The Bad Thought programming kicked in at this. Both phrases were currently out of favor and made meaningless by the constant shifting of truths in and out of favor with the Committee Prime on sometimes a minute-to-minute basis.
The air that haunting night had been cold and dry, and he’d wondered if that was what death was really going to be like. Dark. Windy. Cold. And dry. Lifeless and nothing. Nothing but the realization that you were all alone in a world that didn’t know you anymore. He’d begun to think about death a lot back then. Like it was the signpost for a destination on the lonely highway ahead. Inevitable and arrived at soon enough. Best to get ready for it.
The opposite of comfort, of relationship with anyone left in your life. The opposite of warmth.
The year after that had been one of the worst of his life. He was finally bottoming out back then. Bottoming out on himself. The rock and roll was over. Holly Wood was gone. He was a human whale, swollen with drugs, liquor, and processed fat. Surviving on pills, heroin, nicotine, and burgers washed down with all the scotch and bourbon he could stock.
A thing that just consumed and produced nothing. The opposite of everything that had gotten him where he’d arrived.
And then… the Path.
It had come along just in the nick of time. Because there was a rope in a garage on the edge of Beverly Hills waiting for him after that last-roll-of-the-dice personal empowerment weekend to find something, anything, that worked.
Everything changed from that weekend forward. For the better. For the much better. That too was a kind of shedding. Divesting himself of everything he once was to become something he knew he’d been headed toward all along. Though he’d never been able to quite articulate it.
Godhood.
Shadowy corridors, long ago emptied and since looted, ran off in all directions across the Forbidden Decks the rogue marine traveled across. Crometheus was using the armor’s nav and imaging functions to maintain a course track through the abandoned spaces of the old ship as he headed toward the transportation shafts that would take him to deck sixty-six.
He’d come here a long time ago. Back to main power, during the dark ages when everyone was losing their mind as the decades-long interstellar crawl ruined their reason and shattered their ability to cope. Before the shedding. He’d come here looking for food. Old stores that hadn’t yet been raided. Anything to eat as the ship became a prison with no exits and no escape. Unchangeable in its long crossing to the next world that might, maybe, save them all from themselves. Already back then there was talk that a great discovery had been made in the labs. A way that they could all go on despite the math. Despite the lack of calories versus flight time to the next world.
The terrible math.
But how?
Without food?
Without hope or even a promise the next world might be the one they could start all over on. Build their utopia on. Spread out across the galaxy from.
How could they go on without food? Ironic to have such grand plans and so little basic sustenance with which to fulfill those divine schemes.
So he, along with some others, all of them desperate, had come back to the haunted nether regions of the colony ship Pantheon in search of supplies. There’d been a war during those dark ages between the various sections. A series of battles that culminated into two main alliances fighting for control of the leviathan colony ship wandering through the cosmos. He’d been on the losing side, though he didn’t know it at the time. The side of the elites who ran the show and created a culture all could embrace for their own betterment. Their enemies had been those in main engineering and others allied with them. Drive, of course they were in. Power and water, naturally. Ag… they had been a town-by-town and city-by-city thing. The wars on the big curving plain had been brutal. And merciless. Like something out of man’s stone age.
In the end the losers had been thrown from the wall of main engineering, the southern wall that looked out over the hab. Their leader had insisted that the ship maintain course to the next world. They’d blown the bridge and sub-system control stations by then. Insisting that they make for the planet they were heading toward. That the idiocy of searching for stray ice comets to replenish the ocean in the lower decks was sheer madness.
But by then, the first tentative steps of the shedding and the beginning of the Path in its current incarnation… had already begun.
Later they’d return and overwhelm the cultists in engineering who’d insisted on the intolerance of their own opinions. Those in charge, the winners, him Crometheus, had slaughtered them, but kept a few slaves, returning the Diversity and Tolerance Committee to total power once more. The Inner Council had once been called by that name. But over the centuries power had coalesced and the meanings of words had changed along with alliances.
As they always did.
Had he been on the losing side? Or had he won? Sometimes it was hard to remember what was true. And what wasn’t. The sheddings had involved the rewriting of many histories, both personal and collective. The stamping out of Bad Thoughts. The memory-holing of certain truths.
For the greater good, of course.
But during those dark ages he’d come aft and wandered the Forbidden Decks. Before the alliances. When the place had seemed haunted by all their failures, and the darkness they’d seen on the worlds they’d visited, and within themselves.
Those who had come with him, an ad hoc hunting party like some band of primitive Neolithic hunter-gatherers from the ancient past, all died horribly. Security systems went haywire. Someone trying to hack them had merely managed to set them to a higher, more lethal level. In the end the barriers wouldn’t recognize any of the colonists as having a right to access any of the aft storage vaults. Warehouses that were filled with food, medicine, and weapons. Many died in droves trying to violate those “seven cities of gold” the fabled aft storage decks vaults had become.
He remembered hiding behind a bulkhead at the end of a long passage that led to a vault where stable protein meal was supposed to be contained. The computer expert and the leader of that particular expedition had gone forward to hard-hack the lock. The expert had been one of the most famous app developers back on Earth. He’d developed the Hump app which allowed people to schedule sexual encounters in foreign cities. He was up half a trillion dollars before the collapse of the cryptocurrency market that ruined them all. In that instant, the app developer expert who’d once had a Twitter following of millions, and the expedition leader, a woman who’d held some state position in one of the Euro-governments, both died badly as hidden panels opened up around the complex storage vault lock and hundreds of rounds of auto-turret fire tore their emaciated bodies to bloody shreds in seconds.
No food that night.
Around a campfire built inside a maintenance vehicle hangar, half the party of scavengers overdosed on purpose with some heavy-duty surgery-grade painkillers they’d found in a locked dispensary.
In the morning the survivors parted ways. Most returned to the forward sections. The rest, only a few, had gone on to incur more violent deaths. And in the end, it was just him. Wandering the dark halls alone like that same unquiet ghost who’d once been driven though the paved-over paradise of his hometown on a holiday’s winter eve.
And that was where he met the old one.
Anubis.
That was where he found the Path again.
Now, alone again but in his armor, Crometheus felt live power in the systems all around him. Felt it from a long way off. The Forbidden Decks were still alive. He’d been closing in on deck sixty-six for hours now. Climbing up a central refuse chute that fed into aft reclamation. Deep down below, in the belly of the giant ship, was a stagnant ocean that must still be down there in the gargantuan lower decks. Or maybe they were draining it already. During the beginning of combat operations on New Vega, as they’d staged for assault operations agai
nst military resistance hot spots, it had been raining beneath the wings and exposed belly sections of their long home among the stars. Maybe that ocean that had fed and sustained them for so long, an ocean he’d seen only once in the centuries-long journey aboard the Pantheon, maybe it too was all gone now.
Everything changes. It always does. Best to accept it, because what other choice do you have?
He reminded himself of this. The Benediction of Change.
But now he felt power all around him. Felt it humming and coursing through the decks and long-powered-down systems. Deck sixty-six, according to the accessed deck and archived map data his armor had plundered from passing ancient signals still seeking to be of assistance, contained direct access to an auxiliary reactor and a fabrication forge.
Ideal for staging your own secret coup, Crometheus thought as the magnetized gauntlets pulled him up onto its level at last. The shaft door had been forced open, as though they’d known he was coming up this way all along. Below him what seemed a bottomless pit fell away into the silent gloom. As if to say going back, the past, it was all gone now. There was only forward into the unknown.
That was the only way.
“Ah…” said Maestro. Suddenly present and from out of the constant nowhere of comm-ether. “You have arrived, noble Master Crometheus. Excellent and well done.”
This place was like everything he’d crossed for hours now. Dark. Disused. Damaged. Abandoned. And… if one believed in the spirits of nether, as old Anubis had, then perhaps even haunted. If not by the ghosts of all the silent dead who died badly in that long stellar crossing from here to there aboard the Pantheon, then at least their memories.
Those bad times had definitely haunted the abandoned decks, fabrication shops, monitoring stations, central controls, miles of piping, stories-high device housings, and other enigmatic structures he’d passed to get here. All those things they’d marveled at during their first outbound months of escape from dying Earth. The wonders of their new and beautiful home now lay like brooding sentinels.
The armor’s sensors picked up movement all around his position. The telltale algo identification of a hyperdrive motivator pinged to life somewhere in the distance. Someone, or someones, was coming for him.
Two lightly armored scouts stepped out of the shadows, each holding advanced weapons the likes of which Crometheus had never seen. Behind them came Lusypher in his SS commander’s black trench and dark uniform adorned with silver, finished with high, polished black boots.
“Glad you could make it, son,” began Crometheus’s Uplifted superior. “And you too, Maestro. We’re outside their control spheres now. Free to operate. Free to begin our Final Solution.”
Crometheus, in the much larger heavy infantry variant armor, didn’t understand. And he said so.
“Maestro?”
Lusypher stepped close, out of the dark shadows inside the maintenance processing floor. Some still-working ship’s light cast a small shaft of illumination across his craggy human face.
Except it wasn’t human. Close. But not real.
It was a good facsimile. But there was still that automaton’s barely detectable rubberized trace to the flesh and hair. An almost plastic feel that technology had never quite been able to obscure.
But the eyes… the eyes were amazing. Crometheus had to admit that. Far better than the real human eyes they’d given up long ago.
Still, it was strange looking at the shell, the form, they’d all shed long ago. Not just for survival… but to become what they would one day be.
Survival is just the disturbance that forces us to seek change.
TED 89:14.
“Maestro smuggled himself out of the Council’s sphere of influence inside your HUD, my boy,” murmured Lusypher nonchalantly. “Those in the Tower who don’t want change watch everything. Even me. Especially so. So we went with you for the jailbreak. Good work getting him across enemy lines. Next we can move to the operations phase of our little plan.”
There was a pause. A pause in which Crometheus wanted to ask what, exactly, that might be. And couldn’t. Because… hundreds of years of behavior modification prevented him from questioning a High Path Uplifted like Lusypher. One who’d advanced far beyond him.
And of all the things Lusypher was, he was most definitely that. Uplifted farther, much farther, along the Path. An objective to not just be admired, but to be coveted.
“You’re probably wondering what that is,” he said to Crometheus. Then smiled. The effect with the rubberized body in the human skin suit was not a little unsettling to the rogue marine.
“Well, son, you’re about to find out all about what we’re up to back here.”
Gods: Chapter Sixteen
“Already,” began Lusypher as they crossed through reconditioned sections of the Forbidden Decks, nano-circuitry and updated filters coming to life while they progressed inward toward some destination yet to be announced, “a combined Uplifted fleet is en route for an attack against Espania. The Animal Coalition and their vaunted fleet won’t be putting up much of a fight there. The Espanians have been left to their fate by the rest of the Animals. But that’s not where the real battle is, son.”
They entered a hangar with the two scout armored marines in lockstep behind them. Out across the deck of the hangar were other similarly kitted Uplifted marines. But what drew Crometheus’s eye was the starship. A captured Animal freighter. No doubt hyperdrive-capable. The mass-produced manufacture of which had eluded the Uplifted.
How did everyone else get here, he wondered to himself. And then suspected that plans had been in motion for some time. People had gone missing in all the little ways a tightly controlled society has ways of breeding. The other Uplifted here were taking a chance on this new IP Lusypher was putting together. They’d found ways to opt in. Even if it wasn’t allowed.
“The real battle will be on Spilursa. A world they least expect us to hit them on, yet where they are actually most susceptible to a destabilization attack that will compromise their entire defensive network. And where we will introduce a virus into our allies’ operating systems that will ensure our dominion of thought going forward. I want you to be part of that attack force, Crometheus. I want you to infect our allies… and our enemies.”
Crossing the floor of the hangar toward them was definitely some kind of commander of this very specialized combat unit Crometheus had never before encountered. Their light scout armor seemed newer. Made up of some kind of new graphene material, if he were to guess. The protective gear shimmered across some of the more shadowy colors of the spectrum. Everyone was carrying the same advanced rifle system the two scouts had, along with the standard heavy-caliber, long-barreled sidearm. Here and there other specialized teams were working together to supervise heavy-duty mechs being used to load out the freighter.
“These are the Eternals, son,” said Lusypher, grandly sweeping an economical hand across the bay to encompass all the troops busy within. “A brand-new fighting unit that will be not just the shape of the Pantheon’s military corps moving forward, but of the entirety of the combined Uplifted tribes.”
This space, what must once have been the aft external engineering maintenance bay for one of the starboard in-system drive engines, had been turned into a staging area for the secretive military cabal Lusypher was heading. A seldom-visited place that might be accessed every five years during the intended normal operation of the ship was now the central hub for these new crack combat commandos.
“Will you join us in our crusade, son?” asked Lusypher. “Will you help us make the galaxy in our image?”
Crometheus nodded without hesitation.
The Path isn’t as easy as everyone always wants it to be. When you first start out, you think it’s going to be a series of exercises that improve you and make you a better person. A greater you, step by step. Day by day. One minute at a time and
all that noise. Like working out. Muscles getting bigger session by session with each rep. In time, you’re lifting hundreds of pounds over your head, effortlessly.
But the Path, the higher stages, often takes sudden turns into self-destruction just to discover some unfound enlightenment that will help you to find the Path once again. Shedding. Ruin. Burning away the things that no longer serve.
Crometheus had sensed, when he first started out from the known, and to be honest even at the restaurant when Lusypher gave the nod that he might have their version of the greatest burger ever… that such a moment of self-ruination and change was at hand. He’d sensed that it was coming. He’d been there before. He was here again. Leave the Uplifted Alliance and join a small group determined to seize power. Headed by a bold and visionary leader.
Like some fantastic IPO back on Earth. All the early investors got rich, real rich, quick. This was like that.
You must throw everything away in order to gain everything.
TED 593:1
What was it old Anubis had once said?
Disturbance brings change. And change brings improvement.
That had profoundly revolutionized him during all those years he’d spent with the old master in the haunted spaces of the Forbidden Decks. Playing his mind-numbing mental games endlessly. Following enigmatic quests for some useless thing the old wizard said would make them understand everything. During the dark and starving years when everyone aboard that grand dream of the Pantheon had well and truly lost their way. Even the ship… had lost its way.
Change brings disturbance.
Which is a frightening thing when one is adrift in the stellar void between the stars. Searching for a world. Any world.
Imagine that.
Disturbance brings improvement.
Yes, Crometheus nodded without the slightest hesitation. He would become an Eternal. He would join and do whatever they asked. He’d accepted their offer long before it was put forth. He’d accepted when all this first began.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 16