Interlude Seven (Patreon)

From the memoirs of Dr. Leopold Tempes – Vitria, 286 A.T.S.

The attack was the largest mass murder in Aleph’s history by a considerable margin. Dozens died in the initial wave of bombings and hundreds more in targeted assassinations and terror attacks that continued through the late evening hours and into the following afternoon.

At the time, I understood none of this. I awoke to chaos without context, hearing screams in the streets as I watched the great egg of The Lattice Hall—the Steelborn seat of governance—collapse in upon itself, gouts of flame spewing from the gaping wound. By mid-morning, the Gilded Concourse—Null’s grandest commercial holon—had been reduced to a smoking ruin with a score dead in the Amaranth Theatre alone.

My hosts from the previous evening, to their eternal credit, allowed me to weather the conflict from the comfort of their penthouse rather than forcing me back out onto the street. We wined and dined, entertaining a small gathering of neighbours in the hope that solidarity in numbers would provide some measure of security until the matter blew over. It sounds crass, I know, to drink and play games while the city burned beneath us. But we had no idea what else to do. We certainly couldn’t be seen on the streets. Even before the official announcements, everyone ‘knew’ who had committed the attacks. And as humans, we fit the description.

The Steelborn came for us on the morning of the second day.

Null was a city designed for Steelborn first and foremost, even if it made accommodations for Humans and other Descendants. We had basic needs the Steelborn did not: to eat and drink, bathe, and defecate. These logistical concerns led to the development of several biological holons—segregation out of necessity, not bigotry.

Intentional or not, it made it easy for them to crack down on us.

The security teams worked building by building, floor by floor, and door by door. They were ruthlessly efficient, closing off every avenue for escape, searching every home and interviewing every occupant. The teams were cold and professional, focused on their task to the exclusion of pleasantry, but they were not unkind. Hundreds were dead, and the Steelborn were furious, but as with everything, they took the long view. Collective punishment would not help Aleph recover, and few—if any of us—had a hand in the attack. We were suspected, yes, but in civilized society, punishment comes after conviction, not before.

As such, they carried with them all the necessities of life, with more to come during the lockdown. A carrot to keep us complacent as they searched for discrepancies to smash with their stick.

Unfortunately, I was one such discrepancy.

Long before they reached our door, I knew I would be taken. The penthouse apartment had two listed occupants, and there were three of us inside. That alone was enough to warrant questioning.

What I did not expect was a violent reaction to my name. One moment I was introducing myself, the next I was face down, the blood from my broken nose irreparably destroying my host’s glorious shag carpet.

In retrospect, I did not conduct myself well. Fear and pain made me senseless, and I shouted, squirmed, and fought against captors who had good reason to consider me a threat. They collared and restrained me, then loaded me onto the back of a large, eight-legged Steelborn for immediate transport alongside two heavily armed guards.

Somewhere during the trip, I regained my senses and moved from belligerence to inquiry. I peppered them with all the usual questions. Why had I been arrested? Where was I being taken? When could I speak to a solicitor? They answered none of these. In truth, I am not certain the faceless Steelborn enforcers were capable of speech. Not in any language I could understand. Not that it would have mattered, as the only time either spared me more than a cursory glance was when I shifted my weight to take pressure off an aching wrist.

They dislocated my shoulder for that mistake. I did not make another.

They collected two more prisoners along the way. The first was a panicked middle-aged woman, as baffled by her arrest as I had been. The second was a youth of no more than twenty, recently recovered from the wreckage. I had some sympathy for the young man’s pain until I recognized the split triangle stitched on the sleeve above his missing left arm.

A Son of the Clear Cause. One of the bastard human supremacists behind the attack.

At the time, I pitied him, both for his injuries and the single-minded stupidity that had set him on such a self-destructive path. Knowing what I know now, it is impossible to be certain whether he was an actual Son of the Clear Cause or one of the Harbinger’s minions wearing a costume.

I am not certain which would be worse. Evil with a malign purpose? Or a youth spent in pointless hate over a century-old grudge.

In either case, I was so caught up in my sympathy for the agonized youth that my guards had to jostle me to attention on our arrival. And even after they had, I did not quite understand.

I had expected to be taken to a security station or a jail. But I did not expect it to be so beautiful.

I must have walked past the building half a hundred times without ever once understanding that I was looking at the city jail. Framed with mirrored glass and layered with gold, the oddly shaped six-story building only showed its true colors once you passed its threshold. Inside, the walls were concrete and steel, aesthetics giving way to practical concerns wherever the two clashed.

Nowhere was this clearer than the interrogation room.

A healer attended to me within minutes of my arrival, but afterward I was left alone in that forsaken place for hours on end in an utterly silent room. Not quiet, you must understand, but silent—no footsteps from the hall, no laughter or sniffling. Through careful construction—and I must assume no small amount of magic—the room was an island detached from the outside world.

It has been said that if you desire to drive someone mad, leave them alone with their thoughts. I would posit that the same can be accomplished much more quickly by leaving them alone with their noise.

I was an innocent man in every sense that mattered, but if I could have confessed to something to escape that room, I would have done so with the hour. My ears rang, and my heartbeat was thunder in my chest. I heard the click of every blink, the bubbles in my saliva, and the way my nose whistled with each inhalation.

The Steelborn do not condone torture, but having been subjected to their interrogation methods, I can assure you they have found the next best thing. I all but wept when my interrogator finally arrived.

What entered did not look like a person, not even loosely. It moved on four jointed limbs that reminded me—unhappily—of a spider stretched to the size of a large dog, its chassis a dull matte black that drank in the light with each unsettling movement. Where an animal might have had a face, a flat sheet of metal sat in a multi-jointed, neck-like mount. The sheet swiveled as the Steelborn settled in across from me, then warped and shifted until it resolved a crude depiction of a face.

My face.

It was, I think, off-putting by design. I cannot imagine it is easy to lie to your own face.

Fortunately, as a true son of Vitria, I speak nothing but the truth.

“Tell me everything,” it said.

And so I did. Gratefully. Desperately in places. I told it everything I could recall from the last few days. The theatre, the wine, and how I ended up away from home on the night of the attacks. I told it about the needlessly brutal arrest, and my confusion; about the obvious misunderstanding.

When I was spent, the spider-dog thing wobbled back and forth, like an entranced serpent ready to strike. Then it said, “Tell me everything.”

I was perplexed. My story had been straightforward and thorough, and the Steelborn had not made a single inquiry during the retelling. I knew nothing, and there was nothing more to add. When I told it as much, it repeated the command in a dull monotone. So I obliged, adding more detail in areas I had left uncolored before, giving specific hours and names to the best of my ability.

And when I was done, it asked again.

I had told it everything, and it acted as though I had said nothing. When I protested, it claimed my concerns were ‘irrelevant’ and demanded I tell it everything. Eventually, I relented and repeated the events a third time. Then a fourth. Before long, I expanded beyond the night’s events, providing the machine with context as to why I was in Aleph, though I kept certain details—such as the existence of the Class Codexis—close to my chest.

Only when I mentioned Praetor Twelve did my interrogator change its tune.

“Praetor Twelve was attacked. Your apartment was destroyed in an explosion. You are suspected.”

And there it was.

Until that moment, it had never crossed my mind that the attacks were anything but what they appeared. Etrusian hatred for their creations was well known, and groups like the Clear Cause were abundant. Though unusual in scope and severity, the week’s attacks were only the latest in a long line of similar crimes.

But none of those groups had any reason to target me.

I was no diplomat, no well-known friend of the Steelborn. I had spent much of the last year intoxicated beyond sense. I was a world away from every enemy I had ever made, and it seemed unlikely that Vulcas Orith would bomb an apartment in Null because of my cutting critique of his thesis.

But the Harbinger? I knew his minions were oh-so-quick to violence where secrets were concerned.

How long had they been watching me? Not long enough, clearly. Else, I never would have survived.

The circumstances behind my survival were simple. I had made introductions to a lovely young couple after a performance of The Lover Unexpected, and after a late evening spent carousing, I found myself in their bed rather than my own.

The bomb beneath my bed detonated on schedule—one of the very first—but no one was home.

A small, egotistical part of me remains insulted that I survived by mere oversight. The Harbinger wanted me dead, yes, but his minions did not treat me as a priority. If they’d spent even a few more days surveilling me, they’d have realized just how infrequently I slept in my own bed.

But I suppose, in fairness, they had their hands full elsewhere.

The attack on Praetor Twelve had been much more thorough. I had drawn the bowstring, but Praetor and his thinking machines were the arrow in flight. The Harbinger could not allow even the possibility of Twelve’s success, and dedicated his resources accordingly.

I do not know if the rest of the carnage was opportunistic or incidental—the Harbinger’s plans are too labyrinthine to guess why some were attacked, and others spared—but I know that the ongoing violence was an excellent distraction. The worst attacks took place on the east side of Null, staggered to keep the focus where they wanted it—away from Expedited Research.

By the time the Steelborn could spare security, fire, and rescue brigades, Null Expedited Research and Development had been erased. Every laboratory, archive, and office had been destroyed by explosions or ravaged by fire. The mighty cognitive engines that had threatened the Harbinger’s secrecy were molten slag, and the researchers who had built them were slain.

All except one.

The Harbinger’s agents had vastly underestimated Praetor Twelve. They saw one more academic and approached him with the same quantity of violence that they had allotted to his lesser colleagues. But Praetor Twelve was not like his colleagues. A two-century-old artisan Steelborn and a master of his craft, Twelve was one of the highest-Rank Steelborn ever built—but that was not a well-known fact, even among his own people.

For once, being a shut-in academic was advantageous.

Blessed as we are with uncommonly high Aptitudes, Vitrians are taught from a young age that ‘Skill Surpasses Status’. That talent and dedication can overcome a gap in Level and Attributes. It is a good lesson, but strictly speaking, it is far from the truth.

I am told the aftermath of the battle was quite grisly. Or, rather… no. Not battle, for that word carries the implication of a meaningful contest.

In the years that followed, Praetor Twelve confided to me the details of what had occurred. He had never before taken a life—and would not do so again, Mothers willing—but standing amidst the ruins of his life’s work, he turned his deeply analytical mind toward answers.

When something in a machine is broken—he explained—you must disassemble it to discover the cause. The six men who had come to kill him were deeply broken. What else could explain such a senseless attack? The Steelborn of Expedited Research did not make weapons; they had no interest in power, politics, or status. An academic in the purest sense, Praetor Twelve had devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowing, and yet men had come to kill him without rhyme or reason.

They must be broken, he’d decided.

So he disassembled them.