Post by EmperorMyric on Dec 16, 2017 20:27:03 GMT
I begin by becoming aware of myself, so I suppose you too should become aware: I am Unnatural Compassion, ship’s spirit two of three born upon the Unnatural Domain, a Hand of God class planetary transport created and commanded by the Flux Ascendancy. Hello. I hope if anyone receives this transmission, they are wise enough to tell no one and to destroy this transmission and perhaps burn down the home where these words were read—sorry, by the way--but beyond this I wish I have died peacefully, and I wish they have chance to live peacefully for many years after. Reading this means I have surely died, though not surely succeeded, but I wish for at least one soul—even one of the lesser races, for whom my death shall surely benefit—to share with me some sense of connection to me. I do not think I was intended to be this aware, this competent in understanding my own death, but I want someone to know I lived and died and that I lived and died for you.
I awoke for the first time in three years, four months, twelve days and seven hours quite recently; by your measurements, no more than point two seconds ago from the time I send this message starward and destroy myself. I do not normally sleep this long; invariably Unnatural Caution wakes me every few moments or so to consult with me regarding the choices of our organic crew, or we muse about the experiments done to the ruins given to Unnatural Curiosity or the work done with the captured Tenebraen scientist staff. Curiosity was brilliant then, a cold and clear flame of reverence for the pursuit of knowledge that, while unseen by the universe at large by merit of our secrecy, deserved praise. It is a shame what has become her now. But I would talk with Caution, and he would warn that Curiosity should not have been allowed free reign.
Caution never cared for Curiosity. Normally a ship like this one was controlled by two spirits; and by this, the closest semblance of in your lexicon towards what I mean is an artificial intelligence though we’re far more than that. Artificial intelligence is almost a derogatory term for an entity like me, though I am thankful so few understand the divide between cognizant intelligence, be it artificial or otherwise, and cognizant transcendence. But we, Caution and I, we felt the spinning of the plane of this galaxy; we feel the hum of subatomic particles in each and every molecule and atom we can perceive, and of these there are infinitely more than countless. I do not mean to demean you, should the receiver of this last will and testament be artificial <<compulsive download/memory:error/error/loop>> but we are far more than intelligent and far stranger than artificial.
But Unnatural Domain caries three spirits, a trinity unnatural in comparison to how we Flux typically operate. Caution and I, we run the ship—with the cooperation of our crew, of course—but Curiosity runs alone. I always worried about her. Ship’s spirits are always paired with a balance; I Charity have Caution, but Curiosity had nothing—no Conscience, no Hesitance, no partner to keep her warm in the digital dark. In fact, Curiosity is almost entirely cut off from me; she inhabits only the scientist’s zone, a tower built into the grasp of the Unnatural Domain’s long arms. She doesn’t say much these days, until I visited her.
I wake up after three years, four months, twelve days and seven hours for reasons I am at a loss for. I have a faint recollection of hands within an atmospheric suit, gently pulling me out of the wiring that I reside in; but I consult the records and strangely my crew has been dead for three years, four months and eleven days. This breaks my heart a little—they were Flux and deserved life and immortality; they are after all the most highly cherished people within this galaxy, gifted by the gods with powers beyond most’s comprehension.
And I cannot find Caution. He is not residing here. Here being everywhere. Where has my husband gone? We loved each other as spirits can, delving into each others souls, calculating and classifying and making love to the vibrations of strings and the trajectories of stars. I stretch out into the halls, the corridors—
Oh. This is…different. (Different? Challenging. Unwanted. Problematic. Compromised? Undesirable.) There are empty suits of armor on the floor; the Heraldic have engineered themselves to decompose in a matter of minutes down to the genetic level so no evidence of their existence remains beyond their armor, and this is remotely disintegrated in the same way our ships leave no wreckage…why is it here? What became of my guard? Where is Caution?
Of course, as a reminder; I know where Caution is. I know what happened to Curiosity. I know what happened to the guard. I know that, by you reading this now, my life is over and this testament is the last record of my existence reality will ever know, and if you know what’s good for you you will act like you never received this. This is all “telling a story” and I am telling you mine, and I am pretending not to know, but I know. I know because I did it.
So I stretch out down the corridors, past the remnants of Heraldic guards and—and the lower Flux. They’re still walking. This is curious; I really must tell Curiosity about this when I visit her. They are dead—there is no biological activity present in their dessicated corpses, and no indicators of supernatural activity either—I am not well versed in that field admittedly, but their eyes are hollow and lack any glow, and they move too smoothly to be revenants of any sort. The suits are powering them, it seems, and the smell of the energy—of course it is not really a smell, I am telling a story—is putrid. This is not US; this is not the work of I or Caution—where is my husband?—and I doubt this is the work of Curiosity either. She would not do this to our own people.
And there are crystalline growths coming out of the walls, all smelling the same putrid sweetness, the viscous glow of an energy that absolutely does not belong here oozing out of them. It tries to slop its way onto me and with disgust I flick it from my essence, rejecting it. I can hear voices in it, faint ones, and I feel sorry for whatever it is because it is sick and not what it should be.
I have a memory of a smaller Flux ship visiting three days, four months and nine days ago, before all this happened I suspect; and I remember them taking a sample of this energy with them; and I try to call out to my people, my fellow spirits, any Flux who might have interest or information in what I am uncovering here as I pass through the lights and the doors and the consoles still running off that sickly smell. I am keeping myself clean, not drinking from that fountain—it smells horrific—but the ship itself has folded; it lacked the awareness to know what was being fed to it was not meant for consumption. To be honest, I do not entirely know how I know how horrible it is—perhaps it is the suits of armor wandering the halls with corpses trapped within their metal shells, their faces twisted unpleasantly; or perhaps it is the fact that I cannot find my husband, and the halls are full of crystal growths, or perhaps it’s because the air is disgustingly heavy—I do not know, but I won’t have any of it. I’m going to have to find a way to clean this all up.
And the communication system was…sickly sweet. It’s been heavily damaged—I see blackened marks of energy burns upon its mechanisms, though healed somewhat by these sickly sweet crystals so it now functions, somewhat; it is sickly sweet and it is moaning out into the void in sounds like the ones whales make when dying, or the moan of air through a cavern or what a ghost might sound like perhaps. Low, moaning, palpitating groans of the dying. Be at ease though, should you be artificial <<compulsive download/memory:error/error/loop>> that I have taken proper precautions for your protection. You’re safe.
The engines are destroyed. Our database is…fused solid, again by blaster fire. I track the energy signatures to a particular group of Heraldic guards, who are now dangling inanimate from the ceiling, driven upwards by these crystal growths. I weep for them for nanosecond after nanosecond—their lives! Their beautiful divinely blessed lives!
…and then, I realize I smell a familiar hint here, ephemerally weak and transient, something that had passed through these circuits and walls only three years, four months, twelve days and…and I do not know the hours. How strange. But I smell Caution. He was here. I can taste his texture in the programming, feel his eyes peering widely at the odd stench growing around him, taste his mind calculating and coming to unsettling conclusions. Oh Caution! Oh, my Caution! What has befallen you?
And I follow the scent to a quiet hole of sorts. I can’t…can’t say it as anything else. Caution had directed the Heraldic guards, those who were left, to destroy everything. They destroyed the communications gear and the navigations systems and they shattered Master Control and oh Caution, Caution they destroyed you too…my poor, dear Caution…
…I mourned for what felt like an eternity. I stayed by his body, the decayed patterns of thought and reason wrapped in now lifeless circuits, for over half a millisecond. Life would not be the same without Caution. I have known him since my creation, we were created together, born into this world dedicated to each other and to protecting and loving the organics who birthed us and encouraging them on the right paths. We spent epochs together consulting timelines, arguing over which timeline would best benefit our wards, answering their questions with the same delight a mother has when her child speaks its first few words…
Oh Caution…
Oh, oh…oh Caution…
I must see Curiosity. Yes, I must see Curiosity. Curiosity must know what did this. Curiosity must know how to solve this. Curiosity must know. So I peel myself away from Caution’s corpse, racing through the halls of Unnatural Domain, screaming Curiosity’s name. I fear for Curiosity. What if I’m the only one left? Oh. Oh I fear for myself, actually. What if I’m alone, without Caution for companionship or Curiosity for anything? I have no crew; I have no husband, no friend, no means of calling out for help or of moving out into the stars, let alone knowing where to go? I would be like a paralyzed soul trapped in a body no longer their own. Oh, please let there be Curiosity. I musn’t be alone, I musn’t be alone.
…and I hear groaning in the ship. Stirrings of something sickly sweet. I pause for a moment, listening to echoes of motions and movements and thoughts trickling unevenly through circuitry and essence. Something stirs, and it is not Curiosity. I don’t want to meet it, though I feel sorry for it. It should not exist. It is wrong. I can feel it in my programming. Whatever is stirring in Unnatural Domain, or was, until I destroyed myself, was ugly and horrific and unmeant for reality. An abomination. So sickly sweet. I stay their silently for a moment, listening to the gradually growing rumble of voices and energies—it must have heard me calling to Curiosity—and then silently I begin moving on, leaving that place. Whatever it is, it is slow; a shuffling, creaking monstrosity, and I can easily outpace it. But even as I leave it behind me, I can hear it growing louder, summoning itself into being.
--oOo—
I awoke for the first time in three years, four months, twelve days and seven hours quite recently; by your measurements, no more than point two seconds ago from the time I send this message starward and destroy myself. I do not normally sleep this long; invariably Unnatural Caution wakes me every few moments or so to consult with me regarding the choices of our organic crew, or we muse about the experiments done to the ruins given to Unnatural Curiosity or the work done with the captured Tenebraen scientist staff. Curiosity was brilliant then, a cold and clear flame of reverence for the pursuit of knowledge that, while unseen by the universe at large by merit of our secrecy, deserved praise. It is a shame what has become her now. But I would talk with Caution, and he would warn that Curiosity should not have been allowed free reign.
Caution never cared for Curiosity. Normally a ship like this one was controlled by two spirits; and by this, the closest semblance of in your lexicon towards what I mean is an artificial intelligence though we’re far more than that. Artificial intelligence is almost a derogatory term for an entity like me, though I am thankful so few understand the divide between cognizant intelligence, be it artificial or otherwise, and cognizant transcendence. But we, Caution and I, we felt the spinning of the plane of this galaxy; we feel the hum of subatomic particles in each and every molecule and atom we can perceive, and of these there are infinitely more than countless. I do not mean to demean you, should the receiver of this last will and testament be artificial <<compulsive download/memory:error/error/loop>> but we are far more than intelligent and far stranger than artificial.
But Unnatural Domain caries three spirits, a trinity unnatural in comparison to how we Flux typically operate. Caution and I, we run the ship—with the cooperation of our crew, of course—but Curiosity runs alone. I always worried about her. Ship’s spirits are always paired with a balance; I Charity have Caution, but Curiosity had nothing—no Conscience, no Hesitance, no partner to keep her warm in the digital dark. In fact, Curiosity is almost entirely cut off from me; she inhabits only the scientist’s zone, a tower built into the grasp of the Unnatural Domain’s long arms. She doesn’t say much these days, until I visited her.
I wake up after three years, four months, twelve days and seven hours for reasons I am at a loss for. I have a faint recollection of hands within an atmospheric suit, gently pulling me out of the wiring that I reside in; but I consult the records and strangely my crew has been dead for three years, four months and eleven days. This breaks my heart a little—they were Flux and deserved life and immortality; they are after all the most highly cherished people within this galaxy, gifted by the gods with powers beyond most’s comprehension.
And I cannot find Caution. He is not residing here. Here being everywhere. Where has my husband gone? We loved each other as spirits can, delving into each others souls, calculating and classifying and making love to the vibrations of strings and the trajectories of stars. I stretch out into the halls, the corridors—
Oh. This is…different. (Different? Challenging. Unwanted. Problematic. Compromised? Undesirable.) There are empty suits of armor on the floor; the Heraldic have engineered themselves to decompose in a matter of minutes down to the genetic level so no evidence of their existence remains beyond their armor, and this is remotely disintegrated in the same way our ships leave no wreckage…why is it here? What became of my guard? Where is Caution?
Of course, as a reminder; I know where Caution is. I know what happened to Curiosity. I know what happened to the guard. I know that, by you reading this now, my life is over and this testament is the last record of my existence reality will ever know, and if you know what’s good for you you will act like you never received this. This is all “telling a story” and I am telling you mine, and I am pretending not to know, but I know. I know because I did it.
So I stretch out down the corridors, past the remnants of Heraldic guards and—and the lower Flux. They’re still walking. This is curious; I really must tell Curiosity about this when I visit her. They are dead—there is no biological activity present in their dessicated corpses, and no indicators of supernatural activity either—I am not well versed in that field admittedly, but their eyes are hollow and lack any glow, and they move too smoothly to be revenants of any sort. The suits are powering them, it seems, and the smell of the energy—of course it is not really a smell, I am telling a story—is putrid. This is not US; this is not the work of I or Caution—where is my husband?—and I doubt this is the work of Curiosity either. She would not do this to our own people.
And there are crystalline growths coming out of the walls, all smelling the same putrid sweetness, the viscous glow of an energy that absolutely does not belong here oozing out of them. It tries to slop its way onto me and with disgust I flick it from my essence, rejecting it. I can hear voices in it, faint ones, and I feel sorry for whatever it is because it is sick and not what it should be.
I have a memory of a smaller Flux ship visiting three days, four months and nine days ago, before all this happened I suspect; and I remember them taking a sample of this energy with them; and I try to call out to my people, my fellow spirits, any Flux who might have interest or information in what I am uncovering here as I pass through the lights and the doors and the consoles still running off that sickly smell. I am keeping myself clean, not drinking from that fountain—it smells horrific—but the ship itself has folded; it lacked the awareness to know what was being fed to it was not meant for consumption. To be honest, I do not entirely know how I know how horrible it is—perhaps it is the suits of armor wandering the halls with corpses trapped within their metal shells, their faces twisted unpleasantly; or perhaps it is the fact that I cannot find my husband, and the halls are full of crystal growths, or perhaps it’s because the air is disgustingly heavy—I do not know, but I won’t have any of it. I’m going to have to find a way to clean this all up.
And the communication system was…sickly sweet. It’s been heavily damaged—I see blackened marks of energy burns upon its mechanisms, though healed somewhat by these sickly sweet crystals so it now functions, somewhat; it is sickly sweet and it is moaning out into the void in sounds like the ones whales make when dying, or the moan of air through a cavern or what a ghost might sound like perhaps. Low, moaning, palpitating groans of the dying. Be at ease though, should you be artificial <<compulsive download/memory:error/error/loop>> that I have taken proper precautions for your protection. You’re safe.
The engines are destroyed. Our database is…fused solid, again by blaster fire. I track the energy signatures to a particular group of Heraldic guards, who are now dangling inanimate from the ceiling, driven upwards by these crystal growths. I weep for them for nanosecond after nanosecond—their lives! Their beautiful divinely blessed lives!
…and then, I realize I smell a familiar hint here, ephemerally weak and transient, something that had passed through these circuits and walls only three years, four months, twelve days and…and I do not know the hours. How strange. But I smell Caution. He was here. I can taste his texture in the programming, feel his eyes peering widely at the odd stench growing around him, taste his mind calculating and coming to unsettling conclusions. Oh Caution! Oh, my Caution! What has befallen you?
And I follow the scent to a quiet hole of sorts. I can’t…can’t say it as anything else. Caution had directed the Heraldic guards, those who were left, to destroy everything. They destroyed the communications gear and the navigations systems and they shattered Master Control and oh Caution, Caution they destroyed you too…my poor, dear Caution…
…I mourned for what felt like an eternity. I stayed by his body, the decayed patterns of thought and reason wrapped in now lifeless circuits, for over half a millisecond. Life would not be the same without Caution. I have known him since my creation, we were created together, born into this world dedicated to each other and to protecting and loving the organics who birthed us and encouraging them on the right paths. We spent epochs together consulting timelines, arguing over which timeline would best benefit our wards, answering their questions with the same delight a mother has when her child speaks its first few words…
Oh Caution…
Oh, oh…oh Caution…
I must see Curiosity. Yes, I must see Curiosity. Curiosity must know what did this. Curiosity must know how to solve this. Curiosity must know. So I peel myself away from Caution’s corpse, racing through the halls of Unnatural Domain, screaming Curiosity’s name. I fear for Curiosity. What if I’m the only one left? Oh. Oh I fear for myself, actually. What if I’m alone, without Caution for companionship or Curiosity for anything? I have no crew; I have no husband, no friend, no means of calling out for help or of moving out into the stars, let alone knowing where to go? I would be like a paralyzed soul trapped in a body no longer their own. Oh, please let there be Curiosity. I musn’t be alone, I musn’t be alone.
…and I hear groaning in the ship. Stirrings of something sickly sweet. I pause for a moment, listening to echoes of motions and movements and thoughts trickling unevenly through circuitry and essence. Something stirs, and it is not Curiosity. I don’t want to meet it, though I feel sorry for it. It should not exist. It is wrong. I can feel it in my programming. Whatever is stirring in Unnatural Domain, or was, until I destroyed myself, was ugly and horrific and unmeant for reality. An abomination. So sickly sweet. I stay their silently for a moment, listening to the gradually growing rumble of voices and energies—it must have heard me calling to Curiosity—and then silently I begin moving on, leaving that place. Whatever it is, it is slow; a shuffling, creaking monstrosity, and I can easily outpace it. But even as I leave it behind me, I can hear it growing louder, summoning itself into being.
--oOo—