RE: Intense Struggle! (Round 7 - The Database)
04-09-2014, 12:00 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-09-2014, 12:04 AM by SleepingOrange.)
The entirety of the Database was wired with cameras; the Monitor not only wanted to ensure that no unwanted interlopers ever intruded into his sanctum without his knowledge, but to be able to do spot-checks on any aspect of his filing and storage systems at any time. There was not a hallway or storeroom or nook or cranny anywhere within his domain that was not watched constantly by at least three unthinking glassy eyes, and the already-redundancy-riddled system had been backed up twice over to ensure not a breath was taken during his final round that he wasn't aware of. That all meant that any other entity that managed to infiltrate his surveillance systems would have perfectly accurate views of everywhere within the Database as well, but it was of course ridiculous to assume any other entity than a grandmaster would be able to and more ridiculous still to believe any grandmaster capable of hijacking his data feeds would be subtle enough to avoid drawing his ire.
Such a hypothetical watcher (or the Monitor himself, as he surely was) would have been able to watch Clara keep on in her aimless but determined walk towards nothing in particular. They could have spent quite some time seeing nothing but her striding along, alone with her thoughts, going straight in one arbitrary direction except on those times she had to duck out of sight or grapple with another ASFU. It would not have been very interesting, since there was nothing to see and nothing to do but ensure the sorting droids she left in her wake didn't alert security too soon (and it really was rather disappointing that she hadn't given any thought to the consequences of her actions, or made any effort to prevent herself being discovered beyond attacking the incidental carriers). Eventually, she would reach a wall, which was really what she'd been expecting all along, turn right, and follow that wall until it became a corner. If she hugged enough walls, she seemed to be thinking, she'd eventually find a door, or a map, or something.
She did eventually find something, but it wasn't any kind of something she'd have wanted to find. Looming in front of her was the hub of the Filing Units' duties, an enormous sorting engine tended by dozens of robots; many of them flew, many more were on tracks like the ones she'd seen, and unless she was mistaken, the entire construct itself was a thankfully-probably-immobile robot. The whole mechanized hive buzzed and churned with activity, drones constantly coming and going, sorting and taking, returning and labeling. Clara seemed to sigh and looked to be considering whether to turn back around and follow the walls all the way back to where she'd started and then in the opposite direction, but stopped when she noticed something. On the far side of the hub, barely visible, was a human-sized door. She spent several seconds contemplating whether it was worth taking the risk and trying to sneak towards the door or whether it would be wiser to spend the extra time to follow the track of the enormous room all the way around.
No-one watching would have been able to tell what made the decision for her, but she came to one eventually. She slipped back into the grid of shelves and storage and began creeping her way around the busiest areas. It took a not-insignificant amount of time (although certainly much less than the alternative would have taken), but she eventually skirted the borders of the most active section of the warehouse. There were fewer near-misses than she would have expected there to be, as though someone had been directing the robots around and past her. Regardless of how and why, she eventually came to the door she'd spotted, thanked her stars and her god that it opened when a button was pushed, and scuttled hurriedly out of the smothering openness of the colossal room filled with tape.
She stopped short once she actually began to take in the new place she'd discovered; if the sorting engine she'd passed had been busy, then this room was some kind of artificial pandemonium. Things came and went endlessly and at great speeds, on tracks and on vehicles and on foot and on far too many feet. A rainbow of subtly-differently-colored lines spread out before her, leading down hallways and through doors and often straight up the walls and into hatches in the ceiling. The whole place had the air of a crowded subway station, except that the commuters were themselves often the trains and their cargo. Fortunately, nothing paid her any attention, and possibly nothing was even capable of noticing her; the perfectly-ordered chaos formed a bubble of noise and confusion around her, but made no move to interfere. A number of the non-track-bound robots even actively sidestepped or rolled around her, not sparing her a second glance or slowing for a moment. It was a relief, but… She had no more idea now of where to go and what to seek or even how to find out either than she had had at the start of the round. If she'd still had any undisheartened heart left, it would have been very disheartening.
The nun carefully picked her way across the floor of the robotic thoroughfare (although she needn't have bothered being careful), crestfallen and confused. There was no signage or information anywhere, no indication of what anything was or where anything was going. Or perhaps there was and she simply couldn't perceive or understand it, being organic and not strictly speaking supposed to ever have made her way here. Regardless of the nature of the lack of information, it was a seemingly impassable barrier; even her magic would avail her little, given that no amount of divination would be able to decipher what wasn't there or tell her where to go if she didn't know where that was. She just kept shuffling aimlessly until something caught her eye.
Among all of the alien and confusing hubbub and not-designed-for-humans architecture, the elevator stood out as a strange beacon of normalcy. It would be hard to explain why that particular pair of double doors had drawn her attention, but once it had, its function and nature were clear and obvious. Or perhaps they were so arcane and counterintuitive that it only looked like an elevator to her, and it'd actually be an incinerator or matter reclaimer or horrible portal to any number of terrible things. There was only one way to find out, and she quickened her pace towards the first real (if minor) goal she'd had since Aegis h– since this round had started.
There were two buttons to the side of the doors; they weren't marked, but they really didn't need to be. Once pressed, there was a whirring followed by a pneumatic hiss as the elevator opened and proved itself to be, in fact, an elevator. It was spartan and steel, more like a cargo elevator or dumbwaiter than passenger transport, but it looked serviceable enough. It looked designed for humans, or hominids at least, and that was promising. Maybe it could take her somewhere that she could actually understand or affect. She was almost excited until she turned around.
Covering the entire wall she had come in through were literally hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of identical buttons. None were numbered. None were marked. Many were too high for her to reach even with her cane. There was also some sort of port by the doors that suggested anything wanting to use the elevator would have to interface with it before it would take them anywhere. Another brief glimmer of hope, another dead end. Why would the Fool have gone to the trouble of subverting the Monitor's plans and dropping her into his inner sanctum… somewhere she could do or learn nothing? It made no sense. Then again, neither did multidimensional kidnapping and sapient pit-fights. Many things didn't make sense.
Someone trying to lead Clara without her knowledge would have run up against a bit of a sticking point as she stood idly in the elevator, drumming her fingers on her cane: it was ideal that she thought any decisions she made were her own and based on knowledge she had, and she was unlikely to respond well to direct intervention or contact (although that was out of the question anyway). How to send her where she needed to be (or where someone else needed her to be, perhaps) without her catching on to any interference? It wasn't as though a directory could just fall out of the ceiling without arousing her suspicions.
Still, the nice thing about people of faith, and especially ones who occasionally actually heard from the objects of their worship, was that on the whole they were pretty happy to chalk up synchronicity and convenience to divine intervention or guidance or dutifully-bestowed luck. Perhaps things could simply be nudged along and she'd go with the flow. It certainly seemed to be her default state so far.
Clara was pondering what sort of augury she could perform that might give her any indication of what the most favorable button to press would be (and running up against a brick wall with every avenue she pursued) when the doors whooshed open and deposited what could probably be best called a wheeled android into the elevator with her. She yelped and jumped backwards, raising the cane in case it became aggressive, but it paid her as little mind as any of the others she'd forded her way through had. Within instants of its arrival, it had punched one of the countless buttons; the elevator sprang into action immediately, and Clara collapsed as it sped upwards with a speed associated more with coil guns or maglev trains than cables and stair-alternatives. Perhaps not designed for humans after all, then.
The trip was unsurprisingly short, and the robot left before she'd even picked herself up. Shaking her head and dusting herself down (more for the gesture of the thing than to smooth or clean the grime-and-gore-encrusted remnants of her habit), she pressed the only button with an obvious function; the doors slid open once again and she peeked out into whatever new hell she'd been deposited into.
Surprisingly, it was silent and empty. Even the robot that had brought her here had vanished, likely into one of the innumerable doors that lined this unremarkable, hospital-like hallway. It was certainly more hospitable than anywhere she'd been in the Database so far, which wasn't saying much. She stepped out, figuring here was as good as anywhere to start looking for something helpful. The elevator whirred off behind her with a finality that was entirely due to her imagination. Doors stretched in both directions and on both sides of the corridor. Seeing nothing better to do, she walked towards one of the closest ones and went in.
Being undead made a person pretty hard to shock. The living reanimation process alone was pretty horrific, to say nothing of everything they had to see in the sort of life that lead up to it. Worshiping a death-god and acting as a spiritual barrier against all things that would pervert the souls of the living made a person pretty hard to shock, too. Even simply being very old had a tendency to immure someone against too much surprise (if it didn't sensitize them to it). Of course, all of Clara's experience and context had been of a much more eldritch nature than the technological horror that presented itself to her. Given that, it was rather impressive that the only outward reaction she had was a slight grimace and a general tightening of the features and knuckles.
The room was small and semicircular. Arranged along the curved wall were eight large glass cylinders, each with a terminal in front of it; inside each floated a single person, suspended in a greenish-grey fluid. And the word was person, not corpse; Clara knew that much with an intuitive certainty that wasn't worth questioning, but also knew that the line at this point was so fine and close that the distinction was almost meaningless. Each one was emaciated to the point of skeletal, intubated and wired, unconscious and with a pulse measured in minutes per beat rather than the reverse. She turned and left. The next room was the same. As was the next. And the next three. By the second, it had become clear that this was going to be on the order and scale of the magnetic tape storage she'd arrived in, but a morbid and masochistic kind of hope compelled her to check and recheck and become certain.
She was. She simply didn't know how to react to it.
It was ignorant of course to assume that someone or something like the Monitor would work on a small, manageable scale. She'd had this thought before, followed it to what seemed like a logical conclusion, become angry and despaired at the knowledge that her situation was likely not unique and at the supposition that the cruelty of her tormentor couldn't stop at simply forcing good people to fight. But this, this cold and clinical demonstration of those facts… This living graveyard, this testament to the disposability of life in the grandmaster's calculating eyes, this thing-that-was-beyond-even-abomination… There was no reaction, no space left in her for fear or anger or determination. These people had lives, had stories, had families and embarrassing habits. And now they were just barely-sustained husks, denied their just afterlives or even the mercy of oblivion. There was no way for Clara to know how many there were here. From what she'd seen, from the scale she could guess at in this place, there could be civilizations' or planets' worth of people trapped here. And to what end? Nothing could justify this, but what could even explain it?
For a time, curiosity overcame swift and lethal justice. Experimentally, and hoping against hope she wouldn't make things any worse, she crossed the floor and tapped one of the two buttons on the nearest terminal to her. Unsurprisingly, the fluid began to drain; perhaps more surprisingly, the woman in the tank opened her eyes as it finished disappearing. Clara hadn't really expected the body to have enough left in it to ever become aware of the world around it again, much less stare intently at her.
"Hello?" she ventured.
There was no response, but the woman continued to watch impassively. Her eyes followed Clara as she leaned left and right, so it seemed she was cognizant. Or at least present in some capacity. Clara tried again.
"Who are you?"
The woman's eyes closed for a moment; they opened again as she began speaking, occasionally flicking upwards as though she were trying to retrieve an elusive memory or detail.
"Memory storage unit number 348-04719-205, designate GB-S2-PF-1."
Clara felt she should have been aghast, but this was just one more atrocity in a line of so many that she'd lost count. It was just mildly depressing. Shackling them to unending but unchanging mortality was bad enough, but erasing their identity? Using them as, what, some sort of data storage? Disgusting.
"Who were you before you became… that?"
"I have always been memory storage unit number 348-04719-205, designate GB-S2-PF-1."
It was hard to take that at face value, given that she'd probably have had her own memories wiped if she was just a biological storage unit. Clara wasn't even sure whether it was more twisted to abduct living people or to create lives specifically to be subjugated; no amount of theology or ethics she'd been taught had really ever quantified suffering in a way that let her compare the two. Either way, it didn't matter. She would give these people the release they deserved.
…
She might as well honor their memory by using what they knew to help destroy their tormentor, though.
"What do you do?"
"My purpose is to remember facts and information relating to the sixth battle in the second series of Grand Battles, known to the grandmasters as the Phenomenal Fracas."
That suggested a greater level of organization – and probably a larger scale – than Clara had hoped would be the case. It was shockingly relevant, though. For all she'd known, this person could have been filled with knowledge about plants on a world that didn't exist anymore, or literary trivia from the thirtieth century. It was certainly fortuitous. Or at least a nugget of not-as-terrible in the morass of evil and horror she'd been drowning in.
"Tell me about the Phenomenal Fracas, then."
"What would you like me to remember?"
"Uh, let's see… Who runs that battle?"
"The Phenomenal Fracas was created by the class theta apotheotic quasi-divinity known as the Prestidigitator. He delegates many of the tasks of its administration to his group of gentlemen, all apotheotic quasi-divinities of varying class, all drawing power and vitality from the same source as the Prestidigitator; they are known as First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh or Victoria. The contestants were originally selected and ultimately rejected as potential participants in a Grand Battle by the Monitor, although the Monitor had no other influence on or hand in the Phenomenal Fracas."
Simultaneously helpful and mystifying. "What's a class theta apotheotic quasi-divinity?"
"I don't remember that."
Hmm. Perhaps less helpful than she thought, then. Still, might as well press forward.
"What is the Prestidigitator capable of?"
"Green-level reality restructuring. Orange-level temporal restructuring. Grade 78 necromancy. Grade 59 spacial manipulation. Grade 42 extraspacial manipulation. Class–"
This went on for quite some time, none of it being especially elucidating. The woman might as well have said "A lot"; it would have gotten the same message across in much less time. Eventually Clara told her to stop.
"What do any of those classes or levels or grades mean?"
"I don't remember that."
"No, of course you don't. Who is in the Phenomenal Fracas, then? Please give me a short personality or history summary of each."
Clara wondered as the memory-bank complied why she was bothering. How would any of this be helpful without context? Why bother learning about the victims trapped in another battle when most of them – well, half, she concluded as the woman listed off four names that were currently deceased – were probably dead, and all of them were well beyond her reach? It was just upsetting, and didn't really get her any closer to… Well, to any of her goals.
As the room went quiet again, she resolved to quit wasting her time, and prolonging the spiritual suffering of these poor people. She raised her cane once again, sighing internally as she swung it towards the glass.
She nearly lost her grip as it rebounded; something had to give in the battle between her enchanted weapon, her necromantic strength, and whatever science or magic had made the glass or whatever it was so impenetrable. Judging from the snapping noise and the lack of so much as a chip on the tank, it was probably her wrist. The woman watched the attempt on her life idly, not so much as blinking at the impact.
If it was going to have to be the hard way, then that was how it would be. Clara rubbed her wrist, setting bone and tissue knitting itself back into place without thinking about it much as she pondered how best to save these people. It was probably more efficient to do it this way, anyway; smashing each case individually could take her hours. Conceivably even years, depending on how many there were. Magically killing them felt a little evil, if only because it meant using some rather distasteful spells she'd always tried to avoid (and hadn't had to try hard, honestly, since murder and torture don't come up as an abbess's duties very often); she just had to remind herself that it was for the best. It was a kindness. It didn't really taint your soul any more than wielding a gun or shooting a fireball did. That was all superstition. If anyone would know, it'd be her.
She hummed quietly as she thought. Probably the best and most merciful way of going about this was to tangle the lifelines of all the people she could reach, then stop the heart of one of them and let the rest follow suit and WOW that sounded a lot like genocide. No wonder why some people still don't like necromancy. It'd be pretty easy to take that sort of thing out of context, or just do horrible things with it. Not that you couldn't do something worse just by causing a tidal wave or famine, but still… Distasteful. There was no sense spending too long musing, though, so Clara began the preparations for her spell.
Almost as soon as her chanting began and her awareness began to spread ethereal outwards, she choked on a syllable and snapped back into herself. These people had no souls. They never had had any. They weren't people any more than a computer or a golem or a frog were. They just happened to be made of meat, meat stretched over a human skeleton but containing no humanity. They weren't the atrocity she thought they were. They were…
An opportunity.
Without souls to free or personhood to respect or morals or qualms or histories or anything but conveniently-assembled raw materials housing information she could use if she could sort through it, they represented perhaps the best possibility she'd had since the beginning of this battle to do something big enough to affect her captor. To learn something big enough to become dangerous enough that she'd be a real threat. To have a big enough shield that she could protect her companions – or just Aph, at this point – and perhaps even herself. She'd long since decided that her fate had been to stop the Monitor, perhaps all the battles, but she'd simply assumed she'd die in the process. Maybe now she wouldn't have to. Maybe now she could show him what happened when he toyed with people and treated them like ants. Maybe it had all started when she entertained darker thoughts and darker magic than she usually allowed herself, but she had a plan now. A plan and the tools she'd need to set it in motion.
Most of them, at least. The other thing she'd noticed as she'd prepared her abortive casting was that there were no spirits in this place. At all. Not a ghost, not an elemental, not a flimsy ephemeral construct of concept and thought. Nothing lived here, and nothing unlived or antilived here either. It was effectively a bubble of metaphysically-anesthetized nothing, shod in metal and with infinite data but no meaning. That was going to make things difficult, because what she had in mind would need at least one other cognizant soul to stay at the helm of what she was already thinking of as her lieutenant. But maybe there was a way around that… She'd already dipped her toes into the blacker realms of her art, had already planned actions that would disgust anyone without the context to appreciate them. Why not give into it completely? It wasn't as though any of it were blasphemous. Just… Distasteful. More worryingly, untidy.
But she was six lives too late to give in to hesitation now, too late not to take advantage of everything she had. There was no-one left to judge but her final arbiter, and she may well have been beyond His reach now too. She would do this, and she would win, and whether it was right would be spelled out in the blood she shed, but not before it was. She'd have to do this, and mean it.
She unshouldered her holy book and flipped to the final chapters. Her god's words were just those, a guide on how to live and how to die and what came before and after; they were no grimoire, no recipe for damnation or holy fire, just the words of a loving and benevolent deity as He'd transcribed them for His followers. They were just words, but they were the words of a divine being, the words of something inextricably linked to death and endings. They had the echoes of His power, and in the mouth of His champion, they rang almost as though Schleier had said them Himself.
Clara's sermon began, and within seconds the glass that separated her from the tools of her victory had crumbled to dust. Even the dust itself vanished before it hit the floor, banished beyond the veil by an entropy so profound as to go beyond mere physics. The electricity that coursed through this place ran sluggish in its tracks; the sickly florescent lighting grew dim as the gas within lost its will and its energy; the nun's own autonomous functions guttered and failed, her habits and will no longer enough to sustain them. By the third passage, she could feel that her message had spread to every room near her, and by the seventh, she was confident the gloom had pervaded farther than she'd ever be able to reach on foot. One by one, then by the dozen then score then hundred, facsimile lives were snuffed out more by the weight of her recitation than the failure of their systems. The book snapped shut, but the air couldn't even muster a thud to mark it.
She was going to have to move fast, now, before nervous tissue damage set in. The bodies would be fine for days, but they weren't her chief concern. She reached out to the woman-now-corpse in front of her, belaboredly drawing breath only to hiss it out in a series of clipped, guttural syllables. Clara placed her hand under the woman's chin, tilting her face upwards and cradling her skull delicately until her fingers began to sink through flesh and bone. Her arm rose, bringing the brain with it, a glistening mound that crowned through limp hair as though illusory. It trailed tendrils of nerve and vessel behind it, giving the impression that Clara had extracted a very macabre jellyfish from the woman's body, and as the majority of its tentacles pulled free of the flesh, Clara gritted her teeth and concentrated. This part was going to hurt, or – probably – worse.
It would be romantic to think that the air filled with the sound of wet silk sadly ripping, or perhaps a disembodied shriek, or unearthly noise impossible to describe with mere sound and words, but the fact of the matter was that even if such things weren't still being suppressed by the aura of finality and stillness Clara had invoked, the room would still have been silent. A tearing soul made no noise, and its owner didn't have the breath to whimper as it split apart.
Such a hypothetical watcher (or the Monitor himself, as he surely was) would have been able to watch Clara keep on in her aimless but determined walk towards nothing in particular. They could have spent quite some time seeing nothing but her striding along, alone with her thoughts, going straight in one arbitrary direction except on those times she had to duck out of sight or grapple with another ASFU. It would not have been very interesting, since there was nothing to see and nothing to do but ensure the sorting droids she left in her wake didn't alert security too soon (and it really was rather disappointing that she hadn't given any thought to the consequences of her actions, or made any effort to prevent herself being discovered beyond attacking the incidental carriers). Eventually, she would reach a wall, which was really what she'd been expecting all along, turn right, and follow that wall until it became a corner. If she hugged enough walls, she seemed to be thinking, she'd eventually find a door, or a map, or something.
She did eventually find something, but it wasn't any kind of something she'd have wanted to find. Looming in front of her was the hub of the Filing Units' duties, an enormous sorting engine tended by dozens of robots; many of them flew, many more were on tracks like the ones she'd seen, and unless she was mistaken, the entire construct itself was a thankfully-probably-immobile robot. The whole mechanized hive buzzed and churned with activity, drones constantly coming and going, sorting and taking, returning and labeling. Clara seemed to sigh and looked to be considering whether to turn back around and follow the walls all the way back to where she'd started and then in the opposite direction, but stopped when she noticed something. On the far side of the hub, barely visible, was a human-sized door. She spent several seconds contemplating whether it was worth taking the risk and trying to sneak towards the door or whether it would be wiser to spend the extra time to follow the track of the enormous room all the way around.
No-one watching would have been able to tell what made the decision for her, but she came to one eventually. She slipped back into the grid of shelves and storage and began creeping her way around the busiest areas. It took a not-insignificant amount of time (although certainly much less than the alternative would have taken), but she eventually skirted the borders of the most active section of the warehouse. There were fewer near-misses than she would have expected there to be, as though someone had been directing the robots around and past her. Regardless of how and why, she eventually came to the door she'd spotted, thanked her stars and her god that it opened when a button was pushed, and scuttled hurriedly out of the smothering openness of the colossal room filled with tape.
She stopped short once she actually began to take in the new place she'd discovered; if the sorting engine she'd passed had been busy, then this room was some kind of artificial pandemonium. Things came and went endlessly and at great speeds, on tracks and on vehicles and on foot and on far too many feet. A rainbow of subtly-differently-colored lines spread out before her, leading down hallways and through doors and often straight up the walls and into hatches in the ceiling. The whole place had the air of a crowded subway station, except that the commuters were themselves often the trains and their cargo. Fortunately, nothing paid her any attention, and possibly nothing was even capable of noticing her; the perfectly-ordered chaos formed a bubble of noise and confusion around her, but made no move to interfere. A number of the non-track-bound robots even actively sidestepped or rolled around her, not sparing her a second glance or slowing for a moment. It was a relief, but… She had no more idea now of where to go and what to seek or even how to find out either than she had had at the start of the round. If she'd still had any undisheartened heart left, it would have been very disheartening.
The nun carefully picked her way across the floor of the robotic thoroughfare (although she needn't have bothered being careful), crestfallen and confused. There was no signage or information anywhere, no indication of what anything was or where anything was going. Or perhaps there was and she simply couldn't perceive or understand it, being organic and not strictly speaking supposed to ever have made her way here. Regardless of the nature of the lack of information, it was a seemingly impassable barrier; even her magic would avail her little, given that no amount of divination would be able to decipher what wasn't there or tell her where to go if she didn't know where that was. She just kept shuffling aimlessly until something caught her eye.
Among all of the alien and confusing hubbub and not-designed-for-humans architecture, the elevator stood out as a strange beacon of normalcy. It would be hard to explain why that particular pair of double doors had drawn her attention, but once it had, its function and nature were clear and obvious. Or perhaps they were so arcane and counterintuitive that it only looked like an elevator to her, and it'd actually be an incinerator or matter reclaimer or horrible portal to any number of terrible things. There was only one way to find out, and she quickened her pace towards the first real (if minor) goal she'd had since Aegis h– since this round had started.
There were two buttons to the side of the doors; they weren't marked, but they really didn't need to be. Once pressed, there was a whirring followed by a pneumatic hiss as the elevator opened and proved itself to be, in fact, an elevator. It was spartan and steel, more like a cargo elevator or dumbwaiter than passenger transport, but it looked serviceable enough. It looked designed for humans, or hominids at least, and that was promising. Maybe it could take her somewhere that she could actually understand or affect. She was almost excited until she turned around.
Covering the entire wall she had come in through were literally hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of identical buttons. None were numbered. None were marked. Many were too high for her to reach even with her cane. There was also some sort of port by the doors that suggested anything wanting to use the elevator would have to interface with it before it would take them anywhere. Another brief glimmer of hope, another dead end. Why would the Fool have gone to the trouble of subverting the Monitor's plans and dropping her into his inner sanctum… somewhere she could do or learn nothing? It made no sense. Then again, neither did multidimensional kidnapping and sapient pit-fights. Many things didn't make sense.
Someone trying to lead Clara without her knowledge would have run up against a bit of a sticking point as she stood idly in the elevator, drumming her fingers on her cane: it was ideal that she thought any decisions she made were her own and based on knowledge she had, and she was unlikely to respond well to direct intervention or contact (although that was out of the question anyway). How to send her where she needed to be (or where someone else needed her to be, perhaps) without her catching on to any interference? It wasn't as though a directory could just fall out of the ceiling without arousing her suspicions.
Still, the nice thing about people of faith, and especially ones who occasionally actually heard from the objects of their worship, was that on the whole they were pretty happy to chalk up synchronicity and convenience to divine intervention or guidance or dutifully-bestowed luck. Perhaps things could simply be nudged along and she'd go with the flow. It certainly seemed to be her default state so far.
Clara was pondering what sort of augury she could perform that might give her any indication of what the most favorable button to press would be (and running up against a brick wall with every avenue she pursued) when the doors whooshed open and deposited what could probably be best called a wheeled android into the elevator with her. She yelped and jumped backwards, raising the cane in case it became aggressive, but it paid her as little mind as any of the others she'd forded her way through had. Within instants of its arrival, it had punched one of the countless buttons; the elevator sprang into action immediately, and Clara collapsed as it sped upwards with a speed associated more with coil guns or maglev trains than cables and stair-alternatives. Perhaps not designed for humans after all, then.
The trip was unsurprisingly short, and the robot left before she'd even picked herself up. Shaking her head and dusting herself down (more for the gesture of the thing than to smooth or clean the grime-and-gore-encrusted remnants of her habit), she pressed the only button with an obvious function; the doors slid open once again and she peeked out into whatever new hell she'd been deposited into.
Surprisingly, it was silent and empty. Even the robot that had brought her here had vanished, likely into one of the innumerable doors that lined this unremarkable, hospital-like hallway. It was certainly more hospitable than anywhere she'd been in the Database so far, which wasn't saying much. She stepped out, figuring here was as good as anywhere to start looking for something helpful. The elevator whirred off behind her with a finality that was entirely due to her imagination. Doors stretched in both directions and on both sides of the corridor. Seeing nothing better to do, she walked towards one of the closest ones and went in.
Being undead made a person pretty hard to shock. The living reanimation process alone was pretty horrific, to say nothing of everything they had to see in the sort of life that lead up to it. Worshiping a death-god and acting as a spiritual barrier against all things that would pervert the souls of the living made a person pretty hard to shock, too. Even simply being very old had a tendency to immure someone against too much surprise (if it didn't sensitize them to it). Of course, all of Clara's experience and context had been of a much more eldritch nature than the technological horror that presented itself to her. Given that, it was rather impressive that the only outward reaction she had was a slight grimace and a general tightening of the features and knuckles.
The room was small and semicircular. Arranged along the curved wall were eight large glass cylinders, each with a terminal in front of it; inside each floated a single person, suspended in a greenish-grey fluid. And the word was person, not corpse; Clara knew that much with an intuitive certainty that wasn't worth questioning, but also knew that the line at this point was so fine and close that the distinction was almost meaningless. Each one was emaciated to the point of skeletal, intubated and wired, unconscious and with a pulse measured in minutes per beat rather than the reverse. She turned and left. The next room was the same. As was the next. And the next three. By the second, it had become clear that this was going to be on the order and scale of the magnetic tape storage she'd arrived in, but a morbid and masochistic kind of hope compelled her to check and recheck and become certain.
She was. She simply didn't know how to react to it.
It was ignorant of course to assume that someone or something like the Monitor would work on a small, manageable scale. She'd had this thought before, followed it to what seemed like a logical conclusion, become angry and despaired at the knowledge that her situation was likely not unique and at the supposition that the cruelty of her tormentor couldn't stop at simply forcing good people to fight. But this, this cold and clinical demonstration of those facts… This living graveyard, this testament to the disposability of life in the grandmaster's calculating eyes, this thing-that-was-beyond-even-abomination… There was no reaction, no space left in her for fear or anger or determination. These people had lives, had stories, had families and embarrassing habits. And now they were just barely-sustained husks, denied their just afterlives or even the mercy of oblivion. There was no way for Clara to know how many there were here. From what she'd seen, from the scale she could guess at in this place, there could be civilizations' or planets' worth of people trapped here. And to what end? Nothing could justify this, but what could even explain it?
For a time, curiosity overcame swift and lethal justice. Experimentally, and hoping against hope she wouldn't make things any worse, she crossed the floor and tapped one of the two buttons on the nearest terminal to her. Unsurprisingly, the fluid began to drain; perhaps more surprisingly, the woman in the tank opened her eyes as it finished disappearing. Clara hadn't really expected the body to have enough left in it to ever become aware of the world around it again, much less stare intently at her.
"Hello?" she ventured.
There was no response, but the woman continued to watch impassively. Her eyes followed Clara as she leaned left and right, so it seemed she was cognizant. Or at least present in some capacity. Clara tried again.
"Who are you?"
The woman's eyes closed for a moment; they opened again as she began speaking, occasionally flicking upwards as though she were trying to retrieve an elusive memory or detail.
"Memory storage unit number 348-04719-205, designate GB-S2-PF-1."
Clara felt she should have been aghast, but this was just one more atrocity in a line of so many that she'd lost count. It was just mildly depressing. Shackling them to unending but unchanging mortality was bad enough, but erasing their identity? Using them as, what, some sort of data storage? Disgusting.
"Who were you before you became… that?"
"I have always been memory storage unit number 348-04719-205, designate GB-S2-PF-1."
It was hard to take that at face value, given that she'd probably have had her own memories wiped if she was just a biological storage unit. Clara wasn't even sure whether it was more twisted to abduct living people or to create lives specifically to be subjugated; no amount of theology or ethics she'd been taught had really ever quantified suffering in a way that let her compare the two. Either way, it didn't matter. She would give these people the release they deserved.
…
She might as well honor their memory by using what they knew to help destroy their tormentor, though.
"What do you do?"
"My purpose is to remember facts and information relating to the sixth battle in the second series of Grand Battles, known to the grandmasters as the Phenomenal Fracas."
That suggested a greater level of organization – and probably a larger scale – than Clara had hoped would be the case. It was shockingly relevant, though. For all she'd known, this person could have been filled with knowledge about plants on a world that didn't exist anymore, or literary trivia from the thirtieth century. It was certainly fortuitous. Or at least a nugget of not-as-terrible in the morass of evil and horror she'd been drowning in.
"Tell me about the Phenomenal Fracas, then."
"What would you like me to remember?"
"Uh, let's see… Who runs that battle?"
"The Phenomenal Fracas was created by the class theta apotheotic quasi-divinity known as the Prestidigitator. He delegates many of the tasks of its administration to his group of gentlemen, all apotheotic quasi-divinities of varying class, all drawing power and vitality from the same source as the Prestidigitator; they are known as First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh or Victoria. The contestants were originally selected and ultimately rejected as potential participants in a Grand Battle by the Monitor, although the Monitor had no other influence on or hand in the Phenomenal Fracas."
Simultaneously helpful and mystifying. "What's a class theta apotheotic quasi-divinity?"
"I don't remember that."
Hmm. Perhaps less helpful than she thought, then. Still, might as well press forward.
"What is the Prestidigitator capable of?"
"Green-level reality restructuring. Orange-level temporal restructuring. Grade 78 necromancy. Grade 59 spacial manipulation. Grade 42 extraspacial manipulation. Class–"
This went on for quite some time, none of it being especially elucidating. The woman might as well have said "A lot"; it would have gotten the same message across in much less time. Eventually Clara told her to stop.
"What do any of those classes or levels or grades mean?"
"I don't remember that."
"No, of course you don't. Who is in the Phenomenal Fracas, then? Please give me a short personality or history summary of each."
Clara wondered as the memory-bank complied why she was bothering. How would any of this be helpful without context? Why bother learning about the victims trapped in another battle when most of them – well, half, she concluded as the woman listed off four names that were currently deceased – were probably dead, and all of them were well beyond her reach? It was just upsetting, and didn't really get her any closer to… Well, to any of her goals.
As the room went quiet again, she resolved to quit wasting her time, and prolonging the spiritual suffering of these poor people. She raised her cane once again, sighing internally as she swung it towards the glass.
She nearly lost her grip as it rebounded; something had to give in the battle between her enchanted weapon, her necromantic strength, and whatever science or magic had made the glass or whatever it was so impenetrable. Judging from the snapping noise and the lack of so much as a chip on the tank, it was probably her wrist. The woman watched the attempt on her life idly, not so much as blinking at the impact.
If it was going to have to be the hard way, then that was how it would be. Clara rubbed her wrist, setting bone and tissue knitting itself back into place without thinking about it much as she pondered how best to save these people. It was probably more efficient to do it this way, anyway; smashing each case individually could take her hours. Conceivably even years, depending on how many there were. Magically killing them felt a little evil, if only because it meant using some rather distasteful spells she'd always tried to avoid (and hadn't had to try hard, honestly, since murder and torture don't come up as an abbess's duties very often); she just had to remind herself that it was for the best. It was a kindness. It didn't really taint your soul any more than wielding a gun or shooting a fireball did. That was all superstition. If anyone would know, it'd be her.
She hummed quietly as she thought. Probably the best and most merciful way of going about this was to tangle the lifelines of all the people she could reach, then stop the heart of one of them and let the rest follow suit and WOW that sounded a lot like genocide. No wonder why some people still don't like necromancy. It'd be pretty easy to take that sort of thing out of context, or just do horrible things with it. Not that you couldn't do something worse just by causing a tidal wave or famine, but still… Distasteful. There was no sense spending too long musing, though, so Clara began the preparations for her spell.
Almost as soon as her chanting began and her awareness began to spread ethereal outwards, she choked on a syllable and snapped back into herself. These people had no souls. They never had had any. They weren't people any more than a computer or a golem or a frog were. They just happened to be made of meat, meat stretched over a human skeleton but containing no humanity. They weren't the atrocity she thought they were. They were…
An opportunity.
Without souls to free or personhood to respect or morals or qualms or histories or anything but conveniently-assembled raw materials housing information she could use if she could sort through it, they represented perhaps the best possibility she'd had since the beginning of this battle to do something big enough to affect her captor. To learn something big enough to become dangerous enough that she'd be a real threat. To have a big enough shield that she could protect her companions – or just Aph, at this point – and perhaps even herself. She'd long since decided that her fate had been to stop the Monitor, perhaps all the battles, but she'd simply assumed she'd die in the process. Maybe now she wouldn't have to. Maybe now she could show him what happened when he toyed with people and treated them like ants. Maybe it had all started when she entertained darker thoughts and darker magic than she usually allowed herself, but she had a plan now. A plan and the tools she'd need to set it in motion.
Most of them, at least. The other thing she'd noticed as she'd prepared her abortive casting was that there were no spirits in this place. At all. Not a ghost, not an elemental, not a flimsy ephemeral construct of concept and thought. Nothing lived here, and nothing unlived or antilived here either. It was effectively a bubble of metaphysically-anesthetized nothing, shod in metal and with infinite data but no meaning. That was going to make things difficult, because what she had in mind would need at least one other cognizant soul to stay at the helm of what she was already thinking of as her lieutenant. But maybe there was a way around that… She'd already dipped her toes into the blacker realms of her art, had already planned actions that would disgust anyone without the context to appreciate them. Why not give into it completely? It wasn't as though any of it were blasphemous. Just… Distasteful. More worryingly, untidy.
But she was six lives too late to give in to hesitation now, too late not to take advantage of everything she had. There was no-one left to judge but her final arbiter, and she may well have been beyond His reach now too. She would do this, and she would win, and whether it was right would be spelled out in the blood she shed, but not before it was. She'd have to do this, and mean it.
She unshouldered her holy book and flipped to the final chapters. Her god's words were just those, a guide on how to live and how to die and what came before and after; they were no grimoire, no recipe for damnation or holy fire, just the words of a loving and benevolent deity as He'd transcribed them for His followers. They were just words, but they were the words of a divine being, the words of something inextricably linked to death and endings. They had the echoes of His power, and in the mouth of His champion, they rang almost as though Schleier had said them Himself.
Clara's sermon began, and within seconds the glass that separated her from the tools of her victory had crumbled to dust. Even the dust itself vanished before it hit the floor, banished beyond the veil by an entropy so profound as to go beyond mere physics. The electricity that coursed through this place ran sluggish in its tracks; the sickly florescent lighting grew dim as the gas within lost its will and its energy; the nun's own autonomous functions guttered and failed, her habits and will no longer enough to sustain them. By the third passage, she could feel that her message had spread to every room near her, and by the seventh, she was confident the gloom had pervaded farther than she'd ever be able to reach on foot. One by one, then by the dozen then score then hundred, facsimile lives were snuffed out more by the weight of her recitation than the failure of their systems. The book snapped shut, but the air couldn't even muster a thud to mark it.
She was going to have to move fast, now, before nervous tissue damage set in. The bodies would be fine for days, but they weren't her chief concern. She reached out to the woman-now-corpse in front of her, belaboredly drawing breath only to hiss it out in a series of clipped, guttural syllables. Clara placed her hand under the woman's chin, tilting her face upwards and cradling her skull delicately until her fingers began to sink through flesh and bone. Her arm rose, bringing the brain with it, a glistening mound that crowned through limp hair as though illusory. It trailed tendrils of nerve and vessel behind it, giving the impression that Clara had extracted a very macabre jellyfish from the woman's body, and as the majority of its tentacles pulled free of the flesh, Clara gritted her teeth and concentrated. This part was going to hurt, or – probably – worse.
It would be romantic to think that the air filled with the sound of wet silk sadly ripping, or perhaps a disembodied shriek, or unearthly noise impossible to describe with mere sound and words, but the fact of the matter was that even if such things weren't still being suppressed by the aura of finality and stillness Clara had invoked, the room would still have been silent. A tearing soul made no noise, and its owner didn't have the breath to whimper as it split apart.