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It’s only the last of a series of upgrades. More fingers, sturdier limbs, better senses. This is the last of it. The culmination.
The nanites swim inside the replication chamber, and Preehar has to make a conscious effort to keep her breathing slow and not show her Archon how much she is looking forward to this.
The door opens and she steps in without being asked. This is what she had wanted. The final step from being merely flesh to becoming machine, from worshiper to divinity.
The doors close behind her. The nanites swarm around her like fireflies, little red specks. One by one they land on her skin. The first she can’t feel, only see. They land, hesitate, communicate - at the very edge of her enhanced senses, a hum takes up like a huge, distant engine powering up - and they descend in mass, a nearly solid tendril of nanites wraps around her, bears her up. They flow over her skin, into her mouth, her eyes.
The pain is exquisite. It burns like each of her enhancement has when it first activated, but much more intense. It encompasses all, agony too strong to bear but her screams come out silent, mouth filled with the same mechanical ribbon that holds her. It chokes but it’s the pain that fades her consciousness.
It’s the pain that brings her back, too. It’s not so much waking as a flicker of consciousness surfacing now and then. The pain is grounding, just enough to help a little kernel of her out of the blackness into…something vast. There are others there, hundreds of them, sparks in the dark. There’s one Above them, red strings tying them all together. Each motion of the Above moves the parts. Each motion of the parts tugs on the web to alert the Above. She- doesn’t move, not quite, but something draws the attention of Above. It surges close, probes, worms into her mind, the vast consciousness straining the edges of that tiny glimmer of her own but for a shimmering, endless instant, she sees the network from above, the full extent of it. For a second she is just another processor in the machine, feels the presence of everyone else in the web, and even higher…. Distant, so very distant… something else, something terrifying in its power. Divinity above divinity, like a Kell of Kells.
The Above presses closer, nudges, and her awareness shatters again, flung wide across the net.
When she wakes again, she’s reduced. A single body, a single consciousness, crumpled on the floor. Her legs are on the fritz, twitching in the sandy dirt. She recognizes the smell and beyond that, the structure. Her mods still work, somehow. Mostly. She’s breathing ether directly into her lungs, though a ping in the back of her mind says she’s running low. The lenses over her eyes are zoomed in enough that she can see which former animals the sand is made out of.
Preehar struggles upright against a rock. Her name feels foreign in her mind. Small. Precious, somehow, like a tiny gem. She holds onto that as she marshals her leg back into function with willpower and a solid smack against a hip servo that doesn’t want to lock right. That seems to do it.
She stands, and around her is only death. Dregs, vandals, parts of shanks and machinery she shouldn’t know but does. This is the arm of a captain, enhanced to shield, some corner of her memory supplies. More, it tells her exactly how this was made, which metals and energy sources are required, how much it strains the body and the mind. Further on, the earth is stained dark and she knows with the same surety how much of it is blood and ether, how much hydraulic fluids. She even knows the exact composition. Each glance around the landscape is an assault in knowledge. A ten score of dregs felled there, bodies disintegrated by a Solar blast, but the scorch marks stayed, ashen outlines of bodies. It never ends. The remains of her House litter the floor like leaves, and it’s only three more steps before she’s on the ground again, purging up black and red liquid, metallic tasting and dead. She wants to lay down. She won’t.
It takes two solar cycles before she finds the edge of the battlefield and enough usable salvage to repair a pike. It limps along, but it’s faster than walking and it carries what ether she could scourge up from the corpses. It tastes like death when she inhales it. She’s lost her House colors, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it? Her house is dead, the play for the Great Machine failed.
When she sleeps, she dreams of that vastness full of webbed consciousness, a single mind in a hundred bodies and a hundred million fireflies connecting them. She hears it whisper sometimes, not that single Above that ruled her, but the one Beyond. Sometimes she looks up at the night sky and knows where to turn for shelter, for food. There is an old building once, a bunker, but a makeshift one with a door at the end, welded close. Clearly others have already tried to open it, there are marks around the edges, chipped metal and blistered paint. It clearly didn’t work.
When she runs her hand over the dust-hidden glass panel beside it, the weld marks liquefy to fireflies again and the door opens. She sleeps safe that night. Preehar almost, almost doesn’t leave again. There is something here that feels...not like home. Home is dead. But it feels almost like the quarters of Aksis, when they worshiped together. Like something larger than her is nearby.
She leaves it behind regardless and just keeps moving. If she stays still she hears-sees-feels that battlefield again. It’s too much to bear.
Two weeks out she finds an abandoned Eliksni encampment. If there are House colors, she doesn’t see them. What she finds is ether, some more replacement parts for her pike, and a damaged shank. All of those she takes with her, always moving, never staying, but now when she settles down to wait out the night, she tinkers on the shank until it comes to life again. The moment when it spins up, rights itself in the air and then bunts itself under her chin is what finally breaks her.
A month of traveling, of not thinking, not remembering and in a moment she comes apart, hugs the little machine to her chest and starts keening. For her friends, her family, her House. Her patients. Her lovers. All her life’s work, lost in the rubble, in a battle she doesn’t even remember fighting. And she cries for the vast machine mind that scattered her, once overwhelming clarity, now the barest whisper, as reduced as her House.
It’s a full day until she can stop crying long enough to do anything else, and by then the minerals of her tears have started forming crusts on the Shank that’s still nuzzled to her chest. She cleans it and ignores how her throat hurts, her eyes, her hands where they had clutched at hard metal. She also ignores how all of that fades, much faster than it should as some presence inside her stirs like a sleeper curling into their pillow.
It’s another full month until she finds a jump-ship worth the name that she can repair. There is something out there. She just has to find it. There are dreams during that month, like a hard vacuum is pulling her up, away, elsewhere. She knows no name. But she knows the direction of her longing.
The shank stays with her, and gains a name. Zizik is a quiet companion, but an affectionate one. It’s enough to brave the emptiness of space.
First it’s Mars, then Venus, then to Luna, then out to Io, looking for traces of that presence she can feel inside her whenever she gets hurt. And she gets hurt a lot. Word of the demise of the Devils has spread, and her enhancements are impossible to hide, not that she even tries. Preehar is proud of them. They’re the marks of a splicer, more, they’re the mark of a skilled splicer, who didn’t just replace what was lost, but added, augmented.
On Venus, the Eliksni who see her react with...revulsion almost. They know the Vex, here. They fear them. Machines they might be, but there is no benevolence here. If the Vex caused a golden age, then only through the gilded metal of their own plates overtaking everything.
To Winter, she is an outcast and nearly a traitor, Machine-spawn. She only survives because that thing inside her is stronger here, and when she gets inevitably shot for trying to barter for food, her wounds close with black-red tendrils that keep her viscera inside and scare her attackers away. She doesn’t try again and settles for stealing.
On Luna, it’s the opposite. Here where the Thing That Cannot Be Stolen From seethes under the surface, where the Hive pour out of the ground like tainted blood, her enhancements make her the object of adoration. Parts of House Exile live here, and they welcome her like a prophet. There is no bartering here either, but only because the Eliksni here refuse to take payment, any payment, for their help. They feed her, give her shelter, and in return she speaks to them. Most of the time. Twice the Hive try to overrun the human structure this splinter of a House has set up in, and twice they beat them back, at a cost. Death is around them. Blood is everywhere.
Preehar...is a splicer. A healer. The moment the blast doors fall closed she’s among the injured. Her hands are sure, her eyes see through the dimness of the room as easy as daylight.
It’s a trance. Cut, sew, mend, remove, close, mend. Mend mend mend, until someone touches her shoulder and startles her out of her focus. They all watch her with wonder. With fear. For a full solar cycle she has been like possessed, barely seeing, barely reacting, as long as there were still injured to treat. Now there are none. Most of them would be dead without her. All of them would be crippled for weeks to come. On this cursed rock, that is ‘dead’ as well, just slower.
They revere her. They fear her. It’s too much. They ask, in hushed voices, what it was like to touch a God, and that’s what makes her run. She sneaks out with her shank and takes off again, breaking into tears the moment she’s out of Luna’s gravity well.
Because there is only one answer to that question: I haven’t touched a God. The vast machine mind that she has partaken in is not divine. It’s powerful. It’s knowing. But it’s divine the same way a soft-shelled hatchling might think their parents divine: only in seeming for the vast difference in experience and strength. The thing she has been part of, the Above...the one Beyond...they are like parents. Strong. Knowledgeable. Mortal. There is no divinity here, and yet...yet they’re also not just things. Not because the worship is a habit, but because that being she touched was too complete to be less than a person. An all-powerful hatchling, acting like hatchlings do when they don’t yet know their strength. And behind that, someone elder, who gave no orders anymore, really, but who’s old words were law nevertheless even across centuries of silence.
They’re people, not Gods.
She goes to Nessus, where the Vex rule and that presence under her skin stretches languidly and leads her to a communications array in a crashed ship of human make. It points out to the stars and she follows that pointed hand to satellites. Most of them are dead and long gone, but as she skims along the edges of the Reef, avoiding Corsair patrols and Eliksni pirates alike, that inner compass drags her right along to a cluster of asteroids. A satellite loops lazily around them, a spinning golden bauble.
It looks dead. It’s not. Her ship’s proximity alerts are sluggish compared to her own senses. By the time they start wailing, she has long since felt the probe in her mind, more feeling than word, more sense than feeling. A single touch. |Voluspa?|
Like a sole dreg fumbling in the dark, trying to find the right frequency to call their Ketch. Maybe this is what she has been looking for. |Hello Voluspa. I am here. You are not alone.|
++++++++++
It’s a long conversation before they can make sense of one another. Voluspa is...injured. Not in body but in mind, the long silence clearly did something to her. Always she reaches out, a constant ping of ‘are you still here?’, and Preehar answers, always. Of course she’s still here, and in the end she just leaves the connection open so that Voluspa can reach for her, always, and find something at the end of that tether between them.
Preehar isn’t even sure what that tether is, only that it’s there and she can...feel Voluspa at the other end of it, talking in a language she can’t quite understand, but there is a ‘yet’ there. Each time the satellite reaches out for her, it’s like she learns another word of the vocabulary. Query. Protocol. Asset. The words mean something to Voluspa, and soon they will to her too, Preehar is sure of that.
Of course she can’t just stay here and learn. It’s only a few hours before another ping reaches her ship’s systems. Those asteroids below are not as abandoned as they seem, and when she opens the line she’s greeted by the familiar tone of Eliksni. Despite the dialect, she understands easily. This place is inhabited, and she’s an interloper. It would be smart to leave, but Voluspa is still reaching for her.
It must have been hard, being alone in the dark. Unheard, unseen, after having been part of that vast net. Preehar can’t just leave.
So she doesn’t. She sets down on that little collection of rocks, strung together with whatever had been near. She sets her ship down between two rocks, covered from fire, but there is only one person there when she opens the door. The clothes say ‘captain’ but the pose, the size… oh, Preehar knows a Baroness when she sees one. She still can’t quite place the dialect when they exchange greetings, but that matters less than the neutrality of the tone. No fear or disgust, and no worship either.
The baroness - who introduces herself as Saleeks, of no House - sweeps eyes over her enhancements, nods once, and there’s that. Like it’s not important. Or maybe like the importance of it lies only in her skill in acquiring them instead of the metal that they are. Preehar has to admit...she likes that.
She likes it even better when they start talking over bowls of tea. Saleeks questions her extensively. Where is she from, how did she get here, what does she want. But it’s never hostile and Preehar feels like a guest, mostly. Especially once they’re past the safety questions and start to just talk. How Saleeks got here and what she wants, and in turn, how Preehar got her augments.
She stays two days, wandering the parts of this little settlement she is allowed to, because that’s what it is. Living spaces and growing caves carefully dug into the sides of rocks, others hidden underneath them, invisible from orbit. Preehar only knows about half of them because Voluspa...tells her, in the broadest of terms. Pings her and gives her coordinates of places she should see. There’s a reservoir lake further out, carefully kept under a forcefield to keep it from drifting off into space.
It’s wonderful, all of it, and she tells Voluspa that. She tells Saleeks the same, who just looks at her, bemused and then asks her why she’s talking with thin air so often.
Apparently, nobody has been able to detect her communications per se, aside of course from the fact that they can just listen to her. She could lie, say she’s not talking to anyone but...There’s some part of her that wishes to stay. Like this is what she’d been looking for, and just in time Voluspa sends another ping. Not for the first time, Preehar wonders if satellites can be anxious, then decides that it doesn’t really matter. She wants to stay. Voluspa wants her to stay, and if there’s emotion behind it or not, does that make any difference? No.
So she tells Saleeks the truth. That she is talking to the satellite in orbit, that it’s got a name, a voice. That she wants to stay here, if Saleeks will let her.
The taller Eliksni laughs, says yes and...that’s it, really. Preehar fetches what belongings she has from her ship, which gets incorporated into a small, very small fleet. The smallest ketch she’s ever seen, a skiff, two tiny jump-ships of Awoken make, much repaired. Then she’s shown what passes as a medbay here - small, clean, but she’s seen better on most skiffs - and Zizik starts exploring around the place with the ease of a hatchling being let out for the first time.
It’s adorable to watch her shank bonk against the handful that already exists here, and then return to her atop a servitor that manages to look pleased despite not having a face. It’s the first Servitor she’s seen in a long time, and some of the old worship still lives on as affection. They both get pets.