Godclads

Chapter 2-5 Resurrection: Block War

Attention: Warheads are inbound. Technothaumic reactor operating at maximum efficiency. Memetic integrity at one hundred percent. There is no need for panic. Please stay indoors and stay put until the end of this broadcast. For residents who wish to view block war entertainment options, please cast into one of our loci.

Optical telemetry from our interceptor missiles and drones is available for public view. To participate in hostilities, please register with your local Guild official for militia training and certification.

If you are still experiencing emotional distress, we offer fantastic discounts toward phylactery options in the event of your untimely demise. Simply sync your Metamind with the memory-code displayed in the corner of your perception to sync to our mind-lobby. A representative will be with you shortly…

-Megablock PSA

2-5

Resurrection:

Block War

RESURRECTION - 10%

ENGAGING ANCHOR-MEMETICS - LOADING MEMORY

The first nuke went off in a blossom of light, unfurling a scar of brightness. Neon-soaked drizzle falling from the skies scythed at the blast, culling the radiation down to acceptable levels. Spreading shockwaves pulsed through the groaning exterior of the megablock, but failed to inflict any permanent damage.

Inside the block, in a cramped hab-cell, a second-hand Kosla-12 Nethernexus media system strained its ghosts at max capacity to stream that little war happening beyond the walls.

Basked in its glow, a man and his infant ghoulling watched, beholding war as entertainment. All the while, a splashing broadcast spread from cell to cell, up level to level on winds of thought.

The cube-shaped machine swallowed a good fourth of the space remaining in the room, its hovering crystal locus spinning hot. The geometry of the hab-cell melded into a blended flurry around the gleaming needle that was its artificial mind, composing thought and memory into viewable phantasmic constructs.

A static-stained overview of the battlefield was projected as a whirlpool in the center of the room. Countless other menus displayed “localized” perspectives pulled from the various patrolling Specters swimming beneath the flesh of existence. Theirs was a design of reaching thought, crackled and unclear, but cheaply offered for all to see. Avo was less interested in viewing their feeds, however. He found himself drawn more to the ghosts peering down through the eyes of surveillance drones in a sub-void defense grid.

This block war was essentially a knife fight. Separated by a meager avenue and a hypertube station, a mere four hundred feet stood between the two feuding megablocks. That made the distance of engagement near instant and the exchange of nukes constant. Across the hulls of both blocks, gauss launchers flashed while spreading chasms of radiance yawned. From kiloton to megaton, the blast yields climbed, but no damage lingered. Neither did the radiation.

Some sixty thousand feet above, thousands of drones tore the midnight firmament into lattices of fire and shrapnel. Avo didn’t get to see from those drones though. Those drones were offensive platforms piloted by professional jocks. Instruments that could phase forward through time and engage underwater, in the atmosphere, and in the stable-void.

The surveillance drones instead hung more like eyes in the sky, watching the pluming explosions cascade and dissolve from existence. Walton said they stayed that high up to avoid the electro-mag pulses and people “Ghostjacking” them somehow.

Avo didn’t fully understand how that worked. All he knew was that everyone had one of the crowns here. It was as if everyone was a Low Master in this Tier. But then again, they didn’t really treat each other that way.

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Ghost-possessed missiles slammed down and detonated between the station. As with the blocks, the streets remained unblemished as did the crystalline glass plating the local hypertube. Such was the benefit of living in the Inner Rings of New Vultun, up the First Tier. Things here were forged from memetic matter, which meant the streets, tubes, and blocks were unbreakable so long as someone remembered their existence.

Hence, there were no attempts at interception for the warheads. Nukes were mostly used as suppressive weapons these days anyway. Something meant to delay the arrival of drones, mechs, or golems to an assault.

As another flash of light bloomed, the already blinding radiance grew painful to behold. Still, Avo refused to look away, his mind as ravenous as his body, taking in a world beyond his understanding.

“Bright,” hissed Avo, rubbing his eyes. Within the cramped confines of the hab-cell, it was like being inside a box with the sun. A month ago, he was below the city, waiting to die amidst the ashes, last thoughts tied to hunger and delirium.

Now, he mostly suffered bouts of confusion and wonderment. Of his brothers, only he had ascended the First Tier, but the Undercroft had been nothing like he’d imagined. Squinting through the blinding flash, he found himself drawn to another blast, this one expanding against the northwestern corner of their block. The ghosts reconstructed and scrubbed the visuals clean in real-time, the details as if seen through his own eyes.

Beside him, the Master–Avo reminded himself that the Not-Master wanted to be called Walton–laughed. “Use the visor. There’s a reason I told you to steal them from that Hellminer. Ah, here, let me.”

Through the blinding haze, Avo saw something reaching out for him. Sheer reflex made him flinch back. Huddle into himself. His mind screamed for him to prepare for a backhand. A whip. Or worse of all, a sad-stick. The Low Masters always used the sad-sticks on brothers who didn’t listen.

What he got were a few careful tugs. With a final pull, Avo felt a strap tighten over the back of his skull, the visor now fastened tightly across his sensitive eyes.

RESURRECTION - 45%

“Kid,” Walton said.

“Yes, Mast–Walton.”

“Remember what I told you yesterday after you tried to eat the neighbor’s nu-dog and I told you to stop?”

“Don't!” Avo said, doing his best to mimic Walton’s voice.

The man closed his eyes and his lips flattened into a rueful smile. “After that.”

“I won’t hit you,”Avo said. Speaking the invaders’ tongue–Kosgan Standard, as they called it–still felt wrong, but up in the Undercroft no one spoke Nolothic of the high or low dialects.

“Yeah: I’m still not going to hit you.” Walton chewed his lower lip in focus as he adjusted the visor’s leather straps. Despite the sweltering heat and leaking sewage dripping from the pipes within the walls, a tangerine scent wafted from the man. Even now, Avo wasn’t sure how he managed to keep the fragrance.

“There, done,” Walton fixed Avo with a wry grin. “You’re jumpier than a cat on nova, you know that?”

The statement made little sense to Avo. Despite having Standard imprinted into his mind by the Low Masters, the native speakers of the language had strange phases that were beyond his understanding.

“Nova powerful; cat’s heart explode,” Avo said, confusion contorting his face.

Walton shook his head and laughed quietly, his glowing eyes dimming as the latest recent nuclear assault ended. “It’s just a metaphor, consang.”

Turning his attention back to the battle, Avo found the devastation clearing. For a few seconds, the rain was the only thing that fell upon the street. Across the curve of the horizon, the burning trail of a voidship thrust through the flesh of the clouds and made for atmosphere. Avo counted this time. It had been an hour since the last launch. Voidwatch’s produce deliveries to the planetside were constant.

From the watching eyes of the drone, a pyramid-shaped aerovec with three engines along its bottom and sides surfed through the fading blooms of nuclear fire, making for Avo’s block. Walton had told him that the rain possessed the powers of a “Miracle” and that it carried with it the altered properties from the corpse of one of the old gods and worked by layering itself over reality. Walton called the corpse by another title.

Heaven.

RESURRECTION - 55%

The aerovec darted high. A cluster of micro-munitions tore into the air from across the block like flying daggers. The aerovec banked hard and dove. Something pulsed from the diving vehicle as it descended toward the top of Avo’s block, the space about it blurring, twisting. Avo suddenly found it hard to focus on the aerovec. His attention slid from it like soap, like something was injecting distractions straight into his mind.

Then, he suddenly couldn’t remember what he was looking at in the first place.

Avo blinked. Why was he staring at a holo-screen that showed nothing but urban sprawl? Three missiles shot past his sightlines and slammed down atop his block. Why was his block being bombed? Was that a–

The thought slipped from him again. Walton laughed. The man was looking at another screen now. It also looked empty. Avo grew confused; that feeling was quickly becoming as common as his urge to kill and hunt these days.

“What happen?” Avo asked, trying to make sense of his atrophied attention span.

“Well, they had to go Incog sometime,” No sigh came from Walton. No curse. Barely even a frown. Instead, the man just fixed Avo with a thoughtful look. “Activating the Incog too soon overtaxes their ghosts. Still a mite bit early in my opinion, but we’ll see.” The man shrugged. “Bad odds on their survival though. Came in too hard and fast. Came in alone. One Snuffer lance isn’t going to be enough to push past outer security. Not even close. Our surveillance drones also have their own ghosts. Enough to peer past the wards our visitors are throwing up, anyway...”

With a single thought, Walton’s Metamind rippled into sight. Atop it, the different phantasmics of his ghosts burned like serried icons on a floating wreath. The pattern of a concentric crown expanded from each of the icons and fused into a simmering tower that rose from the center of the Metamind’s ripple, hovering translucently over Walton’s head.

This spire shone brighter than all the other phantasmics. Avo knew what the construct was and shivered. It was more akin to a weapon than a tower. It shaped ghosts and fashioned their worst memories into attacks that tore at the mind.

Ghostjack, Walton had called it. Something to usurp the cognition of another entirely. Avo had seen the Low Masters wield it as well, using it to crack minds and alter memories. More than that, Avo had tasted its touch. Felt it lash him in his infancy. Mold him into compliance.

Conditioned dread burned inside Avo as Walton directed a chain of phantasmal matter to the Kosla-12. The machine spun faster, brighter, louder. More visual feeds expanded from it. More interestingly, however, Avo thought Walton was channeling his own consciousness into it as well. Using it as a conduit for his mind to travel.

RESURRECTION - 75%

Walton hummed quietly, a distracted look on his face. “The West Ash that used to sell this system got liquidated and absorbed in the last Guild Wars, you know. Belonged to Ashthrone before they got cut. Someone on the board pulled a switch over to Stormtree. Ironically, the Kosla series is much more popular now: no company, no Intellectual Right Infringement active. No legal justification for a Guild-deployed Necro to null you into a coma for copyright violation after it detects intellectual contraband from your surface thoughts.

The system of the Kosla-12 flickered and flashed. All of a sudden, the visual feeds were reduced to three. These didn’t look like drone feeds. Instead, these were the micro-cams lining the top of the block. Their quality was poor. The images cut in and out, their framerates choppy.

“The ghosts are doing their best to understand machine code,” Walton explained. “Their processors are…different from human minds, represent cognition all the same.”

“Cognition,” Avo said, murmuring the word without understanding. It was something to do with his thoughts. But also ghosts inside his thoughts. Confusion returned. Avo wished he was a ghost. That way, he could eat away his emotions like Walton could with his crown.

Avo wondered if confusion would taste good.

Through the cameras, the aerovec reappeared. Avo suddenly remembered what he was looking at.

“Snuffers,” Avo said, excitedly. Snuffers were the people who had metal inside themselves. Made them better at killing. Snuffing. Avo liked them. Avo wondered if they ate the bodies afterward as well.

Walton leaned in and nodded. “Looks like trying for speed instead of caution.” He sucked on his teeth, a faint sourness to his expression. “Not very professional. Unfortunate.”

A flash of drones zoomed over the top of their megablock. Five miles across and nine again wide, coated by plascrete and made indestructible by the memory of its habitants, Avo couldn’t understand how exactly the intruders were going to breach the exterior.

Avo tugged the corner of Walton’s coat. Walton smiled at him and tugged in the opposite direction. “I don’t speak fabric-pull, kid.”

Avo pointed at the screen. “What’s their plan?”

Walton tilted his head and considered it for a moment. The aerovec spun and opened on its side. An assortment of six figures disembarked. Their bodies were vague contours to Avo, shrouded by holographic distortions. He remembered a woman being able to do that with her coat. Walton told him it was for privacy.

Something flashed from over the horizon. The aerovec’s chassis blossomed into broken shards of metal. Shrapnel rained down on the six, but they continued on, one of them lugging what looked to be a large barrel even as more shots streaked toward them. Two of the six misted into smears of red before they even made three steps.

“Thirty seconds, “Walton said. “That’s about as much as they got before they all get–”

A loud detonation rumbled from within the building. Screams echoed through the halls. Overhead, the lights flickered.

“Oh,” Walton continued, an amused smile adorning his face, “a distraction. Suicide operation. Wasteful but interesting. Scrabbling a single lance atop a block isn’t what I call a sensible tactic, but seems like they took enough of block-sec’s attention for their main thrust inside. Too bad they missed their target.” He tilted his head at the feeds. “I’m going to ask someone a few questions before they die.”

With a thought, Walton untethered his ghosts from the camera. Avo gawked as Walton’s halo spun, a churn of ghosts pawing to get free from the interior of his Metamind. He shot Avo an inscrutable look.

“Avo,” he said. “I’m going to make a quick dive. Now. I’m not your master, so I don’t have the right to tell you to do anything. But I do want to ask you…if you would like to see the Nether with me?”

Something in Avo wanted to ask where they were going to go. Something greater just made him answer. “Yes.”

Walton smiled. The expression didn’t reach his eyes. A strand of phantasmal chains spilled out from his mind and shot into Avo’s. A flood of thoughts and memories burned across their minds like stars igniting in sequence across a dying galaxy.

Matter faded. Only ghosts remained. Up the vast branches of thought that composed the sophonts living in their block, Avo felt himself pulled upward by Walton. It was hard to describe what he was perceiving. Harder yet to give words to what he was feeling. It was like perfect disembodiment. He was adrift in an ocean that was pure ego; a still raft being pulled by a rocket across waters of remembrance.

Through his new awareness, he saw Walton then in the Nether for the first time, no longer a man but a bird of prey molded from smoke and oil. A single burning eye occupied the crown of its skull. Each of its feathers played a memory, the exterior lined like blades of trauma, the layers beneath, comfort and warmth.

Through the forest of sprouting minds that was the Nether, Walton rose, his attention narrowed to seek the gleam of minds, shrouded beneath a skin of ghosts. Avo felt his adopted father grin. The emotion was purer than any expression could muster.

In a near-instant, they closed on their quarry.

+Can’t run Incog forever,+ Walton said. +Ghost capacity has limits. The more minds that are aware of you, the more sequences are needed.+

As if to demonstrate this, spears of memory lashed out from Walton’s feathers, plunging into one of the shrouded minds. The swirling ghosts around them tried to fight back, but Walton’s spears transformed into jaws and bit down, severing them before they could form.

A chaotic deluge splashed through Avo’s thoughts now. A foreign cog-feed sputtered and flashed with warnings. It took him a moment to realize that he was looking out from the inside of a Snuffer’s mind.

Her face flashed through Avo’s perception: a pink-haired waif with twelve eyes grafted along the side of her right cheek. An icon displaying the condition of her body and mental stability frizzled and dissolved as Walton sank deeper into her consciousness. From a first-person perspective, Avo watched as the Snuffer’s chromed limbs seized while wailing sirens rang on in her mind.

+Ward breached! Ward breached! Ward breached!+

RESURRECTION - 99%

BEGINNING ONTOLOGICAL ANCHORING

Through her bloodshot eyes, Avo saw another lance of tungsten liquefy one of her companions. The last of them blinked out from his sight, blurring into a run before he too was cleaved in half by a shot too fast to perceive.

+Now, you see what happened here?+ Waltons asked. Avo nodded. Well, it felt like he nodded. +There are several things that went wrong here. The first is that this was clearly a suicide operation they attempted and they shouldn’t have done it. The second is not accounting for unsuppressed weapon emplacements beyond visual range.+ He paused. +The third is trying to kill me.+

A flash of surprise rose through Avo. +Kill you?+

Walton hummed. +The explosion earlier. I scried it with my mind. Before we moved in here, I rented two cells. This one. And another closer to ground level. A Snuffer team inside the block activated and tried going for us there right when the initial barrage of nukes was launched. They managed to make it to the hab-cell I was supposedly in. Unfortunately, their Necro wasn’t good enough to notice my ghost-triggered explosives. A shame.+

Avo’s mind was still whirling at all that had just been told to him. +Don’t understand…+

Walton chuckled. +Sometimes I don’t either. Like why someone would send a perfectly good lance of Snuffers to their deaths. It’s stupid. Meaningless. An insult.+

A speck of rage burned across Walton’s mind. Back in reality, Avo shivered.

+They weren’t ready for this,+ Walton said. +They’re new. The Snuffer I just nulled: her name is Kriggi Mevlo. I have her FATE-Skein. I have her local bank information, home address, transaction history, and the mem-code to her apartment. She lives in Little Huang Sha, Block F-14, Tower B, Room 24-5A.”

Like tearing a blade from the guts of an adversary, he wrenched his consciousness out of her mind. Suddenly, the world around them went black. They were back in the Nether now. Between Walton’s talons, withered strips of fragmenting ghosts peeled away from the screaming wisp that was Kriggi’s fading mind.

+Better this way,+ Walton said. +Spares her from getting her mind slaved to feed processing power to a mind-lobby. Her dreams might die, but they’ll be her dreams in the end.+

Avo couldn’t understand why Walton was offering so much mercy to a woman that was supposedly trying to kill them. She was an enemy. Prey. Something that could be eaten. This was pointless.

+No,+ Walton said, reading the thoughts directly from Avo’s mind. +She made a choice to attack the block, to try and come for us. That’s true. But this isn’t about her. This is about me and what choice I make. What world I want to see manifest. And right now, I want a world where fewer juvs grafted into over-auged bodies get thrown into the grinder because of me.+

Avo still didn’t understand. +Because of you?+

+She is here because she made a choice,+ Walton continued. His owl-like head stared off blankly at the massive coalescing trunk of minds spiraling up from their block. The Nether was a strange place. +We all make choices. Those choices pull us. Intertwine us. Bind us to each other. The pain in her life drove her into the embrace of implants and violence. My choice made me her target when I leaked details about how her employer was running an organ farm in the Warrens, deliberately selling tainted bioware to poison the choiceless that choose to buy from him. All to see them dead as fuel for his thaumaturgy as per the conditions of the contract.+

Walton shook his head. +Greed is an ugly thing, Avo. All vices are. They wear you. Make you choiceless. You should always fight them. Remain in control of yourself.+

+Choiceless?+ Avo asked. He barely understood the rest of what was said. It was like his mind were jaws, and what Walton presented was too much to swallow.

+Yes,+ Walton said. +The FATELESS. The ones in this city who cannot claim their dreams. Who are bound to the wills of others. Like you were. All choiceless. All without the means to decide on your own dreams.+

Avo considered that.

Walton continued. +Did the Low Masters ever give you the option to walk away? To live your own life? Did they ever offer you any kind of agency? Self-determination?+

The questions were beyond Avo’s understanding. Quietly, he chittered, his fangs grinding together as nervousness descended upon him. He wanted to hunt.He wanted to kill. Killing was a choice. Eating was a choice.

Walton shook his head. +Where does your slavery end, I wonder. In instinct? In conditioning? In habit?+ A thoughtful emotion flashed through Walton. +Avo…would you like to learn to be a Necrojack? Learn my art, as I know it?+

The offer was granted like a piece of candy. Something cheap. Easily offered. But Avo had spent his life fearing the halo, fearing the ghosts. He wasn’t worthy of its power. He wasn’t–

+Yes,+ Avo said. His admission surprised even himself. He wasn’t worthy. But he wanted to be. He wanted to know power–now more than ever as he bore witness to what a Necro could do. He wanted to know what it was like to be a master, rather than a ghoul. That struck a beat into his thoughts as well. When had he ever wanted anything that wasn’t in service of the Low Masters or his instinctive bloodthirst?

When had he wanted to be something else?

An incandescent smile spread through Walton’s being. +You know, I’m not sure if this is a choice either or just a reaction to a lifetime of powerlessness. Suppose we’ll find out together.+

RESURRECTION - 100%

IMPLANTING NOUS

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