Chapter 5-11 Ghostjack
You know... I didn't have a father growing up, but I remember being raised by several. One was abusive. The other two were just there. The last was a decent man who died too soon.
But... You have to understand, none of them were actually mine. They were just burned into me, memories spreading like... Like conflagration.
Have you ever gotten your mind Jacked? The feeling don't fit the mold of my words... hard to describe it.
Have you ever drowned in your own memories without even noticing? It's like that... except they aren't your memories sometimes. New pieces are added in. You remember talking to someone you never met. You remember a nu-dog you never owned. And eventually, as the deception metastasizes inside you, whoever you were isn't the same anymore.
Caught a mem-con during the war. Was the lucky one in my unit--the delta carrier for the plague. Low Masters sequenced a vile thing for us, it was like a silent wildfire burning through our links, pouring the smog into my mind.
...
What the fuck was I saying again? Ah. Never mind.
Just remember to kill the Necrojacks first.
-Mem-Log of Vincentine Ripperjack Javvers, Head of the Scalpers Syndicate
5-11
Ghostjack
THAUMIC CYCLER: 59 THAUM/c
GHOSTS: [52]
REND CAPACITY: 7%...
A mingling spillage of sloppy viscera pooled across the floor, leftovers from the meal Avo made of Captain Aseleri's two former aides. They had been wrung clean like towels of shattering bone and tearing flesh after Avo discovered the limits of their use. Then, he found a final use for them.
Unlike Jessa--the one Avo named Hap-Tat--killing them was an easy thing. Walton hated slavers, and there was no closer one could get than directly making a sale.
Avo smiled and imagined his father to be proud. So rare.
Meanwhile, Aseleri's screams betrayed her unfamiliarity with pain.
A weakness most unfortunate seeing as Avo was unlatching her ligaments from her bones. Her tissues were woven with strength, and that strength betrayed her. No ordinary diver nor snuffer could have afforded bioware of such sophistication; bones and muscles built to serve her body in a synchronous union.
She reeked of Low Guilder. Disgraced Low Guilder, judging from the cost it would take to engineer a body like hers and her actual living. She was someone that had known the pleasures of the Tiers, but fell hard from grace, crashing down into the putrescent sprawl that was the Warrens.
He held her aloft on wires of blood, his tendrils snaking beneath her skin, the slicing root tips of his Heaven growing deep. Beads of sweat cascaded down her forehead mingling with her flooding tears. The way the pleas sang from her throat was like that of a child, whines, beggings, tantrums all coiled together.
The captain's arm was folded backward along her back, the ball of her limb scooping her cartilage free from its socket. He had mangled her insides again when she made a second try to lash his mind with her Ghostjack.
This time, he was more audience than an adversary in judging her capabilities; again, he found her wanting. This Ghostjack was not hers--it could not be. Her use of it was that of an ignoramus-- a child gifted the hammer and forge from a smithy. She had taken to using it as a blunt instrument, shaping missiles of trauma from ghosts and ripping at his memories, her feeble attack sliding off his wards, like nails snapping upon a chalkboard.
From her, he wrought dry the last of her will and drew her up on wires of tungsten-infused blood, arms spread. She swayed there like a piece of battered meat, gibbering, thoughtstuff straining against the cage of her shoddily maintained protections.
He greeted as a butcher would a prime cut of meat. Too bad she still didn't fully understand her situation.
Aseleri spat a clatter of teeth and blood at his feet.
Avo nodded, accepting her ill feelings toward him. And then promptly responded by fusing sharp grains of jagged blood inside her kidneys, and letting it flow along the tubes of her tract. The sounds he earned from her made the beast nesting beneath his skin chitter with glee. There was a spice that torture added to the body and mind; something that would come useful when he sequenced new phantasmics down the line.
But ultimately, that was just a secondary reason why he was inflicting this pain. The truth was that she made for good feeding, that she could make the beast go quiet if but for a while.
"Aseleri," Avo said, waiting for the captain's eyes to finish rolling. "Hear me? Have a few questions to ask you."
Behind him, he could hear Draus laughing in disbelief. "Jaus. Avo, you're supposed to ask the questions before you torture someone. Even if they are a half-strand."
"Got carried away."
"Yeah," she said, looking at the enmeshed mess of interlocking flesh that remained of the captain's aides, "Reckon 'carried away' would've gotten me an official court martial for the war crimes you're committing."
"War crimes?" Avo said. "Guilds follow those?"
"Sure. When they're fighting other Guilds and, uh, official citizens..." Draus cocked her head at the captain. "The FATELESS, well, they're a work in progress, so to speak."
Now it was Avo's turn to laugh.
"Fuck... you, both," Aseleri said, barely managing to spit the words free. Clumps of viscera dangled from her cracked teeth. She turned to glare at Draus with her bloodshot eyes. "Are you just going to let this... fucking thing torture me. Work me to death? I was a citizen. I was somebody! I lived in the fucking Tiers!"
"Well, that makes the three of us, then," Draus, for her part, flicked a glance at the former slave.
The husk of a girl was huddled in the corner, her skin boiling in an aurora of hues. Her eyes trailed off, transfixed by the unfolding brutality being inflicted upon her former enslaver. A broken expression between horror and schadenfreude crept over her face. Her mind, meanwhile, hissed in puffs of steam, her thoughts vaporous; the steaming hiss belying her mental collapse.
"Yeah," Draus continued, "yeah, I suppose I am fine with watching him torture you to death. What can I say? Shit rolls uphill; shit rolls downhill." Her focus shifted to Avo. "But that bein' said, you played long enough. I let you feed the ghoul, and reckon it's plenty fed. Get what you came for. Get this done."
Draus' request immediately drew the beast's attention. It pleaded with Avo now to keep going, to kill the captain, take her Ghostjack, and kill the Regular as well. But, sated as it was, the urges were weaker, more easily wrestled.
Avo exhaled. Stepping away from his bloodlust was long a struggle, like scrubbing tar using only his hands. Some of it always clung. But today, it was weaker after being fed. And so, he shoved it back down, knowing that once he had a Ghostjack, he would finally be able to reclaim a modicum of control.
He walked away from the captain then, his lashing blood extending like an ever-growing chain. Over to the slave girl he walked. He looked down at her, and in her childlike expression, found naught but confusion. Her mind was exhausted from warring with itself, too much stimulus experienced in too narrow a wind of time. Avo wondered what happened to her sister. Siblings were rarely sold as a pair.
"Wait," Aseleri said, her word's slurred from numbness and pain. "Wha--what're you doing?"
From his palm, Avo shaped a long blade and left it manifest using his Canon of Linger. It grew more than it was forged, the helixes of his ichor linking and joining in mimicry of a blade pattern. Its shape was simple. Crude. Sufficient.
From his being, it clattered free: an offering of retribution made manifest.
REND CAPACITY: 13%
She looked down at the crimson blade and back up at him, not comprehending what he wanted.
The beast wove urges and desires, wondering if her modded skin would taste any different and if he should flay it from her flesh for a sample. But beyond his basest self, Avo had another curiosity he sought to indulge.
He was not the only one harmed by Aseleri, brief though his hurt might've been. Perhaps what he could offer here would give the mod slave a measure of peace. See things made right.
She gazed upon the gifted weapon, its fluid-metallic quality casting the contours of her form back at her. A blossom of blue bloomed across her body. Her thoughtstuff sank inward in a sudden collapse. Her expression cracked into a face-wrinkling sob.
She did not reach for his blade. She never reached for his blade. Instead, her arms were used to hold herself as she wept.
The show of vulnerability called to Avo's hunger. Mostly, he was just disappointed. Ever frail was a baseline mind. Ever frail was unalloyed humanity.
"She don't got it, Avo," Draus said. "She don't got it. Let her be."
Intruding into dialogue, Aseleri snorted out a laugh. "Ah. Yeah. Suppose... suppose I was always good at picking the best... product."
Avo faced her. "Picked wrong with me."
Her smile faded. She coughed. "Now. Wait. I think I might just be ready to talk with you--"
Her death interrupted whatever she was going to say next. He sliced through her skull from the inside, haemokinetic blades unzipping the contents of her flesh during the ascent. Upon reaching the summit, they passed, melded, and sagged, dolloping like the petals of a flower, cupping clumps of bone. Her exposed brain, and nerves then formed a twisted mockery of a pistil. If she still possessed a face, she would have screamed, and loud would her cries be.
But he didn't need that from her. Not anymore. The wavelengths of her thoughtstuff were a sea beset with a storm of storms, tidal waves of trauma crashing and rising and crashing again.
He fed more blood to her brain then, keeping her alive if but for a moment more. He knew not if she was still there when his claws dug into the softness of her grey matter. He only knew the moment she wasn't when he finally bit into her.
To his displeasure, there was nothing that tasted so different from her mind. Amorality held the flavor of banality, the same as any being.
Her will and cognition came aware as he drank all that she was into him. In those final moments, he felt the walls of her wards collapse, shielding nothing.
He speared his Whisper into her exposed mind and claimed his prize.
THAUMIC CYCLER: 60 THAUM/c
REND CAPACITY: 18%...
ESTABLISHING GHOST-LINK
LINKING
LINK COMPLETE - HOST UNDETECTED
LINK COMPLETE - HOST UNDETECTED
SIPHONING GHOSTS [30]
GHOSTS - [82]
DOWNLOADING PHANTASMIC SEQUENCES
DOWNLOADED
PHANTASMICS ACTIVE - [GHOSTJACK]; [TORTOISE OMNIWARD]; [AUTO-SEANCE]
Avo unsequenced the other two phantasmics; they were of no use to him. With bated breath, he claimed his prize, mouth watering as he felt the Ghostjack slowly linking with the base of his Metamind. More than any other phantasmic, he felt the power of his cognition strengthen, shaping the accretion of his thoughts into mutable wavelengths.
Shaped something between a broadcast tower and a sigil of a sword, the Ghostjack rose through the raging stratocumulus that was his sphere-shaped wards. Within his palace, he felt its base reach out and link with all his sequences. Constellations came afire in his mind. His presence flowed forth, washing over all those around him.
He knew not how Aseleri claimed this Ghostjack. Lucky scavenge was his closest guess. She couldn't have been trained in its use, however, and knew nothing of its greatest potential.
Ghostjack was a phantasmic. Same as a sequenced Specter or an in-built Ghost-Link. But not all phantasmics were built the same. Not all phantasmics could reach upward across planes into the very tapestry of the Nether instead of just manifesting where the mind was relative to other minds. Not all phantasmics could directly edit the sequences instead of merely rerouting them.
Little wonder why Ori-Thaum sought to withhold them from the market early on.
Aseleri was a fool. She kept the instrument like a weapon of surprise and wielded it as little more than a platform that fired mind-warping munitions fueled by ghosts.
Avo knew better. And with it, he finally felt whole.
Nearly whole. It wasn't his Ghostjack. He still needed to find his. But this was close. This was a replacement. This was a worthy transplant. He would have traded one of his Heavens for this. Mostly the Galeslither, since it lacked a Hell anyway.
"She still didn't answer your questions," Draus said sardonically.
"Her ghost will speak. Better than her person ever could."
The Regular nodded at that. "So. We done here?"
Avo grunted. Reaching out with his blood, he collected the gore and viscera he felt behind, squeezing it all together in a swirling clump.
"Wanted to see the Hell right?"
Draus leaned back and gestured for him to show her.
He vented, netting the sphere of gore with his entropic squall. In seconds, the gust sheared all physical matter away from existence like salt slaved to the flow of water.
"Well," Draus said, nodding appreciatively, "that would've come in real handy for some of that wetwork I used to do. You keep workin' at that Godclad thing. Might even be a new Heaven for you to make. Avo: Heaven of Corpse Disposal."
Avo hummed in response. Jesting though she was, the idea did make him wonder if he could somehow make his entropic shroud last longer, use it as a deployable bomb instead of a lashing limb.
Good thing he had an Agnos to consult.
He collected what few drips of blood he missed and drew it inside himself. Around them, the dim ambiance of the booth gave nothing away. No cameras nor ghosts scried upon their persons. None would be witness to his deeds.
None, other than the girl.
In the corner, the former mod slave continued to sob, inconsolable now that her momentary reverie was broken. She saw herself, and the reflection stuck bone, reopening prior wounds and leaving her unmade.
Draus made to take the girl. Leave no evidence. Avo halted her with a gesture.
"She can walk," he said.
The expression on Draus' face told him of her doubt. "I know she technically--"
His Ghostjack flared a burning sigil calling upon a swell of ghosts. The constellations of his phantasmics shone through the blacked sheath of his storm-coated wards. From the halo of his Metamind, he cast his thoughts at the girl and poured his cognition into her like an avalanche.
Bare and unwarded, he could have connected to her mind with his Ghost-Link as well, but sharing a mind with her or planting a shiv inside of her was what it could do.
Using his Ghostjack, he didn't bridge with her. No. He swam. Bereft of a proper palace, he pushed his mind deep into hers, submerging into a grey, mechanical ocean, its water running in conflicting spirals, each flowing to their own sequence, the tides alive with madness.
"Avo?" he heard Draus call, "What are you--"
"Quiet," he said, only faintly aware of his own body.
He was a diver, surgeon, and engineer right now. More than that, he was an architect and artist. This was his practice. This was his worship. And within seconds, he found the screaming rapids that led to the trauma he sought.
Bubbled by the submersible that was his wards, he checked again and deactivated all his presently useless phantasmics besides the Ghostjack and the Memguard. Diverting the majority of the capacity to his protection, he pushed deep into the angry maelstrom.
The structure of her inner mind was different than what was beyond. Metaminds gave simulated representations for navigation. Here though, deeper yet, were the memories themselveshardened strips of remembrance that lingered.
From her eyes, he watched as she saw the death of her father; tasted her despair as her sister died on the operating table next to her, body rejecting the mods. The sequence was raw and hot with pain, cooking against Avo's armor and spiking cognitive capacity. The additional ghosts he downloaded from Aseleri's mind had proven to be an ample buffer against her hurt, but her trauma was immense.
COG-CAP: 28%
And immensely valuable.
Avo smiled in appreciation, mouth widening in delight. Her pain was not for nothing. It would serve him as a most potent weapon to shred enemy minds once he tore down their defensive traumas.
He wondered if the hurt he caused Aseleri herself would match it.
DOWNLOADING TRAUMA-PATTERN [ASELERI'S FOLLY]
A fitting name for a versatile weapon. One he could bind to delivery constructs like triggers, bombs, contagions, mind strikes, or even missiles.
GHOSTS: [81]
He fed one of his ghosts an overdose of positive memory sequences, filling it to the brim without more detailed work. With a thought, he released it into her turbulent waters, its joyous burn greeting the inferno of the girl's pain, the strain of her trauma lessening almost immediately.
When he had the time, he would need to finish this dive properly. Something to do while unconscious to achieve maximum focus. The trauma inside her was a spreading inflammation. If it wasn't cut out entirely, it would consume her.
Right now, he lacked the proper patterns. He needed more joyous memories to weaken the traumas. Constructs of melancholy to root her mind in fixation while he was conducting the extraction. Specific traumas to perform precise edits without shearing an essential concept from her mind and leaving her vegetable.
For now, addled would do.
Halting the broadcast of his ghosts, Avo a faint prickle of static rain across his body as his physical senses was at the forefront again.
Inside, the beast recoiled, suddenly noticing the return of his mind. The loudness of her pain had drowned it out momentarily. It was afraid. Good. It was going back inside its cage, where it belonged.
A Morality Inducer wasn't a complex construct to make, and Avo remembered the design well. Walton had made sure of that.
Across the room, the girl giggled and sobbed in equal measure, rising as emotions cycled across her face.
"Jaus, Avo," Draus said, disturbed by the insanity playing across the face of the former slave, "the fuck did you do to her?"
"Diluted trauma with a cluster of joys. Mind defaulting. Should be compliant right now. Won't last. Ghost will fragment eventually. Should take her and go now. You take her. I'll deal with the guards.
Draus nodded. "Hey, uh. We're gonna... we're gonna get you out of here."
"Okay," the girl said, smiling brightly as tears trailed down her cheeks. Her skin was a battleground between between red and blue, the inky colors clashing in a grand charge. "Okay."
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