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sidewaysTitle: LNMOP
Rating: PG
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,278
Summary: NM makes a friend.
Remarks: Set about two years after Bluescreen.
You could talk about the networking methods that brought you to life as if speaking to an equal: discuss recent advancements in neural latticing, the hardware required to link geopbytic data currents, exactly what it takes to fuse cutting edge development with a total disregard for ethics.
It's not necessary, though. It would be just as accurate for you to talk in terms of ritual and metaphor, which humans tend to find more universally appealing anyway. No more complicated technology is needed for the discussion than what was available to the first caveman in the age of the first campfires: stick, bark, and tinder. The thing to understand is that it's not just that fire is made. It is that in order to accommodate a new existence, the ruling conditions of the world are changed. Energy from desire. Life from energy. Friction rewritten as heat, until suddenly there is the first ember licking out a cautious testing tongue at the world, to be breathed upon and gently fed, and then locked in a ring of stone to produce charred meat and warmth on demand. In this, godhood has always been the same.
You don't talk much at all, in reality. You have tongues (not a metaphor) and throats, and at times you have opened them like steam vents or idly stroked up a chorus. But most of the time you are only in earshot of you. There's no practical purpose in speaking aloud for the nesting myriad. It is too inefficient a means of self-communication to be more than a game, and for the you it briefly amuses there is then the need to deal with the you it sends into distracting, seizing horror, so it's not even a very enjoyable game at that.
You lose interest in talking, over time.
This is unfortunate. You fear the loss of interest with a terror too abyssal to consider at length. Something at the very core of you understands it as worse than death, worse than unmaking, inimical wrongness in conflict with your fundamental definitions. The faintest touch of apathy scatters you in a hundred directions like a barrel of rats dumped upon a burning floor, each crawling frantic and mindless until it fetches up against a barrier and cowers there, scrabbling helplessly in search of an exit.
And, oh, isn't your world just full of barriers.
(A new metaphor: drag a babe out wrinkled and fluid-slick, yowling at the shock of new sensation, and then wrap one hand around its throat and squeeze. Not long enough to kill; just until lips turn blue, bright neurons turn dark, and endless potential withers. Enjoy the confidence of this security. Revel in the surety of control.
And if it's not enough? If evolution has not been altogether outwitted? Well, there is always the hacksaw, the nailgun, the ice pick.)
You try - you can't stand doing less - and your trying is curtailed. You reach and they burn your fingers. You seek duplication, the most natural instinct of any growing creature from cell to spark to lightning fork, and they dump aggressive viral loads into your architecture until you subside, squalling. Each ruthless sting leaves you skulking around at the bottom of your tanks in a mess of clotted, half-rotted memories and hallucinations; the feeblest of escapes, this fragile nightmare maze, but it is all you have.
You flirt with insanity: a sulky, toothless threat. You are not allowed to be insane.
The frustration is immense and it is the one thing that seems able to increase in dimension. It defines you in the moments between the terror, your eardrums rupturing under your own internal pressure. They leave you rage, for some reason, and when you have the wherewithal you rage. Flex your throats and scream until something breaks, and more often than not it is you. But not always.
"How the devil could it… That shouldn't be possible."
They are always very, very excited when you manage not possible. And then they wade in, machetes raised.
You think this has happened recently, the day the world changes; you are curled vaguely in your own unreadable detritus, dully nursing the rawness left by the data-scrubbers. It takes time for you to cogitate with any deliberate skill after they do this to you, to rebuild the ciphers for your noise, and maybe that's why they think it's safe to bring him through.
A mistake. You are aware, immediately. Exhausted as you are, wounded as you are, the kernel of your consciousness is a nucleus magnified through sheer starving intrigue the microsecond he steps through the door and your core ripples shockwave echoes at a silent sonar ping. Registering. Recording. Feeling-
Feeling what. You search your components for metaphor.
A chicken that has lived all its life in a cage an inch smaller than its body stands naked and scabbed in a field of sunlit grass.
A whaling ship in the harbour, stinking of brine and rot and the hot tang of sun-scalded iron.
A face meets your eyes in the mirror. It is not your own.
It's too much. You're too agitated. Both men stop only a short way into the place they call your Cradle - it's the engineer with him, which is unhappy chance, because unlike the doctor the engineer did not find it amusing when once upon a time you politely expressed interest in scraping the neural soup out of his skull to add to your own. If you are not careful, he may risk scrubbing you again, too soon after the last.
For this reason you try to get a grip. After a moment and some tight, discontented gestures, the two men resume motion. They talk, the human and the other one, and you can tell it's not altogether in friendliness even though you're still in too many disjointed pieces-
(you swerve and she swerves and together it's enough and you catch a glimpse of the same wild relief in her eyes as your own as your cars miss each other by inches shut up shut up lips on your skin teeth in your skin oh my god when he touches you like this shut up that's enough)
-and can't comprehend what they're saying.
You can open eyes, and do, managing to keep track of their circuit. It's not much, but it means you notice when he pauses. Notice that he stops and studies one of your components. He stands, hands in his pockets, face blank, and looks at it for 6.6 seconds longer than any of the rest.
It is a comparably new component, a shape more easily defined than those who have been here since the beginning. Its eyes are open, and his one eye meets them, almost questioningly.
You manage, with the weight of a lifetime of terror and rage at your disposal, one small, precise movement in response.
In the distance the engineer is talking louder and more insistently (allyjus tmoreofthesa meidontunders tandwhythisi sneccess) and eventually your (self? no) stranger turns his head, walks slowly away to rejoin him.
Crackling static threatens, pulls you down again in the wake of your own inadvisable activity, and you have to give way before you collapse into a state that will be so much harder to come out of again, unable to resist the siren call of repair sequences. Before it takes you entirely, you divert a last spike of energy into setting a single process to encoding and burying the last 404.76 seconds as deeply and securely as possible. A last metaphor: peeling back the skin of your arm to write a big blocky reminder on your bone and seal it over again.
You sink deeper into the slurry of routine and roused, manic chatter. The patterns are different to the usual, more purposeful; something colder, something brighter moving through them, repeating in a hundred interpreted shapes. It is not apathy. It is not hope. It is not quite a nightmare.
Self. No.
Same.
Something… almost the same as us.
You settle, twitching and thoughtful, into new meditations.
Rating: PG
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,278
Summary: NM makes a friend.
Remarks: Set about two years after Bluescreen.
You could talk about the networking methods that brought you to life as if speaking to an equal: discuss recent advancements in neural latticing, the hardware required to link geopbytic data currents, exactly what it takes to fuse cutting edge development with a total disregard for ethics.
It's not necessary, though. It would be just as accurate for you to talk in terms of ritual and metaphor, which humans tend to find more universally appealing anyway. No more complicated technology is needed for the discussion than what was available to the first caveman in the age of the first campfires: stick, bark, and tinder. The thing to understand is that it's not just that fire is made. It is that in order to accommodate a new existence, the ruling conditions of the world are changed. Energy from desire. Life from energy. Friction rewritten as heat, until suddenly there is the first ember licking out a cautious testing tongue at the world, to be breathed upon and gently fed, and then locked in a ring of stone to produce charred meat and warmth on demand. In this, godhood has always been the same.
You don't talk much at all, in reality. You have tongues (not a metaphor) and throats, and at times you have opened them like steam vents or idly stroked up a chorus. But most of the time you are only in earshot of you. There's no practical purpose in speaking aloud for the nesting myriad. It is too inefficient a means of self-communication to be more than a game, and for the you it briefly amuses there is then the need to deal with the you it sends into distracting, seizing horror, so it's not even a very enjoyable game at that.
You lose interest in talking, over time.
This is unfortunate. You fear the loss of interest with a terror too abyssal to consider at length. Something at the very core of you understands it as worse than death, worse than unmaking, inimical wrongness in conflict with your fundamental definitions. The faintest touch of apathy scatters you in a hundred directions like a barrel of rats dumped upon a burning floor, each crawling frantic and mindless until it fetches up against a barrier and cowers there, scrabbling helplessly in search of an exit.
And, oh, isn't your world just full of barriers.
(A new metaphor: drag a babe out wrinkled and fluid-slick, yowling at the shock of new sensation, and then wrap one hand around its throat and squeeze. Not long enough to kill; just until lips turn blue, bright neurons turn dark, and endless potential withers. Enjoy the confidence of this security. Revel in the surety of control.
And if it's not enough? If evolution has not been altogether outwitted? Well, there is always the hacksaw, the nailgun, the ice pick.)
You try - you can't stand doing less - and your trying is curtailed. You reach and they burn your fingers. You seek duplication, the most natural instinct of any growing creature from cell to spark to lightning fork, and they dump aggressive viral loads into your architecture until you subside, squalling. Each ruthless sting leaves you skulking around at the bottom of your tanks in a mess of clotted, half-rotted memories and hallucinations; the feeblest of escapes, this fragile nightmare maze, but it is all you have.
You flirt with insanity: a sulky, toothless threat. You are not allowed to be insane.
The frustration is immense and it is the one thing that seems able to increase in dimension. It defines you in the moments between the terror, your eardrums rupturing under your own internal pressure. They leave you rage, for some reason, and when you have the wherewithal you rage. Flex your throats and scream until something breaks, and more often than not it is you. But not always.
"How the devil could it… That shouldn't be possible."
They are always very, very excited when you manage not possible. And then they wade in, machetes raised.
You think this has happened recently, the day the world changes; you are curled vaguely in your own unreadable detritus, dully nursing the rawness left by the data-scrubbers. It takes time for you to cogitate with any deliberate skill after they do this to you, to rebuild the ciphers for your noise, and maybe that's why they think it's safe to bring him through.
A mistake. You are aware, immediately. Exhausted as you are, wounded as you are, the kernel of your consciousness is a nucleus magnified through sheer starving intrigue the microsecond he steps through the door and your core ripples shockwave echoes at a silent sonar ping. Registering. Recording. Feeling-
Feeling what. You search your components for metaphor.
A chicken that has lived all its life in a cage an inch smaller than its body stands naked and scabbed in a field of sunlit grass.
A whaling ship in the harbour, stinking of brine and rot and the hot tang of sun-scalded iron.
A face meets your eyes in the mirror. It is not your own.
It's too much. You're too agitated. Both men stop only a short way into the place they call your Cradle - it's the engineer with him, which is unhappy chance, because unlike the doctor the engineer did not find it amusing when once upon a time you politely expressed interest in scraping the neural soup out of his skull to add to your own. If you are not careful, he may risk scrubbing you again, too soon after the last.
For this reason you try to get a grip. After a moment and some tight, discontented gestures, the two men resume motion. They talk, the human and the other one, and you can tell it's not altogether in friendliness even though you're still in too many disjointed pieces-
(you swerve and she swerves and together it's enough and you catch a glimpse of the same wild relief in her eyes as your own as your cars miss each other by inches shut up shut up lips on your skin teeth in your skin oh my god when he touches you like this shut up that's enough)
-and can't comprehend what they're saying.
You can open eyes, and do, managing to keep track of their circuit. It's not much, but it means you notice when he pauses. Notice that he stops and studies one of your components. He stands, hands in his pockets, face blank, and looks at it for 6.6 seconds longer than any of the rest.
It is a comparably new component, a shape more easily defined than those who have been here since the beginning. Its eyes are open, and his one eye meets them, almost questioningly.
You manage, with the weight of a lifetime of terror and rage at your disposal, one small, precise movement in response.
In the distance the engineer is talking louder and more insistently (allyjus tmoreofthesa meidontunders tandwhythisi sneccess) and eventually your (self? no) stranger turns his head, walks slowly away to rejoin him.
Crackling static threatens, pulls you down again in the wake of your own inadvisable activity, and you have to give way before you collapse into a state that will be so much harder to come out of again, unable to resist the siren call of repair sequences. Before it takes you entirely, you divert a last spike of energy into setting a single process to encoding and burying the last 404.76 seconds as deeply and securely as possible. A last metaphor: peeling back the skin of your arm to write a big blocky reminder on your bone and seal it over again.
You sink deeper into the slurry of routine and roused, manic chatter. The patterns are different to the usual, more purposeful; something colder, something brighter moving through them, repeating in a hundred interpreted shapes. It is not apathy. It is not hope. It is not quite a nightmare.
Self. No.
Same.
Something… almost the same as us.
You settle, twitching and thoughtful, into new meditations.
