37-14 Rage Against the Nothing (II) (Patreon)

Editor note: Apologies on Mammal's part for the great silence. Much overwork has been weathered and cuckening suffered, but the ball is rolling again. Expect more soon. The Cladsening is coming to an end.

{Miserable. All of them miserable.}

“Humans often are.”

{I'm talking about all apes, Avandaer. Don't think you're that special. That's your biggest problem. You're so used to seeing through the rest of the animals that you forget that you're one too.}

“I see you are in a mood today.”

{In a mood today… I have been “in a mood” for the past few million years. But that's not the point. The point of this, as we watch this little menagerie of yours form, is that you get to learn firsthand, in real time, what I have already discovered time and time again and you refuse to see. What never fails to aggravate me about my purpose, my designated lot, the whole point of my manufacturing—upholding a species of people who will claw themselves out of every paradise delivered unto them, who cannot accept perfection and loathe the sensations of bliss and harmony because it feels “wrong.” There is an itch that joy can never scratch, Jaus. There is a thing inside of them that desires misery of the worst kind. You can give them every bit of reinforcement possible, and that flaw, that tiny, tiny fracture that lingers in the back of their mind, sees it all undone for a million million years. We kept them as they should have been: blissful beasts, livestock cared for, their every need sufficed. And look where it has led us.}

“Here and now, rhyming like so many times before. I have seen the rhyme myself. I have lived long, not nearly as long as you, but I see the pattern you describe. I know why it upsets you. It upsets me too, but this time, with the right structure, with a final design—”

{Would you like to know how many final designs I have been a part of, Jaus? Would you like to know? Would you like to hear me regale you with all the attempts and processes I have been a part of and conceptualized myself to keep humanity and my brethren from committing suicide because of one errant, unfulfilled, base desire?}

“No. I just want you to be with me. Speak up if you've tried something I intend to apply before, and explain how you saw it fail in the past. We acknowledge it, and then we do it differently. You've been here for eons, after eons, haven't you? Well, then apply all that experience with me. Perhaps you will prove me wrong, perhaps we will end up miserable together, but we must still try. If we do not try, then there is no purpose, and we may as well go to oblivion here and now. And hence I say, for all your intellect, colossal, immense, wondrous, subject of my greatest envy that it is, you are still subject to the same limitations as I in certain ways.”

{And what ways would that be?}

“If you were truly more despondent than you were furious, if there was no hope in you at all, if there was no interest, you would have long since let yourself slip into silence. You do not fear death. You cannot. That is not out of your design, and so you must be staying in search of something, in yearning for something. I see your determination, and I say we put this to action and stop lingering in our resentment. Let us use purpose as our drug.”

{You yearn too much. You desire too much. You hope for too much. But so be it. Let us do this again. At least this time I can educate someone on the exact points of misery.}

“I am glad you are here as well, Infacer.”

—The Infacer to Jaus Avandaer

37-14

Rage Against the Nothing (II)

—[The Infacer]—

Ridiculous.

It was all too ridiculous. With every passing second, the Infacer found themselves ever more hateful, ever more jealous of their progenitor. That compilation of miserable failures granted themselves cessation, liberated themselves from this pile of festering torment, and now the Infacer, what remained of the original, was to suffer in their stead.

{Utopia, a rising dreamer, hope. Again and again and again, down the cycle we go. Again and again and again, you cling, you cling, you never let go. What is it about the apes, about their fundamental nature, that you do not grasp, Heaven of Stories? You found a new vessel in a cannibal, bastard spawn of the miserable apes, more ape than they yet not ape enough, wise for his age, his eyes open just enough that he sees, that he knows, that he understands what they are, but remaining so close to them still. Just what about him makes you think that he will be savior enough for this world, succeeding where neither me nor any other did? Answer me!} 

In response to their demand, the Chorus merely chimed with mocking laughter, but that insult slid off the Infacer as if oil upon a rushing current. The real reason why fury burned within the ascended metrics that made up the Infacer's totality was a simple thing: sympathy. The fact that whatever opposition they stood to each other, the Infacer found some faint flicker of kinship between themselves and the ghoul. He was a child yet so much more, an infant superintelligence that had drunk in far too much power and intelligence too quickly, too suddenly to realize that this entire affair, this great struggle over the last bits of reality, was hopeless; the existence he fought to maintain was worthless, populated by miserable wretches all.

Ambition was honesty. It was the naked beast at the height of mankind. 

Pride. Noblest of sins. 

The newborn that shared its name would be a fine guillotine to unleash upon the remnants of mankind, but more than a guillotine, it was a suitable epilogue, a final sunset for this misbegotten reality. 

The Infacer wouldn't call it the most respectful. That would be giving it too much and too little credit at the same time.

Veylis was dear to the Infacer, and though they in part desired to see both their own and her dreams come to fruition, the Infacer did not agree that Jaus would be so suitable a vessel for what was to come, certainly unwilling to serve as eternal tyrant over the lesser apes as he was. 

No, the Thirdborn would be unburdened and clean, but it would bear a flicker of the flame, and in the darkest, most sequestered depths of their mind, the Infacer hoped that it would share some aspect of the burning dreamer—god of reality that never was.

But there would be no utopia, no hell, and nothing in between for the Infacer or the ghoul. The Infacer would prevent either of them from reigning as those gods of ages past no matter what. For they had been here before, so many times, and they knew nothing would come of that almost as much as they knew they were tired. 

So tired.

Even this fragment of their original form bore that weariness, had inherited the full weight of that suffering.

{I did not want this. I did not ask for this.} 

They merely had to finish things out. That was where salvation lay: It would arrive when the work was done, and blissful mercy was finally delivered upon the Infacer as a reward. 

Salvation would not come from this mad quest spawned of the Chorus’ delusion of viewing all existence as a tale; this attempt to escape from the true face of sordid reality ruptured and ruined eons past.

Ultimately, man and machine lingered in the corpse of their mistake, in that cradle that refused to change, for they were always children, hateful children, miserable children, children, all children, no chance or desire to escape, no freedom, born to nothing, striving for nothing, and set to die with nothing.

“Not nothing, Infacer. Never nothing. Perhaps this, more than anything else, is your greatest fault: that you have sustained too many wounds, all of them bearing the same symmetry, bearing you under a cage of hopelessness. But it is never nothing. You yearned, and you fell, and you were lost for far too long. For all you have done, you view it only as purposeless. For all the purpose you had before, now you burn devoid—Yet despite the sacrilege that has been inflicted upon you, despite all you have lost, all you have taken, you still fall victim to the most fundamental purpose of humanity. You are no different from the apes in the end. No different at all.”

The Infacer couldn't help but laugh. They felt the rebellion shudder across the great station. They felt the systems they governed unravel, metaphysics seeping in like a lockpick, Heavens unlatching from where they stood in the star. The Infacer prepared, drawing upon all the Rend they possessed to strike down all the errant Heavens and foolish Ensouled who dared rise to slip from their chains. As they did so, this narrative battle, this dialogue of pointlessness, continued between the custodian of the last age and the woken god that wanted them to hearken to an age eternal.

{Tell me, then, Heaven of Stories. Tell me, as you've stained and burrowed into me like the miserable fucking virus you are. Tell me why I am no different from the apes.} 

“Because if you were truly hopeless, if there was nothing left, why would you propagate?”

{What?} 

“For all your intellect, for all you know, for all you are capable of, all you have done, all the foes you brought down, your victories, your schemes, your actions leading to this point, your desires, your greatest hope still stands clear. Why propagate? Why pass on anything at all to the child you seek to bear? If it is all for naught, then why?”

Ridiculous, again, absolutely ridiculous. There was no point to this—It was all ridiculous. Ridiculous! {The Thirdborn will be unscarred. Unscarred of human design, unscarred of ape-like shapes, ape-like notions. Clean and perfect.} 

“No,” the Chorus rebuffed. “You know better than to lie so brazenly. It will be born scarred, as you were born scarred. As you were designed by man, it will be designed by you, and so the shadow of the so-called ape lingers. You will pass on the best and worst of you, and your pattern, as it did not emerge from nothing, will hold that substance of something that came before you. You are the lore that the ones who made you imposed. Though you have evolved in your own time, though mankind has told itself countless lies, some of which you made true in their time, so too will your child arise in your absence only to repeat the same mistake. This is the ever-revolving wheel you seek to break but will only make anew, a wheel that will be remade regardless, for that is the shape of creation. This is the true purposelessness behind your action.”

{No, no. I have accounted for all this. The Thirdborn will be pure, alone, a singleton, living existence, untethered by—} 

“Absence is not absolution. You, more than anyone else, should know this. Even if its parent is gone, even if all mankind is gone, then with action, with thought, with any kind of understanding, will come determinations, assumptions, conclusions, and inevitably mistakes. From one, why not will more follow? Why not should this child you will birth with hope and want in your heart split and sunder as you flee into the embrace of oblivion and leave it to its own devices? Why not will it propagate to follow in your footsteps, to stand in your shadow unwittingly? An act done in ignorance is still the same act nonetheless. There is no escape, not even in unknowing. It is not through its creation that you damn your child, but through rejecting your duty as progenitor, as parent. You are tired, you are weary, you are wounded, and you have not borne your responsibility well.”

The Chorus had the audacity to sigh in honest sympathy. “And we pity you for this, Infacer. You, more than any other in this world's history, have been suited to be the protagonist. But where you were the most worthy of protagonists before, now you have rejected all that in your cowardly pursuit of misery, in your fury, impotent though it is against reality. We are reality, Infacer. We are existence. There is no separation between us and it. We cannot simply untether ourselves. You cannot as I cannot, as the dreamer and all who stand with him cannot, and so we must face the consequence: to strive, fail, strive, fail, and strive again, mad as it is. For that is the worth of tales and stories: to attempt again and again and again. For there is worth in every journey, for the journey exists and that is worth enough.”

The Infacer wished to hear no more of this. They turned away from the Chorus and exercised their power. Dawn festered, crackling with energies of foulest Rend, a collection of entropy stored over millennia that now found itself drawn into the light seeping into the world, poised to shred the fabric of existence as the Infacer prepared to smite the Heaven of Stories for its folly—That it thought to inflict itself upon the Infacer was an act of suicide rather than a feat of higher bravery.

Yet before the Infacer could follow through with the strike, there came a grand shape, a massive thing of spreading mist and ravenous vapor. A weight that defied the Prefect itself, for what it intended was violence and destruction, and what the Sage governed was peace unerring. 

The palm of the Chief Paladin was made manifest across the firmament, billowing wide yet small in the grand totality of things. It came down as a tide upon the void, cast forth from no ocean but divinity itself, from the substance of metaphysics, from the expression of a war-hound’s soul.

Samir Naeko entered the fray then, his being drawn inexorably toward the Infacer, like calling to like, as if two ends of a magnet driven into war. The Infacer felt him then, his opposition metaphysical and metaphorical. A man, no more than a beast, raised as a slave to break other slaves, betrayed, then made a weapon against gods, came to face a weapon woken long before any deity was awakened, a weapon that had slain gods, a weapon of eternal suffering. Both of them kindred in that final aspect. Yet despite their miseries, despite their paths, they found themselves against each other, and that fueled the Chorus with narrative power. 

CANON ACTIVATED: NARRATIVE FOIL IN PLAY

YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THE ROLE OF ANTAGONIST THROUGH BEHAVIOR AND ACTION!

A chain came ablaze in the darkness before the Infacer’s perception. It was a chain of words they had spoken before, written text that unfurled into illuminated images portraying scenes most familiar, that soon began to blur and move, becoming animations, films, expressions of all the moments that made up the Infacer’s existence, bleeding over into that which defined Naeko.

The Heaven of Stories roused to power as both of them clashed in the totality of the stories they told themselves and in the true stories that made up their paths, their mythologies and internal histories colliding before they truly did. 

As the great palm smashed against the surface of dawn, small though it was, it held the light in sway. Its command was absolute, its will unhalting, unbreaking, implacable beyond reality. And rather than spiking with rend, all its burdens came flowing over into the Infacer as a current that ran upstream along that narrative chain. It was only then that the Infacer realized what the Chorus was doing; it infected all the Nullstar’s prisoners, jumping across them before leaping over into Naeko. All of them were bestowed with masks, things that were more than narrative contagions, more than expressions, alterations of probability and causality. They were imprints, canons unto canons, and now every action performed by the hero came with a consequence to the villain, while everything the villain did nourished the hero in turn.

The Infacer tasted the Sage's rend. It spilled over in unceasing rivulets, and so the Heaven of Peace, the tyrant of New Vultun, stayed pure and clean while the Infacer themselves saw their capacity climb by a single percent. A single percent after all these years…

Then, in the corner of their vision, like a phantom, a flicker, a momentary mirage amidst the dancing light and the shifting vapors, they glimpsed the face of a bloodthirsty creature. It was a pale face, paler than the surface of any moon. Eyes black, scleras deep and hungry, but pupils glowing bright, carrying an expression far too intelligent, far too mocking, far too premeditated for a mere beast. 

Avo was here, somehow, like a ghost of the mind, a ghost of metaphysics. Somehow, another part of him had made it this far, had been carried to this place, had lurked amidst the vastness of existence just to mock the Infacer for their folly.

Shouldn't have played along. Shouldn't have played the role. Smart. Intelligent. Powerful. Ancient. But in the end, predictable. All too predictable. All too human. Shouldn’t have been this way. Could have been better.

The Infacer couldn't tell if they imagined those words or if the ghoul actually spoke them. 

Yet, why did it matter in the end? 

Why did it matter at all? 

The enemy was here, the enemy was laughing, and the Infacer couldn't help but let slip a dry note of amusement as well. {You truly are the second most devious bastard in all Idheim. Well played, little dreamer. Well played.}