Chapter 496 – Big Snake(s) (Patreon)

Another thing long foreshadowed and suddenly triggered! Expansion has consequences. Namely, in this case, meeting new people.

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Damn. You notice how bright the sun is lately? Feels like the days are getting longer, too. We’re heading into winter here, you’d think we’d be getting some sleep finally.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“Of course. Fucking morning people, I swear to Empire.”

-Conversation between two farmers, recorded and flagged by the Division of Divination

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If one were to simply look at what was happening, they would see a strange, clearly inhuman weapon-being, a construct of weapons and alien machinery, staring at a big snake. On one level, that’s precisely what’s happening. 

On another, deeper level, one might look and see a strange fluctuation of Qi in the area. They might stay to watch as the energies in the space equalize, stabilize, turning to something more ordered and clearer than before. They might even experience some degree of enlightenment, watching a higher concept gradually bring this part of the world more in tune with its own existence. 

Both perspectives are true. Both levels equivalent, if distinct. Neither one catches sight of the events that truly matter, nor the “why” of the changes seen around those events. 

On a level more relevant, there is a big snake, which is an island and an anchor and the doorway to a spiraling tunnel. There is a pillar, wielding flesh and machine as one, supernatural design enacted with mechanical architecture, puppeting a part of itself, using it as a bridge as it slips through it and out into that tunnel, surrounded by an entourage of sparks and simple thought. 

Pillar and Raika’s Flame, and by extension, Raika, descend/ascend through that tunnel without ever leaving where they’re standing, because not all forms of movement come in the first three dimensions. 

Big Snake licks its eyeball again. 

The tunnel isn’t really a tunnel, any more than the snake is an anchor, any more than the beast is orbiting anything at all. The metaphor is useful enough, though, so Pillar does not remove it from the memories it is recording. 

Traveling is a matter of perception, and it falls forward as it climbs, deeper into a branch of that greater and stranger Dao. As it travels, its math is checked over and over, even as it leaves the areas where familiar equations have scaffolding to make sense from. It’s a worthwhile process, though, allowing it to keep more of itself focused on the current moment rather than the higher revelation it is traveling through, and offers it some additional insight. 

Like it calculated originally, this serpent is not the only tunnel to the concept. It orbits the deeper layers, and its orbit is influenced by others. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other pathways that Pillar is fairly certain connect to the world that it came from. It tries to create the requisite neural pathways and spare brains to track where those revelations lead, but in this abstract, astral space, simple minds don’t have the ability to navigate properly, much less transmit or understand the data they experience. Even if they did, Pillar is moving in, higher and lower and out, and reversing that flow through pathways it isn’t even in is beyond its ability for now. 

The pathway is not timeless. It has been 1.072 minutes since Pillar directed most of its processing power to this endeavor, and it has a few minutes more before anything catastrophic happens with the resources and sites it’s managing. So it follows along, and goes deeper, trusting Raika’s Flame and the intentions of the… big snake. 

Idly, Pillar wonders if big snake has enough neural activity to understand what’s happening. Or where it is. Or even what it knows. 

The thought is a bit too materialistic, though. It slows progression towards that revelation, and Pillar is in a bit of a hurry. 

The pathway it is in, like all the others it can sense by association, leads beyond reality, towards something deeper. It leads towards FLAME, an ur-concept, not quite at the level of DIVISION, perhaps, but greater than fire alone. Pillar travels, and its minds, without any input required, bring up moments of ignition, of plasma, starlight, campfires, flames of every different hue of both Dao and alkemy. It recalls concepts of ignition, transfer of energy, movement and heat and waving tendrils and colors and consumption and production and, above all, transformation. Above destruction or creation, here, in the FLAME, there is change. 

Perhaps it is no surprise that part of Raika embraced the heat that so defined them. Flame is more kin to CHANGE than it is to END or DIVISION, after all. Perhaps there are other divine ur-concepts that she / it has yet to meet, but of the three, it makes sense that flame is what became of part of her.

Just like the trees of Dao in Raika’s inner world, the pathways eventually bend together. These tunnels in/out/up/down from reality converge, becoming thicker and thicker revelations that encompass more and more as they go. Pillar notices that its attention is not the only one traveling this way, and that other pathways have flickering embers of awareness following it deeper, tracking its progress. It is watched, and not just by its other selves. 

Higher revelation pulls them all forward, towards that comprehension beyond comprehension, until Pillar finds the roadblock.

It is… cruel, perhaps, to call it a roadblock. But perhaps that is simply the nature of what Pillar is seeing. Even from a place bereft of emotion, able to examine social constructs from a place of inhuman detachment, it cannot think of anything that could be done or thought of this thing that would not be cruel.

It looks like a knot. A tangle, interwoven in itself, devouring all the tunnels that lead towards it. Pathways of enlightenment towards the higher concept seem to both originate and terminate inside of it, an ouroboros of awareness and comprehension. It seems contradictory, a perversion, a torment. Whatever is inside the knot, blocking the pathway higher, like an island in this branch of the higher Dao, seems to be trapped in such a way that awareness of the revelation brings it into existence and damns it in turn.

Or… damns the beings that created it. Like a group-thought that’s perverted a simple concept, wrapping around itself over and over in shared delusion and misinterpretation. 

It looks like a ball of snakes.

Behind the Pillar is the pathway it came through, as well as the hundreds more that lead back to the mundane, the “real”. Ahead of it, perfectly placed between higher enlightenment and mortality, is a paradox, contradicting what comes before and what will come after it, and allowing only a lesser glow of the wider tunnel beyond it to touch on the pathways “below” it. 

Acknowledgement, Pillar thinks to a part of its wider self. Comprehension.

The vague implication of agreement comes from the ever-changing horde of fires that is Raika. 

Big snake.

Plural? Pillar asks.

Big snake.

Alright, well, Pillar’s not sure what it expected at this point. The embers are clearly not the most aware or talkative part of Raika’s Flame, obviously.

Instead, it turns its attention “forward”.

What do you want? Pillar asks of the knot, transmitting through Intent. It tries to repeat the message in other languages, but there are no other languages here. There is concept, there is awareness, and there is intention. This is no more a physical space than a thought is a physical object, which is to say that it can be, but not as it currently exists. 

The response is a wail of incomprehensible madness. 

Raika has gone insane many times. She’s become adept at it, and at managing it. Pillar is one of the premier tools for precisely that, in fact. So it is that when the wave of catastrophic discord hits, rather than shattering or going mad itself, Pillar takes them all in, distributing individual pieces of the insanity into more digestible chunks and transmitting them to “translator” brains. 

It understands its mistake fairly quickly. The question was too broad.

It comprehends / translates / misinterprets into sanity a few million responses, all of them overlapping, all of them equally discordant. Even though many of them are the same, or seemingly “repeated” responses, they are all distinctive, each requiring unique translations. But the messages remain distressingly on-theme.

Death

Peace

Joy

A Moment

Painlessness

Revenge

Kindness

Oblivion

A Reason

Justice

Sleep

Rest

For It To Stop

To Stop

Dignity 

Care

Retribution

Peace

Death

END

A cavalcade of suffering, transmitted through a storm of screaming responses. 

Ultimately unhelpful. Pillar refines its technique.

Why have you called me here at this particular moment and time?

Intent is a handy tool. The specific message takes no more effort or time to transmit and be understood than any of the others, as the others are just as, if not more, complex to begin with. Simplification is simply an aspect of translation to lesser things like “language” or “understandable concepts”

Again, a wave of madness, an enlightenment from on high that is broken by the knot which created it. 

Peace 

Retribution

Revenge

Dignity

Communication

Freedom

Cooperation

Good. That was better. Much more interpretable. 

Still not very useful, though.

So. Something from the deep south, the big snake, came up to the undergrowth in the north and eastern parts of the world. It touched on the Flame of Raika, or perhaps was found by it. It then called for assistance with negotiation. 

But… that brings up an interesting question. 

Did the Flame of Raika think that the negotiations would be with the brainless lizard, or with this… thing?

And if it was the latter, how did it know this thing existed? Has it visited this space before? If so, how has it not influenced the wider Raika, or made her aware of this sort of revelation-space?

It feels distressingly close to being inside a Tribulation. All of that infinite power, bereft of the attention of higher beings, but still laid bare at the levels of reality that stand beyond the literal and the mundane. She, and by extension Pillar, would have noticed if part of her was experiencing such a place. 

Right?

What can I offer you in the cooperation you desire?

Again, a mess of messages, this one more discordant than the last. Many of the responses get filtered out, Pillar’s algorithms finding patterns and discarding the pieces that seem to make no sense, or which carry notes of incomprehension about where they are, what’s happening, or who they are communicating with. Ultimately, one message emerges, averaged out between millions of voices, many of whom do nothing more than wail in discordant pleading.

Free Us

An interesting proposition. 

What can you offer me in exchange for this rendered service?

A mistake. Too broad of a question, again. The number of patterns is overwhelming, multiplied by the number of “voices”, each one begging and pleading and offering and demanding and screaming and sobbing. 

The gist, when averaged out, is less than helpful. 

Anything

Bereft of Pillar’s clear and concise interpretive algorithms, some patterns emerge that clump together, creating overlapping meanings inside that first response. 

Death Of Enemies

Rebirth

Devastation

CHANGE

Helpful. Painful, but helpful. And unclear. And a bit distressing to listen to. Looking at the knot in this higher realm of thought, inside this part of the Dao that is all, feels like staring at a festering wound inside a pristine body. Listening to it is worse, because it forces a level of individualism that’s usually obfuscated by the dense cluster of interwoven pathways, interwoven comprehensions and enlightenments that feed on themselves and loop back to ignorance. 

What is this thing?

A part of Raika both deeply annoying and profoundly powerful gives off the equivalent of a “scoff”. 

For a moment, they are in the chamber again, seven seats facing each other. The energy required to bring about the space without cooperation from the others is a lot, is expensive, and six out of the seven pieces of Raika express varying forms of surprise at the intrusion. 

The one that remains sits atop a throne of kindling, made of a million million flames, shaped to the contours of its identity but built of stranger substance. 

Raika’s Flame says what it has been repeating before, breaking Pillar's illusion that it was meaningless or childish. 

Big. Snake.

The “words” come bearing concept, memory, concept. Intent, wrapped in awareness and memory, not unlike the sort of madness that brings about Truth and Dao-comprehension.

Big. Snake.

Plural and singular. 

Like many ropes tied into a knot. 

Pillar, inside the trance-state of a stolen / offered Dao insight, sees it then. 

The embers of the Flame of Raika, which followed Pillar in and which summoned it here. 

Drifting past the knot, through the tiniest of gaps, towards and from the minute gaps that keep the comprehension of FLAME from being totally inaccessible. Not wide enough for a full mind, not wide enough for any of the other “tunnels” to travel through and beyond. 

But of all of the pieces of Raika, her Flame is perhaps the most inhuman, and the most fragmented. Apart, individually, too small for memory, for identity, for a name. 

But together, drifting back and forth from that higher divine awareness and coming together in infernal clusters, there’s enough to know. 

Big Snake.

Plural and singular. 

Devouring and birthing itself. Just like a knot. 

Like a knot in the sky. 

Like a writhing bundle of snakes in the sky, which glow with all the light to illuminate and warm the world, and who drive mad those who stare at it too long. 

The conference of Raika fades back to nothing, the moment of comprehension enough to shock them all back into the vaguer state of fusion and distinction they usually exist in. 

Pillar turns to the little embers that followed it through the tunnel, which repeated the very obvious statement multiple times. 

Big Snake indeed. 

The sun, which is a bundle of writhing wyrms, which is a rapturous paradox blocking enlightenment of FLAME, which is a suffering thing in the sky, screams through the minds of lesser practitioners of the Dao and begs parley. 

And Raika, embers and flickering forest-fires, heard, in a way that couldn’t be explained. But negotiations were reached, nonetheless.

Pillar isn’t sure what it expected, heading south, to where the sun lands every day. It wasn’t this. But then, Pillar’s strength is that it expects very little. Data is data, after all. Let the rest of her worry about meaning beyond pattern, or how horrifying it is to speak to the sun and experience secondhand just how terrible a thing it is. Pillar’s very goal-oriented like that.

Speaking of: it has been 3.10054 minutes since it dedicated most of itself to this task rather than managing the many tasks it’s usually in charge of.

…

Yeah. It’s got time. 

Activating a few more brains dedicated to social manipulation and a dozen new crystal-matrixes designed for pattern recognition and interpretation, it starts in on negotiations.