forrest

collection of written miscellany

ellie and zale, chapter 3 the deal titlecard

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3


    At the core of all things—planets and stars, moons and meteorites, supernovae and comet tails, pulsars and nebulae, flesh and stone, decayed wood and rusted metal, and those once-things long turned to dust; even in always and neverwas, in awareness and sleep, in rainbows and rainclouds too—there is magic; the 183rd element: hecatinium.

    This element set the modem facility aglow on this 8th night of Gamelion, AH386. The static purr of the miniature megaliths, themselves wired with hecatinium and HyperNet, was drowned out by an oscillatory hum emanating from a metal wand propped between the weight of two machines, one of life and one of death—a medical unit and a handgun, both of TatNos model and make—wires wrapped in black electrical tape running from the contradictory devices into slots on the wand itself. The wand was consuming the very essence of both things, like some sort of energy vampire, spitting that energy back out with tricephalous force; a line of green plasma swirled from the tip of the humming spanner, spasming softly as it spread itself some ten feet above the tip of the wand, forming a lime-colored bubble dome about the size of six people.

    Within the bubble were four bodies, three of which were lying motionless on the hard metal floor; the one in motion was Ellie, squatting near a black tower, her eyes shadowed by a dark pair of circular glasses. She was wrapping two wires together with black tape, accented by a light blue glow woven between the adhesive threads. The wires shot a spark, which struck the young woman’s freckled face, causing her to grimace while letting out a primal noise not unlike keweee! She quickly peered into the reflective surface of a nearby megalith to observe the extent of her wound: The spark had burned a dime-sized hole about two layers deep into her right cheek, revealing something red and stringy underneath. And as quickly as she went to touch the wound, it sealed itself shut as if there had been no wound at all. This realization morphed the pained expression on Ellie’s face into something resembling pride.

    “Well, the field works at least,” Ellie said to herself; her voice had a deep softness to it like the midnight hoot of an Old Earth owl; there was a hint of surprise there too, as she had her doubts about wiring two diametrically opposed devices into her spanner, but it appeared to have worked, judging by the regenerative bubble—yet did it work well enough to bring life back to three people on the brink of death? She had never used her spanner in such a way before.

    The spanner itself was given to Ellie on her seventeenth birthday by her grandmother; it was a hand-me-down, as Gigi had not the credits for anything else. Officially, the spanner was a standard TatNos 3rd Generation Diagnostic Wrench resembling a falchion in both shape and size; it ran the Minx operating system on a 2nd Generation Hypnos Atom-State Drive sporting 16 PB of RAM and running a microCHU processor powered by a single fingernail-sized H Crystal that fit into a slot underneath the removable plate locked on the bottom of the handle of which was grafted with a rubbery black polymer. Upon close contact with nearly anything mechanical, the wrench would instantly display diagnostic information for whatever it was pointed at, this information displayed on a palm-sized liquid-crystal display located on the nearly indestructible black vanadium shaft; the information displayed could range from internal temperatures to loose screws to packet-transfer speeds to CoO (Complex of Origin) to CHU-usage percentages by core to the name, birthdate, and current location of the last person who serviced the scanned thing (provided that person was chipped, which nearly all Thessalonians were). Functionally, the spanner emitted pulses of hecatinium-infused energy from a retractable repulsor ring in the middle of the spanner’s torque jaw (retractable so that the torque jaw could be used for its intended manual purpose if needed); the pulses were used to adjust the various mechanical details of any machine—from turning screws to replacing internal chips—all controlled by the thoughts of the wielder, which were interpreted by the Minx operating system through the wielder’s cerebrum implant, which interfaced with the wrench through a barely noticeable pin-prick upon gripping the handle. Each 3rd Generation Diagnostic Wrench was installed with a so-far uncrackable Biological Rights Management system intended to allow only the owner of the wrench to utilize its hecatonic functions, but a quirk in the 3rd Generation BRM allowed any blood relative to use the wrench—which was what allowed Gigi to gift the spanner as a hand-me-down to begin with. Unofficially, the wrench—which Ellie had taken to calling The Spanner of Queens for laughs—was modded with a number of enhancements, one being the grafting of a hecatome glove’s innards into the spanner’s own guts, and replacing the original repulsor ring with the ring from the cannibalized glove, which was a necessary modification to accommodate the additional output afforded by the hecatome glove’s internal chipset. These modifications allowed the spanner to manipulate hecatonic energy in such a way that it was not dissimilar from a magical wand out of a fantasy book, capable of much more than simply fixing machinery, and these hecatonic blasts output in the wrench's original green coloring, which coincidentally matched its wielder's big eyes. But Ellie’s intention was not to make a deadly weapon; the hecatomes programmed into The Spanner of Queens matched those Ellie was trained in at polytechnic: tomes of defense, manipulation, and incapacitation—defensive walls and bubble barriers, hands of god and restrictive tethers, and all the soft electrics; and while she had intended to learn regenerative weaving, the tomes were much too complex for her to grasp, and as such she found no way to program them into the spanner’s operating system herself. But hecatonic shock was programmed with no problem at all, as this tome was one she was well-versed in—a simple, non-lethal means of self-defense that proved invaluable for complex life, albeit a self-defense she had only used outside of the Net thrice before; the third time being just a few moments ago.

    This hecatonic shock was the lightning that struck the mouse—the same mouse Ellie had seen from her spot in the facility's deep noir, the same mouse that had attacked the people she heard after realizing she had left the door wide open, those same people she only got a good look at once they were splayed out on the floor, being tortured by the rodent all wrapped in hellfire. So, when she lifted The Queen and thought of hecatonic shock and those emerald waves of electricity burst forth thus enveloping every inch of the holographic mouse, she believed she had done the right thing; although she had never run 1,200 volts through a man wearing a holo before, and the mouse’s shaking was far more violent than she had ever expected. But despite all that, she believed she had done the right thing. And when she checked the pulses of each person and noticed that the mouse man had no pulse whatsoever, she still thought she had done the right thing; after all, one of the fallen had a TatNos Medical Unit, known to pump non-beating hearts full of life once more—or at least that’s what she had read on the Net—and although she had never used a TatNos Medical Unit before, the thing was straightforward enough, and she figured it out in less than a minute. The medical unit was lacking an H Crystal, but Ellie’s spanner had one to spare, as did the mouse’s gun, and wiring all three devices would allow the spanner to draw power from the handgun while channeling the regenerative hecatonics from the medical unit. The wiring was a simple matter of electrical tape and know-how, and thus: the regenerative bubble now turning the room into a plasmatic jungle of life.

    The green of the do-it-yourself regenerative field was dabbed with spots of red as the HyperNet towers blinked angry blinks of connectivity error. But the colors coalesced into the emerald glow shortly after Ellie, filled with reckless confidence, pulled her face out of an open tower panel, her eyes obscured by the glasses on which her hand was resting, tapping one of the many buttons on the frame. Her toothy grin brighter than ever as she brushed her hands together then rubbed the tip of her hooky nose.

    Floor 3 was online, but there was little time to celebrate; a groan broke through the room’s electronic purr, and this immediately put Ellie on high alert. She slid behind the central network tower for cover, a single sweaty palm pressed against the matte megalith as she peeked her head out toward the room’s only door, which was now firmly closed and locked old-school with a tilted metal chair as the door’s electronic locking mechanism was fried.

    There, near the entrance, a messy-haired young man was twisting around on the floor, wrapped in his own long coat; muted curses as he wrestled his arms free from coattails, propped himself on knee, foot and palm, then rubbed his face with a bare hand, accidentally smearing blood across his face like a wolf after a feast. The coppery smell tipped him off, and he looked down at his bloody palm, blank expression, lost remembering events just minutes before. His reverie snapped when he noticed the green reflecting from the gooey red on his palm, which caused him to do a quick scan of the room—a scan that resulted in a double take at what looked like a ritual totem spewing emerald plasma just a few feet away from him.

    “What in the—” Gray whispered, brushing at his knees before scanning the scene: he saw Jules face down in blood, one hand outstretched in his direction; and the mouse man was mouse no more, just a husk, all ceilingward, his one good eye rigored wider than the festering hole on the opposite side of his face which billowed gray smoke like a mortal volcano post-eruption. This smoke could have doubled as visible stink lines, as there was a fetid mix of ozone, excrement, and burned hair oozing from the rodent’s corpse. “Zeus almighty,” Gray whispered as he covered his nose and repressed a gag.

    Gray hurried to Jules, kneeling down beside them. Jules had suffered two blast wounds, one to each leg, which was obvious from the singed holes in the artist’s poofy pants, the only evidence of wounds that were now closed shut. A third blast smoldered near the fallen artist’s head—a miss—and a fourth had just grazed the side of their smooth stomach, if the small flames slowly creeping along the mesh of Jules’ fishnet shirt were any indication.

    Gray placed a single finger on Jules’ forehead, which must have been the touch of life because the artist instantly turned over and blinked their alien blue eyes up at the young wolf peering down at them. Jules spoke oblivious as if just being snapped out of a weird trance. “I had the strangest dream; there was a mouse, a red mouse, and—”

    “—they had very bad aim, right?” Gray said with a smirk that failed to hide the joy on his face.

    Jules propped themselves up into a lotus position, then made a quick scan of their body, which prompted a gentle laugh. “It’s hard to aim with only one eye.” And then they both laughed, not at the joke—or even at the absurdness of the situation—but at the realization that their friendship had not been cut short, that they still had time to spend together. Their laughter slowly became louder as if the someone were delicately twisting the volume knob to eleven.

    The laughter stopped as Jules noticed the totem, prompting them to tilt their head as if processing the supernatural. Gray looked too, mesmerized by the green plasma fluctuating and twisting and burping in what seemed like eight-dimensional space. Gray broke the silence, “Clearly that’s the thing that saved us, but—” The two friends exchanged puzzled glances before accidentally speaking simultaneously: “Who?” They paused for a moment, then spoke simultaneously once more, “And why?” The laughter returned.

    Jules pushed a long finger into the tip of their nostril, forming a lopsided piggy face, lost in bubble glow. Gray stepped toward the humming totem, approaching it with an arm outstretched, as if to touch the thing, but before he could, the no-nonsense hoot of a serious owl rang out: “Don’t even think about it!”

    Gray and Jules turned siamese to the hoot. Ellie stood with one hand in the opening of her dark messenger bag and the other on the frame of her shadowy glasses, tapping a single button as if toggling data, haptics tickling her face with each tap.

    “You don’t look like a doctor,” Ellie said, peering at Gray over green-reflecting lenses. “And is that your real name—Autolycus? I’ve never heard that one before.”

    “It’s Gray,” the wolf responded matter-of-factly, in a somewhat defensive tone.

    “And you—” Ellie scanned Jules, her lips curling into a curious smile. “Nothing on you.”

    Jules lifted a pale hand and waved an exaggerated wave, unfazed by Ellie’s clairvoyance, tucking a blonde tuft behind their ear before flashing a childlike smile, which Ellie returned in kind.

    Gray watched the ginger girl, who stood shadowed in fluctuating emerald glow, which made her look beautiful, like a grassy meadow dotted with sunflowers at dusk darkly. He stared transfixed, as if he had just come face to face with a faerie. But, like any true skeptic confronted with the supernatural, his expression shifted from wonderment to confusion to anger to a superficial cool in phases spanning only milliseconds, and then, finally, the questions. “Why did you save us?”

    Ellie blinked big greens, “Why not?”

    Gray’s eye twitched at this non-answer. He didn’t immediately respond; instead, he slipped a hand into his coat pocket, which made him feel a little more comfortable. “Why were you here? Are you with the Consortium? What’s your name? And your glasses—are they Net-enabled?”

    Ellie’s thick brows furrowed. She sensed where this was going—“This is stupid”—and intended to cut it short: “My name’s Ellie. I’m in my final year of polytechnic, and I was getting an assignment in class before this whole thing started. I was fixing the Net so I could finish my class, but I found you and your girlfriend being attacked by some—” She gesticulated at the smoking mouse man, “—some mouse person, and I figured, ‘Hey, that mouse seems like a pretty bad dude; why not stop an obvious double homicide?’ which, admittedly, wasn’t very well thought out, and I probably should have just hidden in the back until this all blew over, and—”

    Jules’ smile twisted at the ‘girlfriend’ remark, and Gray, too, looked perplexed. Ellie paused, noticing this shift. “W-What? Was it something I said?”

    “Jules is not my girlfriend—” Gray exaggerated his next word, “—they are my best friend.”

    Ellie’s expression dropped, her eyes wide, the freckles underneath stretched to infinity. “I’m so sorry—you’re totally right. What was I thinking? I just figured the only reason you would be in here during an outage is to get away and—err—kiss—err—I don’t know, do something together, and I just kind of assumed and—” She stopped to collect her thoughts. “Jules, was it? I’m so so sorry. I really don’t know what I was thinking. I’m just flustered right now. I normally don’t do this kind of thing. I—”

    “My name is Euterpe—Julian Euterpe. I think some people call me Jules.” Jules smiled, they sensed beauty in Ellie, but not in the same way Gray might have sensed that beauty—this was a fizzy beauty, there was an understated intelligence in Ellie’s demeanor, expressed through an effervescent weirdness that was both a little immature and a little charming, they thought.

    Gray’s skeptical look softened. He removed his hand from his coat pocket and spoke, “Well, it’s a strange coincidence, still, you being here. I don’t—”

    And then there was a loud mechanical burp; the green bubble wobbled out of phase, then returned to normal, then warbled, then returned once more. The spanner started vibrating just enough to create an audible rattle that overtook the room’s default purr. This prompted Gray to turn and approach the totem.

    Ellie shouted, “Don’t!”

    Gray ignored Ellie’s frustrated hoot. “It sounds like it’s overloading.” He took a moment to appreciate the eldritch wiring between the three devices. “This is really impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m surprised it even works,” he said, reaching out to touch the magical wrench.

    Ellie shouted again, “I said don’t touch it!”

    Gray heard a faint whoosh and felt the air by his face shift as if he had just barely dodged a bullet. Ellie had removed a thick screw from her bag and thrown it at him, which barely missed, crashing into the spanner with a loud clang. The spanner toppled over, and the regenerative bubble burst as if it were made of green slime, pooling on the metal floor like goo before dissipating into little green dots.

    Ellie gasped, realizing her mistake. But instead of rushing to the spanner, she bolted to the mouse man on the floor and grabbed his stiff wrist, pressing down hard with her thumb; she put her head to the man’s breast, listening closely. Then she popped up, positioned her hands on the man’s chest, one atop the other, and began pressing in turns. She started counting but lost track, and when there was no response, she hung her head and went silent.

    Jules wonder-watched as Ellie played first responder on what was obviously a corpse. Gray approached, as if to stop Ellie, but Jules lifted their hand and shook their head. Several moments passed in near silence—the only noise being Ellie’s whispered curses as she dropped her head to the man’s chest to check for a heartbeat one last time.

    Gray thought, surely this care for the mouse’s life was because Ellie was a Consortium member herself and the mouse man was her colleague—otherwise, why would she care at all? His eyes narrowed at this thought, but then he considered how Ellie had saved their lives, which only served to confuse him more. Moments of contemplation passed before waves of revelation washed over him, leaving nothing but a stoic expression on the shore; he concluded that Ellie simply did not want to kill anyone, and this annoyed him, as she was now trying to save the life of the person who had nearly murdered him just moments earlier.

    Jules did not share their friend's annoyance; they were instead smiling a yin-yang smile, both somber and serene, as they enjoyed learning more about Ellie with every passing moment.

    Ellie, however, was not smiling; she lurched toward Gray, who put his hands up as if to defend himself. “You idiot! Why did you have to go and mess with my spanner?” Her emerald eyes lit up like a forest fire. “If you just listened, this guy wouldn’t be dead right now!”

    Gray shot back, “You threw the damn thing!”

    “I wouldn’t need to throw anything if you just listened to me!”

    Jules took a lanky step toward the heart of the forest fire, hoping to quell the flames. “You deserve credit for trying, but the mouse had already given up the ghost.”

    Ellie, still scowling, heard Jules but ignored them; she was fixated on Gray. “Neither of you knew that! And those medical units have healed worse!”

    Gray took a step back, giving Ellie some room. “Don’t you think he would've healed by now? Whatever you did to that guy ghosted him quick. In fact, he’s been dead for—” Gray peered down at the glowy square on his wrist. “—over twenty minutes now.”

    Ellie’s eyes welled into mossy pools, extinguishing the wildfire, and Gray felt like he was stepping into a mossy pool himself, his understanding of the young woman’s motivation deepening as the water rose around his legs. For a moment, it was as if Gray were being purified by Ellie’s healing waters.

    But Gray resisted purification. “He was trying to ghost us. He was a gangster. He would have ghosted you too. You shouldn’t feel bad. He had it coming.”

    Ellie shook her head. “It was just Hecatome: Shock,” she mumbled as she placed a hand on her face. “It’s like a taser. It’s designed to incapacitate. I programmed it myself. There’s no way it could kill someone. No way.”

    “Well, it incapacitated him straight into a grave,” Gray said, misreading her shift in tone and topic, which resulted in a fresh look of disdain from Ellie, whose mossy pools seemed to evaporate instantly as the wildfire returned. “What?” Gray said, gesturing nervously. “I’m just saying.”

    “I have no right to take anyone’s life. That man should have been arrested, tried, sentenced—something! You could have been trying to kill him first—I don’t know!”

    Gray started with soft chuckles that grew into deep guffaws.

    “What’s so funny?” Ellie demanded, defiantly stomping the floor with one foot.

    “It’s just—” Gray interrupted himself with loud “ha's.” “—just cute that you think the justice syst—” He couldn’t stop, half of his sentence lost in laughter. “Especially in a complex—” He placed a hand on his stomach as if to contain a gutful of guffaws.

    Ellie, eyes welling with tears, stomped right up to Gray and pushed his shoulders—“Shut up!”—causing the wolf to stumble lightly backward, his laughter calming somewhat. She pushed him again and again and again, into a wall. and the wolf was not retaliating.

    Sensing this was getting out of hand, Jules held out their own gloved hand; it glew blue, and, as if by magic, a long Old Earth concert flute dotted with many keys appeared, semi-transparent and azure in its holographics; they held the instrument to their lips and played a jingle that was sharp enough to be annoying but melodic enough to be hummable. This jingle caught Ellie’s attention, who turned to Jules with abrupt curiosity. Jules then snapped their fingers; the flute faded like aerosol into atmosphere.

    There was a moment of silence.

    Gray was leaning back against the metal wall, no longer laughing, his dark hair tufted and ruffled, his face still streaked with his own blood—he wore the expression of someone playing the punching bag to a person who just had to let it all out. He no longer thought Ellie was a member of the Consortium—she had passed a number of internal checks, and he now believed her to be exactly who she said she was: a student in the wrong place at the wrong time; a student gifted in tomes and engineering. And so, the next words Gray spoke came from a place of sincerity: “I appreciate it—you saving us. I owe you big time. But you’re free to just walk out of here. I won’t tell anyone what happened—this was my problem, and it still is.” He flicked his wrists dismissively, as if gesturing a lighthearted joke. “I release you.”

    Ellie turned to face Gray once more. “You don’t get to release me! Do you think leaving solves anything? I’ll still know what happened! I won’t be able to live with myself! And if anyone finds out, I’ll be expelled from polytechnic—I’ll never be able to run for office or change things for the people stuck down here!”

    Gray’s brown eyes narrowed, and the corner of his lip curled as if he had some brilliant insight about Ellie’s character forming in his mind—an insight manufactured to overwrite the truth that he was envious of Ellie’s ability to care so deeply about human life when he himself cared so very little. He didn’t understand this care fully, but he understood it well enough to see that perhaps Ellie knew something he did not—something about life and its sacredness that he could not comprehend. At the very least, he thought, there was something fundamentally different between Ellie and himself, and this made him crack inside. Was she better, ideologically? This envy simmered into a soft rage beneath his projected persona of cool, and, intending to hide the rage with some insightful quip, he accidentally expressed it with the following words—words that cut to the truth he had made for himself, this false truth that calmed his envious mind, made him feel a little better, and filled him with dubious justification: “Is that what you really care about then—your standing at school?”

    Ellie stood glaring wildfire once more. She saw Gray’s face covered in blood, looking like a rabid wolf, ready to draw more blood with words if he could, and she knew this about him simply from the vitriolic tone of his question. She closed her wildfire eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, and when she opened them, they were verdant once more. She calmly walked to her fallen spanner, picked it up off the floor, detached the wires connected to the medical unit and the handgun, and then proceeded toward the only exit in the room, all without exchanging another word.

    But before Ellie could exit, her attention was captured by the dead man’s cargo pants, which started to rustle and buzz loudly. The fabric of the dead man’s pocket burst at the seams, and out flew a black ball the size of a fist. Its metal body reflected the space around it, and it seemed to have a mind of its own, floating as if magnetized opposite the floor. The ball buzzed around the room like an amphetamine bee, dodging modem towers and navigating webs of wire effortlessly. Ellie watched, her head tilted; Jules leapt for the thing, missing and landing flat on their face; Gray, a fearful look overtaking his faux stoicism, pulled out his whirring pen and whirred it in the direction of the flying ball, but the thing was much too fast to get a clear lock. The ball zoomed toward Ellie’s head, stopped just short of impact, then opened a small panel on its reflective surface and flashed a matrix of bright red, lighting up Ellie’s pale face, who tried to swat at the metal bug with her spanner, but it zoomed toward the exit with such force that it crashed through the metal door, leaving a sparking hole in its wake, zipping down the outer hallway, never to be seen again. Ellie was left rubbing red out of her eyes.

    “Necromone,” Gray said confidently, slipping the pen back into his coat. “Wasn't expecting that. Rare tech, haven't seen one in a while—mostly because they’re really expensive.”

    With one final rub, Ellie’s vision focused. Still angry, she let out a “Whatever” and approached the exit.

    Jules intercepted her, “It’s dangerous to go alone.”

    “You’re not going to let me leave?” Ellie proclaimed, placing one hand on the curve of her hip, spanner dangling from her other hand.

    Gray spoke, “The thing that scanned you—the Necromone—it profiled you, likely already sent everything back to Ursa Major.”

    “Ursa Major?” Ellie asked, side-eyeing the wolf.

    “The boss of Complex 42,” Gray replied, exaggerating the word “boss” with a tinge of sarcasm.

    “Zeus?” Ellie blinked.

    Gray laughed. “You really don’t get out much, do you? Spend too much time in classes, I guess.” He paused to pick up the fallen TatNos Medical Unit, sliding it into a large inner-coat pocket as he continued, “Complex 42 is controlled by the Callisto Consortium.”

    Ellie's single raised eyebrow revealed her curiosity, but her face was still flushed with frustration.

    “Consider yourself lucky not knowing about the Consortium. Every credit goes through them, one way or another. Cross them, intentional or not, and you’re dead—or their slave, in which case you might as well be dead.” Gray took a moment to brush muddy bangs from his dark eyes, parting his hair to the side, intentionally revealing a small keloid scar shaped like the letter C. “Some of us are born into it; barely anyone gets out; everything is about money; ‘pay, perform, or perish,’ that’s their catchphrase.” There was a pause before Gray ruffled his bangs once more, covering the scar. “I guess, depending on your circumstances, you may be able to avoid dealing with the Consortium growing up. But, since you live here—in a lowly complex underneath the stars—you can’t avoid them forever, so it’s about time you learned. I’m just sorry you had to learn this way.”

    “There’s no way I wouldn’t know about this.” Ellie looked incredulously between Gray and Jules. Her little bump of a gut told her that Jules was the more trustworthy of the two, so the singer’s serious expression helped alleviate some of her initial skepticism, as did Gray’s scar, but she was still doubtful. “The Pantheon would never allow another group to gain control like this. It’s ridiculous.”

    “Do you honestly believe that a bunch of Star Touched who call themselves ‘gods’ would really care about what goes on down here?” Gray’s tone was bitter, almost angry. “The Pantheon is up there in their starships, playing in literal gardens, eating Old Earth delicacies, while we’re down here withering on a radioactive desert planet surrounded by cold steel, subsisting on nothing but BioBars and mind-numbing drugs that they are supplying us!” His bitter tone morphed into mockery. “The ‘gods’ are gorging themselves while we’re slowly dying.”

    Ellie protested. “The Pantheon does care about us—even if some of them individually do not. The economy, and society as a whole, would collapse without complex workers. Plus, we elect them! Things might not be great right now, but they can be changed. We can vote!”

    Gray tilted his head down, a single hand covering his face all to hide a massive eye roll.

    Ellie’s scowl was stronger than ever, but so was her raised eyebrow. “If this Consortium really existed, it would be all over the Net. You can’t hide something like this.”

    This prompted a sharp laugh from Gray. “The Consortium are pros at wiping away their existence.” Gray scanned Ellie up and down, this time with a more critical eye. “What are you, seventeen, eighteen?”

    The non-sequitur irked Ellie, but the low estimate coaxed a grin out of her at the same time. “I’m twenty-two.”

    “Twenty-two years of ignorance. Lucky you.” Gray paused, a finger underneath his nose like a pretend mustache, thinking carefully about how to drill the seriousness of this situation into someone as stubborn as himself. “You know that mouse you ghosted?”

    Ellie’s poise broke, her shoulders sagging under the weight of shame. She spoke meekly. “Quit saying that.” She looked down and gripped the rubbery hilt of her spanner tighter than before. “My memory isn’t that bad.”

    “He was a Consortium operative. An Alkaid—footsoldier—I think. He attacked me in The Idyllic Garden, over a—” Gray’s thin lips pursed, the mask of confidence he wore so well now slipping, “—an old debt.” He then scanned the room, walked to the mouse’s long-barreled handgun, picked it up, analyzed every inch of it, nodded to himself, and then slid it into his coat before turning back to Ellie, whose attention was bound to the floor, as if speaking to cold metal with her mind.

    Ellie was formulating her next steps, preparing her mental talk track; once she believed herself to have it all worked out, she spoke with shaky conviction: “This is all a misunderstanding. I’m going to turn myself in to the Moral Agents. Explain everything. I was only attempting to stop a crime. The Complex Authority can pull the biometrics from the room and figure it out themselves. Easy.”

    There was a brief silence. Jules fiddled with their gloved hand, biting their thick bottom lip, eyes shifting back and forth from glove to Gray to Ellie and back, as if watching a pivotal drama play out between characters in Old Earth Broadway.

    “The Complex Authority is the Consortium,” Gray said, watching Ellie intently, trying to predict her thoughts, but he couldn’t even begin to guess; to Gray, the two seemed nothing alike apart from the stubbornness.

    The room’s electronic hum was as clear as cicadas on a holographic summer night. This hum vibrated all around Ellie, who stood peering over dark glasses at the metal below, her brow furrowing here and there, her grip on The Queen’s rubbery handle going from hard to soft and back again, as if this had a calming effect.

    Gray became impatient. “The point is, the Consortium thinks you killed one of their operatives. They won’t stop coming after you. That Necromone scanned you. They know you now—your name, your age, where you live, your DNA, your living relatives, the last time you took a piss, probably even your favorite band.”

    Ellie, overwhelmed, abruptly turned to the exit, nudged past Jules, pushed aside the chair, and made her way through the now holey, sparking door. The harsh light of the hallway contrasted with the darkness of the modem facility, temporarily blinding her; she went to cover her eyes but let out a loud sneeze instead. When she regained her vision, she looked down both ends of the hallway, a dead sign indicated HABITATION TERMINAL B to her left and FLOOR 3 CONCOURSE to her right. She turned right in a huff, soon finding herself in the massive Floor 3 hub of Complex 42.

    Ellie wandered through the hub, seeking a Moral Agent to confess her sins, but she only saw walls of chromatic steel stretching into misty vapor, dark swirling columns decorated with inert light-emitting diodes lined in endless rows, gigantic ducts, vents, and fans sucking and swirling high up in the walls and ceilings, occasionally blasting her with gelid winds as she passed. She saw once-moving walkways, now silent and still, mingling with hover chariot pathways, converging into intricate, circuit board-like mazes across the gunmetal expanse. She saw lost souls, all fetal against the chrome, their spirits burned into the retina displays of their plastic headsets. She saw dead neon signs on every wall and corner, and she read these signs in passing: PREGNANT? NO PROBLEM! and ALL TOMES MUST GO and SEE DEMONS: SYNTHETIC ABSINTHE and CYBER-SUSHI-24HR-BUFFET and SNOW SYNDROME TREATMENT and GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! and CHEAP INTELLECT ENHANCERS and REAL WATER NO WEIRD ADDITIVES and EZ LIMB REPLACEMENT and HEPHAESTUS’ HOVER CHARIOTS and ANY FLAVOR BIOBARS and GET GUNS QUICK: NO BACKGROUND CHECK and MECHANIZED OPTOMETRY YOU CAN TRUST and another that just read SWORDS. She broke into a jog, her rusty hair bouncing in tandem with her messenger bag as she searched for absolution, cold twisted neon unfolding with every step: BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!, CATALYSTS & TECHNO-MAGERIES, WHITE HOT NOVA TOPIC, PANTHEON OF POWER: FREE PULLS WITH EVERY PURCHASE. She shifted her head from side to side, searching for signs of life and non-life alike. ECHOS MYRON MEMORY BANK, CHEAP H CRYSTALS, FEEL GOOD INC., AUTO-CAT EMPORIUM, LIGHTLY USED HEADSETS & HOLOTABLES, and one near a seedy corner that just read SAD? :)—its purple-blue fluorescence flickered faintly, as if the complex’s auxiliary power fueled all sorrow on the planet regardless of circumstance and was happy doing so.

    Ellie had never seen the concourse so barren. She felt uneasy. She thought of the Consortium. How could she not know of the Consortium? She was aware of the major gangs of Complex 42—the Children of the Nightmare Kernel, the DDR69s, the Eliminator Jrs, the Boomslang Distribution, to name a few—so why was she just now learning of the Consortium? How could she go twenty-two years without hearing about them? Gray’s words repeated in her mind: “They know you now—your name, your age, where you live, your DNA, your living relatives.” She thought about Gigi. But it had to be nonsense, right? But what about Gigi? Is Gigi safe? Is she alive?

    Ellie’s mind flooded with Gigi, who was likely, at this moment, sitting on the hard cushions of the couch in the glorified box that was their living room, flipping through holos for something to watch now that Floor 3 was online, clueless about the trouble her granddaughter was getting into just a few terminal blocks away. Senile and nearly blind, unaware if someone had broken into their quarters, and likely to become insolent at the slightest provocation—a trait she passed on to Ellie—she was completely defenseless against any two-bit assassin this Consortium could throw their way.

    Ellie knew that if anything happened, it was her own fault, and, however irrational these thoughts may have been, they caused her to stop her fruitless jog through the dead neon to make a quick call. She lifted her hand to the frames of her glasses and started tapping, haptics vibrating the skin around her eyelids. There was a positive jingle, and then the ringing started, a ringing that only Ellie could hear, bouncing around inside her skull. It rang and rang and rang. The silence that followed twisted Ellie’s stomach into a knot, and this knot caused her to abruptly turn, dashing off in the opposite direction as fast as she could.

    Ellie nearly skid fire behind her as she turned the corner into the hallway from whence she had come just minutes before, rushing to the habitation terminal that lay just beyond one final turn. As she rounded the corner into Terminal B, the steel-gray walls of which were imprinted with the letter B and caked in stylized graffiti and band posters—JENOVAKILL, Audiovisual Adolescence, The Peggy Suicides—all yellowing and peeling at the edges, she thought for a moment that she had kicked up real flames as something brilliant and orange reflected off a nearby sign that read HABITATION TRANS-AM: TERMINAL B in dead glass. But it wasn’t Ellie’s shoes that had kicked up flame; it was someone else. Someone was playing with fire, and that someone was surrounded by a mass of people who stood odd-watching in awestruck quietus, drawn moth-like to flame. The fire rose higher than the tallest head in the crowd, butterflies and birds burned the oxygen above.

    Ellie, as if possessed by some supernatural force, forgot all about her grandmother and was compelled to approach the flame, to become one with the crowd; and when she did, the masses parted like the seas of Old Earth religious texts, revealing the solitary flame caller—a terminal performer. The performer stood majestic, flames exhaling from a part in their lips as if they had dragons in place of lungs. The flames were blown onto a long, curved blade, which then flicked the fire into the air, this time flashing a momentary constellation in the shape of a vicious bear that supernova’d into hundreds of smaller horses, which fizzled out as they galloped off somewhere near the massive industrial ceiling fans that spun so large that they could slice ancient giants in twain.

    The performer towered over the masses, standing nearly seven feet tall. They wore a tan, pyramid-shaped hat woven with synthetic bamboo; the tip added inches to the performer’s already incredible height, and the wide, sunken brim obscured their eyes and cast long shadows over their square face. They wore a long, dark blue robe over their mountainous, masculine shoulders; the robe itself was threaded with many golden moons—from new to crescent to quarter to gibbous to full—and these moons played amongst smoky clouds that were so amorphous they seemed to billow and burst at even the slightest wave of the fabric. Around the performer’s waist was a simple brown rope, tied tightly above the hips, which produced a subtle hourglass shape to the performer’s imposing figure. Tied on the left of the belt was a long, curved sheath of glossy black, itself dotted with golden moons. The sheath was empty, as the performer held the blade at their side while blowing flames from their mouth after taking long sips from a jug imprinted with a single foreign symbol on its tan surface. The blade, which Ellie assumed was a katana of Old Earth Russian make—or so she had read on the Net—was longer and more curved than any she had seen before, with a circular golden guard that separated the glistening steel—of which the metal was both like a black hole and a sea of silver—from the hilt, which was the size of a short sword all wrapped in midnight-blue cloth.

    Both the performer’s fire-breathing and strikingly foreign aesthetic captured Ellie’s attention, but what she thought most interesting of all was the performer’s shoes, which were simple raised sandals made of synthetic wood that hooked around the performer’s large, brown feet with a single red strap, reinforcing Ellie’s impression that this was, indeed, a terminal performer on the clock, as they were wholly unequipped for everyday complex life otherwise—after all, Old Earth blades were considered antiques for a reason: they couldn’t withstand a single hecatonic blast.

    Ellie was suddenly overcome by great shame; she had forgotten all about her grandmother, however momentary, and this realization broke the performer’s spell on her. She stepped backward twice in a daze before turning completely, intent on hurrying home. But she only made it a few feet before she felt an extreme heat on the back of her neck, which caused her to turn toward the performer, who had blown a large flame directly at her. The blaze billowed out just inches away from her face, singeing at least two freckles and frizzing the tips of her already fiery tresses. When the flame vanished and the smoke cleared, she found her eyes locked upon those of the terminal performer. But the performer’s eyes were like nothing she had seen before: white stars, dead television, holes in space. A tingle ran down her spine, her body locked up, and her right hand tensed on the grip of her spanner. As soon as she froze, the crowd unfroze, as if snapping out of a magicked reverie in unison, everyone looking around at each other with their wild haircuts and grafted metal, all confused, as if they didn’t know how they had gotten there. Then the crowd dispersed, leaving Ellie face-to-face, frozen, with the terminal performer holding the longest curved blade she had ever seen in her life.

    There was silence in the ghost terminal.

    Ellie’s mind was working, but her body would not cooperate. She realized she wasn’t breathing, and this caused a mental panic that was only made worse by the performer’s next words.

    “Pay. Perform. Perish.”

    Ellie’s eyes would have gone wide if she could have moved them at all. A million thoughts raced through her mind in the span of ten seconds, and she tried to grab only the most important ones: the words the performer used—they were the same words Gray used to describe the Consortium: pay, perform, perish. So Gray was telling the truth, unless this was a practical joke—but no, that’s not important; she discarded that thought. What’s important? What was this man doing to her? That’s important. He wasn’t holding a hecatonic device that could cause paralysis like this, unless it was the sword, but the sword looked antique, classical. Maybe he drugged her without her noticing? The fire? Something in that tan jug? But this seemed to happen after she made eye contact with the man. But those eyes, those white eyes—blind? Some sort of fleshy machinery—inserts?—maybe a hypnotic sine wave or a subliminal message? She had never seen or read anything like this. No, the reason doesn’t matter—or does it? What matters is that she’s stuck, unable to move. But was she really? Perhaps this was all mental; she tested this theory: tried to move her hands, tried to tighten her fist, but it was of no use. She wanted to close her eyes, lose herself in darkness, formulate a plan of some sort, but she couldn’t close her damned eyes. She had so many thoughts. Useless thoughts. She became flustered, frustrated. Hopelessness set in. She felt a cosmic dread wash over her at the sudden realization of her own fragility—immortality, lost. “How immature was I.” She was going to die. Then panic set in. She knew Gigi would be next. Images of Gigi’s head rolling on the floor, a bloody path behind it like the slime trail of an Old Earth snail. Her grandmother’s old, faded eyes blinked up at her from the floor as she stood helpless, unable to move. The pit in her stomach became so wide that her brain fell through it. She became thoughtless.

    And then her vision went black.

    Within the inky dark, she saw a faded green bump map of a three-dimensional face poking through voidant space. Ellie felt as if she were standing in the void, watching this bumpy face as it tried to push its way through a thick cloth of pitch black, its light barely poking through, leaving only an outline. The experience would have been frightening, but there was a strange familiarity to it all, similar to bio-circuiting into the HyperNet, and this put Ellie at ease.

    The bump map face, still unrecognizable, started to glitch wildly, and suddenly a cacophony of noise erupted throughout the void. The noise was like the sound of machines being murdered. Amidst the hellish clamor, there were faint voices—one voice, many voices; it was hard to tell. But as the noise continued, Ellie was able to pick out the phonetic sounds, assemble them in her mind, and make meaning from the chaos.

    XX?/s/dfs/dfs/??G?Sdgsdgsgsgs//!!!!!!!!!!!!/WEGwegCANYOUHEARwgw2@!%@!#%@THIS!#$!#@66IMPORTANT!#@5123fdsaMOMENT53564xzczxTURNINGrwetwPOINTqwr13r$^3453365//wnANCIENThtn/2352352/5gasdBREAKf2439ut2352!23526Xx@#%@!#%52352CURSEgaweg42g////////////////GEKKOMAHI/////////////////fqf243324623476sad&^&4573w5THINKITdsfdsagasdgFEELITqwr3qr1524720194514t55@GRAYS#%0^$#&$..12.JULES4124/GONE1/STILL12/4142-12DEADsdgdsag41024AN294IMTHEasfasfONLY2358ONExxqtegLEFTxsaxXNOW3u3215151Iefwegwq@253235sad235626326213t521ewwTHEefxxEGGxxafw2t42q4652641

    Gekko Mahi. These words stood out, but what did they mean? Ellie, in this voidant world, this mindspace, stepped toward the twitching, bumpy face; it was as big as a star in this black hole realm. Ellie spoke like an Old Earth monkey trying to communicate with a god. “What does it mean? Gekko Mahi?”

    As she thought these final words, she snapped back to her senses, finding herself once more in Terminal B. She reflexively stepped back in real time and space, lifting her spanner into a defensive stance, disheveled but hiding it well. The terminal performer stood before her, emotionless, but something in his posture indicated a level of surprise that mirrored Ellie’s own—she could move again, but how?

    The performer, a veritable swordsman, lifted his long steel and pointed it directly at Ellie, who was slowly stepping back, making sure not to make eye contact with the man. He spoke, his voice deep but calm, as if hiding the fact that he could tear down a mountain with a single shout. “Pay. Perform. Perish.”

    “Never,” Ellie said. She meant to wave her spanner in front of her, but instead accidentally looked into the performer’s eyes, which rigored her body, locking her in place once again. She cursed herself mentally.

    The swordsman slowly walked toward Ellie, the sharp tip of his blade sparking against the floor. There was a hesitation in the man’s approach, but not from fear—more from curiosity. This curiosity quickly vanished in one elegant motion as the blade flashed vertically through Ellie’s frozen body.

    But Ellie had already figured it out: “Gekko Mahi.”

    In an instant, Ellie clasped the rubbery grip of her spanner with both hands, holding it like the horizon, the swordsman’s blade caught on the nearly indestructible black vanadium of the spanner’s shaft. The blade appeared still, but the wrench shook violently, typhoon-force waves sending ripples up the skin of Ellie’s arms; the adrenaline pumping through her veins made her unaware of the blood dripping from her palms as she held the blade back, her meek muscles bulging, drool dripping from her lower lip. Seconds passed before Ellie was able to shift the force of the blade slightly to the left, breaking posture; the swordsman was nearly unfazed, but the force sent Ellie stumbling backward several feet, nearly slamming her back against a wall plastered with Old Earth brick decals. The wall turned into a thin hallway that dead-ended into a garbage chute. She took this opportunity to slip around the turn, pressing her back against the wall in a quick attempt to gather her composure. Thoughts of getting back to Gigi—doing it for her—kept her focused and calmed her nerves. She kneeled slightly, placing one hand on the fake brick behind her, flipping her spanner to view the now cracked LCD—25%—and pressed an up arrow that cycled through words before she settled on one with a nod.

    Ellie poked her head out from behind the fake brick to catch a glimpse of the swordsman, who was iconic in his slow, silent stride, his blue robe flowing like midnight waves reflecting serious moonlight on a beach with a hurricane just one mile out. She knew she had to act quickly, incapacitate the man, make her escape down Terminal B, hopefully without killing him. But she lacked confidence in her hecatonic shock after the last incident—but what choice did she have? The calm of seconds before started to slip away, but Ellie remembered Gigi’s words from when she was young, playing at the Recreational Facility for Children on Floor 7, when she leaped from platform to platform without a hint of hesitation—”My little Elpis, recklessly confident, as always!“—and Ellie figured this was a good trait to have when facing off against a fire-breathing moon assassin without an exit strategy. Her confidence returned, and after a single gulp, she jumped out from cover and called lightning; crackling lines of lime green sparked in the air between her and the swordsman, who merely lifted his long blade vertically, one hand on the hilt and another in half-prayer on the steel. All the electricity began to pull into the black side of the blade as if it were some sort of magnetic energy vampire. The sword's silver metal pulsed green, as if it had its fill of sparks, and in the next instant, a silver flash returned the green lightning back at Ellie in the shape of a crescent moon.

    The resulting shock dropped Ellie to the hard floor, convulsing on her side in the wild agony of 1,200 volts. Her high-pitched scream echoed down the terminal hall.

    The swordsman, without a single word, unclipped the jug from his belt, took a sip, then flicked the contents of the jug toward Ellie's now quivering figure. He blew a wicked flame that caught the spilled contents around Ellie, encircling her in a ring of fire, as if she were a demon being sealed. The swordsman stepped through the flame, unaffected. He towered above Ellie, who, through great strength of will, had managed to writhe her way through the electric pain, bringing herself to a crouch. She tilted her head up to get a glimpse of the man, forgetting about his deathly orbs, and found herself locking eyes with him once more, which froze her solid. But she thought the words—Gekko Mahi—and regained control, falling to her bottom and pushing herself with hands and feet to the far edge of the burning circle.

    “Interesting,” the swordsman said to himself before sheathing his long blade, the curved sheath nearly touching the floor. He peered down at Ellie through eyes tuned to a dead channel—Ellie was unsure what he was actually seeing—then he spoke the words once more, as if offering another chance: “Pay. Perform. Perish.”

    Ellie, flames reflecting deviously off her flecked face, covertly tapped a button on her spanner, making sure not to look up at the man. “I told you my answer!” Ellie smirked as she lifted the spanner; a green hand shot out of its ring—Hecatome: God Hand—the emerald hand was massive and attempted to clench around the swordsman.

    “Odachi: Gekko!”

    An instantaneous flash of light left a circular afterimage in the shape of a golden crescent in the space between the swordsman and Ellie, and the hand of god shattered like porcelain, leaving only a green mist behind; the ghost moon soon faded, too, leaving only a gold vapor in its wake; the swordsman stood majestic amidst the golden green, his sword drawn in a vertical two-handed grip, the flat side close to his face.

    Ellie looked at the swordsman; wide-eyed, medusa'd, defeated.

    The swordsman flashed one final flash into Ellie’s frozen figure.

    There was a loud blast; the terminal walls flared red. At the same time, the swordsman’s blade arm twisted into a defensive posture over his face, dragging steel along with it, red vapor trailing from the silver side of the blade; a smoking hole appeared in the wall behind him. The swordsman’s head tilted toward the far hallway, from which Ellie had arrived earlier, and there stood The Wolf Itself—Gray—arm outstretched, long-barreled handgun in hand, red vapor dancing ballet from the barrel. He shouted across the hall while wiggling the handgun slightly, “No BRM!”

    Beside The Wolf stood The Artist—Jules—ethereal blue flute in hand, blonde hair covering one side of their face.

    With the swordsman’s attention diverted, Ellie quickly got to her feet and, with reckless abandon of which Gigi would be proud, ran as fast as she could through the circle of fire, her arms covering her face in a cross, spanner pressed against her chest. She gambled that the swordsman would not cut her down right then and there, and her gamble paid off as she skid to a stop near Jules, who looked at her with a rare seriousness before speaking in a whisper, “He felt bad.”

    Ellie returned Jules' glance with an uncertain smile before a burning sensation on her hip made her acutely aware of the flame smoldering on her cargo pants; the sound of frantic patting disrupted the silence between all parties: Gray, gun pointed at the circle of fire, his smirk fading into stoicism; Jules, holo flute raised to their lips, as if ready to play a solo; and Ellie, now done with her patting, holding The Spanner of Queens in front of her chest in something of a contrived action pose. The three of them stood protagonistically, as if they had just leapt out of a holotable game, and the whole thing felt dreamlike to Ellie, who was trying very hard not to think too deeply about the situation, lest her reckless confidence turn into sudden hyperventilation.

    The swordsman walked slowly through the flaming wheel, his robe unscathed, his expression unfazed, a blaze of dancing fire along the edge of his blade. Odachi: Kagero. The flame wheel fizzled out behind him.

    Gray spoke softly, “Ellie, on three, I want you to throw out your best tome, then turn around and run for your life—oh, and hold your nose.”

    Ellie’s eyebrow raised at the nose bit. She side-eyed Gray and Jules, throwing her voice, “He’s got this thing—a tome maybe, I’m not sure—freezes you.” She noticed both Jules and Gray were focused on the swordsman’s feet, not his face, as if they already knew. “The words ‘Gekko Mahi’ seem to break the spell.”

    “One…” Gray flipped a switch on the gun’s grip, a faded crystal discharging from the bottom panel, which fell into his free hand and was swiftly pocketed. The swordsman drew closer. “Two…” Gray hurled the gun at the swordsman, and as quickly as it was thrown, it was sliced in two, the pieces whizzing past the swordsman’s head, small explosions sparking as they impacted the wall behind him. “Three…” Gray’s coat hand emerged, holding a small tan ball with a rudimentary fuse burning near the end; he lobbed it at the swordsman, and it exploded into a dank cloud that engulfed the halls of Terminal B.

    Ellie gagged at the pungent smoke but managed to wave her spanner through the gross cloud, weaving an opaque barrier before the party; it was the size of two men standing atop each other and as thick as the densest emerald. Hecatome: Mighty Guard. The wall moved slowly toward the swordsman, hovering just inches off the ground, growing larger with each passing moment. Jules then blew a sharp note on their flute, which reverberated into a shrill cacophony, as if a siren had been summoned into the hall.

    Noses pinched, the party bolted down the hallway.

    “That’s Zale! Trained Parivir—whatever that means!” Gray shouted mid-sprint, his voice funny as he held his nose, his coat lashing at the nasty smoke that spiraled down the narrow hallway. “We’re no match. Gotta lose him.” Still sprinting. “Guy’s blind—had to mess with his senses a little bit.”

    Questions flooded Ellie’s mind as she ran alongside Jules and Gray. Where were they going? What about Gigi? Was she safe? Ellie could feel her stomach knotting again, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it because, in the very next moment, a great pillar of flame rose before them, spreading into a wall of fire that blocked the hallway from wall to wall.

    “Run through it!” Gray yelled, ducking his head as he sprinted faster.

    “Meow!” Jules shouted, preparing to leap feline as they approached the flames.

    Ellie gulped.

    As they closed in on the wall of fire, a sudden gale launched them backward. Ellie’s spanner twirled through the air, landing several feet away, and her circular glasses went flying with such force that they shattered before even reaching the floor. Miscellaneous items from Gray’s coat scattered ceilingward, each chiming as they hit the metal floor below. Jules was like a cat caught in a tornado before being thrown against a wall.

    Zale stood where the fire once burned, blade drawn. How he got there was anyone’s guess. Ellie regained composure just enough to see that Zale was walking toward her, so she fumbled around the floor for her wand, but it was much too far away. Her legs were weak from the attack, she was unable to stand, but she tried, and this only toppled her further, putting her in an even worse position with her back against the wall. A sharp melody rang out—it was Jules—but the melody was cut short as the swordsman’s odachi, with supernatural precision, flashed across Jules’ gloved hand, causing the flute to blink out of existence, leaving only a trail of sparks behind.

    Gray hurried to his feet and rushed Zale, holding something like a hilt without a blade, the only item he could find in his coat pockets; but Zale closed the distance for him, palm striking the wolf’s stomach and slamming him into the wall with a yelp.

    “My contract is only for the girl,” Zale spoke solemnly from within the shadow of his bamboo hat. He afterimaged to Ellie’s fallen frame, blade drawn, the tip less than an inch away from the young woman’s forehead; yet this still placed Zale over four feet away from her. “She has some promise, but she has refused the offer.”

    Ellie kept her head down, avoiding eye contact, insane options racing through her head until she realized that she had no options left except for the worst ones. She gulped. “If I accept…” Her voice meek, defeated. “If I perform…” A single tear turned into a chime on the cold steel below. “What will happen to my—”

    Gray’s shout echoed down the hall—“Article 16 of the Callisto Covenant!”—like magic words that commanded Zale to click his blade back into its sheath. “I accept her blood debt,” the wolf said, now standing tall, gusts of air from a nearby vent whipping his coattails all around, his dark hair a windy mess.

    “No!” Ellie shouted, overcome by dread. “Whatever you’re doing—stop!”

    Gray ignored her plea. “Zale, you and I both know she has no say in this—she’s not a member of the Consortium.”

    Zale nodded, his large-brimmed hat tipping along.

    “Transfer her debt to me.”

    Zale was silent for a tense ten seconds before he spoke. “Look at me, Wolf.”

    Gray shifted his gaze to the swordman’s white orbs but was not paralyzed.

    “The killing of a Consortium agent comes with a great price.” The swordsman placed a dark hand on his left ear, pausing as if listening to something only he could hear. “We doubt you can afford it.”

    “I’m good for it. Just scored big off a recent job.” Gray hoped that the slight tensing of his shoulders went unnoticed as he feigned alpha wolf confidence.

    “And there are other crimes of which you are guilty.”

    “I’ll settle those too.”

    Ellie, stumbling to her feet, inserted herself between the two men. She faced Gray, her hooked nose scrunched in anger. “I don’t need a white knight, you moron!” she shouted, but Gray responded only with a sideways glare. Jules watched from the nearby wall, big ocean eyes shifting back and forth between all three parties. “Jules, you’re his friend, right? Tell him to stop!” Ellie gestured toward the musician, but they said nothing.

    After a tense feeling of forever, Zale’s hand lowered from his ear to rest on the pommel of his great blade. “The Consortium has agreed to the terms outlined in Article 16 of the Callisto Covenant. The debt has been transferred—all six million credits' worth.”

    To anyone else, Gray’s posture was unchanged, but to Zale, who lived and breathed even the most minute atomic shifts, the wolf’s rigid stance relaxed; and this made Zale smile an unusual smile before he tipped his hat with a single dark digit and said, “You have three days to pay the debt—the Consortium will give you no more chances, Wolf.”

    Ellie blinked, and just like that, the swordsman was gone. She wasn’t even sure how he left; he just wasn’t there anymore.


Chapter 4 (Coming Soon)


#TheEgg #Fiction

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we used to sleep here in mucor under the moon until floor fell through

#poetry

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Chapter I: I Will Avenge My Predecessor!

Our story begins, like so many stories, in a tavern; there, a bard sits; he recites a poem to the patrons, a poem of suffering and succession; a poem about the legendary Seven Heroes, who once banished a great evil, only to return decades later consumed by the very same evil they once banished; a poem about kingdoms crumbling to dust, then rising once more only to crumble again; of kings and queens falling at the feet of demons, only for their children to take up arms to avenge their gruesome deaths. This is a poem beset by suffering on all sides.

The poem is titled Life—er, Romancing SaGa 2.

Romancing SaGa 2 was created by famed computer game director Akitoshi Kawazu, developed and released by Square for the Super Famicom in 1993, then later remastered and ported to nearly all eighth generation consoles—including the Nintendo Switch, which is how I played the game. I could spend the rest of this essay telling you all about the historical details of the game, how this is technically the fifth title in a long series—the SaGa series (capital G very important)—and how it improves upon the previous titles in nearly every way. I could tell you all about how it manages to be one of the most unique Japanese role-playing games ever created while also retaining that signature SaGa obtuseness coupled with difficulty so macabre that it will make you wish that your mother and father had never met. I could also reword the Wikipedia article in an attempt to impress you by pretending that I am just really really well-informed about the games I like. But I’m not going to be doing much of that (this time). Instead, I’m going to give you some vague background and a seemingly random gameplay fact: the vague background being that, in Romancing SaGa 2, you play the role of an emperor of a kingdom, tasked with vanquishing the now-evil Seven Heroes, all to bring peace to the realm; and the seemingly random gameplay fact is that none of the characters—including the emperor—can recover life points; once their LP reaches zero, no phoenix down or revival potion can bring them back to life—they’re gone for good.

From the moment each character shows their big pixelated heads, they are on a timer, slowly but surely dying from every sword slashed across their chests, every firestorm cast upon them, and every fang ripped through their flesh by some twisted chimera-like creature that has three heads and a scorpion tail and a crooked pair of goat legs and useless little dinosaur arms, all while using psychokinesis to just kinda float there, taunting your party menacingly during the standard turn-based combat so commonly found within these Japanese role-playing games of old. In these battles, our heroes wait patiently to perform their actions between bouts of getting horribly maimed by demonic entities holding the still-screaming heads of other demonic entities; having their eyes squeezed out by the moist tentacles of a man-octopus hybrid; having their organs sucked out proboscis-style by a corrupted butterfly seraph; and, of course, having their blood sizzled by thunderbolts conjured by the Phantasmal Witch Queen of the (once) Seven Heroes, Rocbouquet; and plenty of other grotesqueries that are just too numerous to list here.

Being unable to recover LP comes with its own benefits, namely sweet release from the high-fantasy mortal coil our heroes find themselves born into; and what a coil it is: there’s no humor here, no joy—only constant mayhem, backstabbing, and violence. The only things that non-playable characters have to talk about are how they watched their spouse get slowly devoured by a floating ball of maggots, or how their children were kidnapped by hobgoblins and then made to row oars on massive land boats, of which the only purpose is to destroy the very land they sail upon. Antlions sinkhole into villages at night and eat people who are sleeping unawares in their beds—on a regular basis—and this is one of the better deaths one could hope for in this terrible world.

And that’s just what the in-game characters have to contend with. For the player, Romancing SaGa 2 is its own series of little heart attacks, which is especially dangerous for me, having been diagnosed with a genetic arrhythmia at age twelve. In fact, the whole Romancing SaGa 2 experience is like an EKG monitor run through several layers of computer-game abstraction—up and down with each heart-wrenching turn. The first abstraction layer is Kenji Ito’s near myth-status musical score, each composition its own self-contained epic poem, complete with heroic basslines, cascading drum fills, and heart-fluttering horns that swoop and soar in time with the action. This causes the line to go up. The second abstraction layer is the scenery and backdrops, all of which look as if they were pulled straight from RPG Maker’s stock asset library. This makes the line go down. The third abstraction layer is Kazuko Shibuya’s gorgeous sprites that pop color right off the screen, which themselves are near one-to-one 16-bit recreations of Tomomi Kobayashi’s summertime watercolors, of which every character has this huge smile on their face regardless of the terrible circumstances they find themselves in. This makes the line go up again. And the fourth abstraction layer is the gameplay itself, which is just absolutely brutal with monsters that one-hit-kill without warning and boss battles won only after the eighth attempt when the boss finally decided not to use its devastating area-of-effect attack two turns in a row, which always wipes your party regardless of how much time spent leveling characters. And this causes the EKG to flatline.

And a party wipe is really interesting in Romancing SaGa 2 because, as we covered before, characters cannot recover LP—so, when their LP reaches zero, they die for good. You would then expect the game to fade to black and throw some sort of huge-font GAME OVER screen, whereby you would reload a previous save game and start over from an earlier point—as is the case with most games of this ilk—but no; instead, you are prompted to pick a new heir to the throne, and after the new heir is chosen, they burst onto the scene with great enthusiasm, proclaiming:

“I shall avenge my predecessor!”

The next heir does a quick action pose before assembling a new band of unfortunate heroes and then saunters off to avenge their fallen predecessor; maybe this time they will actually manage to defeat the Seven Deadly Ex-Heroes, finally bringing peace to the world. But it’s more likely that they, too, will end up impaled on Dantarg’s massive javelin, then tossed to the wolves for their flesh to be torn apart and eaten like all those before them. But not to worry, because there are more than enough heirs to go around—literally an endless supply of fresh bodies to be thrown at the great spiked wall of evil, with the hope being that one day one of these fleshy heirs will finally bring the wall crumbling down, restoring the kingdom and bringing everlasting peace.

This presents a number of difficult questions, such as: Is it ethical to continue birthing new heirs into a world beset by suffering on all sides? Is this nigh-endless and possibly futile pursuit of peace truly justified regardless of the all suffering experienced along the way? This idea being that, once the Seven Heroes are defeated, the inhabitants of this world will no longer have to worry about random antlion attacks and hobgoblins stealing their children—but is that assured? Assuming this world is even remotely similar to our own, even if the Seven Heroes are defeated—and this quote-unquote peace is attained—surely there will still be some suffering left over: people will still lie and cheat and steal, hatred and discrimination will persist, disease will continue to spread, people will still find reasons to kill each other, and, at the very least, someone will surely stub their toe on the lip of a raised pathway then proceed to bounce around doing the expletive dance.

So, the real questions become: Is life worth living in the brutal world of Romancing SaGa 2? Does the pleasure of this world outweigh the pain?

I know what you’re thinking, “yo—this is literally just a computer game, what the fuck are you talking about?”

But the problem is…

Chapter II: …This Is Not Just a Computer Game—This Is Real Life

While life on Earth is obviously not the same as the world of Romancing SaGa 2, it does check all the important suffer boxes and more, including: excruciating pain, loss of life, status effects like poison and paralysis and confusion and Ebola and COVID-19, emotional grief, the nine-to-five grind of doing something you hate simply to continue existing, the passing of time and all the decay that comes along with that, et cetera. There may not be demons trying to cut your limbs off and steal your soul to power an evil death machine, but there are humans who have certainly done something similar, and, of course, all the non-human animals who would eat your flesh and muscles and organs at the first opportunity simply because they’re hungry—our very biological needs necessitate suffering, perpetuating the pain of the life around us. Someone or something is always being eaten by someone or something else. Truly, we are beset by suffering on all sides. And let’s be real here: our world is actually much worse than Romancing SaGa 2’s, because at least you can turn Romancing SaGa 2 off without having an existential panic attack.

Earth’s collective ecosystem is built upon pain and suffering. Take the neighborhood cat, for example, that cute ball of black-and-white fuzz that nuzzles your leg when you happen to cross paths; maybe you’ve even given the cat a name, perhaps that name is “Oreo.” During the day, Oreo spends most of his time relaxing in the shade of parked cars and wandering from home to home, expecting someone to feed him. But when he gets really hungry, he ventures out into the suburban wilds to hunt for fresh meat; he stalks a mouse in the underbrush, grabs the mouse by the tail, bats the mouse around for fun, gnaws on the rodent’s spindly legs before sinking his sharp fangs into the rodent’s underbelly, slurps up blood and gut juice before taking a big bite out of the mouse’s side while the mouse is still writhing about in agony. Oreo feasts around the mouse’s nervous system, leaving the head intact, allowing the mouse’s brain to process those final terrible moments of life. Oreo then smacks the mouse’s lifeless head around like a hockey puck before yawning, licking blood-stained chops, and wandering back to the shade of a parked car. This is all between mating seasons, during which Oreo effectively rapes female cats using his barbed penis, evolutionarily adapted to hook into the female cat’s internals, causing extreme pain. And it’s not just cats: the entire animal kingdom is predicated on suffering, as if some evil god designed the whole thing to be as awful as possible—and humans are part of this kingdom of suffering, albeit at the top. The circle of life begets cruelty simply by being a circle instead of a straight line or, better yet, nothing at all—but here we are, so we might as well try to make the best of it, right?

There is an argument to be made that the existence of pleasure justifies the potential for pain, but this assumes that both pleasure and pain exist in equal measure and that they are of equal existential value, which is certainly not the case when we compare the mouse’s experience of being eaten to the cat’s experience of eating the mouse: to the mouse, this is the worst—and final—day of its life, and to the cat it’s just another meal as the neighborhood's apex predator; it might even be a bit mundane for the cat, having brought about little hurricanes of life-ending suffering upon many a small rodent before. The cat may even find the act of relaxing in the shade more pleasurable than the act of eating the mouse—but neither is more substantial than the mouse having its organs ripped out while still breathing. One thing is certain: the mouse went through absolute hell while the cat just got another quick meal. Pleasure is nice and all, but it is never as good as we are expecting; whereas pain is often far worse than we can ever imagine.

Don’t let the fancy cars and giant metal obelisks fool you—humans have it worse than other animals when it comes to suffering, although not always from a physical perspective. It’s true that if you’re reading this, it’s likely from the comfort of wherever you happen to call home; a home that has its own running water, electricity, and some form of air conditioning, be that a unit or a good-ol’-fashioned fan. You might even have a freezer full of meat wrapped in polyvinyl chloride on foamy trays, that meat being from those now-expired animals who suffered terribly at a factory farm before making their way to your freezer—some might then say, “hey, at least I’m not in a factory farm, right?” But the thing about other animals is that they don’t have the higher awareness to fully grasp the horror of being in a factory farm. Mother cows have been known to bellow cries when their children are taken from them, but this is an edge case of awareness that most animals don’t possess; humans, however, possess this awareness in spades. As humans, we are fully aware of the cosmic horror going on all around us, and because of this, we have the added burden of being able to internalize the horror, letting it fester in our minds, forcing us to ask “why” over and over in the fetal position in the corner of a dark room. Non-human animals get over stuff pretty quickly, and only some have been known to hold grudges; humans, however—oh boy—we never get over anything, ever. I am still thinking about some of the weird shit that happened to me in grade school. Now try to imagine, instead of “weird shit that happened in grade school,” that your family was killed in front of you. Try to imagine internalizing that, what it would do to your mind, the mental anguish. That’s the rub: the psychic suffering.

As humans, we may be real smart or whatever, but this intelligence is also a pain magnifier; a curse that allows us to analyze our own suffering; a curse that allows us to ponder questions that are hard to fathom—questions that are so antithetical to life that they are often dismissed outright without any consideration whatsoever. Questions that the Seven Ex-Heroes of Romancing SaGa 2 answered for themselves, and their answers resulted in them becoming the villains of the game. That’s right—we will be tackling JRPG-villain questions with the remainder of this essay, such as:

“Considering the profound suffering in the world, is life even worth living?”

“Ought we eradicate all life to prevent further suffering?”

“Is it ethically justified to create new life given the potential for suffering?”

Many a JRPG villain has asked these questions and come to conclusions that led them to enact plans that would have resulted in the eradication of all life in their respective digital realms—some even think they can eradicate life and “start over” as ruler of a better world where suffering no longer exists. But the more logical villains nearly always come to the conclusion that the only world where suffering does not exist is a world in which there is no life at all. The heroes of these JRPGs would then attempt to thwart these quote-unquote misguided villains, forcing them to see the errors of their ways, insisting that life is indeed full of suffering but still worth living because “that’s what makes us human!” or whatever; and in the event that the villain fails to see reason, they are simply killed outright by the heroes.

Hopefully, by the end of this essay, I won’t have to be killed by JRPG heroes myself.

Chapter III: Obligatory Disclaimer

As supposedly sentient beings in this world, we are beset by suffering on all sides; and this begs several difficult questions, all of which I aim to cover with the remainder of this essay. However, I must stress: I do not claim to have the answers to any of these questions, and I would go as far as to say that anyone who claims to have the answers should be immediately dismissed as a fraud, as these are questions without concrete answers. I am not just typing this to subtly bolster my own case for philosophical legitimacy, either: I assure you, I am not an authority on philosophical matters such as those we will be covering; please believe me when I say this.

To further reinforce the fact that I am not trying to convince you that I am a philosophical authority, I present the following evidence: The majority of my philosophical knowledge comes from Wikipedia articles; I do not know my times tables; I have no formal education in philosophy; I have to do the ABCs song to figure out the alphabetical order of words; I dropped out of high school at age eighteen after being held back several grades because I was more focused on sex, drugs, computer games, science fiction, and rock ‘n’ roll than schoolwork; I mix up left and right, having to do the L-hand thing to remember, often; I earned a Certificate of High School Equivalency by passing a General Educational Development (GED) test, but only at the insistence of my mother, who pushed me to do it; I count syllables with claps; I can’t point to most countries on a map; I went to a community college for half a year before dropping out because my obsession with playing the online multiplayer role-playing game Final Fantasy XI caused me to lose sight of reality; and I have worked meaningless call center and software jobs to fund my lifestyle and provide for my family ever since.

What I’m trying to say is: I am not an authority on philosophical matters—I’m not an authority on much of anything, really. I am semi-well-read, but only in the genres of postmodern fiction, science fiction, and fantasy; I cannot recite the transcendental philosophies of Kant or the nihilistic principles of Nietzsche off the top of my head, and I have attempted to read literature by both philosophers but got bored even trying. So, again, I am not an authority on philosophical matters: I am merely someone who likes to think about what I perceive as problems of existence, using my own deductions. These “problems of existence” arise naturally for me, and I am greatly bothered by them (and this line of reasoning likely explains all of my non-fiction output). Also, I find it annoying when people quote other philosophers in discussions with me, partly out of jealousy that those people know more stuff than I do, but mostly because I value coming to my own conclusions instead of parroting the ideas of others; and in this way, I like to think that I am untainted by the previous thought-work of other philosophers, which makes me a tabula rasa of sorts—a blank slate, but certainly not an authority on philosophical matters. Therefore, the conclusions I come to in this essay—if I come to any conclusions at all—are mine alone, based on my own opinions and deductions, however flawed they might be. And, above all else, all my conclusions should be taken with massive salt piles.

The reason I include this section is that I don’t want anyone to read this essay and then conclude that their life and the lives of their children are merely factory farms for the mass production of human suffering, which could potentially result in a murder-suicide with this essay cited as the reason. In fact, this entire essay is likely just an attempt to come to grips with my own cognitive dissonance around the fact that I, as a parent of two children, have brought life into this world and that this life may very well be full of suffering, and that—maybe—I am partly responsible for that suffering; and that makes me feel real bad indeed.

But I will not pull my punches with this essay. I will go wherever my twisted mind takes me (as I’m sure you’ve already deduced from that overly descriptive account of Oreo the cat), and you can come along for the ride if you want—that’s fine, just be warned that this might get very very dark very very quickly.

And, ultimately, you should come to your own conclusions—not mine.

Chapter IV: Answering the JRPG-Villain Questions

IV.I: Is Life Worth Living? Should I Kill Myself? Should We Eradicate All Life?

Most of us were born into this world screaming, as if we already knew what was in store for us from the very beginning. One of the most common childbirth jokes is “that baby really didn’t want to come out!” and this joke is quite telling indeed; if all comedy comes from a place of truth, this has to be truth of the highest order—because, if we knew what we were getting into, who the hell would want to come out?

The cutting of the umbilical cord is a ritual that signifies the beginning of true suffering; from that moment we are cold, hungry, and lost. No longer can we simply float carelessly in amniotic fluid collecting antibodies, effortlessly absorbing nutrients and oxygen from the lifeline so easily severed from our tiny bodies. The brain doesn’t retain memories from our time in the womb, and that’s probably by design—so that we are unable to conceive how good we truly had it. And depending on the country of your birth, your skin color, your family’s monthly income, whether or not your mom was a drug addict, genetic conditions, and a number of other variables—I don’t have to tell you that your immediate life after birth could get really really bad really really quick, because we are truly beset by suffering on all sides. (You’re probably grimacing every time I use the essay title in the body of the text by this point; but hey, whatever, I think the title’s cool and, most importantly—it’s true. Here’s a heads-up that I’m probably going to keep doing it, maybe even in the next sentence.) And some of us are beset by suffering on all sides more so than others.

This brings us to one of this essay’s pivotal questions: Is life worth living? My immediate answer to this is going to come off as a cop-out: whether life is worth living is a matter of personal preference. The more interesting question is what flows from that personal preference: if I feel that life is not worth living, should I then kill myself? And that’s when things get complicated.

We are all involuntarily forced into this world. There is no heads-up, no consent form, no Boss Baby-type situation in which we decide beforehand who our family is going to be from the cumulus factory on high. Instead, people are biologically driven to have sex, and now you and I exist whether we like it or not. And, if we value freedom and personal autonomy, it seems fair that we should then allow someone to commit suicide if they so choose, because it is their own life to take, and if they feel that their personal suffering is too great, then they should be able to end that suffering; considering this, it seems intuitively cruel not to allow someone to take their own life—and many communities agree, as Kevorkianism is legal in many countries.

But what many countries don’t agree on is exactly how much suffering one must endure to justify the taking of one's own life. To be allowed to kill oneself, does one need to be limbless, writhing, cancer-ridden, squirting blood from all their pores; or do they need to be depressed, anxious, and miserable; what if they’re simply bored with life, finding no significant joy in living? These are interesting questions but, ultimately, the reasoning is arbitrary. We know that everyone experiences suffering differently, and the masochist is the perfect example of this; a masochist enjoys what others would consider “physical suffering,” they enjoy “physical suffering” so much that it can no longer be called “suffering” for them at all; “suffering,” for the masochist, becomes pleasure; subjective. But surely even the masochist has their own form of suffering—sickness, a family member’s death, et cetera—which only goes to show that, regardless of fluctuating definitions and semantics, there is some essence of pain that exists from person to person, and this pain must be considered at the personal subjective level. Yet it remains true that suffering, regardless of personal meaning and magnitude, is something we all strive to avoid and is considered bad in all cases—in fact, most ethical philosophies strive to minimize all forms of suffering, with the theoretical ideal ethical system eliminating suffering altogether.

People will often cite some nebulous concept of “meaning” as a reason to live. These esoteric meanings drive us to continue persisting in a world full of suffering and could be anything from “I want to write the greatest novel ever” to “I want to spread the word of Jesus Christ to every country on the planet” or, in the case of a JRPG villain, “I want to eradicate all life to prevent further suffering.” These “meanings of life” are different, but they share some similarities; they are all typically goals that promise some long-term or permanent state of satisfaction but rarely, if ever, deliver on that promise. This is not to say that this esoteric concept of meaning is ineffective, per se—I cling to many notions of meaning in my own life—only that these meanings are not objective, and there is no single meaning one could point to that applies to every person on Earth. Considering this, it becomes hard to prescribe meaning to someone who feels their life is meaningless, as the search for meaning is often a personal journey. And, as meaning is different from person to person, it follows that no specific meaning has intrinsic value to anyone other than the one who holds that meaning to be valuable. Religion has been effective in prescribing meaning to those without meaning, but this only works if the person is receptive to the mythos and benefits of that religion. I won’t cover the truth-value of each individual religion because, in my view, the presence of multiple religions undermines the truth-value of each religion; however, whether or not a religion is true is not necessarily important if the religion is providing meaning to large groups of people; in fact, a pastor may see this as a righteous consequence that saves lives, even if the religion’s promises turn out to be bunk—but is it truly righteous to convince people to continue living in a world beset by suffering on all sides? The concept of an “afterlife” alleviates this question somewhat, but how do you know which religion’s afterlife is true, if any? Do you then follow all religions?

While it may seem like I’m arguing in favor of suicide—and I am, for the most part—it’s far more complicated than what has been laid out thus far. Hypothetically, if one was living on their own, completely divorced from society and with no ties to anyone else, and this hypothetical person wanted to kill themselves, I would be totally in favor of that; but this is not the case for most people. Most people have ingrained themselves into social units that include other people who depend on them for some level of personal happiness—a parent that takes care of their children or a child that takes care of their elderly parents are both examples of this—and this instantly complicates the suffering-suicide equation, because in these cases, suicide has a ripple effect that harms those who depended upon the person who committed suicide: the child is now in foster care, bouncing between abusive homes; the elderly parent has no one to count their meds in the morning, feed them, or make sure they get to the bathroom without falling down the stairs. In many cases of suicide, the person committing suicide has introduced more suffering into the world simply by committing suicide; and this is a tragedy not only for those impacted by the suicidal ripples but also on a philosophical level, as it seems that, even when trying to escape this world, we create great suffering in our wake. Truly, we are beset by suffering on all sides, and we cannot escape it without creating even more suffering.

Yes, it is true that we did not choose to be born and that we ought to have bodily autonomy—which includes the right to kill ourselves—but we must consider those around us. They say, “life sucks, then you die,” and while I agree with this sentiment almost entirely, one of the benefits of having higher cognition is that we can work together to limit the suffering of those around us—and, although we didn’t choose to be here, we are here whether we like it or not, so we might as well try to make the best of it for ourselves and the people around us; otherwise, we are simply multiplying the suffering in this already insufferable world.

So, allow me to summarize:

Is life worth living? In the grand scheme of things, probably not. But ultimately, this depends on the personal feelings of the person answering the question. With sufficient meaning in one's life, they may feel their life is worth living, and, as such, their life would indeed be worth living at that point. I have no objection to this line of reasoning, provided said peron’s personal reason for living does not involve amplifying the suffering of those around them.

Should I kill myself? Probably not. But, personally, if I were isolated, with no ties to others, and were truly suffering without meaning in my life, or if my suffering were so great that I was merely a burden to those around me, then I would not be opposed to killing myself if—and only if—I wanted to. However, if the answer to the following question, “Will one person be harmed if I die today?” is yes, then I owe it to those people to stay alive for as long as possible, so as not to amplify the suffering of those around me. And it just so happens that I have two children, so I will be staying alive for them for the time being.

Should we eradicate all life? Life is suffering, and—in my view—there is no true meaning or grand plan a la the rapture. It is also true that, without life, there is no experience of life and therefore no suffering, so considering that we are truly beset by suffering on all sides (I’m going to keep doing it), I would not be opposed to the eradication of all life if the following conditions were met: 1) the eradication method is instant and physically harmless (i.e., an all-powerful being snaps everyone out of existence simultaneously) and 2) the eradication method is guaranteed to wipe out all life without any margin for error or sensation of suffering. Considering that both of these conditions (currently) can’t be met—and, likely, can never be met—I am not in favor of eradicating all life at this time. However, in theory, I am not opposed to this as a method to prevent future suffering in every respect.

It follows then, that, if I were given the option to instantly snap everyone out of existence, I might just do it, and that makes me far more similar to a JRPG villain than a JRPG hero.

Maybe the heroes will have to kill me, after all?

IV.II: The Great Gamble

We’ve made it to the final and most important question: Is it ethically justified to create new life given the potential for suffering? Or: should we just stop having children?

As suffering is an intrinsic aspect of all life, the question of whether we should actively pursue making more life is, in a way, far more important than any other question we have tackled thus far; and this is because, if we are creating more life, we are creating more suffering. Creating life entails responsibility to that life, meaning: we are responsible for the suffering of that new life.

The most common argument in favor of creating new life is that since pleasure exists, and pleasure is good, then it is good to create new life so that they may experience that good pleasure. This is an extension of the “pleasure outweighs the pain” concept. This argument hinges on the idea that if we don’t create life, we are depriving potential life of pleasure, which seems problematic on its face, as the logical conclusion would be that we should make new life at every possible opportunity. I have dubbed this argument “The Great Gift,” because it exudes a high level of hubris, as if we are little gods bestowing a great gift—the gift of pleasure—upon our subjects.

Let’s break down The Great Gift and see if it makes sense logically. In the case of existence, we can experience both pleasure—which is good—and suffering—which is bad—and we’ve already covered that both of these are—in terms of magnitude—entirely subjective to the person experiencing them. If we don’t exist, we experience neither pleasure nor suffering; the former of which some would argue is bad, because if we don’t exist then we are missing out on the pleasure we could be experiencing, but it seems more logical that this is neutral instead, as we would not exist to know that we are missing out on pleasure at all; and the same goes for suffering, some may argue that not experiencing suffering is a good thing, but, like the pleasure example, it’s logically more of a neutral thing, as, again, we would not exist to know that we have avoided suffering to begin with. In fact, there would be no “we” at all. It follows then that “existing” has both good and bad aspects, whereas “not existing” is an absence of both good and bad entirely, a totally neutral non-experience. One could then conclude that existing is a gamble in and of itself, in which we are gambling that our personal pleasure will outweigh our overall suffering. The Great Gift then becomes The Great Gamble.

It could be argued that The Great Gamble is made every day when we choose to take risks that have a high potential for personal payoff, like the thrill of rock-climbing, a dangerous endeavor that provides some with a great sense of satisfaction; or using most of your savings to start a business, knowing there is a high risk of failure. These types of gambles, however, are entirely justified and entirely different from The Great Gamble because they are made by individuals who know and consent to the risks. When we create new life, however, that new life is not giving consent—we are deciding for them. In fact, in any other situation, this type of consentless gamble would be seen as highly unethical. Imagine pushing a person into a lion’s den with the justification that the person may make friends with the lions; or forcing a person to take untested drugs with the justification that it may cure their rare illness; or stealing someone’s money and investing it into a weird start-up company with the justification that they will make millions of dollars; each example is highly unethical because the consent of the person is missing. Why, then, would we say it’s OK to make this type of gamble for our children?

When a person chooses to have a child, they are gambling with that child’s life. They are gambling that the child will be born healthy with their wits about them; that the child will not be abused by their own caregivers; that the child will not be hit by a car, left permanently crippled, or unable to speak; that the child will not be mauled by a bear during what was supposed to be just a fun camping trip with grandpa; that the child will not be molested by a camp counselor at the Citadel’s military summer camp; that the child will not contract an illness that results in a slow, painful death; that the child’s pet cat isn’t shot by redneck survivalist neighbors who are very serious about the arbitrary line that makes up “our property.” Some of these example may be close to home.

It could be argued that we are on shaky ground here; as, when we choose to have children, we are not gambling with someone that currently exists, but rather with potential children who do not yet exist; some nebulous idea of a life is being gambled. However, I have a hard time caring about this distinction—as hard as it may be to wrap my head around—as the child will certainly exist one day, and they will certainly experience some sort of suffering. One could also argue that we don’t normally care about a child’s consent anyway—school, shots, bedtime, the list goes on—but time waits for no one, and that child will one day be a full-grown adult that has not consented to existing. You could then argue that, as an adult, they could just kill themselves, effectively nullifying their non-consent by unaliving themselves, but by then they have already suffered non-consensual suffering at their parents' hands simply by being born, and one should not have to suffer to nullify their own non-consent. We could even grant that the child may have a wonderful life nearly devoid of suffering, and that, consequentially, we are in the “ethical clear” because the pleasure has outweighed the pain for the life we created—but even the stubbing of a single toe undermines our “ethical clear,” because we put that child in harm’s way, however minor that harm ended up being. It follows, then, that perhaps the kindest thing we can do for our future children is not have them at all.

To put it bluntly: Every time we choose to create life, we are putting someone in harm’s way without their consent—and because of this, I see no ethical justification for creating new life.

Chapter V: Conclusion

Birth is the prologue to death; the Grim Reaper’s job is easy as Hell; every cell can be a cancer cell; we all become predecessors eventually; life is like a box of poisoned chocolates, it kills you; every cradle is a grave; life is like a black hole, it sucks and also spaghettifies you; death is hardcoded into our DNA; God is a death fetishist; we are all cows in the factory farm called LIFE. Et cetera. Et cetera.

It may seem odd that this essay was written by someone with two children, but I believe it gives me a unique perspective over the tripp-pants-wearing Hot Topic teenager who would normally write something this dark and edgy. (If Hot Topic is even a thing anymore; admittedly, I am out of touch with what is cool among the modern-day alternative youth scene.) Anyway, I love my children. I don’t want any harm to come to them. This is not a unique sentiment, as I imagine most parents don’t want to see their children harmed either. And, in a poor post-hoc attempt to excuse my having kids despite coming to the conclusion that we probably shouldn’t have kids, I wasn’t thinking much about the ethical implications of having children back when I decided to have them—I didn’t think it through much at all, really. I was barely even writing at that point—kinda just vegged out on computer games and television. I had some money from working the same job for over 10 years, so I wasn’t financially strapped, and as such, I didn’t see it as irresponsible to have children at the time. And my partner wanted children, which was another driving factor—so we went for it.

Why people have children is a complicated subject—one that would likely take its own essay to fully explore—but I generally don’t think it’s because of “The Great Gift”; people are not that kind. The drive to have children—outside of the basic biological urge—comes from that same place of “meaning” we covered earlier. People see children as giving meaning to their lives, and they’re right; having children bestows great meaning, and this meaning ties you to the material world by staving off that ever-present sense of pointlessness in life. But using children as fodder to give oneself meaning is, by definition, selfish.

I admit that I have some of the same fantasies that I imagine most parents have in regard to why they had children, such as the desire for a little-me running around that is as cool—perhaps even cooler—than myself; a Me 2.0 who is better than me in every way: a little conceptual avenger, avenging all my could-have-beens and should-have-beens, giving my life meaning, slaying all my demons. And when my LP reaches zero, I would hope that my children will pick up my old sword, hold it to the heavens, and proclaim…

“I will avenge my predecessor!”

I also admit that this is incredibly selfish of me.

But some self-aware-woe-is-me proclamation is not the conclusion of this essay.

Some might say that, given the conclusions reached in the previous chapters, having children is a mistake, and it would then follow that my having children was a mistake as well; and I don’t disagree with this conclusion. But, while this is true, it’s not important. People make mistakes all the time; this is nothing new; people are making mistakes every second of the day. What is important is the Here and Now, which is that my children exist and—last I checked—they want to continue existing, and I am responsible for that existence, and as such, I am responsible for their well-being more than anything else in this entire world; because, not only did I bring them into existence, but I enabled their suffering. Every nick, cut, and bruise; every frown, tear, and sigh; every scream; every hospital visit; every late night in which they are groaning in bed, sick, and I am there stroking their hair, giving them Gatorade and crackers; every time a kid at school says they have a big belly and they come home asking, “Am I ugly?”—everything. I am responsible.

I was afraid that writing this essay would lead me down a spiral of misery, concluding that life is truly meaningless for everyone—including my kids—thus ending with the murder of my entire family. But really, what it has elucidated for me is that I am doubly responsible for the well-being of my children; that, since my children are here, and since I had a hand in bringing them here against their will, I am obligated to minimize their suffering at all costs while respecting their personal will to live. My children are their own people, and they have the right to come to their own conclusions about their lives; and as the person responsible for bringing them into this world, I have to respect that while ensuring my children experience the least amount of suffering possible. This is a personal responsibility all parents ought to bear.

And while I may be more similar to a JRPG villain than a hero, the smiles on my children’s faces are still the most important thing in the world to me. One might get all logical and ask, “But do their smiles outweigh their pain?” But that’s for them to decide—not you or me.

While they’re figuring it out for themselves, I will be the best JRPG-villain parent that I can possibly be—anything less would only bring more suffering into the world.


#RomancingSaGa2 #Ethics #ComputerGames

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hanging from this ledge i contemplate life and death also treats and pets

#poetry

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microbial things dance upon dewy sepals on lavender bloom

#poetry

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the dragonfly spies with brilliant diamond eyes another fine roost

#poetry