Appeal/Forgiveness

Monastis Monestrum: Part Four

A brief aside on the so-called “Monster-People”: when the stars began to die, we saw some among us change. Patches of their skin grew diseased and scarred and wrinkled up, flecked with the dust of the stars. They became slow and ponderous creatures. Human, yes – though many believed they had become something less, their minds and hearts were human. But it – whatever it was… it spread across them, and many died. Yet many did not, and those who lived, we called them monsters and we drove them into the mountains and caves. There they waited for the fighting to end. Some say they are still waiting. Others say they died out when the Desert came to their home and dried out their caves. Others still say they wander the world now, that the Bemont are their descendants. Who can say? For those of us unfortunate enough not to have inherited the memories of old, all we can do is read and guess.

-The Aether Cycle: Being a Chronicle of the Old Humanity and its Final War

In dreams: 2053 CE, Somewhere in North America

In Aleks’ dream, he was someone else, somewhere else, sometime else.

He sat uncomfortably in a plush leather seat, legs splayed back against the door’s inside. Outside the car’s window, shining orange and white sentinels, cylindrical and still, covered half the inky black street. They were kept away by the dividing line, the center of everything. The streets were strange, but not strange – perfectly flat roads that made little noise against the car’s wheels as they glided along in the night. There were a smattering of other vehicles around, more than one could expect to see even on the roads near Kivv, but Aleks felt that the city was nearly empty somehow. These streets could have held more people, and they should have been full to breaking, so full that one could not drive their vehicle along at full speed without causing a wreck.

Aleks drummed his fingers impatiently against a large metal box in the center of the seat, and he stared out at the glittering city. It was beautiful and terrible in its majesty, steel and glass and shining neon for what seemed like miles around. Aleks’ heart nearly sang to see the marvels of human engineering on display.

But in the dream, of course, he remembered. The city was dying, or already dead, he knew not which. Ash fell from the sky all around, great flakes of ash like lazy snow, drifting and spiraling toward the ground around them.

“Raz, you okay?” From the front seat Erick called back. His voice shook – he did not sound okay, himself.

“Yeah,” Aleks heard himself say. In his dream, his voice was flat and reedy, a bit higher in pitch, and shaking with barely-controlled fear or anger or both. “Don’t worry about me. We’re here, we have the meet, and there’s no fighting here yet. We’re going to establish a peace zone and maybe, finally, things will get better.”

“Establishing a lasting peace zone here isn’t going to be the easiest thing ever. Even if we get make the city safe, some of the syndicates around here are getting bolder.”

“Right. Way to pick up the mood, Erick.”

He laughed. There was no amusement in it at all. “Glad to be of service,” he said quietly as the car streaked through the ash-dusting. Thin clouds of the stuff, flaky and wispy, floated past the dimly tinted windows. “You know that Rumi’s been in the area lately, right?”

“Yeah.” Aleks never ceased to be disturbed at how bitter his voice sounded in these dreams. But it wasn’t his voice, of course. He looked down at his hands – small, soft, but marred with red marks on the palms, four tiny crescents each. There was blood under his fingernails. “I know. We should have gotten rid of him when we had the chance.”

“Your brother didn’t want to. Besides, Rumi’s not trying to stop us.”

“Yet.” The dream-Aleks leaned against the back of the driver’s seat. “I wonder how he’ll feel about it after we get the mayor to turn those plans over to us.” With his hand he picked at the plastic plug in a port in the seat behind him. The copper gleamed in the faint light of the vehicle’s cabin. Aleks reached up and ran his fingers through hair that was not his – thick and curly, tangled, unkempt. He paused along the edge of something metallic and warm. A wave of near-panic ran through Aleks for the barest fraction of a second when he realized that, just like the car seat next to him, his head bore a metallic port. But the panic was replaced by a calm that was not his, like the reassuring touch of an old friend.

“I still think I have to advise you, as your ally and your friend, to reserve judgment.” Erick’s voice carried only the slightest hint of disapproval.

“And that’s something I’ll consider. But reserving judgment doesn’t mean that I have to trust someone who has betrayed us multiple times.”

“He’s betrayed us,” Erick countered. “Yes. He betrayed us, Raz, not the entire human race. He’s not stupid enough to willfully bring on the destruction of the world.”

“You heard him last time we met, didn’t you?” Aleks laughed. He assumed a quieter, gravelly tone. “’It’s obvious the world is ending. Only question is who’s going to pick up the pieces afterward.’ He wants to be the one to control the new world, and for there to be a new world the old one has to --”

At that moment, Aleks’ focus was interrupted by the sight of several stars streaking across the otherwise-empty sky. Aleks, not understanding what those stars were, but noticing the absence of any static points of light above the city, felt his stomach drop. He cringed and reached into the pocket in the back of Erick’s seat. “Keep driving,” he said, his voice shrill and quick. “I’m Netrunning to the mayor.” He withdrew a cable and, with no hesitation at all, inserted one end into the port in his head. It felt like eating fire through the back of his head. He pulled out the plastic plug and shoved the other end of the cable into the car.

Aleks felt the connections weave outward – from the car’s embedded systems, the energy leapt to the Aetheric Node under the ground. Connective cables, like the blood vessels of some great organism, carried Aleks along to the destination.

He was there in seconds, though upon arrival, Aleks felt that he had perceived many minutes passing – or at least, she had, all those years ago. A part of him rebelled against the dissonance, against the strangeness of it, and tried to shake Aleks free of the memory. But he held on – he had to see this through. He tried to reach out for the Sower’s gift, the blessed calm, but – of course – this was a memory, a memory of a world without Sowers. He couldn’t have touched the gift if he’d stretched his arm out forever.

Streaking through the government building’s systems, the cables in the walls, the infinite paths through its invisible corners, Aleks felt the satisfaction of a mathematician solving a difficult problem, but without the strain of actually solving it. The fact that he was thinking of the best path forward flicked through his mind, and then he was on that path. A camera sprung alive, granting him vision.

The first thing he saw was a pile of bodies.

They stumbled and ran into the hall as they began to fall, the mist draining off of them thick enough that even through the camera’s grainy feed Aleks recognized it well enough. He saw it rather than felt it, because he had been in this situation before – witnessing this horror through a lens while keeping himself safe in the wires and the walls. Aleks would have shuddered, had he been corporeal at the time, at the thought of what would happen to him if he were there in person – even if by some miracle he were unaffected by the weapon.

With no proper shielding or insulation, the building could not shelter the people inside from the weaponized stars overhead. Their madness lasted seconds before they succumbed, but in those seconds they broadcasted every experience, every pain and joy, to each other. In the few seconds before their deaths, those poor people knew each other better than most people knew themselves.

And then they died, of course. Even a survivor would keep little of themselves. The memories would never leave.

Aleks wanted to reach out to the people, to save those he could, but the part of him that was Raz Shvets knew that it was far too late, and he fled back to his – her – body in the car with Erick. Safe behind a layer of insulation as the travelling stars disappeared from the sky again and the corpses of birds and insects rained from the sky all around. He yanked the cable out of the port in his head, panting, panicking.

“We need to leave,” he said, but Erick had already turned and was driving full-speed toward the edge of the city.

“What happened?” Erick shouted, swerving to avoid running over the body of an enormous condor.

“It was a targeted attack,” Aleks said, “it must have been. Look.” Outside the car, the bodies of the birds were no longer falling. “The rest of the city is probably fine, at least for now.”

“For now?” Erick’s voice shook, a beacon of calm lost.

“I don’t know, okay?” Aleks held on tight to the back of the chair. “Everyone in the government building is dead or dying, and when they’re all this close together – you know exactly what that means.”

There were too many of them, too many addled minds on the edge of oblivion, too many memories of death.

Soon they came to the city’s gate, and a guard, clad in reinforced and insulated armor, stepped forward, holding out a hand for them to stop. His rifle – Desert-era tech, Aleks recognized through the haze of memory – hung loosely on a strap around his shoulders. Erick brought the car to a stop as the guard approached.

“Hey,” the guard said as Erick lowered the window. “Weren’t you supposed to be here for a meeting with the mayor?” He held up a radio handset on the end of a coiling cord. “Haven’t heard from anybody in that zone. Did you see what happened?”

“Yeah,” Erick said, “You need to –“

“Be careful if you go to check it out,” Aleks said, crawling into the front of the car and interrupting Erick. “We couldn’t get to the meeting today because the roads are too treacherous. There’s some kind of Aetheric interference making it impossible to get through there for now.” He paused and glanced meaningfully at the guard’s radio receiver. “That might be why your communications haven’t been working.”

“Right.” Through his mask, the guard looked uncertain, but not ready to argue with the obvious expert’s explanation of the situation. There was recognition in the guard’s eyes too – and this man clearly was not about to question the word of a famous inventor. But he couldn’t shake his uncertainty. “Funny thing though, I could have sworn I heard –“

“That kind of interference can cause hallucinations for miles around, you know,” Aleks heard himself say. “That’s part of the reason the situation’s so bad. Most people don’t have the stuff to tell truth from fiction when their own senses aren’t making that distinction any longer.”

“Right, right.” The guard sighed raggedly and paced around the car, slowly, checking the exterior. “Well,” he said on arriving at the front window, “Your vehicle appears to be free of residue. You managed to stay out of the worst of it, down there. But if the government building is blocked off, doesn’t that mean…?”

“It could be bad,” Aleks said. Erick turned and faced him, eyes narrow with frustration. “You should stay out here and keep watch; don’t get too close.”

“So you’re just leaving? Isn’t there anything you can do to, I don’t know, fix the disturbance or something?” He was blatantly talking without knowledge, so Aleks didn’t need to concoct an elaborate excuse. Besides, he wasn’t lying.

“No,” he said, “There’s not much of anything I can do. But what you can do is keep yourself safe.”

The guard nodded and waved at them. “Go on then, stay safe. I hope you manage to work things out somehow.”

Raz nodded and waited for the vehicle to start moving.

It remained in place.