Godclads

Chapter 2-10 The Golem

All golems are drones, but not all drones are golems.

The difference lies in their ontology. Drones are pure coldtech: nothing thaumaturgical about them. A reliable fusion reactor. No Soul. No Heavens.

Golems on the other hand, run on thaumic mass and have a Heaven grafted to their reactor. Some of the more sophisticated models have Soul engines, but most designs don’t have the luxury.

Souls are things of scarcity in a post-scarce world. Unless you're a Guilder, simple arithmetic means you got to work with what you got.

-Fallen Heaven: A Treatise on Thaumic Arms and Platforms

2-9

The Golem

There was something absurd about working together with a Reg.

Here he was, not attacking his old enemy, just sitting back while suckling strips of flesh off the neck stump of a pig-headed bruiser. Draus, on the other hand, indulged in another kind of cannibalism, casually looting and mutilating the dead for guns and lootable implants. She was watching him too. She didn’t try to hide it. Her face was on the border between discomfort, hatred, and confusion.

PHANTASMICS RESTORED

RUNNING: [GHOST-LINK]; OSARAI MEMGUARD]; [PHYS-SIM]; [SPECTER]

INACTIVE: [AUTO-SEANCE]

His cog-feed stabilized and his phantasmics loaded. Studying the cognitive distribution flowing between his ghosts, he noted that one amongst the dead hunters must’ve had quite the remarkable memory capacity for him to suddenly be able to support another phantasmic. He would have to sequence that one out when he went to sleep later.

For now, he applied the knowledge that his cognitive defenses were back to his anxiety like a paltry balm. Good thing he was this deep in the Underways. Weren’t that many actual Necros down in Warrens either. Most the Metaminds he pilfered through were used secondhand by the hunters. Explained why some of the Metas were outright insane as well–thought-dissonance was fraying for both minds while synchronization enhanced thinking exponentially.

That made them usable by him. The fact that their wards and phantasmics looked to be counterfeit sequences put together worse than what he already had watered the gardens of his disappointment with another splash of warm piss.

They were going up now. The massive platform rumbled up to the waste recycling beneath a megablock. Or so Draus claimed. She said it was abandoned by the Guilds. Said whatever Syndicate running the district above them owned it now. Which meant that they could have been ascending to meet their death for all he knew.

Thin wisping strands slithered around him. The ghosts were drawing closer again. Through them, he tasted a budding excitement. They were whispering about the slaughter they just witnessed. Ghoul and Reg butchering hunters together. A clip of that was going to flush through the Nether lobbies across the city tomorrow. Left a bad taste in Avo’s mouth. Gaining any kind of notoriety was bad for him, especially considering what he was, and especially considering his trade.

It had been a good twenty minutes of climbing through the battle-warped interior of the elevator silo. The walls were scarred and pockmarked by gunfire and shrapnel; the last vestiges of bygone massacres. Avo wasn’t the first to ascend these paths. Not him. Not Draus. Definitely not the flats. But maybe, just maybe, they would be the ones to finish the ascent.

Would’ve been easier to delude himself with that hope if he knew what Little Vicious was doing. Something about the host’s absence caused a yawning pit to grow in his stomach. She didn’t sound like the reasonable kind. The kind to know when to cut her losses. She had taken his continued survival personally. Avo would bet his half-formed kidneys she’d make another run at them somehow.

He frowned. Didn’t she say there were only supposed to be ten or so hunters left? Well. That was a lie. But what did he expect? For the murderous host to a carnival of snuff to practice the virtue of truth?

+Fuck me, but that slaughter hit the spot,+ one of the spectators whispered in the public lobby. +Not every day you get saved by the Dread Draus herself. Mad fuckin’ half strand. Who the hells crashes Crucibles for fun?+

+We’re watching a Crucible for fun, dumbass.+

+Yeah, but she’s living it. Like I said: mad.+

+Pft. Fuckin’ Regs got a better health plan than we do. She dies, she gets her consciousness ported over to her backup sheathe. We die and that’s it. Donezo. Snuffed. Off to the Big Nothing or looped into a Soul to feed the Heavens for the rest of time.+

Chains of ghosts were circling the platform, but still keeping their distance. Wise. Avo had half a mind to null a few more of them to make a couple more examples but decided the amusement wasn’t worth the cost. He had more ghosts and an increased cog-cap, but the spectators had wards of their own. The best case was mutually assured damage. He needed to conserve what he had for when he needed it.

After finishing his meal, he spent some time going over the dead with Draus. She said that they were something of a “fire brigade.” Syndicate hired rapid-response units. Not really part of the festivities and held in reserve mainly for interfering variables like her or stream-raids from their rivals.

Not a word about why exactly she spent her time crashing Crucibles, though.

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Between bouts of feeding, Avo peeked looks at the Regular, studying her. Earlier, he thought her implants to be advanced. Alphware even. And maybe for a time, the chrome she had was, but the fight earlier made him question the last time she went to the grafters for an upgrade.

She was fast. Plenty strong enough too, but this was nothing compared to what a Regular was supposed to be capable of. The way she fought was practiced and fluid, but ultimately too close to a “lesser” human for his suspicions. He wondered if her evident limitations came with not being her in combat-skin or this vessel just being a diminished sheathe for her to wear as recreation away from her prime body.

Avo frowned at the possibility of her having multiple sheathes. It was hard keeping a consciousness anchored after the destruction of the vessel. Took a lot of ghosts and phantasmics to keep the mind stable–egos tended to disintegrate and lose sanity without enough physical feedback. The number of imps it took to afford that kind of resurrection was somewhere north of owning multiple megablocks.

He stared at Draus again and found her pilfering a grenade from another corpse. Yeah. She didn’t strike him as the wealthy kind. Had all the wrong habits.

Not far, the boy emptied his stomach again. So did his father. Avo could smell the stink of an infected wound from a mile off. Their injuries–though comparatively minor–were raw, reddened with swelling, and bordered by a wall of growing pustules. Right. They were still living on one-point-oh immunes systems, and New Vultun had bombarded itself with enough viruses to kill a flat in seconds over the course of the last two Guild Wars.

Only reason the two weren’t dead yet was because Voidwatch constantly updated the nanoclouds above with new and improved vaccinations to be applied to the public via the nightly downpour.

If they lived to see the surface and made it to taste the midnight rains, they’d make it.

If.

Draus tossed an organic eye at him as she walked by. He caught it and sniffed at the organ, his apprehension and hunger doing battle. “Why?”

“‘Member your kind liking eyes. You different about that too?”

Avo scooped the eye into his mouth and savored it. The way it popped between his fangs was always satisfying. “No,” he said to her when he finished chewing. She gave him the faintest nod.

She had a railgun poking through her coat’s shoulder now, its length protruding from the holographic veil like an iceberg from water. It was probably what the hunters were firing at them earlier. He recalled the name. Valquist G-7. Indeed, he saw the lettering imprinted over the right barrel of the gun.

She handed him a few more bullets for his new shotgun. The drum holding his multi-alloy ammo was about as large as his fist and contained around twelve spikes. Strangely, it had a crude belt knotted around its exterior. Didn’t look like that came with the gun.

“Strap it on,” Draus said. Avo did just that. The weight of the bandolier hung from his shoulder awkwardly, but it was better than holding a bunch of loose bullets. “Be useful for reloading when you need to. Reckon you should keep doing what you were doing with it. It’s thick and sturdy enough to be a blunt instrument. Staying close also keeps you from missing.”

Avo grunted. “Like the recoil.” He noticed that Draus was still staring at him, her expression growing increasingly inscrutable. “Something to say?”

“Yeah,” Draus said, though the dryness in her drawl made her sound on edge. Uncertain. “You… uh…that trick with the Specter you pulled. Using your wards as a weapon. That wasn’t a normal tactic. Stranger thing is, I’ve seen it done more than once before in the field.”

Avo grunted. “Not a good idea. Unplanned. Desperate. Sloppy.”

“And the sign of someone who actually knows how to jack.” It really didn’t sound much like a compliment coming from her. She folded her arms. “You’re ain’t screaming and trying to kill everything that moves. You can talk, though you don’t cotton to using anything more than simple sentences. And, more’n that, you don’t really seem all that surprised about where you are and why you’re here neither.”

She leaned in closer, almost conspiratorially. “You weren’t spoofing my memories when you said you were a Jacker, were you?”

“No. Surprised you don’t know. Don’t learn this in Guilder academy, Dread Draus?”

Draus laughed, her war-stressed face wrinkling at the forehead. Avo glared. He wasn’t aware that he said something funny. “You’re a real sensitive sort for a ghoul, you know that?”

“Sensitive?” Well. That was new. No one called him sensitive before.

“Thin-skinned is what I’m calling you,” Draus said.

“No,” Avo said, correcting her. “Not thin-skinned. Just annoyed. Just tired.” He sighed. He hated small talk–whatever this was. He wanted to go back to waiting in silence on his own, watching her from a distance. Far enough that he could ward-bash her mind with a Specter if he had to. At this range, he wouldn’t even get a fraction of a second. "Conversation is pointless. Anything else?"

Draus shot him a flat stare. “Jaus, ghoulie, you sure do sound like my old team captain, know that? He liked telling me to piss off too."

“He also a Necro?”

“No. He was also a half-strand though,” Draus said. “He would–hells, he wouldn’t like you. Seeing as one of your Low Masters nulled him. Left him a drooling vegetable.”

Your Low Masters. The beast coiled inside him, tremoring with fury. No. Not his masters. Not for years. And not anymore. “Shame. Highflame couldn’t put his mind back together? Hm. No. Not one of their specialties. Ori-Thaum maybe. But they wouldn’t fix him. Not for Highflame.”

She bared her teeth at him, a mocking grin spreading over her features. “Like I said: thin-skinned.” But there was no amusement behind her eyes. Instead, a spark of something more vicious bled out from her glare. One of her fingers twitched. Even hurt as she was, Avo had little doubt she could pull him apart in seconds. She had three more guns hanging from her as compared to before. He thought he saw her take a knife from a body. Good sense told him to look away. Let it go.

The beast wanted its shot at her.

Here they were, ghoul and Regular raring to kill each other again. Now, the scene wasn’t so absurd. Now, it was just natural.

A forced laugh broke the tension. Both Avo and Draus spun to glare at the father, who was pointing at them. He forced himself to laugh, his son looking confused as well. Sweat rolled down the man’s forehead as he eyed Avo with that same knowing look he did earlier. The man might’ve been putting on an act. Avo wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Or maybe he finally cracked.

A pity. If he was truly insane maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Avo ate him. Could that be considered a merciful action?

“It–it,” the father slapped his leg. He was no actor. It looked forced. Several hundred spectators were sarcastically making up worst-performance awards to bestow upon the man. “It is like he is a cat. And–and you are owner. You know? When you fed him eyes.”

Avo and Draus looked at each other.

“Cat,” Avo said, lamely.

“I ain’t the type to own a ghoul, consang,” Draus said, voice tinged with disgust. “Hells, I can’t think of someone who even wants–” She trailed off, eyes narrowing at Avo. “You know what, nevermind?”

Avo shrugged. “Was owned. Got adopted. Technically official property of Walton Wardcrafts LLC.” He still didn’t fully want to reveal the depths of his relationship with Walton, but something in him had come loose. He bit back a grimace of annoyance when he considered that her giving him some eyes she found might’ve been the cause for this minor revelation.

Draus’ head tilted in a brief nod before she froze. Her eyes snapped back over to him. “Adopted?”

Avo grunted.

She stared. “I mean…how the hells does that happen? Adopt a ghoul. What, they pick you off the Warrens after the war? Figured you’d make a good pet or something? Teach you to be a Necro for the fun of it?”

“He managed,” Avo said. Draus just kept staring at him. Apparently, it strained her mind to think of someone actually wanting a ghoul.

Her lip twitched in a momentary snarl of confusion. “Must’ve…been a special guy.”

“He was,” Avo said. “Didn’t matter to the rash.”

The undercurrent of building confusion went out of Draus. Suddenly, she was quiet. “Yeah. Know how that is. The rash. It, uh. Anyway. This Walton taught you how to be a Necro too, yeah.”

Avo shrugged. “It’s a trade. A good one. Taught the skill to me. Did dives together. Got paid. Usual story.”

“Usual story,” Draus said, shaking her head. “Maybe for a citizen. Hells. Maybe even for some of the FATELESS. You? You’re not…you’re not a person. Saw how the Low Masters adjusted your psychology. You ain’t supposed to be capable of this.”

“This?”

“Being calm for one,’ Draus said. “Or even thinkin’, really. Every ghoul I met, I had to kill. Every. Single. One. During the war. After. It didn’t make no difference. All a ghoul wants is to hurt. To brutalize. To eat. What’s left is given over to spreading their blood and making new nests. Then, I come down here on one of my runs and there you are…” she shook her head. She looked at the father and boy again. “Why didn’t you eat them?”

“Told you before: diet.”

“See. You being a smartass is part of why I didn’t take your head off earlier. Real novel to get from a ghoul. It’s also pretty godsdamned annoying when I want a straight answer.”

Avo mocking tried mimicking her facial twitches while she was contemplating the fact of his adoption earlier. She flicked a rude gesture at him. Worth it. “Not joke,” Avo said. “I have a diet.”

Draus leaned back, letting her arms fall back to her sides. Her posture shifted now, breaking from defensive to exasperated. “You gotta be shittin’ me,” Draus said with a sigh. “I…explain your diet.”

“Don’t eat choiceless. Feed from hubris instead.”

She stared at him. The pillar was beginning to make a groaning noise. The section they were passing was coated in rust. Sounded like no one had made it this far in a while. “Gonna have to be a bit clearer about that, ghoulie. I didn’t specialize in the study of no cannibalistic ethics.”

“People who hurt others. Liars. Murders. People who work in sales. Lawyers.”

Her staring intensified.

“Sales and lawyers were jokes,” Avo said.

“Ain’t that a shame,” Draus replied dryly. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and sighed, exasperated. “You’re a real fuckin’ weird one, ghoulie. Hard to tell a lot of things about you. Got nothing but more questions when it comes to you.”

He knew how that felt. Felt that way since he got resurrected. Twice. Too many questions. No answers in sight. How did he get to the Maw? Who killed him? And how was he coming back to life?

Draus’ lips pursed into a thin line as she was about to say something else.

Then, from beneath their feet, a dull shrieking rose, the sound loud enough to be heard past the platform despite being muffled. Draus went expressionless and looked down. Avo, contrarily, looked up. They weren’t far from the top. He could see the ceiling growing closer.

A curve of folded metal bent over along the edge. Avo realized those were the gates leading into the megablock. It looked like something inhumanly powerful had forced them open manually. Considering how mangled the alloy looked, he wondered just what could have crumpled a thirty-foot-high gateway like tin.

GHOSTLINK REQUEST INCOMING - ACCEPT?

LINK CONFIRMED

SYNCING…

SYNCED

Draus had connected to him and he accepted without hesitation this time. Through her eyes, he could see her cog-feed scanning down. One of her battle scanners had something bright marked. “Sixty feet to arrival,” she said, more for the father and the boy than Avo. “Get to the edge. Stay there and make for the door fast as we arrive. Got less than a minute of climb-time left. Get ready to run.”

The father nodded and pulled the boy over, out of the way

The screaming of steel grew louder. The brightness marked by her battle scanner drew closer. Something within Avo yearned to grasp for it, to take it into himself. The way the radiance shone gave off a slowly diminishing resonance. It didn’t look much like a fire, but a reflection that somehow possessed a metaphysical vibrancy.

Through the exit hole he made with his shotgun, the heavy scent of blood slithered up Avo’s nostrils; the types were mixed but the volume was intense. The only times he tasted so much intermixed blood together of such quantities was in illegal grafter clinics.

He cast his Specter down through the platform. Joined to his mind, Draus dove along with him. Slipping past the material world, he guided his perception five feet, then ten. For a moment, all there was around them were the floating ghosts and the vast nothingness before them. In their mind’s eye, it was like they were in the depths of the ocean, waiting for something colossal to appear.

Then, the faintest of phantasmal chains flashed. A thread of ghostly matter. A spill of flowing thought. Something was wrong. A single strand of thought didn’t manifest on its own. And Avo couldn’t recall seeing the Nether so silent in a spherical expanse before either. Then, he tasted the spill of thoughtstuff. A familiar rage greeted him, its taste only recently missing after boiling this very silo.

Little Vicious.

He began pulling back.

Draus turned to look at him. “Sit-rep?”

“Vicious,” Avo said. “It’s her. I’m pulling–”

GHOSTLINK LOST

A pulsing wave tore through the Nether, smashing down against his wards like a tidal wave and snapping his link with Draus. They both grimaced as a spike of pain throbbed through their skulls. Not far, both father and son cried out, their trains of thought viciously wrenched loose from their minds, surface thoughts scalped away by the waves of a hostile detonation.

Around them, the Spectators and ghosts were cast out like bodies in the riptide.

Someone just detonated a thoughtwave bomb. Someone was trying to suppress the Nether.

Someone was deliberately going above and beyond to counter him.

Avo hissed, trying to get the attention of the father and the son. They were sweating, clutching each other as they coughed and shivered. They turned, eyes blearily, confused as to where they were. Overhead, the ceiling descended. The folded gates held out its bent frame toward them, as if in a welcoming gesture.

Next to the central pillar of the elevator, a ten-foot lance of flowing red punched through countless feet of steel like there was nothing in its way.

Draus spun. Her wrists flashed. Her micro-munitions struck and splattered the lance, smearing it across the walls. In an instant, the red came back together and reformed into a spinning hyper-thin lattice of whips. The new constructs slashed out for them.

Avo ducked. He felt something chip an inch out his shoulder. Draus blinked, covering the father with her body. Just in time for one of the tendrils to slice a clean line deep through her lower back. Her holocoat fizzled and popped. Error codes were raining down along her body now. Still, she betrayed no pain, only turning to cup a hand to her wound.

Then, as fast as it came, the haemokinetic constructs sank back out from the new punctures it made through the platform.

The boy whimpered. The father muttered a choking prayer.

“Almost there,” Draus said. Her breathing was controlled. Smooth. Avo could smell her hurt better than even last time. “We arrive, we run like hell.”

“What is attacking us?” the father asked.

“Golem, I think,” Draus said. She gave a laugh of disbelief. “How the fuck do they got a golem? I don’t know–”

The platform beneath them thundered and bent as something heavy slammed into it. Avo stumbled. A shrill, haunting laugh filled the air.

+You didn’t think it would be that easy, did ya?+ Little Vicious returned, her voice booming loud, announcing the climatic moment to the evening's festivities. Something tore into the underside of the platform. Its alloy began to wail. The edges began to bend. Immediately, Avo heard a new name being chanted by the returning spectators.

+Golem! Golem! Golem!+

+You smashed up my show, Reg. That wasn’t polite. That was pretty fuckin’ mean, actually. You know how long it took for us to find the proper candidates for this event? You want to know what it took to prepare the venue? How many imps it cost?+ Little Vicious paused, taking in the jeers from some of the audience, decrying her as a cheater. She sneered with laughter. +Still nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you and the ghoulie. This was my big night. My day off. And you fucked it. You two absolute half-strands fucked it. I’m gonna…oh, I’m gonna enjoy hurting the two of you!+

A surge of force bent the platform over from one of its edges, the impact sending Avo bouncing off a wall. Two new crimson appendages punched clean through where he stood, mauling the pillar, and tearing through it from below. A loud grinding crash rumbled. A gear was flung loose, descending toward Avo.

The platform screamed like it was dying, making the final few feet of its ascent just in time.

On his hands and feet, Avo scrambled toward the gate. Ahead, Draus was shepherding the two flats. And him. It struck him then that she could have run off at any time. She was more than fast enough.

+You shits better start running,+Bubbling flows of blood flooded through the rents of the platform sawing it apart with hyper-thin lines of razor floss. Through the rents beneath him, Avo caught sight of his unseen pursuer. It resembled the chimeric union between a blood-forged serpent layered with countless groping arms and a spear-tipped spire. Stumbling past the crack, Avo heard his Metamind wailing in his stead. His cog-feed flickered, blunting the damage.

He just beheld something unnatural–a defiling of the natural order. Below, a thaumaturgically constructed behemoth coated in ever-flowing rivulets of blood was tearing through metal to get at him. A golem, something both machine and miracle–a weapon platform infused with the partial corpse of a god.

Without a beat, Avo sprinted after his group already fleeing past the lip of the gate in the megablock. Part of him wanted to stay. Fight. Drink the freely offered blood. As delicious as the thought was, his legs kept moving. The beast didn’t whine much about that. Not even it liked its odds against a god.

“Sangeist,” Draus said, spitting information as fast as she could deliver. “Stormtree golem. Its blood mimics the properties of the solid matter it deconstructs. Don’t let it close. It’ll tear us right up.”

Avo checked his phantasmics again and considered his options there. Little Vicious probably had far superior wards than the hunters she employed, but more than that, she was actively using the thoughtwave bomb to suppress him. Part of him was flattered. The rest of him was occupied with the fact that he couldn’t even pull a ward-bash on her now. No constructs he sent beyond the sanctuary of his wards would be stable anyway should the bomb go off again.

He wondered if there was any way he could have engaged even if he had his complete kit. Not easily, was his conclusion. He would’ve needed an opening. Some subterfuge. Maybe Walton could. But Avo wasn’t Walton. No one was Walton.

“I got point,” Draus said, trying to keep her footing as they fled deeper into the depths of the block. “Ghoul. Take the rear.” She shot a look at the father and the son. They were haggard. Sickened. Every step they took was a stumble. Behind, Avo watched as more spider-like limbs cleaved through the platform, cupping it in on itself as it twisted the pillar into a knarled knot with deliberate ease. “We’re close, consangs. Promise. You’ll be seein’ the city soon.”

“Nu Volton,” the boy tried to say, his breath coming labored as he bounced in the arms of his spriting father.

“Yeah, kid,” Draus said, rounding the corner as stacks of storage units came into sight. “New Vultun.”