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The Last Human IV - 46 - Where Gods Once Stood
🕑 Added 2024-08-14 14:50:46 +0000 UTC< First | < Prev | Next >
Concrete steps, cracked and crumbling and stained by ages of rainwater led down into the cave. The steps were simple, unassuming. And the cave itself was little more than an open gap in the earth, shielded by broken shelves of rock. Nothing about this place spoke of great grandeur, yet Agraneia could not help but stare at her own feet, clad in the suit’s armor, with a sense of awe.
“What’s wrong?” Laykis asked.
“They stood here.”
“Who?”
“The Makers. Once, they stood where I am now.”
Laykis turned around, scanning her surroundings with her one glowing eye. “This was a natural park once.”
“Is that some kind of temple?”
“You could say it’s a holy place,” Laykis said, amused.
Agraneia inhaled deeply, as if by breathing in this sacred air she might increase her own virtue. What virtue? The voices stirred. They dragged in the shadows, heavy and dead, slithering like snakes striking from the dark. Agraneia flinched. Almost stumbled on the steps, kicking a pebble off the steps and into the cavern where it skittered and echoed into nothingness.
“Agraneia?”
Agraneia blinked away the visions, and found the android staring at her.
“Perhaps we should rest. We have been traveling for sixteen hours and twelve—”
“We rested in the hills,” Agraneia said.
“We hid from a swarm of drones. That was not rest.”
“Are you tired?”
“I do not tire like organics do. You, however…”
“I, however, can’t sleep,” Agraneia growled. “Not here.”
“At least eat something.”
“I ate dry rations back in the foothills.”
“Eat and sit. We will not reach Khadam today.”
Agraneia grumbled, and Laykis pulled up the feed of Yarsi’s memories. “Look,” the android said. “See the path ahead.”
The video feed showed more steps, down into this very cave. Then, the first signs of deep-Earth machinery. A maze of service tunnels and pipework and mechanics too complicated for Agraneia to understand. And at the end, a vast, dark tunnel protected by a black door which opened like the mouth of some awful sea creature. As the feed moved into the tunnel, everything grew dim until Agraneia could see no more.
“We will enter the belly of the Sovereign soon. You will need your strength for the unknown.”
“Fine.”
Agraneia pulled off her helmet, gasping as the stale air became stiflingly warm. She ripped open a package made of tough, brown plastic to reveal a stiff slab of reconstituted meat-like substance. She took a bite, and grunted appreciatively at the taste. Savoury, almost like white fish. Better than anything she’d eaten back in the Imperial military.
She sat and ate with her back against the cave, the metal of her suit scraping lightly against the stone. It was a good sound—to be surrounded by earth and rock, instead of the Ark—where only a few thin meters of metal protected her from the endless void. Even if it was a little hot in here, thanks to the gush of heated air rising from the depths.
A noise made her stop chewing. She glanced around.
…that you choke and die on it, you vile, murdering…
It was only the voices in her head, whispering on the hot breeze.
Agraneia reached for another bite, when a yawn interrupted her, taking over her jaws before she could stifle it. She could feel the android’s gaze upon her, but Laykis said nothing. She was sitting in her own corner, pulling thin wire from her ribs. Then, she popped out her dead eye, and placed the delicate wire into the socket, and replaced the eye. It flickered to life. And went dark again.
“Hmm,” Laykis said to herself, disappointedly.
“Hmm,” Agraneia answered.
“Agraneia,” Laykis said, her fingers twisting the orb in its socket, “Will you tell me about your disorder?”
“My what?”
“Your hallucinations.”
She took another wolfish bite, and spoke with her mouth full. “No.”
“Reason?”
“Don’t like to talk about it.”
“Avoiding the battle won’t win it.”
“Sometimes it does.” She knew she was being petulant. She didn’t care. The plastic crinkled in her fist as she tore off another bite, and chewed slowly so she wouldn’t have to answer. But the android didn’t ask again. Instead, Laykis opened a small panel just above her collarbone (if an android could be said to have a collarbone), and pinched out three needles connected to delicate wires. One by one, she slid the needles into her dead eye and twisted them gently as if searching for a signal in the back of her socket.
Agraneia winced. “Does that hurt?”
“I don’t experience pain like you do,” Laykis said, as she continued to needle and scrape at her eye socket. “But I still experience it. Pain is a crucial teacher, if you can retain the presence of mind to learn from it.”
“So…?”
“I am currently experiencing what might be called sheer agony,” Laykis said. “But I have endured worse. Did Poire tell you that your Emperor once took me captive? He tried to force me to answer his questions. I refused. He tried to manually extract the information from my core. But my core is unique among machines, and he could not crack it. Then, he discovered my pain receptors.” She paused her needling, and her hands fell into her lap. “Fortunately, my Maker capped my pain receptors at a threshold. Sometimes, it costs me dearly—I have lost limbs where an organic’s instinctive reaction might’ve saved it—but the trade means I retain control.”
Agraneia chewed thoughtfully while searching the android’s body. All her scars seemed to take on a new meaning, then. And something else…
“What’s special about your Core?”
“My Maker was clever. Tython developed a type of core with multiple layers. Cores within cores, if you will. A wholly unnecessary aspect, if all you care about is the longevity and functionality of your machine. But my Core allows me to withhold deeper information from the outer layers, inaccessible by anyone other than me. There are depths of my Core that even I do not understand.” Laykis hummed, as if amused by a thought. “I suppose that is another thing we have in common.”
Agraneia stopped chewing. Scratched her brow with a thumb. She didn’t like to think about those parts of herself. The dark, the unknown. That was where the voices lived. Neither of them said anything for a while. Agraneia neatly folded up the remains of her wrapped, and, not wanting to pollute this holy place, tucked it back into her gear. Still pondering Laykis’s words, a lump had formed in her throat. The cyran took a swig from her canteen, but it still wouldn’t go down.
It had to come out.
“I was…” her voice cracked. She cleared it with a rough grumble, and flexed her hands, and tried again. “I was on Thrass when they started talking to me.”
Laykis scraped the inside of her dead eye with the needles, and the eye flickered to life. She withdrew the needles, and fixed her glowing gaze on Agraneia. Listening. It felt good to be listened to. Even if her audience was only a machine.
“I was going for a promotion,” Agraneia shrugged, “Because that’s what you do, I guess. I don’t know. I volunteered for the next call, and they gave me point. I liked point. More control. You’re always first to see the action. So, we went out, and found our target. A little village, just a few huts on a hill. Intel said the village would be stocked with supplies—and it was. We found piles of weapons. Rocks. Ammunition for catapults. Not even trebuchets. And piles of sticks, waiting to be carved into arrows. I always knew we out-geared them, but that… that was the first time it really hit home. We had cannons. Guns. We had old tech, too. And they had rocks.
“In my mind, you know, they were older. Battle-hardened savages who knew what they were getting into. Here was a sport, a challenge. Thought I’d need every advantage. So I slipped into the river, and crawled up through the reeds, and found them sitting around a fire. Kids, huddled together in threadbare clothes. Thin from hunger, and as young as I had been, when I first went to the Academy. I thought they’d be older. I thought…”
Agraneia blinked, trying to clear her vision. Gods, they were so clear. She could see them now, flickering in the shadows. Dead eyes and bloody mouths forever open. You vile wretch… Look what you did.
There were too many of them, stirring in the shadows. Their voices rose like a wave in a black ocean, filling the cave. Drowning her.
One of them flickered on the edge of her vision. He whispered into her ear, Is that all you have? You won’t make it, Ags. Not if you can’t talk to the only friend you have left.
Agraneia drained her canteen, and wiped angrily at her lips. “My knife went into the first one’s back. I was amazed at how easy it was to kill. The hardest part was thinking about it. And they’d taught us how to stop thinking. So I kept killing. And then, the rest of my squad was there. Bayonets out. Stabbing. Grunting. Trying to do it quiet. One of them—the locals—started crying. I remember, she just curled into a ball and covered her head, and started crying. She wouldn’t fight back. Wouldn’t even run. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Did you let her go?”
Agraneia stared at Laykis, unblinking.
“Ah.”
Agraneia tipped the canteen back. Empty. So was her chest. Everything. Empty. And growing emptier. She chucked the canteen with a growl, and it clattered on the steps winding down into that black pit, and echoed for far too long.
Huh, Eolh croaked in her ear. Agraneia flinched at the unexpected voice. How deep do you reckon it goes?
“What happened after the mission?” Laykis clicked when the echoes had gone silent.
“Back at camp, Sergeant was the happiest I’d seen him all campaign. He clapped me on the shoulder and when he went to shake my hand, he had a medal in his palm. Never heard him say a single nice thing about me until that day. And the next morning, got the word they bombed the whole village anyway. Nothing but smoking ruins. Nothing we did that night mattered. Nothing was gained. They just wanted to train us.
“Most nights, you don’t dream. You’re so bone tired, you lay down and black out until morning. But they gave us the day off. And the next. I dreamed. I’d be creeping through the village again, late at night. Listening to the quiet conversation of some xenos, talking about better days. Behind them. Ahead.”
“Is that why you avoid sleep?”
“And other reasons,” she said, her fingers twitching. “Battles usually help. That’s when I find rest. When my heart pumps so loud, I can’t hear them.”
“What do they say to you?”
“Used to be memories,” Agraneia shrugged, “Of the dead and the dying.”
“And now?”
“They talk to me. Say things that I already know.”
“Negative things?”
Agraneia nodded.
“Like what?”
“I deserve worse than death. I deserve to watch everyone I care about bleed. And die. And that I should… that I…” Too choked up to speak, she growled at herself. Clawed at her scalp with her fingers, metal and organic. They were only words, weren’t they? How could this be so damn hard? But all those damned thoughts in her head were like rope. The more she fought them, the tighter they pulled at her throat.
Laykis only sat there. Patient. Eyes glowing. Waiting for her to unravel thoughts.
Agraneia tried again. “One of the voices is different.”
“How so?”
“I didn’t kill this one. This one isn’t my fault.” Frustrated, she rapped her skull with her knuckles, maybe a little too hard. “He shouldn’t be here. You hear that, Eolh?” she shouted. “You shouldn’t fucking be here!”
The echoes of her voice rolled back at her, telling her what she already knew.
“Hmm,” Laykis cocked her head, intrigued. “Eolh?”
Agraneia swallowed, and nodded.
“That doesn’t align. Everything else, yes, but that one doesn’t sound like post-traumatic stress.”
“Post…?”
“A mental state that affects empathetic sapients who have experienced an event of extreme pain. Or, in your case, a lifetime of events. Fortunately, my Maker equipped me with an incredible set of empathetic sensors. I have learned how to engage xenos across many different emotional states.”
“I’m not emotional—”
Laykis stood up, and sat down next to Agraneia. The cyran stiffened at the construct’s sudden proximity.
“What—”
Laykis extended an arm and robotically patted Agraneia twice on the shoulder, saying, “There, there.” Pat, pat.
Mouth agape, Agraneia stared at her.
“Did that help?” Laykis asked.
A surprised laugh burst from Agraneia’s lips, and when the android stared back at her, almost hopeful, Agraneia laughed so hard her belly ached and tears ran down her scaled cheeks.
“Gods,” she said, sniffing and wiping her nose, and gathering her gear. “I thought you were serious. Like you actually knew some technique that might—”
“Sit,” Laykis held Agraneia down with a shocking amount of strength. Or maybe she was more tired than she realized. So, Agraneia sat, and Laykis talked to her, and asked her questions about her time in the Emperor’s legions. And it was easier than she remembered, talking. Maybe because of what Laykis had done, too.
Not that Agraneia could picture Laykis killing thousands—or was it more?—in the name of survival.
At one point, Laykis asked Agraneia if she could try something. She sat face to face, so close that Agraneia could see each scar, each tiny burr in the android’s metal mask. She told Agraneia to recount her grievances. “Walk me through everything you can remember. And as you talk, watch those memories slide past, as if outside the window of a train.”
It started slow at first. A murky remembrance of a battle. Xenos and blood. The non-combatants who had only gotten in the way. The other soldiers she had left behind because they were too slow. Or too weak. Meanwhile, Laykis’s eyes flicked on and off. First the left, then the right. “Follow my light,” Laykis said. Agraneia frowned. She felt stupid, but she did it anyway. At first, the flickering lights and the sound of her own voice made her chest feel tight, like the walls were getting too close. Then, it started to melt. She relaxed, until all she saw was brightrness in Laykis’s left eye, then the right…
“Was that a holy ritual?” Agraneia asked, when Laykis finally ended their session.
“Not exactly,” Laykis said. “Though I did learn it from the Makers. Old books. The idea is to activate opposite sides of your brain while reliving your trauma. It can help new, healthier pathways grow.”
To grow beyond what you’ve always been. Isn’t that what Talya said?
“Shut up,” Agraneia whispered.
“The voices are still talking to you?” Laykis asked.
“Mhm.”
But something had unclenched in her chest, if only a little. And when she listened, they only whispered her name. Even Eolh was silent.
“The more you practice,” Laykis said, “The more you will heal. It takes time.”
“Time that we do not have,” Agraneia said. “We must move.”
“We will not find a better camp. And I need time to swap my power reserves.”
It sounded like a made-up excuse, but when Agraneia reached for an argument, she found she didn’t have the energy. And the rock was surprisingly comfortable, after all those miles. And the voices had gone soft, so soft. Maybe she could spare a moment. Maybe if she just laid down like this…
Agraneia woke with a start, and held out a blade made of the remains of her liquid armor. The cave was full of them. Faces. Weapons. Machines. In a single motion, Agraneaia rolled and kicked her legs beneath her and launched at the opposite wall, throwing herself at the nearest machine. Her organic hand closed around the drone’s neck, and she cocked her liquid arm, ready to ram it into the thing’s head.
Two eyes flickered. Left. Then right. Laykis did not struggle in Agraneia’s gasp.
“Fuck,” Agraneia growled through clenched teeth. “You should not have let me fall asleep.”
“You needed it.”
“I almost killed you!”
The android’s head turned, drawing Agraneia’s attention to her liquid metal arm, the point still aimed at Laykis’s head. Disgusted with herself, she collapsed away from the android, raking her scalp with her fingers. She wanted to scream, to blame. She wondered if she could hit this madness out of her head. She just wanted it to stop. I want to be better. But she couldn’t even control herself.
Then what can you do?
“I’m sorry,” Agraneia said. “I’m sorry, Laykis.”
“Where do you feel it?” Laykis asked, her clicking voice cracking through Agraneia’s reverie. “The stress. The pressure. Where in your body does it reside?”
Agraneia let her hand drop to her own throat. “Here,” she said. “It hurts to breathe. And here,” she tapped her chest, just above the heart. “Cold and heavy.”
“Anywhere else?”
Agraneia opened her hands and held them up. “Here,” she said. “Like hot iron. Like if I don’t use them, it will burn right through me.”
“Good,” Laykis said.
“How is that good?”
“You already knew you were hurt. But today, you found the pain. You are one step closer than ever before.” Laykis stood up. “But only one.” She padded across the steps, careful around the edge of the cavernous drop. She bent down, and picked up Agraneia’s helmet, and offered it to her. “Come. We have many miles to go.”
