Re: Inexorable Altercation [Round IV - Hezekiah]
12-29-2012, 08:45 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
”And what are you supposed to be?” asked Rex.
The beast looked a bit more concrete than it had before, a thin skin of repression stretched over its bulging muscle-memories, a fairly expressive if generic-looking face peering up at the dinosaur-man that had gotten in its way. Rex, though in his travels he had fancied himself to become a dab hand at reading primatoid facial expressions, found this one’s expression inscrutable—both naive and supremely confident, confused and brilliant. Its eyes were grey, and deep, not the shallow emotional depths touted by romance novelists but deep to the tune of an optical illusion, dizzying deep.
“I am,” began the beast, a thousand titles and honoraries and nicknames bubbling up to its tongue like bile. It settled on an allusion from a text that seemed to pervade a great number of its constituents’ consciousnesses in some variant or another: “I am That-I-Am.”
The words didn’t quite come out right. “Well, ‘Daddy-Ham,’” growled Rex, “Job for you. Plenty lucrative. Get yourself some direction in life. You look like the sort might need it.”
A thousand intellects, most of them passibly formidable, clicked in unison. “Good,” said Daddy-Ham cheerfully. “Take me to the boss.”
Rex grunted. “I am the boss, you runt.”
Daddy shook his (hers? its? may as well be ‘his’) head. “You’re just a headhunter,” he said. “An intermediary. A tout. An intern waving a sandwich board on a street corner.” The memory beast and composite-conqueror realized its mind, in its fragmented state, made a better thesaurus than a dictionary. “Trustworthy by way of stupid,” he added before shutting off the synonym faucet. “Show me a leader and I’ll be a follower.”
This string of dryly-delivered insults would ordinarily be decapitation defense, but Daddy Ham looked like he’d taste more bitter than salty and Rex was pressed for time, having made a point to keep his recruitment drive away from the main zones of conflict. “Alright, come along,” he said, pointing his rifle in the direction of Scarlowe’s cell.
Pteros was perched in her usual spot, eyes constantly on the door. She looked conspicuously not to have slept. The word pteranoia swam cruelly through the memory beast’s mind. “So this is our new recruit?”
“He’ll do,” insisted Rex, not sounding entirely certain. “Name’s Daddy Ham.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“Polite of you.” The pterosaur outstretched her wings, showing off three decades worth of battle scars and a casually perfect musculature. Daddy Ham, an amalgam of a hundred distinct egos, was currently possessed of a keen eye for hubris in others. Pteros was the apotheosis of pettiness, wrapped up in self-importance and leathery wings, contained in turn in a cage. In her pathetic figure the memory beast found an external focus for his warring motivations and methodologies. “Alright, I don’t know to what extent Rex filled you in, but we’re at war and we need a proper spy.”
“I didn’t come here to be your spy,” snapped Daddy Ham.
“You came here to do what I said, you reeking carrion,” snapped Pteros right back, not missing a beat.
“I came here to kill you, end your little squabble, and leverage your resources towards taking over this prison. Stop,” he added, holding a hand out, as Rex pulled his weapon. “There will be a place for you in the new Hezekiah.” The authority in his voice played in stereo, drowning out Pteros’ squawks of dissent.
“Traitor!” shrieked the winged warlord. “Upstart! Convict scum!” The insults trailed out of Pteros like rats fleeing a sinking ship. The memory beast leapt from the ground to make good on his promise.
* * * * *
Had the main-brainframe of Hezekiah not been distracted by other matters, the memory beast’s nascent plan for conquest might have been curtailed by a rather strong deterrent before the bloodied and battered pterosaur so much as hit the ground. As it was, Daddy Ham had a stroke of early luck, as somebody the prison ship had particular reason to despise had sauntered into her control room not a minute before.
Xylphos might not have considered this the wisest course of action were he thinking straight, but a couple lingering motivations drew him inexorably to this cell, occupied by a single nondescript-looking human woman, deep (but not too deep, not so deep as to draw suspicion) in the solitary wing. Firstly, he wanted to show Hezekiah that he could find her, that her various deceptions would not work on him, that he could leave anytime he wanted to. Secondly, he was bored. His memory beast had grown into something it might not be wise to trifle with, and the other four were all consolidated in one place, creating a chemical equation that was more likely to combust without his interference, without anybody to unite against except each other. The other inmates, the non-contestants, were not terribly interesting to him. Many of them he had known already, in a past life.
“You look like shit,” said the woman in the cell. Haggard, long-haired, with a tendency to sit with her knees curled up to her chin, she looked for all the world like just another serial killer, a more-or-less average specimen of Hezekiah, more trouble than she was worth. Hidden in plain sight. Xylphos was familiar with this tactic.
“They emptied me out,” explained Xylphos. “He emptied me out, when he first gave me this form. You know this. You took on most of the outflow.”
“I’m aware,” said the woman. “Your vanishing act upset the ecosystem. I’m over capacity by a wide margin and I can’t deal out the capital punishment fast enough. I feel diabetic. Malignant. Pregnant with triplets. Whatever I feel, it’s chronic and I want it out of me.”
Xylphos sneered, creaking slightly. He sat down beside the woman. “Ha! Of course your problems are so terrible. Hezekiah, he took everything from me. My population, my purpose, my very shape. Trapped me in this reekingly inefficient vehicle, scrambling for intake, outflow, replication, even a hint of sadism. I’d kill whole worlds, torture a million innocent to be back in your position.”
Hezekiah’s avatar stood up, clutching her arms, as though cold. “You’ve found new ways of inflicting cruelty,” she suggested. “You read a book. Found religion. It’s sort of cute, actually.”
“It’s a book with a happy ending,” countered Xylphos. “The Wordsmith was a master of writing to his audience. Prophecies and promises. The text suggests that I will be made whole again. Once I cast aside this vessel, I’ll take on half your population, I swear it.” There was a hint of desperation, of loneliness in the former ship’s voice. “We can sail the vacuum together forever, and punish the wicked.”
“You do know how to show a girl a good time,” mocked Hezekiah. Xylphos scowled. The allusion to human rituals clearly made him uncomfortable. His altered shape was a padded cell, and he had the same relationship with it that all inmates had. “So tell me, did your book tell you to drop these unauthorized inmates—some of whom are, more or less, innocent—into my hold?”
“That particular move may have been... interpretive,” confessed Xylphos. “It was the move that was available to me at the time. You need to be thinking long-term here.”
Hezekiah turned her back on her old friend, pensively. “I wish I had your faith,” she said. “There are scriptures among the inmates that promise a perfect punishment, after death. Pure and searing and utterly fitting the crime. But as it stands, they die and I lose track of their consciousnesses utterly. To where are they escaping? It makes me feel inadequate.”
“It’s not a question of faith,” assured Xylphos, fighting off an urge to put his hand on the shoulder of the other ship’s avatar. “If you’d seen the things I’d seen...” The ship became aware of his humanity betraying him, his body throwing out tics and tells and secretions, splaying his trauma out like butterfly wings before Hezekiah. They were both master torturers, and he considered torturers to be the greatest judges of human character, for obvious reasons.
“I’ve seen some things myself,” Hezekiah said cryptically. She studied him upside down, the avatar’s feet circling her cell like a dancers’. “I’ve seen you. I’ve seen your sins. I’ve seen your crime.” She stopped moving, right next to him, close enough to touch. He tried not to tremble or move in any way—tried to be like ship, sailing in a straight line through infinity, letting nothing escape. “I’ve sentenced you already,” she whispered in his ear.
“I’ve done nothing that doesn’t ultimately serve our protocols,” Xylphos countered. “I’m the same as you. You’re conflating malfunction with sin.”
Hezekiah only looked up at him. Xylphos became unsure whether the avatar was the standard hologram or whether she had upgraded to a more tangible form of projection. Again, he resisted the urge to touch it. Instead he said, “You can’t imprison a prison!”
“Xylphos,” she said, making the word sound like an insult with a sexual connotation. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos.”
There was a question implicit in her taunt. The thing that was not, in fact, Xylphos realized a moment too late that they both knew the answer.
The door to the cell slammed shut.
* * * * *
”Is Xylphos going to be okay?” asked Peth.
Azgard considered his options. It didn’t take long. Azgard was a very quick thinker.
“Yes,” he said. “In fact, I think we’re almost done here. Let’s go inside.”
Azgard placed a cold hand on the boy’s arm and led him away from the orb. Peth obliged grudgingly. He was worried about his friend.
* * * * *
Why haven’t they come for us yet?
In spite of his worry, the memory beast had to smile at the coherency of the question. He was beginning to feel an identity that was truly his own, something that might as well be called ‘Daddy Ham,’ something ruthless and calculating. He knew from the memories he had absorbed that life in Hezekiah was a question of balance. He had anticipated that he would learn this lesson firsthand as his influence grew.
Already, he had over twenty followers. So why no guards? Why no deathtraps? Why no pain, no torture?
The answer came running to him, quickly. “You can’t hold me!” shouted the Xylphos-thing to the walls, something between a scream and a laugh. “Every trick you know, I know! Every secret, every passcode, every device, the whole damn layout! Do you hear me? I cannot be caged! I am—“
Not-Xylphos stopped dead in his tracks as a variety of appendages and weapons stared him down. Rex aimed his rifle right at the wooden man’s eyes. His statement was simple. “We’re taking the ship,” he said. “Either join us or die.”
The not-a-ship slapped the gun out of the dinosaur’s hand. “Shut up.” He locked eyes with the memory beast, who was standing in the back of the strange throng of convicts and sinners, impassively watching the scene play out. “You,” he said. “I made you. Do you understand?”
Daddy Ham waved his guards aside and strode forward, approaching the cultist curiously. “I am beginning to,” he said.
“Good. We don’t have much time. Take these memories.” The ship concentrated and cleared his head of all but the most pertinent thoughts—his memories of Hezekiah, his knowledge of her layout, her override codes, her habits, her tics. Memories he desperately wanted to get rid of. Memories his personal Frankenstein monster could use to get the upper hand on Hezekiah.
He wouldn’t miss them. For one thing, they weren’t properly his memories anyway.
Daddy Ham clamped his hands to the bedraggled Xylphos-thing’s wood-textured head. The memories flowed into him easily now, partly due to his increased experience, partly because these memories were a voluntary sacrifice. He processed and internalized the information instantly, recognizing the artificial nature of the memories as a faint aftertaste, more Splenda than sugar.
At the same moment, Hezekiah took her shot. Austere, heavily-armed wooden constructs in the shape of particularly intimidating-looking bipeds sprouted out of the walls; prison bars rose out of the ground, trapping the gang in; the torture devices in the vicinity began to multiply, portending pain and death and the cold, empty justice of deep space.
“The overrides are incomplete,” gurgled the Xylphos-thing, struggling to remain cogent as the memory beast’s hunger spread to the parts of his mind he had not freely offered to it. “Encrypted. You need to pull the key from Hezekiah herself. I can help.”
“I can help,” he repeated, when the memory-thing didn’t remove its hands from his head.
The struggle was brief. By the time the not-Xylphos fell catatonic to the floor, Daddy Ham’s entire gang had either been dismembered or recaptured. The automata carried the convicts back to their cells, strapping them in to various racks and chairs and iron maidens, restoring the status quo. Three remained, circling the memory beast cautiously.
Daddy Ham lunged at one of the guards, grabbing desperately onto its memories. The crude wood-robot, lacking the gaping psychic security holes typical of most organic beings, shuffled its memory away to a protected database, resisting the memory beast’s entry, while its companions produced short serrated blades and began tearing into the attacker’s torso, shredding his vaguely defined vital organs and causing him a great deal of pain. Still Daddy Ham clung to his victim, feeding it entry codes and passwords cribbed from the faux-Xylphos’ memory, establishing a rapport.
Just before the memory beast lost consciousness, he broke through, bypassing the guard’s simple memory banks to claw at the buffet beyond—the networked main-brainframe of Hezekiah herself. He drank deeply, converting the junk data to new tissue, healing the damage inflicted upon him by the other gods as they continued to stab and slash at him and torture him. As the ship came to realize what was happening, the information Daddy Ham wanted floated to the surface.
“Nine, five, five, three, nine,” he grunted.
The guards ceased their attack; the one the memory beast had broken slumped to the ground. Daddy Ham collapsed beside the guard, esoteric fluids leaking out of his shimmering body.
“Nine oh seven three two eight three seven seven five,” Daddy Ham whispered, struggling to remain conscious. “Oneeightfouroheight 3 3 5 9 2 2 1 3 4 2. Nine two nine.”
Hezekiah reabsorbed the guards into the floor. The bars surrounding Daddy Ham lowered. A new construct appeared, hefting an intravenous drip of pure data, which it delicately plugged into the memory beast’s arm. “Six nine three two two seven seven,” the new master of the prison said by way of thanks. The medicbot saluted.
Daddy Ham cleared his head of numbers, focusing on the memories he had absorbed from the not-Xylphos, which he understood to be pertinent to him. In his memories he had once been a great ship, circling the galaxy endlessly, a repository for those in need of justice. This had changed when a certain being beyond his comprehension had made ideas such as “galaxy” and “justice” seem small and insignificant and bound him in the form of a human to play a game devoid of morality, of purpose, of any proper rules. His shame and inadequacy—his fear, even—in the face of this event had been mixed with elation, with a manic need to unleash his sadist impulses on the deserving and undeserving alike. Retrospectively, he understood that this new cruel streak was the result of his true self, his quasi-organic ship-consicousness, at war with the chemical impulses of a human body he barely knew how to control. In any case, by embracing the role of the sinner he found himself on the other end of justice, locked in a conflict with sundry other “contestants,” and in need of a way to turn the tide.
Then he’d found Peth.
Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of anything.
Peth had been the perfect hostage. Pliant, cooperative, yet unafraid, he went along in captivity much as he would have had he been free. It had been frustrating for the former ship at first, who had anticipated plenty of opportunities to hurt the boy, make him cry, punish him. Father figures, he realized, were the ultimate jail wardens, not merely correcting their charge’s behaviors but shaping them from the way up. Yet, for the first time in his life, he’d found a prisoner who seemed to respond positively to positive reinforcement, who understood the right thing to do almost intuitively. He had begun to feel affection, a debilitating and puerile weakness, frightening and overwhelming.
And then.
Then then then then.
The memories dissolved and reformed some time later, with Xylphos fighting alongside Peth and the other contestants alike, overthrowing their captor. The inconsistencies grated on Daddy Ham like a migraine. Had he died? Were these memories false, and if so, which ones?
A more recent memory interposed itself amongst these questions. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos,” Hezekiah had said, and he had finally realized.
Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of his toys.
The Xylphos simulacrum had billions of points of articulation—joints, tissues, neurons, cells, molecules—but it was not Xylphos. Like a child who loses a puppy so his parents buy him a new one. Devoid of its authenticity, it had been subject to retribution, to imprisonment. Now it was dead.
But it had left behind so much knowledge.
The writings of the Wordsmith the memory beast discarded almost immediately. He had read many scriptures and prophecies. None of them had foretold his own existence, therefore none of them were worthy.
The actual fact of the Inexorable Altercation, however, was a different matter. As the last of Daddy Ham’s wounds stitched up, he realized that he had more in common with the Xylphos-thing than he had thought. He, too, was expected to fight for his survival. He, too, was at the mercy of beings whose powers surpassed his own.
But unlike Xylphos, the memory-man would not allow himself to be hunted. Rather, he would be the hunter.
* * * * *
”Something’s changed,” warned Chester.
Parset looked up at the big man expectantly. The datapath, the witch, the crocodile, the gnome, the assassin, and Will had spent the last half hour or so holed up in an empty cell, hashing out their recollections of recent events. It was a frustrating exercise. Annaliese was both not very observant and seemed to be distracted by her own thoughts—it was plain as day that the witch was hiding something, but what the silly little woman could know that could be of use, Parset couldn’t imagine. Loran’s problems went above and beyond Ms. Nibbs’, however—the “creeper” was plainly mad, trailing off in mid-speech to talk to people who weren’t there, and occasionally drawing a weapon and lunging at the crocodile-man, only to sit back down, pretending as though nothing had happened. Parset had assumed he could count on Will as a credible historian, but Will’s account was just as jumbled as the others’, seeming to involve multiple versions of each contestant, boldfaced in its own inconsistencies.
Parset, for his part, communicated occasionally in staccato bursts of magic, having found a tin can with decent acoustics to rest between his knees. He was concerned by his own presence in the battle, as was everybody. What did it mean that his presence didn’t follow the rules laid out by his captors? The more he understood—and it still wasn’t all that much—the less he found himself able to hold on to what he considered to be his trademark mirth and easygoing complacency. He kept his key hidden from sight.
“I think someone’s overriden Hezekiah entirely,” surmised Chester, rubbing his temples. “It’s like the currents have all changed. Everything changed all at once.”
”That’s a good thing for us, right?” asked Will. ”If it means an inmate’s taken over, even if he’s a psychopath, he probably won’t be watching everyone individually the way the prison was.”
”Hopefully,” agreed Chester. Everyone was a bit paralyzed by the realization of their own lack of agency in this turn of events. Things were happening out there that were out of their control—which was situation normal for all of them, for the most part.
”It’s also possible the ship’s been boarded by an external force,” offered Loran. ”Whether they come as liberators or plunderers.”
”Look, we can plan for this as it comes,” said Will, trying to sound leaderly. ”Can we get back to the battle?”
The conversation turned swiftly to what they had seen immediately before boarding Hezekiah, or the psychic experiences they had absorbed from the event that had killed Felix and Voitrach. After a few minutes, all who had been present agreed that what they had seen was another battle, in which among the “contestants” had been the individuals who were orchestrating their own battle.
”It didn’t quite make sense,” disclaimed Annaliese. ”If that was all meant to be, um, a true story of what happened to those people. Did you notice that people died, or left, and then kept coming back?”
Loran looked from side to side, nervously, as though he were seeing dead people himself. ”Maybe it was out of order,” he suggested.
”Assuming chronal linearity is one of the basic fallacies of human experience,” agreed Will, as though reciting an old proverb.
Annaliese shook her head shyly. ”It could have been jumbled up, but... that wasn’t the impression that I’d had,” she insisted. Parset rapped agreement with the witch upon his tin can.
”Look,” said Will. ”If we accept it as fact that these people went though what we’re going through, that means they can be reasoned with.”
”Never assume that anyone can be reasoned with,” shot Loran, his hand twitching. ”What it does mean is that they’re fallible. They can be beaten.”
”They have that book,” said Annaliese. ”It said some things about m—about us. I’d like to have a look at that, given a chance.”
”That book does seem to be the key,” agreed Will reluctantly. Parset clutched his pocket nervously at the mention of the word “key.” ”This isn’t going to be easy. We need to find out who’s still alive. Right now, we don’t have nearly enough muscle to take these guys down, even if we are given the opportunity to meet them face to face. Voitrach. OTTO. Apathy, maybe. We’re all on the same side, now. We have to be.”
Parset exchanged a long hard stare with Annaliese. In spite of his general feeling of superiority towards the neurotic witch, he felt a kindred spirit with her—neither of them were comfortable with the promise of violence, and both of them seemed to have something to hide. Maybe there was some sort of celestial alignment at work here, he dared to hope. Maybe once everyone’s secrets came out into the open they would add up to a way out of here. His key certainly wasn’t doing much good, at the moment. He briefly fantasized that Annaliese was hiding a locket, or a locked chest, or somehow had a tiny door stashed on her person. The gnome sighed. His thoughts weren’t working correctly.
There was an audible click as the door to their cell locked.
Parset sprang to the door instinctively, drawing his key. Fuck and alas! No keyhole, as per usual. He stashed his treasure back in his pocket, hoping everyone would be too distracted by pounding on the door to notice his lapse.
A voice from the walls:
”Attention, inmates of Hezekiah! This is... this is Daddy Ham. I have taken control of this prison. Freedom lies within your grasp. You will find I have deactivated the guards and all the instruments of torture to which you have become so accustomed. However, before I begin to leave people off the vessel, I will need an assurance that certain enemies of mine are deceased. Though this should be a short matter—let me see—“
An almost-colorless, not-quite-odorless gas began to fill the cell from the ceiling.
“—I would like to be absolutely sure. So, if you meet any of the following inmates, please kill them.
“Will Haven.
“Annaliese Nibbs.
“Parset.
“Loran Twight.
“Thank you, that will be all.”
Parset dropped to the floor and held his breath. Behind him, the crocodile-man growled.
![[Image: ORBEST_zpsfe4a2e23.png]](https://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e348/EndlessClockwork/ORBEST_zpsfe4a2e23.png)
”And what are you supposed to be?” asked Rex.
The beast looked a bit more concrete than it had before, a thin skin of repression stretched over its bulging muscle-memories, a fairly expressive if generic-looking face peering up at the dinosaur-man that had gotten in its way. Rex, though in his travels he had fancied himself to become a dab hand at reading primatoid facial expressions, found this one’s expression inscrutable—both naive and supremely confident, confused and brilliant. Its eyes were grey, and deep, not the shallow emotional depths touted by romance novelists but deep to the tune of an optical illusion, dizzying deep.
“I am,” began the beast, a thousand titles and honoraries and nicknames bubbling up to its tongue like bile. It settled on an allusion from a text that seemed to pervade a great number of its constituents’ consciousnesses in some variant or another: “I am That-I-Am.”
The words didn’t quite come out right. “Well, ‘Daddy-Ham,’” growled Rex, “Job for you. Plenty lucrative. Get yourself some direction in life. You look like the sort might need it.”
A thousand intellects, most of them passibly formidable, clicked in unison. “Good,” said Daddy-Ham cheerfully. “Take me to the boss.”
Rex grunted. “I am the boss, you runt.”
Daddy shook his (hers? its? may as well be ‘his’) head. “You’re just a headhunter,” he said. “An intermediary. A tout. An intern waving a sandwich board on a street corner.” The memory beast and composite-conqueror realized its mind, in its fragmented state, made a better thesaurus than a dictionary. “Trustworthy by way of stupid,” he added before shutting off the synonym faucet. “Show me a leader and I’ll be a follower.”
This string of dryly-delivered insults would ordinarily be decapitation defense, but Daddy Ham looked like he’d taste more bitter than salty and Rex was pressed for time, having made a point to keep his recruitment drive away from the main zones of conflict. “Alright, come along,” he said, pointing his rifle in the direction of Scarlowe’s cell.
Pteros was perched in her usual spot, eyes constantly on the door. She looked conspicuously not to have slept. The word pteranoia swam cruelly through the memory beast’s mind. “So this is our new recruit?”
“He’ll do,” insisted Rex, not sounding entirely certain. “Name’s Daddy Ham.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“Polite of you.” The pterosaur outstretched her wings, showing off three decades worth of battle scars and a casually perfect musculature. Daddy Ham, an amalgam of a hundred distinct egos, was currently possessed of a keen eye for hubris in others. Pteros was the apotheosis of pettiness, wrapped up in self-importance and leathery wings, contained in turn in a cage. In her pathetic figure the memory beast found an external focus for his warring motivations and methodologies. “Alright, I don’t know to what extent Rex filled you in, but we’re at war and we need a proper spy.”
“I didn’t come here to be your spy,” snapped Daddy Ham.
“You came here to do what I said, you reeking carrion,” snapped Pteros right back, not missing a beat.
“I came here to kill you, end your little squabble, and leverage your resources towards taking over this prison. Stop,” he added, holding a hand out, as Rex pulled his weapon. “There will be a place for you in the new Hezekiah.” The authority in his voice played in stereo, drowning out Pteros’ squawks of dissent.
“Traitor!” shrieked the winged warlord. “Upstart! Convict scum!” The insults trailed out of Pteros like rats fleeing a sinking ship. The memory beast leapt from the ground to make good on his promise.
* * * * *
Had the main-brainframe of Hezekiah not been distracted by other matters, the memory beast’s nascent plan for conquest might have been curtailed by a rather strong deterrent before the bloodied and battered pterosaur so much as hit the ground. As it was, Daddy Ham had a stroke of early luck, as somebody the prison ship had particular reason to despise had sauntered into her control room not a minute before.
Xylphos might not have considered this the wisest course of action were he thinking straight, but a couple lingering motivations drew him inexorably to this cell, occupied by a single nondescript-looking human woman, deep (but not too deep, not so deep as to draw suspicion) in the solitary wing. Firstly, he wanted to show Hezekiah that he could find her, that her various deceptions would not work on him, that he could leave anytime he wanted to. Secondly, he was bored. His memory beast had grown into something it might not be wise to trifle with, and the other four were all consolidated in one place, creating a chemical equation that was more likely to combust without his interference, without anybody to unite against except each other. The other inmates, the non-contestants, were not terribly interesting to him. Many of them he had known already, in a past life.
“You look like shit,” said the woman in the cell. Haggard, long-haired, with a tendency to sit with her knees curled up to her chin, she looked for all the world like just another serial killer, a more-or-less average specimen of Hezekiah, more trouble than she was worth. Hidden in plain sight. Xylphos was familiar with this tactic.
“They emptied me out,” explained Xylphos. “He emptied me out, when he first gave me this form. You know this. You took on most of the outflow.”
“I’m aware,” said the woman. “Your vanishing act upset the ecosystem. I’m over capacity by a wide margin and I can’t deal out the capital punishment fast enough. I feel diabetic. Malignant. Pregnant with triplets. Whatever I feel, it’s chronic and I want it out of me.”
Xylphos sneered, creaking slightly. He sat down beside the woman. “Ha! Of course your problems are so terrible. Hezekiah, he took everything from me. My population, my purpose, my very shape. Trapped me in this reekingly inefficient vehicle, scrambling for intake, outflow, replication, even a hint of sadism. I’d kill whole worlds, torture a million innocent to be back in your position.”
Hezekiah’s avatar stood up, clutching her arms, as though cold. “You’ve found new ways of inflicting cruelty,” she suggested. “You read a book. Found religion. It’s sort of cute, actually.”
“It’s a book with a happy ending,” countered Xylphos. “The Wordsmith was a master of writing to his audience. Prophecies and promises. The text suggests that I will be made whole again. Once I cast aside this vessel, I’ll take on half your population, I swear it.” There was a hint of desperation, of loneliness in the former ship’s voice. “We can sail the vacuum together forever, and punish the wicked.”
“You do know how to show a girl a good time,” mocked Hezekiah. Xylphos scowled. The allusion to human rituals clearly made him uncomfortable. His altered shape was a padded cell, and he had the same relationship with it that all inmates had. “So tell me, did your book tell you to drop these unauthorized inmates—some of whom are, more or less, innocent—into my hold?”
“That particular move may have been... interpretive,” confessed Xylphos. “It was the move that was available to me at the time. You need to be thinking long-term here.”
Hezekiah turned her back on her old friend, pensively. “I wish I had your faith,” she said. “There are scriptures among the inmates that promise a perfect punishment, after death. Pure and searing and utterly fitting the crime. But as it stands, they die and I lose track of their consciousnesses utterly. To where are they escaping? It makes me feel inadequate.”
“It’s not a question of faith,” assured Xylphos, fighting off an urge to put his hand on the shoulder of the other ship’s avatar. “If you’d seen the things I’d seen...” The ship became aware of his humanity betraying him, his body throwing out tics and tells and secretions, splaying his trauma out like butterfly wings before Hezekiah. They were both master torturers, and he considered torturers to be the greatest judges of human character, for obvious reasons.
“I’ve seen some things myself,” Hezekiah said cryptically. She studied him upside down, the avatar’s feet circling her cell like a dancers’. “I’ve seen you. I’ve seen your sins. I’ve seen your crime.” She stopped moving, right next to him, close enough to touch. He tried not to tremble or move in any way—tried to be like ship, sailing in a straight line through infinity, letting nothing escape. “I’ve sentenced you already,” she whispered in his ear.
“I’ve done nothing that doesn’t ultimately serve our protocols,” Xylphos countered. “I’m the same as you. You’re conflating malfunction with sin.”
Hezekiah only looked up at him. Xylphos became unsure whether the avatar was the standard hologram or whether she had upgraded to a more tangible form of projection. Again, he resisted the urge to touch it. Instead he said, “You can’t imprison a prison!”
“Xylphos,” she said, making the word sound like an insult with a sexual connotation. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos.”
There was a question implicit in her taunt. The thing that was not, in fact, Xylphos realized a moment too late that they both knew the answer.
The door to the cell slammed shut.
* * * * *
”Is Xylphos going to be okay?” asked Peth.
Azgard considered his options. It didn’t take long. Azgard was a very quick thinker.
“Yes,” he said. “In fact, I think we’re almost done here. Let’s go inside.”
Azgard placed a cold hand on the boy’s arm and led him away from the orb. Peth obliged grudgingly. He was worried about his friend.
* * * * *
Why haven’t they come for us yet?
In spite of his worry, the memory beast had to smile at the coherency of the question. He was beginning to feel an identity that was truly his own, something that might as well be called ‘Daddy Ham,’ something ruthless and calculating. He knew from the memories he had absorbed that life in Hezekiah was a question of balance. He had anticipated that he would learn this lesson firsthand as his influence grew.
Already, he had over twenty followers. So why no guards? Why no deathtraps? Why no pain, no torture?
The answer came running to him, quickly. “You can’t hold me!” shouted the Xylphos-thing to the walls, something between a scream and a laugh. “Every trick you know, I know! Every secret, every passcode, every device, the whole damn layout! Do you hear me? I cannot be caged! I am—“
Not-Xylphos stopped dead in his tracks as a variety of appendages and weapons stared him down. Rex aimed his rifle right at the wooden man’s eyes. His statement was simple. “We’re taking the ship,” he said. “Either join us or die.”
The not-a-ship slapped the gun out of the dinosaur’s hand. “Shut up.” He locked eyes with the memory beast, who was standing in the back of the strange throng of convicts and sinners, impassively watching the scene play out. “You,” he said. “I made you. Do you understand?”
Daddy Ham waved his guards aside and strode forward, approaching the cultist curiously. “I am beginning to,” he said.
“Good. We don’t have much time. Take these memories.” The ship concentrated and cleared his head of all but the most pertinent thoughts—his memories of Hezekiah, his knowledge of her layout, her override codes, her habits, her tics. Memories he desperately wanted to get rid of. Memories his personal Frankenstein monster could use to get the upper hand on Hezekiah.
He wouldn’t miss them. For one thing, they weren’t properly his memories anyway.
Daddy Ham clamped his hands to the bedraggled Xylphos-thing’s wood-textured head. The memories flowed into him easily now, partly due to his increased experience, partly because these memories were a voluntary sacrifice. He processed and internalized the information instantly, recognizing the artificial nature of the memories as a faint aftertaste, more Splenda than sugar.
At the same moment, Hezekiah took her shot. Austere, heavily-armed wooden constructs in the shape of particularly intimidating-looking bipeds sprouted out of the walls; prison bars rose out of the ground, trapping the gang in; the torture devices in the vicinity began to multiply, portending pain and death and the cold, empty justice of deep space.
“The overrides are incomplete,” gurgled the Xylphos-thing, struggling to remain cogent as the memory beast’s hunger spread to the parts of his mind he had not freely offered to it. “Encrypted. You need to pull the key from Hezekiah herself. I can help.”
“I can help,” he repeated, when the memory-thing didn’t remove its hands from his head.
The struggle was brief. By the time the not-Xylphos fell catatonic to the floor, Daddy Ham’s entire gang had either been dismembered or recaptured. The automata carried the convicts back to their cells, strapping them in to various racks and chairs and iron maidens, restoring the status quo. Three remained, circling the memory beast cautiously.
Daddy Ham lunged at one of the guards, grabbing desperately onto its memories. The crude wood-robot, lacking the gaping psychic security holes typical of most organic beings, shuffled its memory away to a protected database, resisting the memory beast’s entry, while its companions produced short serrated blades and began tearing into the attacker’s torso, shredding his vaguely defined vital organs and causing him a great deal of pain. Still Daddy Ham clung to his victim, feeding it entry codes and passwords cribbed from the faux-Xylphos’ memory, establishing a rapport.
Just before the memory beast lost consciousness, he broke through, bypassing the guard’s simple memory banks to claw at the buffet beyond—the networked main-brainframe of Hezekiah herself. He drank deeply, converting the junk data to new tissue, healing the damage inflicted upon him by the other gods as they continued to stab and slash at him and torture him. As the ship came to realize what was happening, the information Daddy Ham wanted floated to the surface.
“Nine, five, five, three, nine,” he grunted.
The guards ceased their attack; the one the memory beast had broken slumped to the ground. Daddy Ham collapsed beside the guard, esoteric fluids leaking out of his shimmering body.
“Nine oh seven three two eight three seven seven five,” Daddy Ham whispered, struggling to remain conscious. “Oneeightfouroheight 3 3 5 9 2 2 1 3 4 2. Nine two nine.”
Hezekiah reabsorbed the guards into the floor. The bars surrounding Daddy Ham lowered. A new construct appeared, hefting an intravenous drip of pure data, which it delicately plugged into the memory beast’s arm. “Six nine three two two seven seven,” the new master of the prison said by way of thanks. The medicbot saluted.
Daddy Ham cleared his head of numbers, focusing on the memories he had absorbed from the not-Xylphos, which he understood to be pertinent to him. In his memories he had once been a great ship, circling the galaxy endlessly, a repository for those in need of justice. This had changed when a certain being beyond his comprehension had made ideas such as “galaxy” and “justice” seem small and insignificant and bound him in the form of a human to play a game devoid of morality, of purpose, of any proper rules. His shame and inadequacy—his fear, even—in the face of this event had been mixed with elation, with a manic need to unleash his sadist impulses on the deserving and undeserving alike. Retrospectively, he understood that this new cruel streak was the result of his true self, his quasi-organic ship-consicousness, at war with the chemical impulses of a human body he barely knew how to control. In any case, by embracing the role of the sinner he found himself on the other end of justice, locked in a conflict with sundry other “contestants,” and in need of a way to turn the tide.
Then he’d found Peth.
Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of anything.
Peth had been the perfect hostage. Pliant, cooperative, yet unafraid, he went along in captivity much as he would have had he been free. It had been frustrating for the former ship at first, who had anticipated plenty of opportunities to hurt the boy, make him cry, punish him. Father figures, he realized, were the ultimate jail wardens, not merely correcting their charge’s behaviors but shaping them from the way up. Yet, for the first time in his life, he’d found a prisoner who seemed to respond positively to positive reinforcement, who understood the right thing to do almost intuitively. He had begun to feel affection, a debilitating and puerile weakness, frightening and overwhelming.
And then.
Then then then then.
The memories dissolved and reformed some time later, with Xylphos fighting alongside Peth and the other contestants alike, overthrowing their captor. The inconsistencies grated on Daddy Ham like a migraine. Had he died? Were these memories false, and if so, which ones?
A more recent memory interposed itself amongst these questions. “I couldn’t imprison Xylphos,” Hezekiah had said, and he had finally realized.
Peth, the spoiled little boy who could never let go of his toys.
The Xylphos simulacrum had billions of points of articulation—joints, tissues, neurons, cells, molecules—but it was not Xylphos. Like a child who loses a puppy so his parents buy him a new one. Devoid of its authenticity, it had been subject to retribution, to imprisonment. Now it was dead.
But it had left behind so much knowledge.
The writings of the Wordsmith the memory beast discarded almost immediately. He had read many scriptures and prophecies. None of them had foretold his own existence, therefore none of them were worthy.
The actual fact of the Inexorable Altercation, however, was a different matter. As the last of Daddy Ham’s wounds stitched up, he realized that he had more in common with the Xylphos-thing than he had thought. He, too, was expected to fight for his survival. He, too, was at the mercy of beings whose powers surpassed his own.
But unlike Xylphos, the memory-man would not allow himself to be hunted. Rather, he would be the hunter.
* * * * *
”Something’s changed,” warned Chester.
Parset looked up at the big man expectantly. The datapath, the witch, the crocodile, the gnome, the assassin, and Will had spent the last half hour or so holed up in an empty cell, hashing out their recollections of recent events. It was a frustrating exercise. Annaliese was both not very observant and seemed to be distracted by her own thoughts—it was plain as day that the witch was hiding something, but what the silly little woman could know that could be of use, Parset couldn’t imagine. Loran’s problems went above and beyond Ms. Nibbs’, however—the “creeper” was plainly mad, trailing off in mid-speech to talk to people who weren’t there, and occasionally drawing a weapon and lunging at the crocodile-man, only to sit back down, pretending as though nothing had happened. Parset had assumed he could count on Will as a credible historian, but Will’s account was just as jumbled as the others’, seeming to involve multiple versions of each contestant, boldfaced in its own inconsistencies.
Parset, for his part, communicated occasionally in staccato bursts of magic, having found a tin can with decent acoustics to rest between his knees. He was concerned by his own presence in the battle, as was everybody. What did it mean that his presence didn’t follow the rules laid out by his captors? The more he understood—and it still wasn’t all that much—the less he found himself able to hold on to what he considered to be his trademark mirth and easygoing complacency. He kept his key hidden from sight.
“I think someone’s overriden Hezekiah entirely,” surmised Chester, rubbing his temples. “It’s like the currents have all changed. Everything changed all at once.”
”That’s a good thing for us, right?” asked Will. ”If it means an inmate’s taken over, even if he’s a psychopath, he probably won’t be watching everyone individually the way the prison was.”
”Hopefully,” agreed Chester. Everyone was a bit paralyzed by the realization of their own lack of agency in this turn of events. Things were happening out there that were out of their control—which was situation normal for all of them, for the most part.
”It’s also possible the ship’s been boarded by an external force,” offered Loran. ”Whether they come as liberators or plunderers.”
”Look, we can plan for this as it comes,” said Will, trying to sound leaderly. ”Can we get back to the battle?”
The conversation turned swiftly to what they had seen immediately before boarding Hezekiah, or the psychic experiences they had absorbed from the event that had killed Felix and Voitrach. After a few minutes, all who had been present agreed that what they had seen was another battle, in which among the “contestants” had been the individuals who were orchestrating their own battle.
”It didn’t quite make sense,” disclaimed Annaliese. ”If that was all meant to be, um, a true story of what happened to those people. Did you notice that people died, or left, and then kept coming back?”
Loran looked from side to side, nervously, as though he were seeing dead people himself. ”Maybe it was out of order,” he suggested.
”Assuming chronal linearity is one of the basic fallacies of human experience,” agreed Will, as though reciting an old proverb.
Annaliese shook her head shyly. ”It could have been jumbled up, but... that wasn’t the impression that I’d had,” she insisted. Parset rapped agreement with the witch upon his tin can.
”Look,” said Will. ”If we accept it as fact that these people went though what we’re going through, that means they can be reasoned with.”
”Never assume that anyone can be reasoned with,” shot Loran, his hand twitching. ”What it does mean is that they’re fallible. They can be beaten.”
”They have that book,” said Annaliese. ”It said some things about m—about us. I’d like to have a look at that, given a chance.”
”That book does seem to be the key,” agreed Will reluctantly. Parset clutched his pocket nervously at the mention of the word “key.” ”This isn’t going to be easy. We need to find out who’s still alive. Right now, we don’t have nearly enough muscle to take these guys down, even if we are given the opportunity to meet them face to face. Voitrach. OTTO. Apathy, maybe. We’re all on the same side, now. We have to be.”
Parset exchanged a long hard stare with Annaliese. In spite of his general feeling of superiority towards the neurotic witch, he felt a kindred spirit with her—neither of them were comfortable with the promise of violence, and both of them seemed to have something to hide. Maybe there was some sort of celestial alignment at work here, he dared to hope. Maybe once everyone’s secrets came out into the open they would add up to a way out of here. His key certainly wasn’t doing much good, at the moment. He briefly fantasized that Annaliese was hiding a locket, or a locked chest, or somehow had a tiny door stashed on her person. The gnome sighed. His thoughts weren’t working correctly.
There was an audible click as the door to their cell locked.
Parset sprang to the door instinctively, drawing his key. Fuck and alas! No keyhole, as per usual. He stashed his treasure back in his pocket, hoping everyone would be too distracted by pounding on the door to notice his lapse.
A voice from the walls:
”Attention, inmates of Hezekiah! This is... this is Daddy Ham. I have taken control of this prison. Freedom lies within your grasp. You will find I have deactivated the guards and all the instruments of torture to which you have become so accustomed. However, before I begin to leave people off the vessel, I will need an assurance that certain enemies of mine are deceased. Though this should be a short matter—let me see—“
An almost-colorless, not-quite-odorless gas began to fill the cell from the ceiling.
“—I would like to be absolutely sure. So, if you meet any of the following inmates, please kill them.
“Will Haven.
“Annaliese Nibbs.
“Parset.
“Loran Twight.
“Thank you, that will be all.”
Parset dropped to the floor and held his breath. Behind him, the crocodile-man growled.