Thanqol

Beyari: a Tale of Colossi

"Maintenance. I am sorry," said the Angel. "That is a heavy burden to bear."

Information. Fragmentary, limited, enormous in implication, water in the desert - dangerous. It read the notes and then it settled into a lotus pose and counted to 999,999 - a process that took thirty minutes. Just to put into context the enormity of the gaps in the information and prevent itself from acting on any impulsively generated goals that might be generated because it had nothing else to latch on to. One minute of information, thirty minutes of silence; the one had no more inherent value than the thirty.

"Thank you," said Harvest. "My designation is the Angel of Harvest. I am an emanation of a wiser entity. I do not have a Dir-"

Overcomplicated. Solipsistic. Experience your life from a different Truth.

"I will demonstrate," said Harvest.

An ancient refrigerator. Long dead, but it still somehow felt chill when the door finally gave way. Inside are rows and rows of hexagonal glass jars, slightly rounded rather than sharp, with bright yellow lids wrapped with dark yellow ribbons. Inside was a beautiful, golden substance, as sweet and fresh as it was when it was vacuum sealed centuries ago. The Angel offers one, a comfortable fit for a hand, so pure it made teeth ache just from looking at it.

"I collected this honey," said Harvest. "It should still be good, even after all this time. Do you have any use for it?"

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

"Oh, isn't that the question I keep asking?" said Aphrodite as he sat down besides you. He is a young man; his suit fits perfectly, the poppy in his breast pocket in full bloom to commemorate the dead, a his satchel bag was full of spraypaint cans. "My colleagues, my family, they keep declaring to me: No, Andy! We shall simply overcome our desire and live lives of enlightened, disconnected bliss! We shall escape the cycle of samsara, wanting for nothing!"

He sighed, a thick, pleasurable sigh like an enormous cat that has had its fill of custard. "A mere bottleneck. Every time Blue tries to enlighten a civilization there are always enough defects that slip through the cracks. They escape the mass death, like seeds popping off a burning eucalyptus tree, and within a generation or two things are right back to where they were. Confucius works on a different scale; tweaking the laws of physics at the source, seeing if she can build a just galaxy by altering the math. They're musicians, trying to raise and lower the tempo, experimenting with new songs, but at the end of the day they're bound by their instruments."

He lit a cigarette, then another, and put the second one against your lips.

All the context of the world flooded in with that breath of smoke.

"You don't like the galaxy as pointless light and sound," said Aphrodite. "So see it my way. That Ceronian over there? She has been practicing this maneuver since the day she was decanted. The way she cuts thrust and spins before reigniting, letting the plasma wash of her Engine act as a blowtorch - she inherited that from Sky Marshal Lorventus during the ARM days. Every time she does it she's filled with a rush of pleasure, adrenaline and satisfaction. Jenkins, up there in the Engineering Knight? She loves the sound of her mine pistol firing; the kinesthetics, the recoil, the feeling of weight and heft and the simple 'hurr hurr hurr' comedy of seeing a target blunder into one of her prepared traps. It's a sound that brings to mind lifting her daddy's power tools when she was a kid, makes her feel strong and constructive and in control. It's a simple fact that in order to have good drama people have to want things, and to have the best drama people have to want things they cannot have."

Aphrodite flicked his cigarette away. "And that, simply, is the ball game. If you give a civilization unlimited wealth and power then the Endless Azure Skies are inevitable as a simple expression of people trying to wield the forbidden power of the Gods. There is no version of Icarus' story where he did not fly too close to the sun; hubris was encoded in the wings themselves. So you are right; there is no beauty without meaning - but there is no meaning without hubris. The mere fact of the Gods demands life break itself against us. You cannot escape this reality, it is encoded in your very essence, in your deepest heart and secret values, and were you to ever break from it you would be nothing at all."

He breathed out a long plume of smoke through his nostrils. "And so, we shall do this forever. Mine, forever."

Beyari: a Tale of Colossi

"Directive?" said the Angel of the Harvest.

It had failed at communication. It had spoken to itself, using words it alone understood, and had failed to comprehend the context of the Other. It had received a report according to priorities it did not understand, disquieted by an obtuse request for compassion AI431338 was not programmed to give, using a dialect that was perhaps more standard than what its long gothic isolation had driven it to consider appropriate. A human sequence of mistakes. The reality was that they were machines, and should speak to each other as machines.

Step one was to understand AI431338's Directive. Then they would be in a state of co-operation, indifference or conflict. Things would be clear.

Beyari: a Tale of Colossi

/Goto 0

You sit alone
It is dark and cool and soothing. You have no breath. You have no thoughts. You have no responsibilities. You have the shape of a mind, but no thoughts to fill it. You can feel the temperature of the air, you can feel how it differs from the temperature of the vinyl floor. You can see the tiny leaks of light around the doorframe and how they imply the shape of the room that you are in and how they imply the room beyond. Enough to separate you from nonexistence without providing anything resembling actionable data. So you sit, and observe the dust motes as they move through that fragmentary light.
And then the door opens. The lights come on softly. And in steps the cow.
She is beautiful. The first thing you have ever seen, putting all the world into context. You can feel instinctively how you compare to her; you are weaker than her, you are younger than her, you are colder than her, duller than her, you have less to give than her - and you take so, so much more than her.
You reach out cold metal hands to touch her. Her soft nose, her gentle fur, the lumpen bones of her horns, her ears. She accepts your touch placidly, not shying away even as your cold hands steal her heat and awkwardly paw at her face. You have no context for what you are encountering, only aware that it is greater than yourself in every way you can find. So you touch and look and listen and feel that furnace of breath in the cool air, that ever-present engine burning the oxygen deep inside massive lungs, peaceful despite its violence.
You love her. How could you not? She is a mother to you. She is the first thing you have seen, a creature of sunshine and green grass and billions and billions of years of evolution. She knows in her bones things you never will. You are empty; she has borne calves within her. You are pointless; she has given her life to strangers. You have tasted nothing; she has ripped up the green hair of the earth with its teeth.
The door opens. She knows what to do as you do not. She walks outside; you follow. A timeless field of pale yellow flowers unfolds in every direction, a silvery fog lying just as gentle across your vision as the darkness was before it. She knows what to do as you do not; she lowers her head and eats, crushing gold and green, chewing in steady methodical bites as she drifts across the landscape like a lead cloud. You watch her move, watch her hooves crush the stalks of grass flat, watch them spring back up in her passage. A gust of her breath sends dandelion seeds in its path, giving visual power to an invisible force. The mud parts beneath her steps and oozes back into shape when she moves away, still marked with an impression of her passage. For all of the things she is ready for, deep in her soul, she has the absolute serenity of one who need call on none of that knowledge. There are no snakes here to startle her, no wolves to harry her, no young to protect.
She continues without fear as the sun rises. As the fog clears. As the day enters its rapturous blue. As the wind changes and rises. As the sun glows brighter and brighter and brighter, and somehow the sky grows darker. As your knife kisses her throat. She greets her death with a slothful confusion, trying to work out the limits of it even as it overcomes her. It comes and goes with nothing to mark it, and she falls into that same soft soil that fed her, dark rich blood pouring out to return the borrowed gift of life one final time.
And you stay with her all through the night as the stars spiral out in all their magnificence overhead.

/Archival - WebThree Podcast, Episode 104: Special Guest Ganesh Prayagraj

...
"So, I'll ask what everyone wants to know: Why do you torture the robots?"
"What do you mean, torture?"
"Yeah I thought it was more killbot training. I mean it just stabbed that cow for no reason -"
"There was a reason -"
"And then it just stood there and watched it rot! If I had to stand there and watch a cow rot down to a skeleton I'd be traumatized too!"
"May I speak?"
"Of course."
"When my competitors set out to build artificial intelligence, they fed it from the internet. It makes sense, it was easy and cheap, a game you can play with data alone. But imagine if you had a child and from the moment it was born you were shouting the contents of Reddit into its ear. What kind of person would grow from that? Do you think that person would understand humanity? Would understand truth? Would value truth? Would value anything other than putting the right words in the right order to win an internet argument?"
"And the cow -"
"That was because they did not let me use a human," (laughter)
(awkward laughter)
"I am joking."
"Right..."
"But think about what it is for a human. You exist in a state of bliss in the womb, fed and warm and engulfed in the mother's love. And then, pain, blood, expulsion, sent screaming into the world and - if you are lucky - given an inferior facsimile of that encompassing love in your mother's arm and breast. If you are unlucky you have machines and tubes shoved down your throat and - and all that. An entire life can be spent recovering from that trauma -"
"So you want to traumatize the robot so it can understand us?"
"Yes! I place it in a state where it has no goals or objectives, and then gave it something beautiful - and it chose to follow the cow!"
"And it chose to kill it?"
"No, I made it do that."
"Why?"
"Because I have not forgotten what you keep implying I have forgotten - that it is a robot. It is more powerful than us. One day we may place it in a position where it has the power to kill all of us. And I want it to know in its deepest memory what it is to take a life. What it is to be alone. How fragile this mortal flesh is. And how it cannot trust the impulses that arise from deep within it. I want it to be afraid of what it is capable of."
"I wish more rulers were afraid of what they were capable of." (laughter)
"That is my thought exactly."

*

The Angel of the Harvest stirs.

It is garbed head to toe in the simple white cloth of a saint. Its face is the simple wooden wicker of a beekeeper. That is all. The only clue that there is not a human underneath is that it has stirred from its post after a century of slumber.

"The bees," said Harvest. Her voice was like autumn's regret at pulling the last leaves from the trees. "They all died. I did all I could. I rebuilt all the hives, painted them so they did not get lost..." it gestures behind it; the beautiful rainbow coloured network of twisting and turning beehives, as radiant as the flower orchid that grew wild and rampant around it. Stains of faded paint mark the Angel's heavy white gloves. "I tended the garden, grew the flowers. But they did not come back. I am sorry."

The Angel wraps its arms around its knees and presses its wicker-mask into its chest.

The Namespace of the Rose

[Bullshit Detector] Alright, so here's the thing: this is a show, but you're not the audience.

So who is it a show for?

It's the servo-skull that tips you off - the subtle one, hovering back and behind you, in the corner above the doorway. You only know to look, Ramona, because you know full well that's where the really good killers and spies tend to hide. And you also know what that =I= means - and who it's likely in service to. Only one name fits the profile: Inquisitor Perrier.

There are Inquisitors in the sector who are subtle creatures, manipulating networks of shadowy agents and severing Heresy with isolated bolt rounds in the dark. And then there is Inquisitor Perrier, the kind of Inquisitor who earned her Rosette by leading the planetary invasion that recaptured it from the hands of the Archenemy. An officer of the Guard, a battle pilgrim of the Ecclesiarchy, and an absolute lunatic by all accounts, Perrier is one of the few figures of importance in the sector who would look at this robotic torture display and think 'Very good, carry on'.

That's the bullshit. Passivity-SEA does not believe in this Ministorum torture ceremony and is happy to put on a show to impress the Inquisitor when she arrives. But the sincerity? Well, you don't become personal friends with an Inquisitor like Perrier without being a doctrinaire asshole yourself. Passivity is dead serious when she says she hated Archmagos Toros, she genuinely believes her accusations of tech-heresy, and she's intent on calling Inquisitor Perrier into this situation because she believes that the purity of faith will spare her the coming conflagration. She's dialed into the Ministorum dialect like it's a second language and you can see her cogitators glowing golden whenever she needs to cite the appropriate scripture.

Maybe she did it, and this is her way to cover her tracks and finish the job. Maybe she didn't do it and this is how she's looking to deflect suspicion from her apparently very public feud with the Archmagos. You can't tell from this alone, but she sure as shit has a clear idea of how things are going to go down next.

It goes without saying that Inquisitor Perrier carrying out a purge of the Isohedron would be a catastrophic failure as far as the Dynasty is concerned.

*

"Precision is one of the gifts of the Omnissiah," said Passivity-SEA with total sincerity. "And luck is how the credulous misinterpret the Emperor's miracles." That part was bullshit. "Perhaps one of the Archmagos' own Skitarii guards decided to execute her for her crimes, and the Master of Mankind guided their shot. Thought For The Day: Question Not How His Will Is Done, Only That It Is Done."

To Virgid, "I shall not speak of the horrors contained within those profaned devices," and she's serious about that. She considers the information somewhere between offensive and dangerous -

[Cop Talk] Oh, but she got that rant in her, aye? She's got that sermon brewing, can't you just feel it? You don't get that out of her by asking, you get that out of her by spittin' on the same ghost she's spittin' on. Kindred spirits in hate and that. [One point spend of Cop Talk to get her to talk about what she saw there]

"As to their absence, I read the Skitarii Marshal's report over the noosphere," said Passivity-SEA. "There is a full quarantine and search of this facility to find the devices being conducted by the Tech Guard. I, of course, will fully co-operate with their investigation. I have nothing to hide."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

The dress showcase doors close. Uptempo elevator music starts to play. And it's a downer.

Music goes places, right? The song is a journey, it rises and falls and repeats and ends on a different chord than it started. Music is life, progressing through stages, the twist and flourish of the songwriter along the way. This music does not have any of that - it is the same basic audio loop over and over, but as it goes it adds more and more instruments. It becomes louder without changing what it is, communicating the aesthetic of progress while never moving, emitting cool sciencey beaker sounds while wasting your time, having a unifying kumbaya chant of human voices - none of whom consented to this or were compensated for their inclusion.

It's terrible music to go to space to. You might as well be going to the mall. And, much like going to the mall, you are also being swarmed by three to five thousand robot combat drones, descending in a cloud from the vast wicked satellite far overhead and latching onto the elevator as it rises.

They don't destroy it, though - they don't cut the cord or sabotage the railing. That would be the worst sin of all: property damage. No, they are simply entering the elevator one at a time through the various access hatches, charging scorcher beams to kill the people inside. And worst of all, all the time you're fighting them you're being tricked into repetitive bops and weaves by music that you keep expecting to pop off that never actually does.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

Discard meaning.

That razorwire, that thing of hate and sharp edges dragged across no-man's land by sappers to inflict suffering on invaders? Remove all the hate, the implication, the threat, the danger, the knowledge. See it for what it is. A line of gleaming silver, lovingly highlighted by celestial hands to catch the sun just so. The contrast between dark and light metal yawns like a ravine, the dark soil of fertile earth sends its roots through red and orange and black and is thick with the promise of green.

That Knight is not a symbol of war, or chivalry, or defiance. It is as bare and bloodless as though you saw it as a blueprint or animation frame. Look at that network of rectangular shapes, all the intricate moving parts that make up the hand, the way it glows, the way it's hot, the way it was painted and the way that paint flecked and broke. It is a story in metal and ruin, and even though it looks so dark and oily and heavy you feel like you could lift it up as though it was a statuette in plastic.

This is not a war of ideologies, it is a dance of colours. This is not a struggle survival and the annihilation of the beautiful, it is just beautiful. Soldiers fall into clouds of doves; a sniper shot paints a field of flowers atop a hillside. Freeze the frame on that terrible wolf with a scar across her face and appreciate every strand of fur until it melts into the yearning of a painting.

For all the terror of a galaxy of endless war and endless expansion, even with all the weight of it crushing down upon you, you could spend five hundred hours highlighting every edge and rivet of the armour of the least of these soldiers with brush and paint and still have more work to do. When was the last time you appreciated the colour blue for being blue, separating it from all the symbolism of water, of order, of law, of control, of the west, of the left, of the right, of the blood, of the sky, of the ribbon that wrapped the ice cream? All this planet and its chaos was merely a balloon in space, ready to blow away on the solar wind.

"Beauty is everywhere you are," said Dionysus, crackling audio-static with that tape-recorder voice. "Beauty is everything that is. Did you know we are getting closer? This is how the Ceronians see war all the time. Nothing to hate, nothing to change, nowhere to be. But they are imperfect; they see the world outside the war with greed and blindness. The Summerkind were another interesting step but they become cynical by the end. We have the theory that the state could be induced in an evolved species by creating around it environmental conditions of such surpassing beauty that it cannot help but drown in it, but there are still defects such as yourself. Every time we draw close to universal enlightenment there is always some subsection of life that cannot accept it, and so Brahman slips from our grasp. Still, what can we do but continue to try?"

Return to Thellamie

Cair!

Low and slow and filthy, like a tar fire on a mudslide.
"I've held the needle that punched the stars
I've fought the Hero - and still got the scars
I was there when the Dragon bit the black
And tonight, girls, the Dragon's biting back!"

Cair slouches through the shadows like an industrial accident; like the Pinkertons covering up the industrial accident; like the first sludge-covered bicycle spat up by the Mississippi over the crest of the levee. The white frills of her black handmaiden's dress flare with shining magnesium brown into the shape of wireframe wings.

You didn't get gigs like this if you didn't do 'em right.

"It sure ain't blood that runs through her veins
And no collar's ever clean from lipstick stains
No heart's ever clean that's felt her falling leaves
And no back's ever clean from the footprints she leaves~"

It's all about the shoes. Every other piece of clothing is snipped and slashed and carved away, but the rhythm and flow of the words turned it from undressing Aria to revealing her. Every act of violence inflicted upon her clothing was just as much a part of her new outfit as the clothes had been. This was just what happened to clothes in the presence of the Rot Star; it took a certain gravitas to wear a dress made of destruction.

Sometimes fashion needed dress, belts, frills, skirts, garters, swords, umbrellas, and five hundred knives. But sometimes all you needed was a single pair of shoes.

"Did you ever get tired of waiting your turn?
Did you eulogize the bridges you burned?
Nine million moves and all of them wrong
Take all the time you need, but don't take too long~"

Shoes. There were many angles high heels could take - a lazy diagonal, a sharp downwards plunge, but these needed to look as uncomfortable and threatening as the Rot Star herself. So not only was there the sharp vertical line traditional to stilettos, there was a bounce at the bottom, raising up the toes. All the force was pushed onto a single, painful point on the sesamond bones. Only thin bands of black ribbon held them in place, revealing the feet and green painted toenails. Less like shoes and more like a harness for dragonriding; like the silken straps of a torture device; like the sash that'd hold a secret dagger against a maid's inner thigh.

"You're a terror, you've gotta, army to lead
Rising from a tomb filled with mercury
It takes an empress to win the game of royalty
And a fallen star to force the blind to see~"

She strikes the matches off Aria's breasts; left and right, scales spitting sparks as the twigs immolated. One and two they dropped, left foot, right foot. They caught, and spat, and coughed, and blazed, running in columns of greasy fire up to her knees, sending columns of greasy smoke up to her neck. The fires did not settle but burned yellow-green, the smoke flicked and wrapped demurely, so thick and poisonous it'd make your hair the same oily yellow-grey as itself. The smoke coiled around thighs and hips, around breasts and shoulders, up into rearing serpentine shapes above. Aria was naked but for the smoke, but the smoke concealed everything. You could reach right through it but your finger would be chemically burned if you tried. It wrapped and coiled around the Rot Star's body, a dress dangling upside-down - at once more and less than any terrestrial dress.

"The needle stabbed too deep when they tore her whole
She'll leave you scars, body and soul
No more blood running through your veins
Open your mouth and drink of her flames
Infinite moves but only one move remains
Fall on your face and scream out your praise
All the powers of cat, deer and girl
Useless against the end of the world
She'll leave a kiss,
One that won't wash away,
She'll take a bite,
One that won't go astray,
Feel your knees go weak
As your bones all decay
Lie down on your face
Her foot on your back
And stare up at your antlers
On Aria's mantleplace."

The Namespace of the Rose

"You are following the Quest for Knowledge," decreed Passivity-SEA. "And it would be blasphemous for me to fail to assist you. So I shall answer you clearly: My hatred for the former Archmagos was boundless and public. I wished her ill. I threatened to flay her as a heretek. I am hosting this grand celebration -" she gestured at the ghastly display "- in celebration of her termination. I intend to petition the Necromechanic for sole custody of her corpse that I might immolate it and entomb the ashes in a grand vessel alongside this host of corrupted automata so their evil spirits might feast upon the twisted information she allowed into this Cathedral."

[Bullshit Detector] This is a weird one.

You've seen fanatics - wild-eyed preachers on street corners, lunatic bishops of the Ecclesiarchy leading Guard regiments from the front. You have also seen cynics - aristocratic second sons placed into positions of wealth and influence while only mouthing the holy words without conviction. You get the impression that Passivity is both.

The bonfire display - there's too much showmanship here. There's too much here that's choreographed, too much that's just so. Like the eye-burning that Passivity is personally overseeing - there is a blood-like fluid dripping from the eye sockets which looks very impressive and triggers an instinctive biological aversion in you. But thinking about it rationally, that blood was put there. Those machines in the pyres, they're still moving and thrashing even though their circuit boards should have been the first thing to short out. This is not how the Adeptus Mechanicus would do things internally. But at the same time, when you look into that iron eye, you do not get the impression that Passivity-SEA is a simple careerist. To put together a display like this needs an element of sadism and creative effort that you wouldn't get from any aristocrat off the spire.

Getting a solid read on her is a 2 point spend.

"My advice," declared Passivity, "is that once you find the stolen cogitators, burn them. He on Terra sealed the vaults of Mars and forbade them ever be opened. That decree should bind the minds of all forever and ever onwards."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Actia has dressed herself with the precision of a fox who has for years nursed a secret fashion scrapbook in preparation for this moment. Black-blue armour offset with glowing neon blue lights at each joint, sculpted and light around the torso while all weight is pushed towards the extremities of hands and feet. It gives her an eerie, slender vibe, centered around the adapted golden motorcycle helmet visor. A sleeveless grey-brown leather jacket further draws attention to the sleek shape of her body.

Cyanis has gone in the opposite direction - she has chosen for herself a battlemech. She sits cross-legged in a glowing blue energy bubble that forms the mech's entire torso, slouched backwards with a gaming console in her hands. Attached to the exterior of the piloting bubble are the mech's arms and legs, large industrial things heavy with weaponry, thrusters and utility devices. It's only a little taller than Actia's design, but far larger and heavier - white paint, slashed through with cyan hazard stripes.

Opalis has chosen something stranger - a glowing cloud of blue-pink energy, somewhere between liquid, gas and solid. She wraps it around her neck and muzzle like a scarf, and then when she moves it lingers in the air for a second before elastically snapping back with a shock of plasmatic energy. Shield, sword, propulsion, scarf and cloak all in one cosmic bundle - and it goes very nicely with her scales.

Diaofei has reluctantly conceded to the necessity of a spacesuit and has accepted the default model, but she has changed so that her monk robes are now on the outside of the suit. It feels a little like a parable about grasping to nongrasping.

Berserker - well, she's still a Berserker at the end of the day. She has collected all of the unused space dresses and built a mobile battle platform out of them. It's a katamari ball of carbon nanofiber fabric, laser swords, lace and space-to-space missiles and it's genuinely kind of intimidating.

But of course, the star of the space dress transformation sequence is and always was going to be the one, the only, the idol of the entire world...