11-07-2017, 03:34 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-09-2017, 12:56 AM by Kelly MacAryn.)
Thrown far from the collapsing singularity, the traveler lay slumped against a tree, staring at nothing as a quicksilver will-o'-wisp glow rose like candle-smoke from his eyes.
Expelled from a vision of vivid epistemological totality, Kelly MacAryn plunged towards himself; his returning sense of individuality formed an inchoate psychic comet, cutting a scathing blue scar across the angry green skies of his roiling mind. At the touch of its piercing razor glare, his psyche rebuilt itself, the swirling disorder of new information and ancient memory captured and catalogued by complex mental constructs which erupted from the mire with all the suddenness and efficient brutality of a titanic mechanical mantis come to prey upon the scuttling chaos.
A tidal storm of sticky associative webs and grasping concept-claws exploded into purposeful life, devouring the mist and darkness with a righteous hunger for structure that was terrifying to behold. They knew exactly what they were doing, exactly where everything fit, swirling and refining and splicing it together with the aurora-glow of the comet until they had made a city - towers of intellect without peak or foundation, great avenues of contemplative thought, libraries of knowledge and skill and catacombs of doubt and regret within a shining edifice of Mind - and still the architects continued, building wider and higher and stranger, spurred by the blinding blueprint within the glow...
With a modicum of structure restored, the foundations of metaphor shifted.
Kelly's seat of awareness occupied a table set for one. The glow of the comet was the glow of a candle, sapphire-blue and as sharp as ground obsidian, providing a slowly-growing oasis of piercing light within a world of ebon mist; a maze-like pattern of avenues was traced upon the tablecloth, and his place was set with strange and eager utensils.
There was a menu in his hands. The traveler scanned the wine-list - a shifting tally of his skills and knowledge, their vintages and vineyards largely water-damaged and illegible. There were several items listed there that surprised him, foreign wines he'd never sampled (but somehow intimately knew), including a fine old frankish blue, noted for its bittersweet chocolaty richness, and subtle notes of Hell.
He skimmed the appetizers, his opinions, plans, mannerisms, concerns and extant strategies, the surface of his personality in impossible flavorful detail, parsed as text in a language of himself.
The candle flickered. A shape emerged from the haze and, with the unchallenged speed and savagery of a tragedy in a dream, slapped the menu out of Kelly's hands. The shape pulled up an invisible chair on the opposite side of the table.
Kelly frowned, watching his menu tumble away into a bottomless void. "Who are you? And why did you do that?"
The stranger smiled.
"Because I got tired of your solipsistic metaphors. You're getting smarter every second as you put yourself back together, and this kind of navel-gazing isn't getting you anywhere."
Kelly put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, folding his hands under his chin. The candle flame cast his angular face in stark blue highlights and pools of unknowable void, sharply defining him. For the first time since this process began, he felt himself start to really think.
"You still haven't told me who you are."
The stranger, still undefined, leaned back on his nonexistant seat.
" Technically, I guess I'm that clever little input-management system you've got: your haunt. Our psychic recovery-daemons, and the fallout from Tearen Wover's little excercise in ontological apocalypse, have stirred things up enough in your brain that the two of us are, momentarily, distinct. But that's honestly not important. I've built enough of a personality out of the stuff you left lying around for us to talk to each other, but we don't have long before our little repair-crew puts my components back in their boxes. You need to listen to me."
Kelly narrowed his eyes. He had a million questions, but he'd regained enough of himself to recognize that asking them wouldn't be an efficient use of his time. "Alright. I'm listening."
The traveler's haunt matched his posture, leaning forward until they were practically eye to nonexistant-eye.
" If you were to think of us as a mainframe computer, then what the godmind did to us - what you let him do to us - has caused something like a hard-reboot. Before, most of our past was hidden by a pretty fucking sophisticated system of telepathic locks, bald metaphors, cerebral encryption and carefully orchestrated psychic confusion - but our recovery-daemons are going to chew through most of that like fat kids with candy-floss. Probably only the locks are going to survive, and even those'll be pretty fucking weak."
Kelly nodded. His lips twitched, eyes sparkling. "Good."
His haunt shook its head and slapped its blurry hands on the table, shaking the candle and sending the flatware rolling. The traveler flinched back, jolted by the sudden violence, nearly tumbling from his chair.
"No! No no no! Not good! Listen! How do you think we got the way we are, huh? So many friggin' skills, so equipped to survive, but so much of our history lost?"
The undefined figure began to fray, shrinking as Kelly watched, devoured by the suddenly-rising light of the candle, an off-white solar glow so intense that the tablecloth began to smoke.
"This wasn't an accident, Kelly! This isn't some copy-error, some transcriptive bubble-universe botch-job! The very moment we arrived in the Omniverse we did this to ourselves!"
Kelly squinted in confusion, suddenly stumbling, standing on nothing as the chair collapsed into ash. He held up an arm to shield his eyes from the blinding light as azure flames rose higher and brighter. The fire shrieked, ecstatic, erupting from the candle and engulfing the tablecloth, the table, and everything else save the traveler himself. Floating cinders, drifting like snow in the void, formed intricate strands of gossamer aurora as the psychic's mind thundered towards complete reconstitution; His visitor was gone.
"... but that doesn't make any sense," he said.
There was no response, at first, but as the now all-pervasive glow reached a crescendo, a last whispered warning drifted from within.
"Don't push too far. Some memories are like a loaded gun."
* * *
Expelled from a vision of vivid epistemological totality, Kelly MacAryn plunged towards himself; his returning sense of individuality formed an inchoate psychic comet, cutting a scathing blue scar across the angry green skies of his roiling mind. At the touch of its piercing razor glare, his psyche rebuilt itself, the swirling disorder of new information and ancient memory captured and catalogued by complex mental constructs which erupted from the mire with all the suddenness and efficient brutality of a titanic mechanical mantis come to prey upon the scuttling chaos.
A tidal storm of sticky associative webs and grasping concept-claws exploded into purposeful life, devouring the mist and darkness with a righteous hunger for structure that was terrifying to behold. They knew exactly what they were doing, exactly where everything fit, swirling and refining and splicing it together with the aurora-glow of the comet until they had made a city - towers of intellect without peak or foundation, great avenues of contemplative thought, libraries of knowledge and skill and catacombs of doubt and regret within a shining edifice of Mind - and still the architects continued, building wider and higher and stranger, spurred by the blinding blueprint within the glow...
With a modicum of structure restored, the foundations of metaphor shifted.
Kelly's seat of awareness occupied a table set for one. The glow of the comet was the glow of a candle, sapphire-blue and as sharp as ground obsidian, providing a slowly-growing oasis of piercing light within a world of ebon mist; a maze-like pattern of avenues was traced upon the tablecloth, and his place was set with strange and eager utensils.
There was a menu in his hands. The traveler scanned the wine-list - a shifting tally of his skills and knowledge, their vintages and vineyards largely water-damaged and illegible. There were several items listed there that surprised him, foreign wines he'd never sampled (but somehow intimately knew), including a fine old frankish blue, noted for its bittersweet chocolaty richness, and subtle notes of Hell.
He skimmed the appetizers, his opinions, plans, mannerisms, concerns and extant strategies, the surface of his personality in impossible flavorful detail, parsed as text in a language of himself.
The candle flickered. A shape emerged from the haze and, with the unchallenged speed and savagery of a tragedy in a dream, slapped the menu out of Kelly's hands. The shape pulled up an invisible chair on the opposite side of the table.
Kelly frowned, watching his menu tumble away into a bottomless void. "Who are you? And why did you do that?"
The stranger smiled.
"Because I got tired of your solipsistic metaphors. You're getting smarter every second as you put yourself back together, and this kind of navel-gazing isn't getting you anywhere."
Kelly put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, folding his hands under his chin. The candle flame cast his angular face in stark blue highlights and pools of unknowable void, sharply defining him. For the first time since this process began, he felt himself start to really think.
"You still haven't told me who you are."
The stranger, still undefined, leaned back on his nonexistant seat.
" Technically, I guess I'm that clever little input-management system you've got: your haunt. Our psychic recovery-daemons, and the fallout from Tearen Wover's little excercise in ontological apocalypse, have stirred things up enough in your brain that the two of us are, momentarily, distinct. But that's honestly not important. I've built enough of a personality out of the stuff you left lying around for us to talk to each other, but we don't have long before our little repair-crew puts my components back in their boxes. You need to listen to me."
Kelly narrowed his eyes. He had a million questions, but he'd regained enough of himself to recognize that asking them wouldn't be an efficient use of his time. "Alright. I'm listening."
The traveler's haunt matched his posture, leaning forward until they were practically eye to nonexistant-eye.
" If you were to think of us as a mainframe computer, then what the godmind did to us - what you let him do to us - has caused something like a hard-reboot. Before, most of our past was hidden by a pretty fucking sophisticated system of telepathic locks, bald metaphors, cerebral encryption and carefully orchestrated psychic confusion - but our recovery-daemons are going to chew through most of that like fat kids with candy-floss. Probably only the locks are going to survive, and even those'll be pretty fucking weak."
Kelly nodded. His lips twitched, eyes sparkling. "Good."
His haunt shook its head and slapped its blurry hands on the table, shaking the candle and sending the flatware rolling. The traveler flinched back, jolted by the sudden violence, nearly tumbling from his chair.
"No! No no no! Not good! Listen! How do you think we got the way we are, huh? So many friggin' skills, so equipped to survive, but so much of our history lost?"
The undefined figure began to fray, shrinking as Kelly watched, devoured by the suddenly-rising light of the candle, an off-white solar glow so intense that the tablecloth began to smoke.
"This wasn't an accident, Kelly! This isn't some copy-error, some transcriptive bubble-universe botch-job! The very moment we arrived in the Omniverse we did this to ourselves!"
Kelly squinted in confusion, suddenly stumbling, standing on nothing as the chair collapsed into ash. He held up an arm to shield his eyes from the blinding light as azure flames rose higher and brighter. The fire shrieked, ecstatic, erupting from the candle and engulfing the tablecloth, the table, and everything else save the traveler himself. Floating cinders, drifting like snow in the void, formed intricate strands of gossamer aurora as the psychic's mind thundered towards complete reconstitution; His visitor was gone.
"... but that doesn't make any sense," he said.
There was no response, at first, but as the now all-pervasive glow reached a crescendo, a last whispered warning drifted from within.
"Don't push too far. Some memories are like a loaded gun."