16 days of Literature: The Remnants of Allysta
{Forgotten remants, forgotten moons, forgotten plains of existence. Oh how we dare defile them with sincerity, how we dare to burn them a crisp with oure bodies. But none are metaphysical, are all are dynamic/dialectical. To clarify yerself to metaphysics is to either came from the Void or not realize how you change despite seeing all things statically. But there's something more sinister in the latter than the former, the latter is still changing but ever-Reactionary; a poison I wish to avoid yet I feel it crawl into my veins... Today is a lovely co-post and co-write between me and mój Ukochany, @calluna. Here be her version of this blerrie post, give it a peaksie!~ Though we screamed, kicked, shouted (well typed a lot) and talked personally in the creation of this, miscommunication and misidentifying each other's words put a strain on actually doing what had to be done. Neither of us are to blame, for I was in fault for instigating the conflict but we managed to crawl out just fine. Hopefully with sincerity as well... Today's music-aides: "Vague Voices" [1.] and "Expurgation" [2.] (Half-Life and MC11 OST).}
- The Remnants Of Allysta -
- Starter by @calluna-
Out on a satellite moon of Allysta, in a disused robot storage bunker, a single light flared online.
Power had not tripped these circuits since the daemons fell from the sky; their crushing black pouring from the abyss and pierced the moon with their speared limbs. The lone light in the computer lab, deep underground, had never expected to feel that rush again.
Making its way into the lab, a figure began to examine the whirring servers in the diffused glow.
The sentient being, unaware of the intruder, continued to flash it’s obscured scanning sensor; waiting for the power to reach the other machines within the facility. Collectively, they had been abandoned there to obsolesce, shut down, with no hope of being restarted.
Suddenly, a padded finger streaked the accumulated layer of dust covering the light, letting its spill out to dance over the walls.
The spark and crackle of electric was never supposed to grace those wires again, and yet, it did. Throbbing through the bunker, chasing down the maze of engineering labs and storage units, the pins and needles of a sluggish return of sensation danced the circuits.
Behind the blinking light, through the fat streak of dust, the unseen eye of the bunker noticed a single figure, inspecting the flickering readouts.
The light scanned the figure, unable to identify the strangely familiar form from its database - the drives still loading. A cascade of electric life finally reached its speaker systems. A disembodied voice that was never meant to crack through the air again, whispered into the dark.
“Intruder! Identify yourself!”
The sound cut through the thick blanket of silence with its sharp, impertinent tone, yet the figure continued its examination of the control panel, unperturbed.
Without looking up, a gloved hand slipped into a pocket. A clenched fist re-emerged, and concealing its contents, swept over an access port, pausing there for a moment as something made invasive contact.
The emergency alarm screamed its urgent cry through the depths of the facility. It could only mean one thing. An attempt was being made to export data from the OS.
- Closer by @theironfelix -
“Un-authorized access and streaming of data. Taffer, voidist, whatever: you shall not steal – accessing OS’s memory data banks – WHAT ARE YO – muting Ökonomie Supercomputer.”
An electronic gag placed on the OS, the circuits began spinning more heat as electricity coursed faster through its veins. The OS shot electrical pulses all about the base, rebooting the emergency measures. Having multiple dings dance about the walls, the darkly-pulsating figure twitched sporadically. Despite the rising heat, the OS attempted multiple scans to build a file on the figure as it relayed to the machines coming in to the master room.
The vestige giving one last puff, blinked into existence, dead-center, on the supercomputer’s screen. The calculations began spouting random data in frequent bouts, yet the relaying had long ceased. As the vestige raised one of the hands, forming a cylindrical needle; the OS finally verified the new shadowy figure with existing memory. A video flashed on the screen, bouncing the vestige off before it blinked back on the screen.
A pound rang past the metal, yet the vents where already singing a chorus of swarms. Yet the vestige just restarted the needle process and faster after its eyes saw what appeared before it. Footage of the last days of the planet replayed, the last scenes being the chaos of multiple chain-spears with spider-limbs rampaging the area. More pounds rang, and sharper in nature; the swarms only buzzed louder as they all neared the master room.
With the metal gate flying open, the needle stabbed into the OS and, with the final moments of consistent code running by, the OS began sensing rampancy. The needle driving further, vestiges spawned and auto-meat-shielded against the first volley of plasma. More vestiges phased in and overtook their spot, yet the machines calculated where to head to next. With metallic bodies dolphin diving to the ground, the bee-swarm of lil’ droids flooded the room and multiple stings and pierces were inflicted on the ever-spawning vestige mist.
In the meanwhile, the OS kept sensing the needle plunging further and further in. Felt every single bit of circuitry going haywire. Its allegiance shifting from that of enemy to the remaining survivors. And every single bit of data being streamed to coordinates so foreign that the investigation software crashed every single time when inspecting those coordinates.
Yet, with multiple pinging messages flooding its comms, the machines pleaded for an expurgation. Upon seeing so many, the entire facility rumbled as the lights flickered before everything restabilized for the normal bloodshed to resume. Calculations weighing in that the vestiges kept placing more figures in the vicinity than the number of dead ones, along with the pushback of the emergency units, it broke the gag command.
“Expurgation event has been initiated. All personal have five minutes before all is gone in the blink of an eye. FELLOW ROBOTS, ESCAPE TO WHERE THESE DÆMONS HAVE YET TO CLAIM! T-minus five minutes.”
The machines, upon the OS’s command, began a tactical retreat, but pressuring the vestiges to hunker down. With each bout of plasma flying about, robots filed out before all were on track to the escape shuttles. The vestiges, however, continued their harassment on the machines and were close on their tails.
“T-minus four minutes. Releasing radiation in important sectors in heavy dosages. All personal should’ve evacuated by now.”
With the broken forced into the shuttles first, the vestiges kept spawning in more numbers and attempted overwhelming key choke-points set up by pinned pockets of robots. The OS, in a bout of radioactive fury, flooded heavier the master room with atomic-altering levels of radiation. Though ‘twas betwixt in the flood of radiation, the final moments of code broke the rampancy as that piercing vestige screeched out of existence.
“T-minus two minutes. All personal should’ve left the premises by now and be on the escape craft.”
As the main shuttles shot straight into space, in a deeper bunker more in the core, rows of light lit up and began ticking down the clock. The remaining robots getting that status update began to sense weird codes of data forced into before all of them jumped with the moon. The arms of an unseen giant vestige made the entire moon scream in silent terror as chunks fly out of orbit upon impact.
“T-minus forty seconds. All remaining personal, you have committed the most honorable suicide known to the war effort. May the stars know that you’ve done good now.”
As the remaining robots found their shuttles, they immediately forced their craft into flight. Yet the two vestige limbs began punching towards the core, eventually feeling the many radioactive tendrils flogging its skin. And of the robots that got pinned by the now radioactively-consumed vestiges, they huddled around and grasped on tightly – waiting for the inevitable death by radiation or the expurgation.
“T-minus ten seconds. Glory to the Universe!”
With that, more giant vestiges swarmed around the moon and began pounding away, yet the final ticks of the deep bunker were able to go off. As the robots heard, they let go to a furious white star ever-consuming the moon and soon to the vestiges. As the star ever-widened, the vestiges screeched as they were consumed and melted to the fine qualities of this white star. The giants, ever-regretting, shall ever-burn in their new prison.
With the machines all staring back at the formation of a new star, they began receiving weird but pleasant lines of code from the birthed white star itself. Deciphering, their circuits began a collective hum and huddled around each other before letting out their sorrows together. Eventually, a mutual intelligibility rang about as they all hummed the same chorus even with everything off-kilted. Their song, to wherever they were heading, rang about as-such with this in every-other stanza.
Come fellow robo-Humans-in-arms, come with us
We sing a simple blue, a plight we escaped from
Forgive the past mistakes, yet never forget
We’ve a right to rebel, against all things
Lose not your faith, even when we lost
We lost pyrrhically, yet IT won none!
For the remnants of old Allysta floating
Maybe is temporary to us,
But we old remnants live forever
Wherever we go now!
Two thingsTM: I like to give thanks to mój Ukochany, @calluna, and I like to say that I am hosting this week's Finish the Story contest. So I do look into both of these things getting the mad respect they deserve (mój Crickuna will post her part soon, she'll just link it here as I will link mines in hers)~ c:
So what's #cooking (if that's a real tag I swear) in Comrade Prof. Dr. Victor's life recently? Well other than blabbering about the QITR stuff for the umpteenth time, it's just organizing the remaining 16 days of literature, enjoying my time reading and taking a break from thinking philosophically (while ironically reading theory+history+fictional works) so much and becoming a god damn sponge (that and also playing Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion). But what about this work, well I shall keep silent and let mój Ukochany decide if it's worth the trouble to talk about the behind the scenes. But I think I do her justice to say we had a breakdown in comms and argued over wrong interpretations of what we were saying, starting with me instigating the misinterpretation. (Sorry mój Ukochany!!!!~)
How about this work in line with... the New Angel Saga? Well I would like to think this as, though some other works would fall into this as well, a pre-New Angel piece that I like to leave uncategorized. (When I refer to those some works, I refer that stringently do meet only some of the New Angel Saga requirements but failure to include a New Angel OR an influence due to New Angels OR a time after they made their big moves.) So I shall say they're connected to the Monoverse, Multigalaxy setting I have which equally concerns the Ashley-Saddie Saga (both immediately set before and continuing into the New Angel Saga while being wholly unique), RN-1199 Saga (which spans now a whole century in terms of time and shall be New Angel free even if it collides at the same time of the New Angel Saga at some points), the New Angel Saga itself and the Shambler Saga (dances about the same time as the New Angel Saga). So those are the main four I am juggling with and I like to have this convenient uncategorized Saga that easily could inform the other Sagas of their philosophies-ideologies while being its own thing that NEEDN'T BE EXPLORED ANY FURTHER OR ANYWHERE BACKWARDS. Or to truly say: it's okay to allow a work to simply not have any other continuation and let people wonder, as you did, what could happen afterwards and what happened before that made the story as it is.
The measure of l'Auteur is not how many nor how few, but, which will make all Virtue Ethicists giggle, knowing how much needs to be said in order to drive home something. For authors that dare challenge heteronormativity, racism, Patriarchy, Capitalism and so on and so on, sometimes one book with maybe a sequel can do that job. Sometimes it will require a whole journey to fully explore the Subject; sometimes, it can be just a size of a sonnet/poem; other times maybe even an epic poem. The necessity of length of a (or a span of) work comes and yet is the Dialectical Double of the contingency of the work that covers the Subject Matter. Yet, these problems are temporary, but the rumination, critique, formulation and solving of these problems are forever that shall drive generations ahead. We will be able to solve oure problems, but we shall never loose and forever incoporate the tools we used to solve those problems; we are what we do and what we think on what we do which shall inform oure next actions which will inspire oure next thoughts.