RE: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 2: Krei'kii'kelriz]
06-14-2017, 06:41 AM
Robin was once asked, by a jovial-if-pugnacious drunk at a house party, what she thought of human nature.
And she answered - that in her then-half-decade of "research" (her own intoxicated barely-postgraduate words, she remembered them a few days later and asked herself where the hell she got off) - she had:
The drunk asked Robin if the ghost was the Burnham Hall Bludger, to which she replied no, but resolved to look them up later.
She told the drunk, while there exists day-to-day many a choice asshole in one's proximity, the universe's most versatile underlying force wants to make the world better. Wants to help us make the world better.
Robin's consciousness flitted through the ship. Friendship ended with the old boys club of gravity, entropy, electromagnetism. Now arcanics is my best friend. Her projection was clad in compliant souls who'd joined her ritual; they lent weight to her actions here and resistance against the current. Ghosts - so many -
carrying themselves down old courses, the ancient and alien effortlessly coordinated. The fresher ghosts were caught in the flow, nudged unmoored adrift of their bodies and borne elsewhere.
Robin followed the river, and nothing stopped her.
---
The bridge, the control deck, the trepanation granting access to the withered brain of the Krei'kii'kelriz. It was to here the cult had borne Florica, finding her not far from the resuscitated heart, dispatching her Raxucorp escort, and carrying her carotid to central command. It was deep in the guts of the Krei'kii'kelriz, displaced from its frontward swarm of sensors much as the mammalian occipital lobe will from its eyes. The Wakeful Church had chosen this latticed cavern as the centerpiece of their territory, occupying it from all sides and shielding it from attention.
This cradle this grave this tragedy, this Krei'kii'kelriz, the death (the singular, the collective, the communal) of millions, it was beyond the comprehension of any in the Galactic Alliance. Too individualistic. Their incursion upon the Krei'kii'kelriz was barely an autopsy, closer to scavengers carving up the kill. Lines drawn, sectors quartered and apportioned to Alliance members with an arrogantly endo-galactic eye.
It had taken a more collectivist view to understand the Kelriz' structure, to understand without the cues of crew and electrical signal how this part of the ship was critical.
New converts with more fear than faith told each other stories about what lay within. A portal to Paradise. A Far-Traveler's tomb. The true leaders of their Church, smug and snug in the galaxy's most technologically advanced cage. In truth, the bridge and brain had remained unbreached until today, its layout mapped and disseminated only from sonar pinging its way down too-narrow capillaries.
The cultists were breaking the seal, laser cutters whining at the bulkheads, the sound coordinated counterpoint to the distant explosions. Robin, astral, slipped in with no trouble.
The souls of the Kelriz' crew already gathered here today like mourners. Stormclouds. Simple on an individual level, in a way that took Robin a pained moment to understand.
Time hadn't worn these signatures down - for every year the ghosts had shared their halls with the living breathing, there had been thousands more of the ship dead and alone in deep space. Robin had no empirical data for the cohesion indices of ghosts in space, but where she came from ghosts were knocked around and broken down amidst the churn of life.
No. These were the uncomplicated souls of children.
Fuck, thought Robin.
And she answered - that in her then-half-decade of "research" (her own intoxicated barely-postgraduate words, she remembered them a few days later and asked herself where the hell she got off) - she had:
- discerned the true shape of the soul
- glimpsed upon the nature, the habits, of an unprecedented energy source
- chatted up a ghost.
The drunk asked Robin if the ghost was the Burnham Hall Bludger, to which she replied no, but resolved to look them up later.
She told the drunk, while there exists day-to-day many a choice asshole in one's proximity, the universe's most versatile underlying force wants to make the world better. Wants to help us make the world better.
Robin's consciousness flitted through the ship. Friendship ended with the old boys club of gravity, entropy, electromagnetism. Now arcanics is my best friend. Her projection was clad in compliant souls who'd joined her ritual; they lent weight to her actions here and resistance against the current. Ghosts - so many -
carrying themselves down old courses, the ancient and alien effortlessly coordinated. The fresher ghosts were caught in the flow, nudged unmoored adrift of their bodies and borne elsewhere.
Robin followed the river, and nothing stopped her.
---
The bridge, the control deck, the trepanation granting access to the withered brain of the Krei'kii'kelriz. It was to here the cult had borne Florica, finding her not far from the resuscitated heart, dispatching her Raxucorp escort, and carrying her carotid to central command. It was deep in the guts of the Krei'kii'kelriz, displaced from its frontward swarm of sensors much as the mammalian occipital lobe will from its eyes. The Wakeful Church had chosen this latticed cavern as the centerpiece of their territory, occupying it from all sides and shielding it from attention.
This cradle this grave this tragedy, this Krei'kii'kelriz, the death (the singular, the collective, the communal) of millions, it was beyond the comprehension of any in the Galactic Alliance. Too individualistic. Their incursion upon the Krei'kii'kelriz was barely an autopsy, closer to scavengers carving up the kill. Lines drawn, sectors quartered and apportioned to Alliance members with an arrogantly endo-galactic eye.
It had taken a more collectivist view to understand the Kelriz' structure, to understand without the cues of crew and electrical signal how this part of the ship was critical.
New converts with more fear than faith told each other stories about what lay within. A portal to Paradise. A Far-Traveler's tomb. The true leaders of their Church, smug and snug in the galaxy's most technologically advanced cage. In truth, the bridge and brain had remained unbreached until today, its layout mapped and disseminated only from sonar pinging its way down too-narrow capillaries.
The cultists were breaking the seal, laser cutters whining at the bulkheads, the sound coordinated counterpoint to the distant explosions. Robin, astral, slipped in with no trouble.
The souls of the Kelriz' crew already gathered here today like mourners. Stormclouds. Simple on an individual level, in a way that took Robin a pained moment to understand.
Time hadn't worn these signatures down - for every year the ghosts had shared their halls with the living breathing, there had been thousands more of the ship dead and alone in deep space. Robin had no empirical data for the cohesion indices of ghosts in space, but where she came from ghosts were knocked around and broken down amidst the churn of life.
No. These were the uncomplicated souls of children.
Fuck, thought Robin.
peace to the unsung peace to the martyrs | i'm johnny rotten appleseed
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow