A dull crack echoed through the dark, low chamber, followed by a tight whimper of pain, quickly hushed. Dry footsteps rustled on the stone floor, bare calloused skin scraping against smooth stone.
Another slap, this one wet. A swish of fibers, and drops of blood struck the floor in a flat pattern. More footsteps, soft and deliberate, mixed with the small sounds of pain breathing through the room.
The tenth and final disciple in this cell of the glorious, inevitable Church of Epistemological Singularity knelt on the stone floor, her back bare and ready to receive. The deacon swung his whip, completing the ritual circuit. Ten penitents. Ten strokes for each.
“Only through pain do we recognize the flesh,” the deacon intoned. “Only by recognizing the body can we divorce it. Only through severing the flesh can we accept the machine.”
The ritual words complete, the disciples rose and shuffled out of the room to their individual cells to Meditate and reflect on their many sins.
“You,” the deacon said, gesturing at the tenth and final disciple. The youngest, incidentally. “Stay.”
This cell of the church was not the worst this deacon had seen. No, not the worst, but it was close.
This whole planet was soft. Corrupt. Rotten flesh breeding maggots.
The Church on this planet had strayed. The members were dependent upon their flesh, greedily seeking the benefits of membership while eschewing the greater path. And that was something that would not do. No, it would not. He would fix this, and fix it for generations to come, long after he had left.
He had arrived earlier that day, dispatched by the very Architect himself to this frontier world. A small mission, a side quest for the betterment of the flock, before he returned to his primary calling: the Integration of new flocks. But mere hours into his visit, he had not been able to turn a blind eye to the excesses and predations of these so-called members of the Church. His Church.
“I must see that the rot has not spread,” the deacon said. “I will be checking each and every member on this planet to make sure they are worthy, or to make them worthy. But that is not why I am here.”
The young woman knelt silently, the blood dripping from her back and onto the floor. She had not flinched, not once. The deacon approved. Only this woman had truly understood the value of penitence: of how to use the ritual pain in cleansing one’s attachment to the world, how to shed one’s body and sever one’s mind, all in preparation for the arrival of the machine god.
“No, it is not why I am here, but this work must be done. And thus, you will assist me and work in my stead.”
No reaction from the penitent. No hint of shirking her duty, nor a hint of pride at being chosen for such an important task.
Excellent.
“First, you will find the last known whereabouts of a recruit named Thorn Farmer.”
……
Present time. Three hundred kilometers south of the city of Aba.
“Well, now that we’ve named it, can we get a move on?” Gammon asked.
“Him,” Thorn corrected. “Not it. I can’t tell personally, but my System says he’s male.”
“We’ve got a long trek ahead of us, and we need to get to it,” Gammon said. “Lief and Korakis are both heavily wounded but stable. I’ll carry Lief, you take Korakis?”
Thorn nodded. He took Korakis from Lief and placed him on his shoulder, his hands hovering around the bird until he was sure Korakis could stand on his own. The raven fluffed his feathers and gave him a peck on the neck. He was remarkably resilient for having received a hole in his chest mere minutes before.
“Let’s go,” Thorn said, and they set off towards where he’d left his truck.
The walk through the forest was slow, calming and meditative. He’d been fighting for his life for days, and that stress was slowly seeping away, step by step. Gammon kept trying to push the pace, but Thorn refused to walk any faster.
Unfortunately, as soon as they made it back to his truck, his stress level rocketed.
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Thorn looked at the burned-out husk of his vehicle. Someone had torched it, blowing the engine to pieces. The ground around it was scorched, the brush he’d covered it with and the surrounding copse reduced to ashes.
He put a hand on the twisted frame of his truck. The years he had scraped and scurried and saved to buy it. His livelihood and his home. He swallowed.
“Must have been that Grif Scrivler,” Thorn said. “Couldn’t wait for me to come back and pay up, or tracked me out here and torched it after I disappeared and couldn’t receive any System comms.”
Thorn wished he could look at the log of comms he’d been unable to receive while offline. He likely had a few unfriendly messages from Grif.
“So… does this mean you don’t have any caf?” Lief asked.
Thorn was about to tell Lief he could try walking back to Aba on his own if he wanted to keep talking about his stupid caf, when he was interrupted by a set of new System comms.
“Crkkkk, hzk. Tok.”
That was cool. One of the core abilities of Integrate was understanding and interpreting language; Thorn just now realized that ability extended to species other than humans.
And now he was also sending a System comm. The beast was able to use the agent he’d implanted into the machine tech to communicate. Thorn had wondered if that part would work, and apparently it did. He really had implanted what was effectively a System into the beast. Or at least part of a System.
He just couldn’t understand what the bird was saying.
“Hzzk, grrrk.”
“Crrrrkkk, crrk? Crrrrrk.”
Korakis pecked him on the side of the neck.
“Czrrrk.”
“Where is the damn caf?” Lief asked. “Thorn. You promised me caf. You said there was caf in your truck. So where is it?”
Thorn met Gammon’s gaze. The corners of her eyes wrinkled in amusement. He sighed.
It was going to be a long walk back to Aba.
……
One week later. Crows Guild command ship, The Ill Omen.
Colonel Smithson leaned against the hard back of his chair. He had just finished giving a report on one of his latest missions, and his hand idly reached into his pocket before he stopped it. His boss didn’t care for ceremony or formality, but that didn’t mean she let him smoke in her office. A pity.
“Just to confirm again: you think the kid fixed the dead zone?”
“Yup,” Smithson said. “Although ‘fixed’ gives him too much credit. His actions appear to have facilitated a natural cohesion instead of the accelerated decay we expected. The fabric is very weak in that area, and we’ll have to monitor it continuously, but we didn’t have to deploy any of the countermeasures we prepared.”
“Hmm. At first I wasn’t sure, but if the kid somehow did that, I agree with changing your approach from containment to recruitment. But after that, you picked the bird? A raven? Why?” asked the woman across the desk from him. She sat in a much larger and much more comfortable chair, winged with flames and stylized crow’s feathers. Aesculus Corvarum herself, one of the founders of the Crows Guild.
“The Warden was severely injured and hiding it, only the last wisps of his quints and that overpowered Regeneration Skill of his keeping him from a coma, or worse. Besides, if I screwed up, or the kid didn’t actually have the juice or guts to put things together, it was a far lower risk to the Guild to potentially kill his pet rather than his friend.”
“Confirming his abilities was the right move,” Aesculus said, “But he’s in the Guild now, and using those Skills like that is against the Starkhold Conventions.”
“You mean the Starkhold Suggestions?” Smithson interrupted. They both knew that all of the Guilds were breaking the treaty in one way or another. Breaking the rules wasn’t the problem; getting caught breaking the rules was.
“Technically it’s not against the Starkhold Conventions. It’s a very fine line, but it is clear. The ‘System’ he implanted is not actually an independent System. There are Systems that tame beasts; people will assume he’s got one of those. Besides, keeping a pet raven alive is far, far different from a machine genocide that leads to a galaxy-wide holy war.
“No one appreciates the finer details of history these days.”
Aesculus rolled her eyes and sat back in her chair.
“Even so, I have to hand it to you. Your ability to make lemonade out of lemons remains legendary.”
Smithson grunted at the praise. He was good, and he knew it. He was also compensated exceptionally well for it.
“Having a CES System User on our roster could open up quite a few things for us…” Aesculus mused. “Any hint of the church making a move?”
“Not yet,” Smithson replied. “But they will.”
“As sure as blood runs red,” Aesculus said with a nod. “I don’t even need to say it, but you’re keeping an eye on him, I gather.”
“Of course,” Smithson said. “He’s in good hands for now. I was the bad cop; I pushed him towards a local officer who’ll look after his development.
“He’s a renegade, though, that one. It will be difficult to build his loyalty.”
Aesculus smirked. “No wonder you like him. He’s just like you.”
“He could betray us one day, stab us in the back.”
“I know. But either way, he’ll be useful.”
“True.”
“You’re such a softie,” Aesculus said with a laugh and a shake of her head.
Smithson grunted, this time in irritation. His hand fished around in his pocket for a cigar that he couldn’t light.
“Alright,” Aesculus said with a sigh. “Enough of the fun stuff. Tell me what you learned about who’s going to be attending the symposium in two months…”