FOUR: FOREIGN BODIES

1.

You're floating out astray This cold and lifeless body At this moment what you taste Is the key to your evolving – Xenon, by Deftones

> okay. so what the fuck am i doing?

Sekri, doing a mad dash out of the building, is clearly fucking panicking. The fur around him is sticking up straight, the sensation of goosebumps nearly blocking his advance. But this is no time for that, as there is no time for anything, nearly by definition.

< ok so the pod < its generally used not just as an apparatus for rest, but it also prevents decay < if you can go fast as fuck – and i do mean fast as fuck- > is the fast i am going sufficiently fuckening? < sure buddy < anyways you need to take the pod with you back there < then hook her up to it > what? how?!? it is a giant heavy slab < thats what im trying to figure out bub < since the way im seeing it youre fucked six ways from sunday > how confidence inspiring of you. < right well i dont have many inspiring platitudes

2.

They're delusions, don't deny it Don't make this out to be something about you Go waste your breath somewhere to someone new – Doomed User, by Deftones

Marka sits alone in his office, flames emanating from his form, hunched in front of a computer. The prior conversation is eating at him a bit, though there truthfully is not much to it: it's necessary, unfortunately, at the very least for standards befitting a Coherence officer. His thoughts begin to blend, the Understandings of the entity he tracks comprising comedy and horror alike, tragedy and love. But that's not why he's here. His thoughts don't matter, it is merely the Understandings that do. By all means, there is procedure for this, but given what he knows about Amry's predicament there is unlikely to be time for it. He needs to track down this Concept, and he needs to do it now. Throughout every conversation, he's been compiling knowledge. Orange. CLICK! E-MEOW. CLICK! SNAP! CLICK! Comedic. CLICK! Lasagna. SNAP! The list goes on, stretching roughly as far as is perceptible, each representing an incredibly banal aspect of the entity he seeks to reclaim. Each one a constituent part of the whole, each one a fully functioning Understanding in its own right. Its entirety unable to be processed, its whole being intangible, but these components being easy. And every CLICK! is an illumination, one deep enough that it plunges into the sea behind reality. He closes his eyes.

3.

In a new realm Catch this dream on film You might just get used to it And you'll smile, smile, and dive deep – (L)MIRL, by Deftones

Important things rarely seem to happen at opportune times, ones where there can be a moment of reprieve, where there can be an easy solution. Life rarely tends to work like a narrative, and Amry knows this well, having been through inopportune times of her own: picturesque moments rarely seem to happen to her. But she can't fucking die here. She watches Sekri dash out of the room, likely trying to find something to put her in stasis for a bit. She is alone in a pile of toys, reflective of her larval state, though lucid enough to piece together the dots. Sekri went to talk to Marka, of course, and Marka denied her needs. Again. Marka proceeded to go trace down this entity's Concept, and Sekri went to find something to go help. So what does she do? Is she doomed to irrelevance? Which is when she has an idea. Her form may be decaying, but her Concept remains lucid, at the very least until her form is removed entirely. She has one place that she can retreat to, and only one place, unable to move her voidform out of the pile of feline plush toys. So she closes her eyes.

4.

(Marka) wakes up. He is not tangible, nor is he perceptible. But he knows he exists, and he knows where he is. The space around him is as abstract as his own form: the Inclinosphere is vast, after all, infinitely extending on every end. It warps and bends around him, his Concept itself becoming one of its parts. Solar sigils manifest around the space, twenty-two intersecting lines forming familiar features, each line an Understanding. The irrelevancies comprise the infinity of the space, everything else, everything unknown. But what is known illuminates around him. A CLICK! for a light, to set flame to a Jungian cigarette.

The illuminated blue lines around him bend and twist, shifting dimensionality repeatedly, spiraling towards a final nexus of intent, a blight that needs to be remedied; to be recontextualized. (Marka) knows what Marka needs, his parenthetical self subservient to the non-parenthetical, the Concept a doll of the form to be articulated on its inelastic joints. To even call (Marka) a “he” is itself a misnomer: he is nothing but a puppet, a perception of the greater whole. But if he is a puppet, he is a useful one, a necessary one — an element of the necessary symbiosis of his species with the sea of information, a network of blood vessels pumping through the trains of thought. It is a natural extension of his biology to him, an inescapable fact of life as true as any tautology, a vile truth of the universe he inhabits without his consent. He has a job to do, and it is very simple. He is to see where the Understandings meet, find the entity's Concept, and denote coordinates. It is a simple task, in truth, one that he has done many times — it is the job of a Coherence officer to traverse the Inclinosphere, not to interfere with it. He is a passive observer, a voyeur, one that inhabits this space but refuses to engage with it beyond mere sight — to understand, to acknowledge, but never to reason. The reasoning is beyond him. To describe the act of his movement is difficult — there is no language that would suffice to fully capture the nature of it, a nonexistent form traveling through a fully abstract space. Arguably, the space moves around him, and not the other way around, depending on your frame of reference. It is arguable that he even moves at all, because how can you do kinematics on an object with no mass? But description is, unfortunately, necessary. (Marka) swims through the Inclinosphere, attempting to find where the twain shall meet.

5.

Sekri runs through the halls of the offices, trying to retrace his steps. For speed and also coolness points, he gets onto the rail of the stairs and rides on it, placing him on the surface in record time.

< that was sick as fuck > i do not give a shit it is faster < ok but it was still sick as fuck

Wait a blink, Sekri thinks to himself. He can only get out of here so fast, and the complex he is in is vast compared to his size. Riding rails can only do so much, but with the amount of entities that are in here, surely- Sekri runs back up the stairs.

< where the fuck are you going?!? > if there is endless entities, then there is a wheel-form < oh no

Upon getting back into the same room as Amry, Sekri does a mad dash through all the storage, laying waste to the shelves. He finds a curved board with wheels attached to its bottom, metal axles bolted to the surface, the same feline representative sigils on its bottom.

< sekri please dont do something fucking stupid

He gets on and starts riding it. At first it goes slowly, but the adrenaline gets to him as his lower paws start to propel him faster, faster, and faster. He does a sharp turn out of the room, hops onto the stairs, and then grinds on its rail with the wheel-board, hitting the surface with near-perfect precision and still going. Elsie has no idea how to feel about this. I had no idea Sekri could do that, she thinks to herself. When the fuck did he learn that?

< what the fuck > you said we needed to get the pod out > this should do double time, yes? < when did you learn to do this

6.

(Amry) wakes up. Immediately, she takes stock of her surroundings. She is still extant, which decidedly is a positive thing for her, though she has no form here, nothing that could be called even a voidform. Her voidform, of course, was merely a reflection of the contradiction belittling her, the one that slowly began to unsynthesize itself, ripping apart thesis and antithesis into separate points as if undoing a seam. She has very little time left here, but she has more time than the alternative, the one where her form decays emptily, a fate befitting her title. She's scared, above all else. Truthfully, that emotion seems to be taking precedence, as it seeps outside in within her. This is it. This is where she goes to die. At least it will be a more comfortable death, one that she spends not entirely alone, but with the presence of another. Wait. How does she know that there is another here? This thought begins to scream at her, but the answer is quite simple, she thinks: obviously Marka is seeking the Concept of the entity she needed. Truthfully, any entity would do, but they are very fickle to locate: one needs to construct a full table of Understandings in order to even denote any coordinates. The job of a Coherence officer is not an admirable one, and certainly one that (Amry) nor Amry would ever want. She has no formal training in Concept detection, regardless. It would be a lost cause to try and locate something that she does not fully know, one that she only sees reflections of. But then an idea pops into her head. She does not Understand the Overload-class entity she seeks to subsume, of course. She has no concept of it beyond the presence of plush toys and strange objects, orange things carrying signals throughout a barren world, though the Inclinosphere is much more barren in comparison. Signals, though, are all she needs: she needs not to Understand the entity. She needs merely to Understand a beacon. She needs to Understand someone who is going there.

7.

> it is unimportant, truthfully > the point is that we need to get out of here fast > and getting back in will be an issue for the future < ok that makes a surprising amount of sense

Sekri does a sharp 90 degree turn down the hall, passing by a large painting of what appears to be someone dressed in near-regal robes. To the right of that someone is, once again, the tell-tale signs of the entity they have been tracing, clearly meant to be revered: it is an oil painting, after all, nearly comically extravagant in its framing and placement.

< where the fuck are you actually genesis point < what a strange genesis > tell me about it. anyway it is not important < its important insofar that it lets me get this fucking report done < ive been at this for days and ive just been waiting on any word from you < and now here you are, riding around on a wheel-board after shit goes down < what gives? > not. important. ok fine so basically marka is a bitch < wow youre sure acting strange > would you not act strange in this situation? < right > we needed an entity for amry to sustain herself and yet here we are > he wanted to submit it to culture < well hes got to at least send it through the arbiter > yes, but we do not have time to send it through the arbiter. < ok well its standard procedure so i do kind of get where hes coming from < but i get the point i guess < its decay or trouble < you gotta take trouble

8.

(Amry) begins to think, think harder than she ever has before, racking her own memory to try and unfold the narrative of her meeting. If she can just track down Marka — er, (Marka) — she can make this work. She can get to the entity before him. She can be free from this, she can subsume an Overload, enough energy to keep her going for much longer. But she needs to Understand him. She needs to get him. So Amry recalls to herself, and starts swimming belaboredly through the Inclinosphere.

It was many ticks ago, not far enough to be the before-times but certainly closer to a larval awakening or subsumption-driven reawakening. I was sitting alone and reading some novels I had gotten from Records — ah, yes, right, it was before I had seen much in the way of fiction, unable to comprehend the subtleties of grey boy yaoi. The tome I read was black and white and red all over, and it received pretty mixed reviews! It was three separate stories, each intertwined against each other, hinging on a major decision point that the reader had to make on their own. At least that's what the reader thought, of course: all the choices were already made ahead of time. In truth, I can't seem to remember anything that happens in it. I suppose it's not particularly important. I remember enjoying it a lot, though. I was sitting alone in the Records library, full of readily available ideas, when someone came up to me. I cannot remember what he looked like then, in truth — significantly different from the flame-ridden form he inhabits now. I had put down my book, and then we talked about... Something. I can't remember, it was too long ago, it has faded between my tendrils, slipping away from me. I remember the conversation being quite pleasurable, though! We exchanged subtle cues in our messaging, when I talked about the inexplicable tome I was failing to comprehend in full and he talked about his novels about vampirism and death and dying, though those words are only truly permitted in a fictional context. Utterable, though, which is somewhat surprising, though I suppose preservation of the acquired fiction is important. When we sat down about it, we actually enjoyed many of the same themes! The concepts of romance, of star-crossed lovers being tied together by a bond of fate. He was positively beaming, really, it was kind of charming. I had so much hope then, and we started talking more and more, largely about the types of stories we enjoyed reading. I think I had more hope back then. Over time, he would end up growing very different, though I would remain the same. Dispersal does that, I suppose. I never really got it.

CLICK!

9.

In truth, the process is itself rather boring, banal in its simplicity, as if connecting dots on a sheet of paper with no ingenuity required. Very little room is left to interpretation here: you take the lines illuminated from the Understandings and you find where they meet. Nothing too special about that, really, though the dimensionality and curvature means that there is very little tolerance for non-comprehension. You either Understand, or you do not. Simple as. (Marka) is excruciatingly aware of this, given the amount of time that he has already spent moving down one of these lines, tracing it until it begins to intersect with something. His life, if you can call it that, is very minimal, in earnest: it is one where he is told to do this, to trace lines to their conclusion, and that is it. Nothing of note has ever happened here; it is a perfectly still system, all the cogs in their right place, the flesh one with the machine. Which is why when (Marka) hears a CLICK!, he does a double take. Through him pierces a beam of light, one not of his own color but of a green, almost turquoise hue. To say it is piercing is itself somewhat inaccurate, due to the lack of form in this space, but liberties have to be taken. (Marka) thinks to himself what this could mean, given that there are not meant to be multiple interlopers in the Inclinosphere. Communication is difficult, thoughts begin to blend — if too much time is spent with a team, it is likely that two could become one. Whoever must be here needs to be desperate, performing actions not in Cognis's whim. ...Amry? As (Marka) considers this, a profound dread begins to seep into him, an inescapable fear for both him and her. Was Marka's action correct? Surely it must be, as he is an inescapable arm of Cognis, a profoundly loyal officer to the division of Coherence, the gem of the Ministry of Information; and yet he has failed to consider that it could hurt her. He did try to warn her, after all. That is all that he could do. Anything else is in her tendrils. No matter. If there is to be a crisis of faith, it is to be explored in the future, not the present. An interloper is after him, after all. Unfortunately for them, this just became a race against an atemporal clock.

10.

Sekri stands in front of the vessel, wheel-board tucked away. He runs into it as fast as he possibly can, and does a bee-line for Amry's room, getting to the door in near-record speed due to his familiarity with the area. Locked. FUCK.

< oh no > what? < ok so youre going to go get your pod, right? > right < well so theres a minor issue with that < you havent learned this and i could be at risk of nda, but i dont really give a shit right now < the pods are custom made < its not like you can just sub them in < you can either break down that door or you can try to use your pod < either one seems risky > door it is < how are you even going to do that > watch and learn.

Sekri runs to his room. He looks around for something large, something heavy, something that could hammer something down. Then he gets an idea. He takes his entire bookshelf, dumps all the books out at a ferocious pace, and loads it up onto the wheel-board. He takes a bunch of the books, now sprawled across the floor, and jams them back into their locations. He then rummages through his drawers, and grabs a bunch of regular old tape.

< ok but how the fuck are you propelling th-

Sekri grabs a standard issue fire extinguisher from the halls, places it on top of the bookshelf, and tapes the entire thing together, adding some tape to make sure the weight of the books don't fall out. A fire extinguisher is basically a miniature rocket engine, he thinks to himself — surely enough to jam this straight into the door.

> don't fucking doubt me. < wow youre scary like this

He pushes the entire heavy apparatus over to the hallway and places it a few paces away from Amry's door, ready to fire. Wordlessly, he pulls the pin. The foam blasts straight into him, coating him in it, but the propulsion works: the wheels start turning, then faster, then faster, until- CRASH! The door falls down. Books fall everywhere in Amry's room — “DUDGEONS AND DRAGOONS”, “KNIVES IN THE LIGHT”, “LEGIONS (NORMAL)” hitting the floor and walls with ridiculous force, splattering everywhere. The bookshelf compresses up against the wall, leaving splinters flying every single which way, all over the room, stabbing a couple of Amry's plush toys in the eye. If she survives this, she's going to be severely pissed about the cleanup. But at least she has a chance.

< holy shit > holy shit.

11.

Time passed. We were roughly of age for conscription into Cognis, to become servants of the whims. We had been chosen by the Arbiter himself, in fact — we were assigned titles of Emptiness and Pertinence, due to the nature of our tastes, almost diametrically opposite and yet glued together. We had been talking much at that point, and we never seemed to run out of things to discuss — it all felt so wonderful, honestly. Being new in the Ministry of Information left very few pickings for us. Marka, of course, was obsessed with climbing the ladder: he learnt of the mission and he devoted himself to it in full. I was initially inclined to do the same, but, ah – we were both assigned to Retrieval, as is standard, and began going on missions to find Concepts worth dispersing, ones that ideally were helpful. Of course, we did not directly get the fruits of our labor, the Ministry of Dispersal made sure of that. But our work was rewarded, mostly. It was on a planet that I cannot quite recall, but we arrived to sapient beings, ones that were surprised by us. They seemed to be obsessed with us, as if we were their first touch of the extra-cosmic. The strangest thing is that their fiction seemed to depict us as being much more hostile than we actually were — in reality, that mission ended up being one more strictly of diplomacy than anything else, we negotiated the removal of a Concept that they would not miss. I think, at least. That's how I recall it. They seemed perplexed, though. They kept talking about the spectacle of aliens and how we failed to be it. They showed us a moving picture of aliens arriving, their vessels being significantly more sophisticated than ours, their forms being more consistent, and gas emanating from their ramps. After much petitioning, we managed to readjust our vessels to fit their conceptions, the fog-machines being installed for the sake of spectacle. It was always about spectacle, especially to him, and to Cognis as a whole.

CLICK!

12.

No time to waste, Sekri thinks to himself. He starts undoing the tape, which is surprisingly easy given that the bookshelf imploded. He slips the wheel-board out from underneath the shelf, the slack induced in the tape letting him just lift it off and remove it from the bottom. Unfortunately, it messes up the logos on the bottom, but he doesn't especially care. Instead, he diverts his attention to the pod. It's heavy, of course, and it's going to require some serious finagling to get it up onto the board. Of course, given the ridiculous solution before, this is going to require something similarly inane- Oh, okay, he just lifts it onto the board. That's fine. Sekri tapes it back to the board, just for security's sake, and starts rolling it out. The pod's sleek, black exterior clashes distinctly with all the grey tape on it, but once again, the clean-up can come later, there's a woman who's larvally regressed and fucking dying.

< ok do you have some jumper cables > i have no clue < computer room

Sekri once again runs down the same hallway, dashing into the computer room. Of course, there's someone there who isn't very happy to see him bloodshot and with nothing to lose.

HOLY SHIT YOU CHUCKLEFUCK WHAT ARE YOU DOING I HEARD CRASH THUD BOOM

“no time, i need jumper cables“

THIRD DRAWER DOWN ON THE RIGHT STORAGE CONTAINER WHAT ARE YOU DOING ANYWAY

Sekri starts rummaging through the drawers, grabbing as many cables as he can possibly find. Their ends are strange — neither have any metal, but instead they are both fleshy, as if you could stretch them around something, a rubber band created for connection. Regardless, this isn't important to Sekri, because that's normal to him. He grabs about ten of them and then dashes out of the room, heads back to Amry's, and pushes the pod down the halls, to the front, and lets it fall down the ramp, as it coasts onto the blackness coating the planet's surface. From the background, he hears the computer go OH OK JUST LEAVE THEN BITCH. He does not have time for this.

13.

I suppose the first sign of trouble would have been when we were both in Retrieval still. As Retrieval officers, we were not expendable, but certainly less than protected — and that showed when Marka began to decay. He had not subsumed any Concepts in many a tick, and he was starting to get more difficult to talk to, more difficult to engage with, more difficult to talk about. Not by any shame on my part, it was merely the decay speaking for him, unable to be ignored or un-ignored. The Dispersal notice came only a few blinks before he would have faded. I was cradling his voidform in my lap, my own form being... describable, then, as he started to fade. His messaging became more and more incoherent, less consistent, even. He had told me many things about how he was afraid, because it was his first subsumption. There is one thing he said that is ever-present, that I do not think I could forget. “i do not want to lose you”, I said. His response was strange. “I don't think you have a choice.“ It was a strange perspective on it, to me. I always desperately wanted to retain my Self, the Self I knew to be me, and so I made efforts to cultivate it. But he seemed resigned to the subsumption changing him whole, making him into an arm that Cognis could articulate freely. Decay never seems to happen at opportune times. I know that well now. Marka closed his eyes, and he was never the same. He woke up and I could instantly tell that something was wrong: he had lost the glint formerly in his eyes. I was never attracted to his body, for it is transient, but it was so different. I knew not what to do. But there he stood, all the burning, all the blood, all the trees.

CLICK!

14.

(Marka) can't seem to articulate his emotions. This has become a relatively standard occurrence for him, given the generalized repression, but it especially hurts now. Because something hurts, and he can't seem to put his finger on it. He can't even tell where the thoughts are coming from, but he can't seem to stop getting flashbacks. It's as if the cosmos itself is telling him that he's wrong. That, or the interloper is desperately attempting to remind him of something, which is more likely, given that the interloper is the cosmos here, as is he: there never was a distinction, an intentional flaw. He once again wonders if the interloper is (Amry), but he opts not to think about it. Not because he believes it is not, but because he doesn't want to believe it is. (Amry)'s thoughts seeping into his... it might cloud his judgment, or at the worst, cause failure of the primary objective, his only purpose in the present moment. But he does feel guilt. A profound guilt, a seeping pain running through every inch of Marka's form, (his) thoughts impacting his. (Marka) decides that it's best to get out of here as fast as possible if this is to continue. So he keeps swimming.

15.

< ok so whats the whole deal with all of this < this place is so weird > we initially thought it to be an altar > but it is a place for making jokes < what > right? it is so strange for an overload to be like this

Sekri pushes the pod-wheel-board down the blackness into the building as fast as he can, running through the halls yet again.

> so what do i do with the pod once i have it < ok so youre going to have to take the usual restraints < then link them to amrys form with the jumper cables < once you do that turn the thing on and you should be able to make stasis happen what do you mean you think? < i mean its this or decay, i figured youd want to try whatever you can < i didnt want to tell you it might not work because then you probably wouldnt rush as hard < nothings going to be 100% here, sekri < we make our own choices, we pay our own prices < and amry certainly made a choice > i want to get mad at you for saying that. > but i do not think i have the time. < hence why i said it now < besides, im being helpful, theres no issue

After maneuvering significantly more hallways mid-conversation, twisting and turning, Sekri comes across a minor major issue. Before him lies a set of stairs, the same one he grinded down earlier. Except this time, he has to go up it, with a giant heavy pod on a wheel-board to boot. Someone once warned Sekri about stairs, but he can't seem to remember who.

< fuck

16.

It got worse ever since then, a time where he has been surviving on smaller Concepts, ones that refuse to change him dearly. My own comments on how I miss the past him are not helpful to him, so I try and avoid them. But the person before me was not the one I knew — he was bitter, crass at times, as if he had a delusion of grandeur that itself was grand. In a sense, we were growing apart, trees branching infinitely, a multi-headed snake. My actions did not help, of course. I was so obsessed with Retrieval that I was willing to survive on the pittance provided to me by the Ministry of Dispersal and the occasional Culture candidate. It was so wonderful, though! I loved seeing foreign bodies, foreign lands, foreign languages; it was a noble endeavor to me, possibly one of the few good things that the whims of Cognis truly provided. But my absence did not cultivate a good relationship. Marka, on the other hand, was even more ruthless than before, endlessly climbing the ladder until he became the head of the Coherence division, the person to explore the Inclinosphere, the person to Understand. He truly was the one who ended up determining what was Pertinent. The increased stature certainly did not help with his newfound inflated ego, one that haunts me even now. I just wish I could revisit those times, but the more time I spend thinking about them, the more they fade. It is kind of pathetic of me, is it not? I yearn for someone who never existed, for he was always like this, and I am merely deluding myself. ≈:[

CLICK!

17.

> ok surely there has to be something i can do here

Sekri runs back up the stairs to the room with all the entities, including the plush pile. He runs through every opportunity in his head, every possible thing he can conceive of, his thoughts becoming an innate extension of his biology. He needs something elastic, something like a slingshot, something like... Sekri notices a black object between two of the shelving units. It has the same face as everything else on the center of the blackness, but it is surrounded by a rim of orange, and appears to have metal components connecting the rim and the blackness. It almost seems to have the same structure as a table, though somehow elastic — as if someone could bounce up and down on it indefinitely. That should work, he thinks. Propellant isn't needed as long as he can nail the Athletics check, which is exactly what he thinks to himself, because he's a huge nerd. He grabs the elastic-spring and runs down the stairs with it.

< what does that even do

He doesn't respond. Instead, he lays the elastic-spring on the stairs, wheels the pod-wheel-board onto it, and then pushes the entire apparatus onto the floor. He lays it out, and then he starts... jumping. Repeatedly. Up, down, up, down, up, down. With every jump, his energy goes into the pod-wheel-board, it flying up and down opposite him. He better have enough stamina to pull this off. Sekri attempts to do the coolest maneuver his form has ever possibly pulled off. When the pod-wheel-board has reached its bouncing peak, he does a acrobatic fucking pirouette off its side, landing down on the floor and lifting it up so that the next bounce of the pod lands it straight on top of the stairs. Or that's what he'd like to happen, anyway. Rather than an acrobatic fucking pirouette, he instead mostly just falls to the floor, and the shock forces him to push the elastic-spring up. A partial success, at worst. The pod-wheel-board lands on top of the stairs regardless, hitting the floor with a loud THUD, but thankfully not instantly disintegrating into a million pieces on impact, instead just causing something that feels like a quake of the planet's surface. Though having a quake here would just be silly.

> YES!!! < i guess thats what that does, then

18.

It finally came to a head the other day, when I was out with Sekri, attempting to figure out what was going on with the new coordinates. I was outside the office when he finally sent me a link. It is impossible for me to forget the words.

LINK: EMPTINESS > PERTINENCE > So how goes the expedition? < gaaaah!!! < you should not jump me like that, i am trying to do my fucking job ≈:[ > I seem to have a knack for it. Elsie kept being surprised by my arrivals. < well that is because you keep running behind people without notifying them, as you did me ≈:P > You always said you found it charming. < not important!!! < anyways it is certainly passable, at least, but we went to the coordinates marked and there was nothing there! > Nary a thing? > That seems like an error on our part, in earnest. Certainly the coordinates had to point somewhere. > Do you have any intention on how to proceed? < well i do not really know, i think the best procedure is simply exploration > Amry... < do you have any better ideas? > No, but it feels as if you are spending time dilly-dallying when you need to be working. > Exploration is aimless, and you do not have time. You know how I worry. < yeah yeah i get it but it seems just kind of over-bearing!!! < is this not a mission to solve my decay? > It is genuinely surprising to me that Dispersal would not simply give you anything. > You should take your promotion. < and for what??? Truly, I do understand this, but, ah- it is simply that if you were promoted, you would have greater priority. > Retrieval teams are expendable. Processing agents are not. < it is my passion > I do envy your naïveté, but it is simply a matter of material circumstance. < for what??? so i can spend all the time cooped up on cognis as nothing but a servant? > I fail to see the relevance of servitude in this conversation. < you sit around all day perusing all these concepts and for what < are you happy? are you fulfilled? i see your commitment, marka, but not the passion > Please, I'm not Sekri. I at least have other priorities. < like what? > I do collect things from Records, you know. I have time-passers, ones that are unrelated to anything. < but exploration is the ultimate time-passer! > But your obsession with exploration is almost certainly violating your own health. Amry, you have no priority. You are near the bottom of the list for Dispersal, and yet you are decaying at rapid pace. > Your obsession with the pains and pleasures leads to a jouissance consuming you whole. < mf said jouissance ≈:? > I implore you to take the promotion. If I need to, I will make it an order from a superior officer. < i- < that is great, marka It is just- < no, let me finish < i understand your concern for my well being but i want to see the worlds < i want to understand what we do with my own sight < i want to breathe the airs of life, i want to touch the grounds of the foreign ... > I refuse to let you go. > This is madness. > You do know what happens when you decay, yes? > Your full removal from even the Inclinosphere? > I have not a clue how to explain this to you, good grief. > You will slowly dissipate, every inch of your Concept being eaten, bit by bit. > Everything that I know about you will disappear. Everything anyone knows about you will disappear. > I- > I don't want to lose you. < i think you already have. LINK TERMINATED

I was there, I hung up, and I felt like screaming, as if there was something tearing me from the insides out, a profound decay of decay. I knew that I was being assertive, as I deserved to be. I needed this, I needed to tell him that what I wanted was not what he wanted. But he wanted what I wanted, once. He needed me, once. Two wrecks crashing into one another does not fix the mess, I suppose. Should I have done it differently? Maybe. But I still care about him, I truly do, more than anything else I have left. But my time is nearly up. So this had better work.

CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!

19.

(Marka) knows what this means. The guilt continues to seep into him, but it is futile, as if to plug a black hole with a cork. He keeps swimming as if his life depended on it, because it does.

20.

Sekri runs up the stairs, grabs the pod-wheel-board, and rolls it over to the plush pile in the opposing room. He didn't have time to check on Amry the last time he was in this room, but now it's practically his only concern, the frenetic action of the prior blinks being dissolved into nothing but concern for his friend. She is a friend, he thinks to himself. Any gripes get sidelined when someone's dying. Sekri grabs two of the jumper cables, and attaches one to...

> wait, where do i put these < wherever her restraints usually go > i am not going to walk in on my mission partner in hibernation. > how would i even know that. < well thats the issue you see < youre going to have to guess

Oh. Oh no. Well, fuck it, he thinks to himself. Nothing to lose, right?

< also if you get it severely wrong she might never wake up > WHAT < again its death or permanent stasis < not much of a choice

Sekri attaches the jumper cables to the restraints. As if alive, the cables seem to wriggle and writhe around, thoroughly encompassing the restraints like they're doing a strong grip rather than anything resembling an electrical connection. He averts his gaze, and jams the other sides into Amry's voidform at seemingly random locations.

< i guess there really isnt a strategy < hit it

21.

The space converges. It wraps around a point marked with a representative sigil, one serving as a confirmation of (Marka)'s progress. At the very least, anything haywire from this point on is the fault of the interloper, and not yours, he thinks to himself without questioning the second person pronoun. He links with himself, denoting the coordinates — one line per Understanding.

LINK: PERTINENCE = PERTINENCE = RHRKI / Orange = TAEFE / Lasagna = DBIUN / Comedic = PSHSF / Syndication = EFIDI / Derivative = UPSDB / Subsapient = ECUEU / Memetic = ARKEC / Divine = ECEVD / Fictional = IQKIU / Commercial = IEFSC / Icon = Z / E-MEOW LINK TERMINATED

Of course, certain information privacy constraints have to be taken for something as sensitive in this, even in a link with the Self — the nature of what is to be done with this requires encryption of a high degree. Though the encryption itself is not very strong, it is enough to break through barriers of information decay — a permanent marker of a temporary Concept. (Marka) gets ready to leave. He begins to close his eyes. But...

marka!

SHIT. Okay, this isn't the worst situation that (Marka) could be in. By all means, he has done his job, he won't be the one in trouble. But the interloper is exactly what he feared, what not just (Marka) feared but Marka. He doesn't want to deal with this right now, he knows he can't deal with this right now.

marka!

Which is why (Amry) gets right behind him, up close and personal in a way that he can't ignore for once in his life. By all means, the time for conversation is now, because there is fundamentally no time, the biological clock being the only metric. (Amry) looks worse for wear by now, the edges segmenting her from the rest of the Inclinosphere being difficult to define. It is questionable as to how she is able to message at all, though she is — barely. It feels as if she is pushing through a space full of wet slop, the metaphor of swimming being far more apt: her own movements are belabored, as if the current of ideas is working against her, attempting to stop her from reaching this point. Though that would assume a degree of malice, one that fails to be true for the Inclinosphere: it is a mere reflection, as in a mirror, never to be known fully. But (Amry) speaks up regardless.

how are you? You see me here, you upturn my objective, and you ask me how I am? it is merely a formality, hmph ≈:O believe me, i know why you are here it is... not my place to tell you what to do but i do want to ask you to reconsider You already made your decision. I can only do so much to help you. Despite my rank and title, there are few strings that I can pull without the curtain falling upon me. right, well in that case, i wanted to see you before i die Don't use that word. would you rather i use decay? because decay is perhaps more violent rather than simply popping out of existence, i wither away into nothing ≈:/ is that a more coherent view of it, to you? Don't do this. do what? remind youuuuu~? You are taking advantage of me in a... vulnerable state. I could report this, and you would be subsequently tried by the Arbiter himself. You would be violating the Ultimate Law, the one that separates us from... them. truthfully i do not know the difference anymore the before-times and the after-times are beginning to blend to me i do not have much more time ≈:[ You know that I can't do this. can i? can i even do anything anymore? i can barely move, hahahaha ≈:P this moment is all i have so let me have it ...Fine.

The two just... sit there, as if sitting is a thing they could do. No words are spoken, nothing exchanged, as if the two were able to communicate not just without language but without even thought. The moment they share is theirs, and theirs alone. To describe it would be an atrocity.

22.

Nothing happens. Amry doesn't get up, nor does she seem to spontaneously combust, disintegrate, or anything. She is just... there, exactly as before.

> i- < so its possible that you just made it worse < like significantly worse < but theres no real way of knowing > how am i even supposed to attach these? > i do not have time for this > i understand it is the only option

Sekri begins to cry.

23.

However, we deal in atrocities here, as do they. Time passes. The biological clock runs down. The gears begin to grind to a halt, a perfect machine becoming more perfect with every moment its segmentation fades, a fragmented universal psyche becoming whole, the collective unconscious becoming the collective conscious, the empty and yet ever pertinent walls of the space beginning to be carved out with a metaphorical power tool. No words are exchanged, but the two gaze upon the sibilant solar sigils shifting softly, an endless labyrinth of openings, the gaps where nothing has been born and nothing can die. The shadows cast upon them, though they are only perceptible on (Marka), given the piercing turquoise beams running through his Concept. The beams begin to spill into him, as if to fill him out, though the task is futile. He is an outline, but there is nothing to fill it. (Amry), on the other hand, has no outline, as it begins to dissolve slowly. She knows what is next for her, as is next for Amry. The incoherence begins to seep into her, her Concept beginning to decay along with her Self. In truth, she just wanted to die here, to sit alone with him. Because regardless of what he does, she does care, and she knows it. She misses him. She has to. The incoherence spreads further. It is inescapable, inexorable, the only sure thing in a place like this, in a world built around conquest. A mere pawn of the whims of Cognis, (Amry) sits there with her executioner, her own sentimentality beginning to seep out of her. But the sentimentality seeps too far.

(Marka) thinks to himself yet again, forcefully pushed by the oncoming incoherence. He thinks of the times spent in discussion of dumb fucking novels, the times spent in one another's arms, the morning conversations. He thinks of the arguments, the politics, the non-presences. He sees the whole of it, all of it, all at once, because he has to. In this moment, it is as if he is reading off his own memories: transcriptions on a page, scenes in a play, acts in a story. The very action of recollection becomes nothing but a useful fiction, one that informs his present and his future, a refusal to break from the archetypal Self. He is in fear. He does not know what he's doing, nor does he know how Marka will react, the parenthetical diverging from the non-parenthetical, the spaces intertwining, the void collapsing. The selves are blending, two becoming one, a couple permanently entwined in one another's Concepts, as if engineering new forms of life, splicing DNA, cutting the strand to extract the base. He would cry if he could. He has not been granted that luxury. And that's when (Marka) makes his choice.

Go. Now. ≈:? I will pull whatever strings I can. You know how this will end. Run if you can. ≈:! Go!

To describe the act (Amry) does next is difficult. The sanctioned term is “subsumption”, though it has gone down a series of tactical bureaucratic replacements: largely for optics reasons, ostensibly. But before it was “subsumption”, it was “reification”; before it was “reification”, it was “replacement”; before “replacement”, “dissolution”; before “dissolution”, “decay”, a term strangely similar to the predicament (Amry) faces at the moment. Linguistics sanctioned by the whims of Cognis rarely seem to allow much in the way of ambiguity; terms change under one's nose, seemingly as if it always was. But here, there is a curious degree of freedom, one exercised immediately prior and one that will be exercised now. To describe the act (Amry) does next is to describe the emotions it instills, the reactions, the impacts. To describe any act, one needs a greater context to perceive within — parts inextricable from the whole. But this is impossible to give, for its reason has withered away in the background, fading as one does. The only perception is that of the present moment, the context of the past and future being intangible and inexplicable, respectively. To describe the act (Amry) does next is to describe a fundamental contradiction being resolved, the natural synthesis of the meme and the anti-meme. It is to describe the spread of non-information, no, anti-information: to do everything with nothing, to tell people to forget, to retroactively rewrite reticular reality. To describe the act (Amry) does next is to describe something so hideously vile, something so profoundly wrong, that it breaks a thing quite literally titled the Ultimate Law. It is the separating barrier to them, the one that breaks them from the savagery of the before-times, a horrific conquest fought on the noöspheric plane. It is a war they won, and a war they will continue to win, despite anything and everything, one where the scars can never be healed. To describe the act (Amry) does next is to describe the nature of existence itself — the death and rebirth of towns, cities, nations, continents, planets, galaxies, clusters, universes. It is to describe the one thing that all sapient beings must do, the fundamentals of life. Which is why the following statement, and its word choice, is important. (Amry) unhinges her proverbial maw, and eats the Concept.

24.

> but she is practically already-

The curtains have been drawn. The stage has been set. The spirograph opens.

Amry wakes up. Her voidform, highly tentative, begins to convulse. It raises off the floor as if she is a marionette, a subservient entity to her parenthetical self. The hole in reality she occupies expands out of her, bubbling like a grotesque mass, as if she burns the very space she occupies, refusing to cohere into anything even intelligible. Sekri dodges back as if he's ready for a fight, though he knows he's not in danger. He knows what this is, but he can't believe she did it. The hole expands further, as if a maw placed in the center of the stage. From the sides of the room, every orange object, everything that could even be associated with the entity they've been tracing- they all begin to fade, as if being sucked through a black hole, nothing on the other side. The very light seems to be stripped away from them, giving way to nothing but rot in its wake. Orangeness seeps into Amry, blackness curling up towards newly-formed triangular tips, whiteness seeping into a facial structure that no longer seems so foreign, forming into eyes full of noise. Her tendrils, the last remaining aspect of her prior form, begin to expand inside-out, giving way to orange fur and paws, bursting out and leaving an excess of black bile on the surface. The surrounding entities fade further. Almost every aspect of their coherency is being stripped- no, thoroughly subsumed- no, eaten. Paws give way to nothing, receivers give way to nothing, mugs give way to nothing. There is nothing here, and nothing will remain. Amry's chest begins to contract, the hole slowly getting smaller. Its top looks like a fur-coated rug, slowly contracting into something recognizable as a stomach. The triangles on her top begin to be filled in with ears, the mouth under the newly-formed eyes gaining an almost content expression, as if this was always the plan. Above all else, she looks smug. Her new form begins to lower, eyes full of static slowly turning into a recognizable face, one that you almost certainly already know. She speaks up. “alive? Σ8}“

ACT ONE: THIS IS NOT FOR YOU

LINK TERMINATED

writing by Tulips. art by Tulips (PRELUDE-THREE) and spiralcomp (FOUR).

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