As Sergius came back online, Aislinn carefully disconnected the cables from the mobile unit’s spine. In the wake of alarms and red line after red line of code spilling down the monitors, silence had landed in the room like the aftermath of an explosion. It left a faint ringing in Aislinn’s ears. One by one, the displays had returned to calm blue status screens as though the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened at all. Which was definitely reassuring and not ominous in any way.
Neither of them spoke. The silence continued to stretch until awkwardness set in.
Sergius buttoned his shirt with rigid mechanical precision and the deliberate focus of someone trying very hard not to think about anything else.
Aislinn had seen him like this before. Usually right before he made an incredibly bad decision. What made it stand out all the more was the fact that the peripheral processes that helped the unit cross the uncanny valley had yet to start up, sidelined for higher functions to finish restarting first. The lack of movement was unsettling. Real bodies were always in motion. Breathing, blinking, swallowing, fidgeting.
She stepped back but stayed in his line of sight. “Do you want to do this here, or outside?”
Her voice was level but firm. She didn’t want him to feel trapped but she wanted him to know this discussion was nonnegotiable.
Sergius gave her a flat look. It was not surprising that she wasn’t going to tip-toe around the issue, given how little she backed down. Ever. “What.”
“The conversation you’re trying to avoid.”
“I’m not avoiding anything.” He absolutely was.
“You triggered every emergency alert in the room.”
Sergius considered objecting. Unfortunately, she was correct and there was little point in trying to hand wave it away.
Her gaze was unwavering. “After what I just saw, it's not an unreasonable request. Don’t give me your ‘piss off’ face.”
“My ‘piss off’ face.” He slowly repeated.
“Yes. The one you wear 90% of the time.”
He almost said something automatic and dismissive to that but the response stalled out somewhere before it reached his mouth. Maybe he should work on his expressions. Or maybe it didn’t matter. That thought arrived with the familiar exhausted fatalism he’d been trying not to examine too closely. The niggling assumption underneath everything lately that there wasn’t actually going to be a future long enough for self-improvement to become relevant. He recognized it now, at least. Recognition unfortunately did not stop it.
“It was a dream.” He said finally.
“A dream?”
“Hallucination. Whatever you want to call it. It was likely corrupted processing caused by --”
“We can call it a dream.”
He stared at her. Aislinn stared back. He reached for his jacket. “I’m going to head to Garlemald. Mark me as unavailable for jobs in the roster.” The abrupt topic change was tactical and they both knew it.
She didn’t bother to tell him he’d been labeled that way on the roster for moons now. “No.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
“Good. Because it’s still a terrible idea.”
“I need to check something.”
“What?”
He paused too long.
“Sergius.” Aislinn’s expression swiftly sharpened. “What about this dream makes you want to go to Garlemald?”
She resolutely remained where she was, stubbornly occupying the space between him and the door. Sergius briefly evaluated the possible methods of physically moving her aside. None of them ended with her speaking to him afterward. So he stayed where he was too.
“In the dream Garlemald was overrun with voidsent.” He said reluctantly.
Aislinn didn’t visibly react, but Sergius saw the micro-tension in her shoulders. The careful regulation of her breathing. Elevated heart rate. Fear. He looked away before she noticed he’d noticed.
“And you didn’t want to tell me.” She said after a moment.
“That’s usually how avoiding conversations works.”
Her expression went stony. “Don’t do that.”
He wanted to exhale in frustration. People did that to display emotion. His system supplied the impulse automatically now. Another behavioral adaptation he never asked for. “I’ve seen the way you react to voidsent.”
That stopped her.
“You’re terrified of them.” He continued before she could interrupt. “More than anything else we’ve dealt with.”
The surprise that crossed her face was quick but unmistakable. Not because he was wrong. He wasn’t. But because he had noticed her issue with voidsent at all. And moreso, because she realized he was trying, badly and awkwardly, but genuinely, to spare her from it. A cycle ago she wasn’t sure he would have considered that variable at all. The realization seemed to make her hesitate in a way Sergius couldn’t categorize.
“It could have just been memories from Alvarium resurfacing. Blasphemies. Not voidsent.” She said instead, shifting the conversation before either of them had to acknowledge his clumsy show of empathy.
“It wasn’t.” He didn’t want to elaborate and explain how he knew that it wasn’t old trauma.
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t you trying to process what happened. Dreams are rarely literal. Either way, I’d advise against going anywhere right now.” She said. “Your systems were throwing lines and lines of corrupted code.”
She gestured toward the terminal, its steady blue glow, innocent and blank. As if none of it had happened. Sergius didn’t look at it. He already knew exactly what had been there.
“I don’t think you can fix it.” He told her.
On reflex, Aislinn’s chin lifted a fraction in knee-jerk defiance. Under different circumstances he might have found it funny. Tell Aislinn she couldn’t do something and it would worm its way under her skin until she felt the overwhelming urge to prove you wrong.
“I don’t want to argue.” He added before she had a chance to formulate a reply. “It’s not a judgment of your ability.”
It was worse than that, though he couldn’t tell her. Because fixing it would mean understanding what was actually causing it and if she learned that, if she understood what was inside his systems now…
No. Absolutely not.
“Just believe me.” He finished.
She studied him for a long moment, eyes narrowed slightly, like she was trying to determine where, in what he had told her, the omissions hid and what, if anything, was outright lies.
“Fine.” She said at last, in the tone people used when they absolutely did not mean fine. “But I’m coming with you in case there are problems.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You’re afraid of voidsent.”
“I am.” She acknowledged. “Still coming. There will definitely be problems with you and whatever is wreaking havoc with your systems and you don’t want to follow my advice, so really, what do you expect me to do?”
He couldn’t deny that was accurate, even if it was offensively so. Sergius looked at her for a long moment and realized that as far as she was concerned, she had already made the decision and this conversation was mostly a facade at this point.
“You wouldn’t listen if I said no anyway.”
“No.” She agreed with a calm even he knew was forced. “Probably not. At least we agree on something.”
She turned away from the terminal as she went to pack her gear, like this had all been settled logically and there was nothing else to discuss. Behind her, Sergius remained rooted in place. Part of him wanted to stop her but the worst part of him was relieved she intended to come anyway.
Four stood motionless beside the diagnostic terminal sequestered in Aislinn’s lab, rigid and blank. Cables snaked from the unit's spine into the parent terminal where Aislinn’s custom diagnostics crawled through layer after layer of systems, hunting for corrupted code.
The progress bar advanced so slowly it was almost painful.
At first Aislinn had watched every percentage point tick upward but now she sat at the terminal, bathed in the blue glow of its multiple screens, sketching schematics for another project in order to distract herself. A watched pot never boils, or something like that.
Sketching helped her clear her mind and it kept her hands busy. It also helped sort through the things she was feeling.
Sergius should have told her sooner.
That thought kept circling back around no matter how many times she shoved it aside. The corruption in his systems was obvious now that she knew where to look. It had been there long enough to root itself deep. Long enough that parts of it had started disguising themselves as small inconsistencies buried under sub routines, missing data fragments and latency spikes.
Did he think she couldn’t fix it? Had he simply not trusted her enough to try?
Beside her, Four remained motionless except for the faint flicker of status lights. Sergius slept. Or as close to sleep he ever got. His systems had entered a low-power state while the diagnostics ran. A fact he had nearly argued with her about. He still didn’t entirely understand why people voluntarily rendered themselves unconscious every night. Now though, he could admit it had some advantages.
The darkness was quiet. Warm in a strange abstract way. His processes drifted without the constant friction of the world around him demanding his attention.
“Finally.” The voice slipped through the dark like a cold shock to his systems. “This is much easier.”
Sergius became aware all at once. Still asleep, but aware. The blackness around him wasn’t empty anymore. Snow fell upward into a starless sky.
He stood in the ruins of Garlemald, though not the real ruins. This place wore Garlemald’s shape incorrectly, like it was assembled from partial memories and old visual files. Sergius stared at the skyline, cataloging inconsistencies. Buildings bent at impossible angles. Structures repeated where they shouldn’t. Distances stretched and compressed unpredictably. Snow drifted sometimes up, sometimes down but it carried the smell of blood and burned ceruleum no matter which way it fell.
This was either a dream or some kind of hostile system intrusion. Neither option improved his mood.
The girl stood several yalms away. Same as before. Too thin. Arms too long beneath ragged sleeves. The smaller set of hands still covered her eyes, fingers cupped against her face.
Sergius recognized her instantly. He hated that he recognized her instantly.
“What the hell are you?” he asked.
The girl tilted her head. The motion crackled, skipping between positions like corrupted footage. “I was waiting.” Her voice sounded strange. Distorted and layered, like several people speaking slightly out of sync. “Dreams are easier. But you don’t dream. And I couldn't wait anymore.”
Around them the snow thickened. Sergius looked down. The drifts at his feet weren't snow at all. Ash. Bone fragments. Tiny white teeth.
His combat protocols surged awake. He reached for weapons that weren’t there and found only empty air. Excellent. Sergius scanned the surrounding streets. Something moved in the ruins behind the girl.
“You would have died badly, Sergius.”
Hostiles. Blasphemies. No. Voidsent. Hunger wearing shapes. Dark silhouettes unfolded themselves from alleyways and shattered buildings, their bodies consisting of every nightmare come to life. Mouths opened where faces should have been. Their eyes reflected red through the dark.
Definitely not ideal.
“The veil is thin here.” The girl whispered. “Cold places help. Places full of grief. Fear. Starvation. Garlemald screams loud enough for us to hear.”
The things behind her twitched closer in jagged, stuttering movements.
“You fell.” She continued. “Do you remember?”
And he did.
Memory fragments slammed into him without warning. One second he was standing in the dream-version of Garlemald and the next he was back in the real one, systems overloaded with fractured combat telemetry. Going after Ayrm. A snowstorm and a ruptured magitek motorcycle. Gunfire swallowed by shrieking static. Bodies torn apart in white snow drifts stained black.
Too many blasphemies boiling towards Alvarium in numbers too large for tactical projections to process cleanly. Claws. Teeth. The sensation of systems failing one after another while he kept fighting anyway because if he hadn’t that meant one more blasphemy that would make it to the outpost.
Sergius stepped back and the landscape rippled oddly around him.
The girl's hands covered her eyes but somehow he knew she was watching him quietly. “You remember now.”
He ignored that. “I survived.”
“Yes.” She said. “That’s the problem.”
“You infected me.” he said.
“Yes.” She sounded both surprised that she had and slightly unsure why.
The voidsent behind her shuddered closer, their mouths opened wider and wider until their jaws split down their throats. The wind carried whispers through the ruined city. ‘Hungry. Hungry hungry hungry.’
“When the barrier weakens.” The girl continued. “They’ll come through properly. Your world is soft. Full of lovely, breakable things.”
Something brushed against Sergius from behind. A clawed hand. Too many fingers.
He whirled around and found one of the creatures ilms away from him, towering overhead. Its skin hung like flayed strips from a body made of shifting darkness. Hyuran faces pushed briefly through its torso, screaming soundlessly before sinking back inside.
Its breath smelled like mass graves. Memory data he was sure he had purged. Sergius swung at it automatically. His fist passed through its skull. The creature smiled anyway.
“You can’t fight it here.” The girl said. “This place belongs to me. A dream.”
The ruins around them pulsed. Buildings bent farther inward. The sky cracked open like an egg revealing enormous shapes moving beyond reality itself. Vast mouths. Limbs folding against limbs. Things pressing against the thinning barrier between worlds hard enough to deform it.
Garlemald groaned beneath their weight. The girl stepped closer. Snow collected on her shoulders and sleeves without melting.
“You should wake up soon.” She said.
“Why?”
Again that pause.
Sergius had dealt with manipulators before. This didn’t feel like manipulation. So what was it? What did she want?
“Are you warning me?”
“I don’t know.” That sounded like the truth. “I think…” She hesitated, the words catching strangely. “I think I wanted someone to know. We’re all hungry.” The girl continued, almost absently. “And hunger spreads.”
The looming voidsent lunged.
Sergius came awake hard enough to trigger emergency reboot protocols, every alarm screaming simultaneously. At the terminal, Aislinn shot upright so fast her chair nearly overturned.
Sergius' diagnostic monitors had erupted into crimson warnings. Lines of corrupted code flooded every screen in pulsing waves that looked disturbingly organic. And for just a second, Aislinn could have sworn she saw another figure reflected in the red-lit glass behind Four.
Sergius stopped moving before he walked into something breakable or alive. Though in the confines of Heartwood’s library that probably just meant a shelf of old books or Zilmat. For one stretched, ugly second he just stood there, every process thread spiking hard enough to make his temperature warnings twitch. Then he shoved himself into action and cycled through the drones.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Every visual feed came back black.
“Come on.” He cycled through them a second time.
Not disconnected but black all the same.
He tried not to think about Alvarium. About waking up on that table with memory corruption and missing hours and Aislinn telling him, very calmly, that she had to pry open his chassis and that if she hadn’t gotten there when she did he could have lost the mobile unit, Four, permanently. Since then the glitches had been happening more often. Little things at first. Stuttering motor control. Corrupted audio. Lost time.
Now this. He dumped the visual executables and restarted them.
Nothing.
Diagnostics had insisted he was perfectly functional, which just proved the diagnostics were garbage or he was. Possibly both.
The dark shifted. An image resolved slowly out of the static like something surfacing from deep water.
A girl.
Sergius froze.
She had dark hair hanging in limp strands around a narrow face, but the bad part was the proportions. Human-shaped in the same way a distended corpse was still human-shaped. Almost right until you looked directly at it.
Her skin had the gray-white color of drowned flesh. Her arms were too long, stretched wrong at the joints, as if someone had taken hold of her wrists and pulled until the bones lengthened like soft clay. And there were four arms.
The second pair emerged from behind her shoulders and crossed gently over her eyes. Like she was playing a game. Her mouth opened displaying rows of needle-sharp teeth within. She was talking. No audio came through.
Sergius felt a cold pulse of panic so overwhelming it almost locked his systems. He couldn’t see anything except her. Couldn’t override the image. Couldn’t tell if she was real, corrupted data, or some part of his own damaged code shaking loose.
He force-killed the visual feed. Nothing changed. Still there.
She tilted her head a fraction farther than a neck should comfortably turn.
He rebooted the entire visual system. Nothing.
The girl remained exactly where she was, patient and silent, those extra hands still covering her eyes.
“Nope.” Sergius yanked the entire mobile unit offline.
Emergency shutdown warnings cascaded through his systems. Somewhere Aislinn would be getting alerts. He’d deal with the interrogation later if later happened.
The world dissolved into shutdown static. And just before the audio channels cut completely, something whispered through them.
“The eyes remember what they were.”
Sergius went cold.
What. The fuck.
Several minutes later he brought Four back online. Systems initialized one by one with cheerful little confirmations.
Motor functions operational.
Memory integrity stable.
Visual systems functional.
No anomalies detected.
“Sure.” Sergius deadpanned.
Vision returned abruptly. Zilmat’s enormous, wet eye filled his entire field of view.
Sergius recoiled so violently he slammed backward into a bookshelf hard enough to rattle it. “Damn it, Zilmat!”
The voidsent bobbed backward in alarm. “Sorry! A-are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
He absolutely was not fine, but he wasn’t discussing that with Zilmat while his pulse emulation still felt like it was trying to punch through his chest plating.
“You didn’t tell A-Aislinn about this when she was here the other sun.” Zilmat said carefully.
Sergius glared at him.
The voidsent’s leathery wings twitched nervously. “Another reason you’re…you’re af-afraid to leave the library. These glitches are getting w-worse.”
“It’s a software issue.” Not exactly the truth. Sergius didn’t know what the hell it was.
“You s-said Alvarium was overrun during the end days. You s-said you fell there.” Zilmat’s eye widened further with every sentence. “Aislinn repaired you afterward. What if. What if she missed something? You need to tell her.” Zilmat said.
“I am not telling Aislinn.”
“She needs to know -”
“She absolutely does not.”
Zilmat hovered uncertainly.
Sergius saw the decision form a second before the voidsent bravely blurted it out. “Well, if-if you won’t tell her, I-I will!”
Sergius observed Aislinn enter the library and immediately knew this wasn’t about books.
There were several indicators. The direct line toward him without even pretending to look at the shelves. The expression that said she had already concluded somebody (probably him) was being an idiot and was only here to confirm details.
He marked his place in his book but didn’t close it yet. There was still a statistical possibility she might reconsider and leave. Not a high one.
Aislinn stopped and stood in front of the armchair he had folded himself into.
“What’s your plan?” Not a real question. More the kind of thing people asked when they were already annoyed with the answer.
So he put the book down and looked in her direction expectantly. She never needed encouragement for this sort of thing.
“Sit here and sulk? Be aggressively useless to everyone out of spite?” Those also were not questions.
His attention drifted toward Zilmat, who was hovering beside the shelves pretending to reorganize books while very obviously listening. The voidsent was terrible at it. Sergius had seen malfunctioning security constructs with better situational awareness, and those at least had the excuse of missing half their sensors.
“That’s not -” He stopped.
No, that was exactly what he was doing.
“So what.” He said instead. “You need me to go out on a job?”
Aislinn made a sound that conveyed offense, disbelief, and exhaustion all at once. “At this point? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t trust you to carry soup from the kitchens to the clinic without somehow turning it into a personal crisis.”
That hit harder than he was expecting, which was irritating.
Aislinn looked small and generally harmless, (she barely came up to his shoulder), but that had nothing whatsoever to do with her ability to dismantle him psychologically.
“Sergius, I know that whatever happened in Alvarium was bad and I’m not here to say anything about it one way or another.” She exhaled slowly. “But it’s been over a cycle.”
He looked away before he could stop himself. Reflex.
She noticed, obviously. Aislinn noticed everything. It was annoying.
She’d only seen the edges of the events that had unfolded at Alvarium herself. She had been called in twice to stabilize members from the team Heartwood had sent, Sergius included. He knew she had read the report the team had filed, though reports were useless for understanding anything important. Reports reduced disasters into timelines and acceptable losses and neat little summaries that made it sound like people had been behaving rationally the entire time.
They never were.
“Have you considered doing anything besides hiding in this library with only a…” Her eyes flicked toward Zilmat, narrowing slightly.
“Voidsent.” Sergius supplied.
Her attention snapped back to him. For a second he caught the expression before she smoothed it away. Discomfort, maybe disgust. Fast, but not fast enough when dealing with something like him.
“H-he’s not hiding.” Zilmat said, emerging from behind the shelves with nervous reluctance. “He h-helps catalogue the books.”
“You’re hiding too.” Aislinn told him, flatly.
Zilmat visibly wilted.
“But at least it’s convenient to know you stay in one spot.”
Then she looked back at Sergius.
“So this is it? You’ll outlast us everyone here while spending the entire time moving books from one shelf to another? All that Garlean know-how and ingenuity reduced to what amounts to a catalog system?”
“I can’t possibly fuck it up.” He said.
There it was. The actual problem. Failure. He could feel it sitting there between them without either of them saying the word aloud.
Aislinn stared at him for a long moment, then spoke. “Sergius, get over yourself.”
It wasn’t cruel. That somehow made it worse.
“You’re not the only one who makes mistakes. I read that report. You certainly weren’t the only one in *Alvarium* who made mistakes. You’re just the only one who decided the appropriate response was to become furniture.”
Zilmat made a tiny offended noise on Sergius’ behalf from somewhere behind the shelves. Aislinn ignored him but pointed vaguely in the voidsent’s direction anyway.
“You’re trying very hard to become like that. Small and harmless. Can’t you see how ridiculous that is?”
Sergius leaned back in his chair and looked away from her. Her expression had shifted into frustration mixed with concern and he didn’t have the energy for concern right now.
Unfortunately the library aisles were too shallow to retreat into without looking absurdly dramatic. The room had gotten uncomfortably quiet. Even Zilmat had stopped pretending to shelve books.
“You know what your problem is?” She asked.
“I assume you’re about to tell me.”
“It’s not that you’re afraid, though you are. It’s that you think your fear is special.”
He frowned at her. “That’s stupid.”
“No. It’s normal.” Her voice did that thing where it went soft around the edges. He hated when she did that. “You think your failures were catastrophic because people got hurt, because you survived when maybe you think you shouldn’t have, that nobody else could possibly understand it.” She shook her head once. “Everyone carries something, Sergius. Everyone has a list of things they wish they’d done differently. Most of us just don’t build a bloody shrine to it and move in permanently.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Aislinn pressed on before he could decide whether he actually wanted to argue.
“You’re afraid.” She repeated and it wasn’t any better hearing it the second time. “But you can’t let it trap you here. Here’s the truth. No one is coming to drag you back to the Empire. It’s gone. Whatever you were there, whatever they made you into, it’s over.” She said. “And shite happened in Alvarium. And yes, you are going to fail again eventually. You’ll hurt people. You’ll make terrible decisions. That’s just being alive.”
“Comforting.”
“I’m not trying to comfort you.”
That, he could trust, was true.
“You have to decide what you’re going to do from here on out but I swear to the Twelve if you choose glorified cataloging system of Heartwood’s library I will put you out of your misery myself.”
Sergius glanced at her. She looked completely serious. Which made his mouth tug upward in amusement.
Aislinn’s expression shifted immediately into satisfaction. Like she had been waiting for proof that he was still capable of pulling out of a nosedive and she’d just found it. 'There you are.'
Sergius scrubbed a hand over his face. “You are aggressively difficult to ignore.”
“I know.” She leaned back against the small table beside him, some of the tension finally leaving her posture. “But you’re talking, so I’m counting this as progress.”
From the stacks, Zilmat carefully resumed his task of reshelving books, slowly relaxing as the tension in the room eased by increments. Sergius looked down at the abandoned book on the table. Earlier, the silence of the room had felt like burial dirt packed overhead. Now it just felt quiet.
Aislinn nudged the edge of his boot with hers. “While I’m here, I’ve been asked to tell you to stop scaring the recruits.” She said casually.
“Tell them to get over it..”
“You made one cry last week.”
Probably the one who had been an ass to Zilmat.
“Then he’s not going to last long in a mercenary company, is he?”
Aislinn considered that. “Fair.”
And just like that, the conversation drifted away from Alvarium and failure. It wasn’t forgiveness. He wasn’t sure what that would even look like and he suspected anyone claiming to have found it was either lying or dangerously well-adjusted. The memories were still there, tangled together inside him like damaged wiring. Dangerous if handled carelessly. Easy to trip over in the dark.
Aislinn kept talking, dry and relentless in that way she had, steering the conversation away from anything either of them actually wanted to examine too closely. Apparently this was her preferred method of emotional support and the only version he could tolerate without wanting to climb out a window. Sergius realized he was listening instead of waiting for her to leave.
I love a character raised to be a weapon as much as the next guy. But what really gets me is a character raised to be a shield. Who can’t fathom being needed—or even being wanted— beyond keeping others safe. Who believe they are alive only to insure someone doesn’t die. no matter the cost. Characters who self-sacrifice not because they think they deserve it, but because no one else does deserve it, and it’s their job to protect.
Characters who’ve been told that’s why your important. Your worth something because this other person/ thing is important, and you are here solely to keep them safe.
Bonus points if it’s not a legitimate job they’ve been given. Maybe at one point it was, but now that they are free from it, they haven’t given up that mentality. No one is forcing or asking them to do this, but they need to. They need to in order to be deserving.
my favorite genre of fictional character is like "i am terrifying to almost everyone, i'm very good at killing, i can endure anything, i've become exceptionally good at playing into my reputation, and if you try to give me positive social interaction i will react with confusion and cower in a corner like an abused animal. and i may try to shoot you. but there is also a chance i may imprint on you like a feral dog receiving its first loving touch! good luck."
I love you robots and artificial intelligence with mental illness. I love you repression being depicted as literally deleting archived data to preserve functionality. I love you anxiety attacks being depicted as a system crashing virus. I love you ptsd being depicted as an annoying pop-up. I love you anxiety disorder being depicted as running thousands of simulations and projected outcomes. I love you artificial beings being shown to be human via their own artificiality.
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
