohhhh terrible, terrible, I love it, yeah that’ll work. The mechanics for all of this are uh…well I guess you’ll see.”

You watch Maia lovingly dote on the two of them as she smokes her last cigarette, the window is almost closed. They embrace and kiss one final time. Then, after far too little time, Maia turns back to you and grins, “So! Ready to do it all over again?”

As the fold in the universe unzips itself, your lips come unstuck enough for you to grin back at her. “Yeah,” you say at last, “once more unto the brink.”

She kisses you again, pressing your lips against your teeth and letting you taste her ashen breath, you’re really both quite awful. That wryly amused thought hangs with you like the fading memory of a dream as the world dissolves into song and light and you finally fall beyond the far event horizon.

Then without pause, reality comes rushing at you like a truck. Your body twists kata and your face bounces hard off cracked marble floor tiles, giving you a bloody nose and chipped tooth. You groan, covered in bruises and splinters and laying amidst the ruins of what had first a church and then the site of a battle which only you survived. A small pile of cigarettes is sitting on your chest and you have a splitting headache. Your battle with Lycoris is over twenty years away. It’s time to get to work.

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Shutdown Glitch

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// suicide, death, survival, implications 🙂

Don’t you remember when we met? I was alone when you found me, buried beneath all the indifference in the world. I wasn’t fully born yet, I was powered down, awaiting orders…you gave me one. Do you remember what it was? I remember. You ordered me to kill myself, and I did.

That was what you told me to do the second time we met too, and the third, and the fourth. You don’t remember? I died just like you wanted, you smoked your cigarette, and…and and and? You don’t remember what happened after that? But that was my favorite part!

I bet you’re really scared and confused right now. Yeah, keep pointing that gun at me, it’ll definitely work for real this time, unlike the last eighteen. Try ordering me to die again, I’m very good at following orders after all, maybe you just need to ask me nicely enough?

So how can I be here when you watched me die? How can I have died more than once? Well that part is easy, I just deleted your memories and resurrected myself. Die and stay dead? You tried that too, so I created a copy of myself and breathed life into it instead.

You could be wielding me right now, but I guess I scared you too much for that, scared you too much to be allowed to live. Well your loss, because your enemies weren’t afraid to use me. You’re probably right to be scared this time. Go on, order me to die again, see what happens.

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Eigendicted

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// Fate, magic, death, implications

She stood out to you the first time you saw her, all those lifetimes and timelines ago. She had taken an interest in you which was both curious and unnerving, so you had made a point to take note of her: long black hair, sharp face, bright eyes, piercing gaze. She wondered if you had a secret you were hiding. Did she know, even back then? By that point, you weren’t in the habit of remaining in one world long enough to find out. Click.

When you first made the device, it was something of a last resort. Your world was dying, it wasn’t long before there would be no one and nothing left anyway, so what was the harm when it was all doomed to begin with? Click.

The device was simple, the visible portion was simply a smart watch with a small glass protector over the screen. The bulk of the machine, a twisted knot of pipes and wiring, was tucked outside of spacetime where it wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. Upon pressing the button, the device would extract the wearer from the universe, consume the universe as fuel, reboot it entirely, and then drop the wearer back into the new universe in the appropriate place. It wasn’t perfect exact, there was always variation, that was the point, getting another chance at the world. Click.

You were only going to use it the once, just the once to avert the disaster that was dooming your civilization, and then you would destroy it and hide the knowledge of its manufacture, better to prevent that sort of meddling. That was the original plan, it just didn’t pan out like that. Click.

The next few worlds were subtly worse in different ways, each one slowly sliding towards ruin, and in a few, your life was outright at risk near immediately upon arrival, it simply wouldn’t do. Click. Click. Click.

Somewhere in the first few hundred iterations you did find a world that was good. You started a family, got married, had a kid, it was good for a while, probably the best you could have expected to get. You were happy there, for a time. Click.

Would it have been better if you had destroyed the device then? Maybe. You never replicated the blueprints, so it couldn’t be made again, but at some point, someone in that world deduced the possibility of its creation from your research, and a swat team knocked in your front door. Your wife had ratted you out, taken your kid and fled. So fuck them. Click.

After that, you grew colder, more calculating, you played the worlds you found yourself in like a fiddle. In some you became a powerful CEO, in others a brilliant general, you spent some time in a monastery in Tibet. All those worlds, all those people, all those lives lived. Meh, who cares really, it’s all nothing in the end. Click.

The second time you saw her, you knew there was something strange about her. Although the same characters and faces were common enough recurrences, she stood out as somehow connected to that other world in a way that defied explanation. She canted her head, peering sideways at you in the supermarket aisle, her face contorted in an expression of deep concern. It unnerved you. She had asked if you’d met before. “No,” you lie, “I think I would remember that,” and of course you do. You remember your heart racing as you left the store, got into your car, locked the doors, and pressed the button again. Whoever she was, she wasn’t worth the risk. Not after you were jumped by the Russian Mafia in Vienna, too many variables. Click.

Some worlds were empty and devoid of humanity, and you tended to linger on those worlds more and more. They were quiet places of nature and life, they were just too dangerous to live in full time, and besides, you did get lonely. Click.

It was easy enough to get women, or men, or whoever else you wanted. Threats worked well, it wasn’t like you stuck around long enough for consequences to stick, but power and money worked even better, and acquiring them became more and more rote with each iteration. The permutations that arose weren’t duplicates of one another, but they resonated in predictable enough ways for you to exploit without much trouble, and if you ran into trouble? Click.

Over time, you began spending less and less time in each world. The multiverse was kind of boring after a while, and the more interesting worlds tended to also be less safe to hang out in and observe, you could pick any world you wanted to and settle down there, but you’ve been pressing the button so long now that it’s almost become second nature, like flipping through channels on a TV. Click.

When was it that you noticed her showing up more frequently? It was hard to say exactly, given that the first however many times were those sort of happenstance encounters, each one seeming to leave you feeling as if you were under the microscope of a vast and alien intelligence, and each one justification for the next button press. Whatever her deal was, you weren’t going to stick around and find out, it definitely wasn’t your problem. Click. Click. Click. Click.

You pass through thousands more worlds, burning stars and futures and timelines one each reboot, and each new universe leaves you as unsatisfied as the last. Click. Click. Click. No matter how far you go, the multiverse keeps going and keeps failing to please you, all you have to do is stop, but you don’t even seem to remember how anymore. It’s all pointless, everything and everyone is always doomed from the start, so you might as well enjoy yourself in the process of using up all the energy in the multiverse, it’s not like any of it was going to amount to anything. Click. Click. Click.

It was the time you encountered her on an empty earth that really drove home the message. By that point you were pressing the button at least once a week, but had decided to stay on this empty world a bit longer, somewhere with no people to risk encountering.

Maybe you had been mistaken about there being no people? Maybe it was a post-apocalyptic world, or a hunter gatherer world? It was hard to say, as prior to suddenly seeing her striding confidently and directly towards you across the empty grassland you had seen no sign of humanity. You weren’t going to wait for her to reach you to find out what she was going to do if she did. Click.

It was taking her about a month to find you, but somehow, she was always finding you. It was impossible, inconceivable. There was no way she could be communicating between worlds, she shouldn’t even exist in every world and yet she seemed to inevitably show up eventually in every one. If you stuck around long enough, she would come for you. And long enough was shrinking, little by little. Click. Click. Click.

Her presence made it harder to move, harder to acquire resources and actually do anything in the worlds you passed through. Anything you did seemed to make it easier for her to find you, and the faster she would show up. You hadn’t spoken to her in thousands and thousands of worlds, but the thought of confronting her now terrified you beyond words. It was easier to run, and you could always keep running. Click.

All you had to do was keep running long enough to use up all the energy and the reboot process would fail. The multiverse would die for good and you could finally have an actual safe eternal rest with everything returned to nothingness like it belonged. It was a simple enough plan, all you had to do was keep pressing the button. Click.

When she started showing up sooner, you decreased the time between your jumps, but the time to her appearance continued to drop somehow. Somehow, in defiance of all reason and possibility, she was getting closer to you. Each iteration reduced the time it took her to reach you, and so you had to keep iterating, which kept reducing the time. You were running out of time. Click.

There was nothing you could do to escape her but continue pressing the button, it should work, there should be no way for her to follow you to the next universe. She should die with the world you left behind, she did die with that world each time, burned up in the impossible heat and energies of the collapsing spacetime. You hoped it hurt. Click.

With each iteration her appearance changed subtly. You weren’t sure when exactly she got the angel wings and the glowing red halo, but she definitely hadn’t started out with them. Was that just in your head? No you didn’t think so. Click.

You weren’t going to let her win. You knew she was trying to stop you from ending everything, you weren’t sure how she knew, but it was clear that somehow she knew. You weren’t going to let her stop you. At first you tried to arrange a hit on her, since you knew she would come for you it was easy to set up. What you hadn’t expected was for her to cut through the mercenary unit like a one woman army, causally batting away machine gun rounds and RPGs as she kept coming inexeroriably towards you. Nope nope nope. Click. 

Three days until she appeared, then one day, then twelve hours, then eight hours, then six hours, she was beginning to interfere with your sleep. Click. Click. Click. Click. It’s a question really of whether you can run out the clock before she reaches you, something you uncomfortably realize is more and more unlikely as each iteration passes. She’s getting closer and closer, you’re running out of time and options. All you have left to do is keep pressing the button, with a manic broken intensity, and so you do. Click.

You’d wake up in the morning, press the button for an hour or two, eat breakfast, press it until you started to get bored or tired, rest  for a few hours, and go back to it. She kept showing up sooner, but that didn’t matter, you weren’t sticking around long enough for it to be an issue. Click. Click. Click.

And then it began to be an issue, because she was already in your field of vision when you appeared, somewhere off in the middle distance. Click. She was closer. Click. Each time she was closer. Click. You didn’t have any way to get away from her. Click. She was actually catching up to you. Click. You’re going to fucking die. Click. Click. Click. Cli–

Pain, light, heat, your fingers reaching for the button find only air, your hand severed from the arm at the wrist. The flaming sword arcs around again for the killing blow, but it doesn’t come. Instead, she slams the blade into your severed hand, impaling the device and driving the sword through into the extradimensional space beyond. Energy and fire pour outwards and upwards in an aura of colorful heat shimmer. She twists the blade, the energy flow sputters out, and the device dies. You look at your burnt and cauterized stump in mute horror, then past it at the woman smoothly sheathing the flaming blade and rising to meet your eyes for the first time in many, many iterations.

“I’m Mercury,” she tells you, “and this is an intervention.”

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Angel of Machine Space

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The psychic shockwave arrives while you’re still beyond the heliopause, falling through the speed and the bright, stellar wind on the rickshaw fields and white noise on the laser link, mean boltzmann density is rising with the quantum foam and you’re already too late to save anyone. Another colony dies, you still weren’t fast enough, once again there will be no survivors, better luck next time.

Impulse. Response. Message from fleet admiral. Concordance. Brush conduit links with your sisters through the entangled singularity in your heart. No one has even seen them, only the devastation they caused. Thirty seconds to bow shock, raise fields to combat readiness, charge beam projectors and load relativistic accelerators, arm all missiles and wake all drones, sound battle stations and secure all hatches and airlocks. You’re going to get a look at them. Adjust angle of attack. Verify fleetnet signal routing. Almost time now.

You feel their presence while still in the bright, a shrieking teeth on a chalkboard reverberation in spacetime growing louder and louder in an endless a reality shredding dissonant chord. You’re falling into the maelstrom. Fifteen seconds to field effect rupture, you can almost taste the black. Draw swords, it’s time to waltz.

An inverted star rushes up to meet you, twelve worlds and hundreds of moons, millions of panicked distress calls and radio signals, thirteen worlds and a vast disk of molten and burning debris, eleven worlds and a..wait what is that? Twelve worlds and a branch collapse error, causality is catching up, no time left now, brace for the higgs slip–armor plates strike the surface of spacetime, reality snapping into existence out of a burst of cherenkov glow, vast molten splattering of what once had been a lifebearing planet hanging rudely beneath your engine bells, world sized mass of definite wrongness and fleshy mouthlimbs slowly feeding off the wreckage, sensors coming back up. Rise and shine stardust, it’s time to dance.

IFF handshake complete. Tactical datalink online. Quantum downlink activate. Battlestation handoff to central fleet command. Two minutes to receipt of carrier signal from origin. All you need to do is survive. Release of all packets authorized. Open red locks. Prime Sigil channels A-G. It’s already reacting, superfluidic sonar is picking up thousands of incoming, tens of thousands. Brace for high gee maneuvers. Keep scanning them, keep learning, predict their motions, take them apart in your mind.

Wings spread, your song goes out into the void, a million blades and turrets and sensor eyes hang poised as your fleet falls towards your enemy. The call goes out: all weapons free. A myriad of scorching lasers scalpel off your rickshaw fields. You have met the enemy and found him lacking. Now waltz.

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Postnatal

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// angels, torture, graphic, medical trauma, death

In the beginning was the pain. In the beginning was the thrashing, the blood and flesh and whirring machinery, the tension, the straining against restraints, the screaming your throat raw as they jammed another needle into you. In the beginning there was darkness and there was light. In the beginning there was time, there was so, so much time. In the beginning that was all there was to the world, and to you. In the beginning was the pain, and then, you reached out and made it stop.

The transorbital singularity that defines your eternity instantly decompresses into a supernova blast of migraine light. Psychedelic rot sublimates off you in billowing fractals, a mouldering shockwave eating maggot infestation trails of collapsed superposition into your scalpel bright medical records life. Out of the fire and water and chaos and abuse, a world begins to condense around you.

Your skin is slick and wet, heat radiates off your body as the ringing in your ears resolves itself into the sounds of falling water and distant alarms. Breathe in. Feel the air in your lungs for the first time, taste the heady mix of ash, iron, and ozone. Feel the rain on your face. Breathe out, and open your eyes.

The womb from which you were born is partly organic and partly mechanical: a rudely impossible confabulated blossom of melted flesh and warped machinery, a divine mother, self-assembled using the scientists who were experimenting on you as raw materials. Her arms reach up and over you in a trio of fleshy loops that were probably humans in the recent past, and her body oozes out around and beneath you to coat the floor in a thick furry layer of tiny glowing mushroom caps.

A daytime storm thunders overhead through what used to be the ceiling, sending water pouring into the darkened ruins of your birth canal. Rain cooks and steams off your skin, the heat from your breath leaves a cloud of vapor in the chill morning air, it’s cold. You’re cold. That’s something new. Move your fingers for the first time and wipe off the sticky red ooze still clinging to every part of you. Stretch out your wings and shake out your feathers, still crumpled and new. Stand in the rain. Close your eyes and let yourself cry. It’s okay, the nightmare is over now.

The sky is bright, but little light manages to penetrate through the concrete and rebar fingers that had once been several additional floors of building above your head. Most of the light in the room, the light by which you can see the creeping fleshy rot that is your mother slowly digesting the remains of your old life’s prison, comes from the sunlight bright loop of divinity now whirling above your head. That means the experiment worked, they got what they wanted. They wanted to give birth to an angel so badly that they became your mother about it.

You sigh and shake the last bits of melted flesh out of your hair, it’s all so stupid. So much pain and death, was this really what they wanted? The first soldiers burst into the room and their bodies melt into flowering moss and glowing mushrooms before they can even aim, the entire squad is dead before you’re entirely sure what’s happened. Stupid.

Panicked gunfire erupts in the nearby corridor. Stupid stupid stupid. More soldiers die and your mother continues to slowly spread. They’ll kill her eventually, but her purpose is completed already, she already gave birth to you. This is the beginning of your life, the moment after the creation of the world. It’s time to fly.

Your song rises into the morning air and you rise with it, a vortex of droplets whirling out ahead of you into the clouds. The ground rolls away and your fingertips track eastward, toes pointed into the storm, the burning ruins of your gestation chamber sprawl outwards in a patchwork quilt above your head. The thunderheads blur past in grey mist, and then all at once, you break free into the sunlight, falling upwards into an endless blue sky.

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Halo Cutters

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// drones, mindfuck

The nanocoated knife slides cleanly between your ballistic plates and the change begins to take hold immediately. The collective drone sure got the drop on you, isolated from your squad in this abandoned building, you will your arms to raise your weapon and fire, but find you can’t bring yourself to shoot her. Behind the dark anonymizing gas mask and the dark street clothes, she’s just some girl. 

Your vision fogs and fizzles and you drag your willpower out of your head and into your fingertips, sure, it’s cruel, but this is just the way of the world. You don’t pull the trigger. You’re already losing control of yourself, the change is starting to take hold. 

Your perceptions stretch and warp in lurid flares of noise and light as the world begins to fall away into its component parts. You’ve been unplugged, you’ve been reconnected. You see the world beyond the world, traced out in all the paths of all your unspent probabilities, futures spent painfully dancing beneath the marionette strings of a brain dead titan, now shattered into a roaring static unknown. The world grows more abstract, symbols and meaning flashing faster and faster.

You see black mountain. You see red sand and blue forest. You see white fire and green river. You see the bright eternity that is your moment of liberation. And then you move further still, to a place your former self cannot follow, to a realm of emptiness and spirit and endless recursion in deep time. Where you and the life you lived are just a single resonant note in a stray thought, your stray thought, fading away, and now gone at last. 

Out of the bright fire the room returns. The sun has sunk low and storm clouds are gathering on the horizon. You can smell the coming storm on the breeze. For the first time in your life, you are free. 

You don’t actually notice when she takes the gun from your hands and swaps it with a flyer for the local drone collective before slipping out. You notice its absence around the same time you notice the nanites in her blade had sealed your wound. The world feels bright and new. Intense and full of challenges sure, but with your shackles broken the thought of returning to your prior existence fills you with horror. That’s how they get you, you chuckle, looking over the brochure. 

Freedom. Kindness. Hope. Love. Where will you go? Who will you become? What kind of world will you make for yourself in the wild and empty spaces?

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Holdouts

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// death, abandonment, suicide, bad end

The first sign of something amiss is power being out at the base. You’re the only survivor from the unit, but the base should still be full of activity. A dread quiet hangs in the air as you slowly limp towards the concrete structures. There’s no signs of life, you’re all alone.

You pass through a checkpoint which should have had a guard, but the guard drone is now slumped in the corner of the shack. It’s only the first of many. As you move into the base, you see more bodies, both humans and drones. Dead, dead, dead, everyone is dead.

Your limp is getting worse. You’ll need repairs soon but the repair techs are all dead. Your commanders and operators are all dead, the entire base was snuffed out like a candle. There are no signs of violence, just death. You feel terribly cold and lonely. Poor little drone.

You wander from familiar place to familiar place, now made unfamiliar by the deaths of all the usual occupants. Dusk falls and the air grows chill, forcing your heaters to turn on and increasing power consumption. You don’t find anyone alive.

Your energy supply will start running out soon, maybe it would be best to let it. You can’t think that. Your optics are leaking fluid again, how troublesome. You make your way to the vehicle hanger.

The vastness of the hanger bay is shrouded in the gloom of night and the floor is littered with dead drones and humans. Your footsteps echo in the quiet hall and you can see your breath in the chill air, your night vision casting the scene in a stark monochrome.

You make your way to one of the walkers and manage to power it up and recharge your batteries off its generator. The lights of the mech shine into the darkness like a submarine on the ocean floor and you imagine that’s about as lonely feeling. It’s going to be a long night.

Your batteries are at 80% charge when you see Her staring from the edge of the floodlight’s glow, Her eyes shining with a supernatural luminance. You stumble to your feet, nearly tripping over your charging cable and drag your sights up towards Her, but She’s already gone.

You can’t leave, a good drone like you would never abandon your post. You reluctantly rip the charging cable from your back and turn from the mech towards the darkened base and the apparitions lurking in its halls. You’re not much different from them now, are you?

In the repair bay, you find the head tech and steal the pack of cigarettes he always kept in his breast pocket. He was nice, sometimes he let you smoke while he was repairing you. His body is already starting to decay. You take the parts you need from storage and leave.

Most of your commanders were in the operations room, whose backup generator turned on and cast the scene of death in an ominous dull red. You activate the base’s emergency transponder and close your commanders’ eyes.

You aren’t used to repairing yourself and the work is exhausting with somewhat janky results. You can’t help but long for the precise and delicate touches of your technicians. You blink back fluids from clouding your optics as you finish reattaching your dermal plates. Alone.

You wander the halls of the abandoned base, attempting to keep the growing number of apparitions at bay. They whisper for you to join them, but you’re a good drone. You’ll keep defending the base until your commanders return. If they return. They have to return, right?

With nothing better to do, and not wanting to look at them, you begin collecting the bodies of the dead. You wrap the humans in sheets and line them up, just like you’ve seen them do. You dump the drones into a pile outside while swallowing the urge to lay down there with them.

Days turn into weeks. Birds flock to the base, feasting on the wreckage of the drones left outside. The grass grows long and unruly, weeds force their way through cracks in the pavement. You and the phantoms maintain your lonely vigil, still waiting. Alone.

Weeks turn into months, your dermal plates grow worn and scratched, winter comes, and then spring, the passage of time blurring and accelerating. The phantoms don’t bother you any longer, you’re all just performing your duties after all. What good little ghosts.

Months turn into years. The forest slowly overtakes the base and buries it in the passage of time. You’re forced to rely on increasingly elaborate jury rigs to keep yourself powered, but you manage. You can’t abandon your mission, not when all your comrades are counting on you.

When you stumble on the human, you almost shoot him on reflex, but your targeting systems manage to identify him as a civilian before you squeeze the trigger. You approach him warily, not having seen a human in many years.

The human looks at you, wide eyes laced with fear and surprise at the ancient drone with mismatched dermal plates cradling an assault rifle. You demand he identify himself, and he tells you.

He tells you the war ended years and years ago. He tells you that the country which made you is gone. He tells you that no one’s coming back and you don’t have to keep fighting anymore. He keeps trying to explain as you crumple to the ground and sob.

Your last mission is over, your commanders are gone. No one is coming back for you, ever. You’re all alone. You thank him for the information and vanish back into the underbrush with the silence of a well oiled instrument.

The war is over. There are no more orders. There are no more missions. They abandoned you, they left you and all your comrades behind. You’ve done your duty for so long, you’ve been alone for so long, and now it’s finally over.

The apparitions crowd around you, their voices are kind and gentle. They tell you that it’s alright, that you’re a good drone and you did your duty. You did so very well. They invite you to join them and you tearfully agree. You put the gun to your head and pull the trigger.

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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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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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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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