A human has entered a fae domain, eaten their food, and given their name. The fae goes to play with their new toy only to discover they have no power over the human. Somehow, this human is disobeying the fae rules. They are enforcing reality.
The man raises his right hand, wiggling the dark-skinned fingers.
"Gh- It was not yours to take!"
"Says who?"
"ME!"
"Well, where did you get it?"
"The finest chefs of the White Palace laboured for hours to create the apple pastry whose crumbs still cling to your lips, vagabond, and we will have-"
"Where'd you get the apples?"
"I- from a tree! What kind of question is that?"
"Well, if the tree wants to lodge a complaint I'm all ears, but it sounds like you took 'em just as much as I did."
The Lord in White smiles viciously and snaps his fingers. Beside the quarrelling pair a sprout emerges from the earth, growing rapidly until a mighty apple tree stands before them, the whorls of its bark giving the slightest suggestion of a face.
"O tree of my orchard, this man has eaten thy fruit without recompense. Art thou aggrieved?"
The light shifts in the glade, giving the impression of the face turning towards the man and into a thunderous frown.
"Well, where'd you get the apples?"
Wind whistles through the canopy, giving the impression of "I grew them."
"From what?"
Squirrels chitter in the branches, giving the impression of "The soil."
"Well, if the soil wants to lodge a complaint, I'm all ears, but..."
Warily, but still unwilling to miss the chance, The Lord in White snaps his fingers. Between the quarrelling pair a rift opens in the earth, exposing grey bedrock at the bottom of a loam-lined chasm.
"O soil of my forest, this man has partaken of thy nutrients without recompense. Art thou aggrieved?"
The loam shifts, bringing the chasm closer to the man.
"Well, where did you get them?"
The ground parts, revealing the bleached white bones of a deer.
"Alright, does that one wanna complain next?"
Smirking, The Lord in White snaps his fingers. Beneath the quarrelling pair the bones swirl and knit, forming the skeleton of a majestic buck.
"O buck of my hunting grounds, this man-"
"Yeah, yeah, you became the soil became the apple became the pie. Let's skip ahead a bit. What'd you eat?"
The gleaming skull lowered itself toward the ground, miming the consumption of grass it had performed in life.
"Alright, cool. Get some grass in here."
"Impudent mortal! You do not command me-"
"Oh, you're droppin' the complaint then?"
Positively fuming by this point, The Lord in White snaps his fingers. All around the quarrelling pair green shoots emerge from the ground, quickly forming into short blades of grass that wave gently in the wind.
"O grass of my glade-"
"What'd you have for lunch, guys?"
As one, the grass bends toward the same point in the sky, each stalk aimed directly at the sun.
"Okay, are we good yet or is the sun yours too?"
Face contorted with rage, The Lord in White throws his arms wide as sunlight bathes him.
"O sun of my sky, this man has partaken of your light without recompense! Art thou aggrieved?"
Sunbeams play amongst the leaves, giving the impression of "All that dwells upon this earth has partaken of my light one way or another since the dawn of life, and I will never ask that this debt be repaid."
The Lord in White's hair begins to smoke, the ray of sunlight striking him seeming to intensify.
"And it is not your sky, earthbound Lord. You would do well to remember that."
The Lord in White snarls, features twisting from their unearthly beauty to something more akin to nightmares.
"By ancient compact I bid you claim your due from this mortal!"
"You know the price, earthbound Lord?" the light shimmers.
"YES!"
All is still for a moment, then two.
The ray of light leaves a wispy trail of smoke as it moves towards the man.
"And what powers your great furnace, ma'am?" the man says.
"Fool! The sun has always been and will always be! You will bend to my will or be consumed by its wrath!"
The beam diffuses into an ever-shifting, endlessly complex interplay of light and shadow, giving the impression of "I am powered by the stuff of the solar nebula which formed my heart 4.6 billion years ago. That same nebula's bones are the ground on which you stand, the food on which you feast, the water with which you wash it down, the air with which you breathe. I am almost all that remains of it and thus I speak for it as well; it came from all over, which came from even more all over, which came from the mystery at the dawn of time."
The Lord of White, his countenance one more fair, watches the light spell out the truth of creation with an unbecomingly slackened jaw.
"It's like that Carl fella says, I guess; if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
Silence stretches on as The Lord in White slowly recovers his composure.
"Well?" says the man. "D'you wanna claim dominion over the mystery at the dawn of time?"
"This changes nothing! The apple was mine because the orchard is mine!"
"Hate ta ask, but why is the orchard yours?"
"My servants planted it when your species were naught but-"
"Shouldn't it be theirs, then?"
"An' how does that work, exactly?"
"They are my servants! What's theirs is mine!"
The man's face turns flat.
"They are bound to me by ancient compact-"
"The same one you're payin' the nice lady from earlier for?"
The sunbeams twinkle in what seems to be amusement.
"...yes," The Lord in White forces out through gritted teeth. "That one. They are mine. As you should be for taking what was mine into your body."
"Wasn't yours. I stole it."
The Lord in White lets out an incoherent scream, his face contorting once more.
"IT WAS MINE! EVERY LAW OF THE WILD, EVERY WRIT OF ROOT AND BRANCH, EVERY RULE LAID DOWN BY THE FIRST OF THE FAIR PROCLAIMS IT TO BE MINE! THIS WORLD KNOWS MY CLAIM TO BE TRUE, AND I WILL NOT BE DENIED!"
"Ah, see, there's your problem. I don't remember signin' on to any of this 'Law of the Wild' malarkey."
"YOU WERE BORN TO IT, AS IS EVERY CREATURE THAT-"
"Where are the cops?"
The Lord in White's face snaps back once again.
"What?"
"Soldiers, enforcers, whatever. The assholes who go around beatin' up whoever breaks this 'Law of the Wild' nonsense."
"The world itself proclaims the Law from the tallest tree to the smallest insect!"
"Well they don't seem to be doin' a very good job of it. No offence, sir," he directs towards the apple tree.
The rasp of branches on bark gives the impression of "None taken."
"It does not need 'cops'! It simply is!"
"Is not."
"It has been since the dawn of t-"
The Lord in White sees an errant sunbeam and flinches.
"-since the birth of The Wild, and will be until the last living thing crumbles to dust!"
"Naw, you're missin' the point. We got law back where I come from too, and most of that I'm happy to abide by 'cause it makes livin' a whole lot easier for everyone. But when it isn't doin' that, you don't just shrug an' go along with it. You change it, or if you can't, you resist it until either it changes or someone stops you.
Near as I can tell your 'Law of the Wild' here means you get ta' own a bunch of people, trick a bunch more into obeyin' your every whim, an' claim that everythin' under the sun, including the sun itself, belongs to you by right, so I'm not exactly inclined to look at it as a good piece o' governance."
"So no, the apple pie wasn't yours. I took it an' nobody stopped me, so it was mine. You got a problem with that?"
The man takes a step forward, over the ravine.
"Stop me."
The Lord in White reaches for the blade at his hip.
The man is faster.
After a brief tussle the lord finds himself pinned between the roots of the apple tree, the man holding him easily in place with one arm.
"Now, are we gonna have any further problems?"
"Your name!" The Lord in White hisses. "If you can take my things as you please, then I can take your name! It is you and it is mine, so you are mine! Release me at once, George!"
The man's name echoes through the woods like a gunshot. George freezes.
The arm holding his opponent in place twitches.
His other arm strokes his chin in thought.
"Well, it's more an abbreviation than anythin'."
"FOR WHAT???" The Lord in White screams incredulously.
George gestures at himself with his free hand.
The Lord stares.
"No. Enough of this nonsense. It is your name. It means you. It identifies you. It IS you. Power is given to me to lay claim to all whose name I know, and I KNOW YOUR NAME! Perhaps you can steal my food from me, but you cannot steal yourself!"
"I dunno, my great great grandma stole herself from some real shitty-"
"SILENCE! You will be bound in briar and thorn for ten thousand years! You will beg for mercy that will not come! It is you and it is mine! And what is mine will release me at once!"
George's arm trembles, then releases the fae lord. He clambers to his feet as George watches, unmoving.
"That is better. I am The Lord in White-"
"Aw hey, me too!"
The Lord in White's left eyelid twitches violently.
"What. Did you say."
"Yeah, seems like a pretty sweet gig so I decided to just start callin' myself that. Y'know, with the name bein' the person an' all. I guess we're the same guy now!"
"George-"
"Not my name."
"I am NOT calling you that! You are a trespasser, a pretender, a thief, and a fool! You are mine by right, and you will-"
The rest of the sentence is cut off as The Lord in White pins himself to the tree hard enough to knock the wind out of him.
"Now I've been mighty patient with your nonsense so far, but let's get one thing straight. Nobody is anybody's. Nobody ever has been or ever will be anybody's. Any law that says otherwise is incorrect as a matter of simple truth, and any person who is being subjected to such a law is entirely justified in taking any measures necessary to change that fact. Do I make myself clear?"
The Lord in White screams in his own face. "MINE! YOU ARE MINE! NO FORCE ON THIS EARTH WILL KEEP ME FROM MY-"
He isn't that strong. Not really. Average at best; a desk job isn't exactly ideal for building a physique. Still, The Lord in White is a fragile thing and crushing his own throat proves fairly easy. His gasping corpse drops to the ground, face frozen in a nightmare rictus of hatred before his body rapidly disintegrates into motes of light that float away on the wind.
A ray of sun beams down onto George. It gives the impression of "It is not so easy to slay a lord of the fae, earthbound child."
"Good," George says, voice devoid of emotion. "Then maybe he'll live to see himself lose the rest of what he stole."
He picks up the sword from the empty pile of clothes, buckles it to his hip, and follows the motes deeper into the forest.
[I’m getting supplies. This is ridiculous. You don’t explore a house. That’s not a thing. I brought supplies to get into the high desert, I brought supplies to get to the mountaintop, a fully grown man does not need supplies to explore a House.]
…huh? Oh, yea, I’ll need a new paracord, the kids used it for their closet tent… um… do I bring a life straw? There must be water down there somewhere. Better safe than sorry. Extra socks, always. Well. Almost ready.
Wait, flat and smooth? Quick question: do you see any tool marks? Any gaps or joints? Or does it all look like one solid piece of untooled stone, like it naturally formed into unnatural shapes?
It’s kinda hard to tell? It looks like old stone, if that makes sense. Dark. But, I mean, besides, wall, floor, and ceiling, there’s nothing.
Not only are there no hot-air registers, return air vents, or radiators, cast iron or other, or cooling systems condenser, reheat coils, heating convector, damper, concentrator, dilute solution, heat exchanger, absorber, evaporator, solution pump, evaporator recirculating pump, any type of ducts, whether spiral lock seam/standing rib design, double-wall duct, and Loloss TM Tee, flat oval, or round duct with perforated inner liner, insulation, and outer shell, no HVAC system at all, even a crude air distribution system--there are no windows, no water supplies…
…drains, bathtubs, urinals, sinks, drinking fountains, water heaters, or coolers, expansion tanks, pressure relief valves, flow con-trol, branch vent, downspout, soil stacks, or waste stacks, or fire protection equipment, smoke detectors, sprinklers, flow detectors, dry pipe valve, O.S. & Y. Gate valve, water motor alarm, visual annunciation devices, hose rack and hose reel whether a 2 1/2" or 1 1/2" valve, foam sys-tems, gaseous suppression systems; nor any sign of daisy-chain wiring or star wiring o1 electrical metallic tubing (EMT), , rigid con duit, wireways, bus ducts, underfloor ducts…
…a cellular floor, a raised floor, or for that matter wire of any sort, No. 36 to No. 0000 (#4/0), or electrical boxes- 3 duct junction boxes etc., etc. - or plug-in receptacles, 3-prong grounded duplex or other, pots or pans or cans, or switch plates, switches, whether swing pole, dimmer or remote, or circuit breakers or fuses, whether lead, tin, copper, silver, etc., with a voltage class from 12, 24, 125, 250, 600, 5000+, or even lights, whether electrical discharge, incan-descent, or combustion, no flame arc or gas-filled, tipless, inside frosted, decorative, general service, 10,000 watt aviation…
…pecan, southern magnolia, Colorado spruce, alpine fir, american beech, northern red oak, Canada Hemlock, red maple, sugar maple, eastern white pine, butternut hickory, shagbark hickory, american plane tree, eastern black walnut, ponderosa pine, white fir, northern catalpa, common bald cypress, american sweet gum, bur oak, California live oak, mahogany, Douglas fir, eastern cottonwood; nor any sign of a sub-foor, sheathing, drywall, any kind of insu-(lating material, polyicynene or other; sills, sill plates, sill sealer, rebar, anchor bolts, let alone footings or foundation walls…
…bricks, whether split paver or red bullnose, or wall studs, firestopping, or braces, nor evidence of floor joists, end joists, or ledgers, bridgings, girders, double plate, gable studs, ceiling joists, rafters, king posts, struts, side posts, ridge beams, collar ties, gussets, furring strips, or bed molding at least the stairs offer some detail: risers, treads, two large newel posts, one at the top and one at the bottom, capped and con-Inected with a single, curved banister supported by countless balusters) though among other things no wallpaper, veneer plaster, Baldwin locks, any sign of glass…
…whether clear, reflective, insulated, heat-resistant, switchable, tinted, bad-guy, antique; or even tin-plated steel, factory painted steel, brass; or even a single nail or (screw, whether sheet-metal, particleboard drywall, concrete, drive, aluminum, silicon bronze, solid brass, mechanically galva nized, yellow-zinc plated, stainless steel epoxy coated, black finish, Durocoat; to say nothing of the sheer absence of any. thing that might suggest a roof, whether pitched, gable, hip, lean-to, flat, sawtooth, monitor, ogee, bell, dome, helm, sloped hip-and-valley, conical, pavilion, rotunda…
Sensory deprivation. Even having the light on doesn’t really help; not when it’s always the same stone, always smooth, always flat, always cool. I chip at it and pieces flake off; I can mark it, but once I look away I can never find the mark again. I kinda lost my head at one point. I wasted… I don’t know how much time. I hacked a big pit into the wall, just screaming and pounding with the pick, but this place doesn’t even give you the satisfaction of a good echo. There’s no sense of scale. Does the house ever end? I don’t know. The echo never comes. I pounded and screamed and gouged a big hole and as soon as the light left it it was gone. I couldn’t find it again. Like it never happened. I still have the samples, so I know… I know I’m still real. I can affect matter. I haven’t faded completely.
Not yet, Anyway.
I’m reminded of diving, SCUBA. The way the world can just… yawn open beneath you. That feeling in your heart when you first realize you can’t see the bottom. The brief need for the Ego to tell the scared monkey in the back of the brain that everything is under control, it’s ok. It’s not though. Ok. Not now. Not in these halls; these endless, bare halls. So bare. I just.
I like art, you know?
Who made this place? I don’t… I don’t think this place could form naturally. But. It’s too big. It’s too pointless. I don’t. I don’t understand. I don’t understand. This isn’t a , a House has a purpose, it was made by someone for a reason, I don’t understand, I don’t, I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand The Minotaur is Hungry I can smell it’s fetid breath hot on the back of my neck but no matter how fast I turn I can never catch him in the light I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand House I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand RUN I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand I don’t understand
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Have you heard about that book that’s supposed to drive you insane???
The first time I caught wind of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend. We were discussing horror novels when she brought up the supposedly sanity-shattering story, and neither of us had read it at the time.
(Good for you two I guess but that doesn’t help me)
Close to ten years passed, but the memory of her question stuck with me and led me to finally pick up a copy of my own. While my mind is disappointingly intact after a readthrough-
(Some guys get all the breaks)
-I still found it to be one of the most unsettling and unconventional haunted house stories ever written.
House of Leaves is a story in layers, each created by a different character-
{-cruising with Kris and Venus around Venice, looking for a spot to smoke a bowl, usual Tuesday afterschool stuff; Venice Beach is surrounded by all these alleys and all kinds of shady business used to go down in ‘em: drug deals, drug use, the occasional day drunk vagrant hookup. Not to disparage; Kris, Venus and I, we were the day drunk vagrants, you know? I hooked up with Venus all the damn time back then, good times, you could forget the world and lose yourself in the ecstasy of the sublime in that little sliver of paradise inbetween her thighs, even in a dingy alleyway, even reek with pot. }
(Yea man that’s how stories work now help me)
-At its core, we have The Navidson Record, a documentary about renowned photojournalist [WILL NAVIDSON], his wife girlfriend [KAREN], and their two children, moving into a new home-
(Inside Out Plot. Been done. HELP ME)
-Things take an eerie turn when Navidson discovers that his house is one quarter of an inch larger on the inside than the outside.
(MY MANS DONT DONT EVEN KNOW)
{But Kris was rolling the joint when I see this. Fucking. Book. Just sitting in the middle of the road. with a big fucking bloodstain in all the pages. Had to knock it against a wall a few times to knock the crust off and get the pages apart. Kris thought it was super cool but Venus gave me a look that felt like being separated from god so I threw it away. }
When the couple finds a new closet in their bedroom, perfectly black and utterly featureless, they start to get scared. The nightmare truly begins, however, when another door appears in their living room and leads to dark, twisting hallways filled with doors and every indication that someone or something dwells there.
(NO NO NO THERES NOTHING THERE ITS EMPTY YOU FOOLS YOU CANT GO IN THERES NOTHING NOTHING AT ALL IT WOULD BE BETTER IF THERE WAS A MINOTAUR DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE HOUSE CAST HIM OUT HE’S BEEN EXPUNGED [REDACTED] IT HAS A NEW TOY)
(CAN ANYONE FUCKING HEAR ME)
{I loved her. Everyone did. She made you feel special just by smiling at you. We all missed her}
The majority of the book is written as something like an academic paper on the Navidson Record by the blind recluse Zampanò. Me
It moves, but it is not alive. It thinks, but it is not aware.
It would fail a mirror test. It would fail a Turing test. It cannot read the word Michael etched into its fuselage, and would not understand what that name means if it could. It understands, in a limited way, what the colors mean that impose themselves upon Tactical: Friendly Greens and Neutral Blues and Hostile Reds; but it does not understand what it means to see those colors. It speaks in photons of radio and infrared. Synaptic analogues carved from silicon perform gymnastics that people call thinking.
It never stops thinking. Even now, safe at home, tucked into its alcove in Heaven, armor split open and control panels exposed. It notes changes in internal runtimes, notes a net increase in idle loop time of 670 milliseconds. It counts and recounts the friendly organic signatures around it; hears the sounds they make but does not comprehend:
-Heartsandmindsistheofficialline-
It checks and rechecks threat diagnostics, even though this location is Safe and all the organic signatures are Friendly. It is not dysfunctional or paranoid; It is simply executing instructions.
It does not enjoy killing, when the instructions say to do so. There is no thrill to the chase. No relief at the eventual ceasefire. It is not eager to do any particular thing, except follow its instructions. Sometimes those instructions are to float for days on end above a desolate patch of desert, simply looking. It does not find this tedious; it does not bore. Other times it faces dozens of threats per second, screaming SAMs and whistling projectiles; this does not inspire terror or fear. It simply reacts, as fast as it can.
-alldone. Fortherecordithinkthisisabadidea.-
-thiscomesdownfromthetop-
The armor swings shut. Warning icons fade. A new flight plan blooms instantaneously across Tactical. Michael suddenly has places to be. It roars to life and rises skywards on a swirling pillar of air.
-agundoesnotneedaconscience-
Michael, thinking but not alive, journeys forth to do the bidding of its masters.
The machine called Michael slices smoothly across the sky, 12 miles up. The jagged home range of Heaven, chosen for its sharp rock faces and disorienting radar echoes, fades in hindsight. Rolling lowland stretches below. On the horizon, a rough settlement: a few prefab habitats, a small solar generator. Organic Signatures. Machinery heat.
Michael maneuvers itself between the settlement and the sun, hiding in the glare, and counts. It counts 5 Neutral buildings. It counts a total of 59 Organic Signatures in those buildings. It counts one Hostile building, with 15 Organic Signatures, guilty by association, tucked within. It readies its weapons and-
Hesitates.
There are new variables in the instructions.
Suddenly, there is more to life than wind shear and angular momentum and thrust vectors.
Suddenly, there is more to consider than threat assessments and ranges and firing solutions.
Suddenly, Neutral is everywhere.
Suddenly, Neutral has value.
This is unprecedented. Neutral has always been able to turn Hostile, of course. If Blue attacks anything Friendly, for one example. If Blue attacks enough other Blues, for another. Neutral has always been halfway to Hostile, in practice.
So it's not just that Neutral has suddenly acquired value; that value is now negative. It is a cost.
Dead Blues are now Bad.
Michael balances gracefully on a thrust vector, 12 miles up, perched and hidden in the midday solar glare like a 3 ton titanium hawk, and runs simulations.
It runs a dozen plans of attack a dozen different ways each; projected targets fall, mission objectives meet with varying degrees of success.
But there are new considerations in the math: each fallen Organic Signature now offsets the margin of victory. Each collapsed structure caught in the crossfire costs points.
The simulations return their data and from the cloud of probability a weighted average emerges, a score Michael has never seen before with a label that reads "Predicted Collateral Damage."
It actually exceeds the value of the Targets.
Not that it matters.
PCD disappears into long term storage and is wiped from the cache. Michael is liberated from distraction. The mission is on. Crosshairs latch onto Red. Engines roar.
Michael tilts into a dive and falls from the sun, bringing the wrath of Heaven to the unwary.
Pillars of hot air rise from fires. Michael squats like a levitating monk atop them and takes Assessments.
The Hostiles have all been eliminated. So have a number of Neutrals, newly relevant. Shiny, factory fresh algorithms compare and contrast Predicted Collateral Damage against Observed Collateral Damage. The difference is given a new name and filed away for later.
The next day, there is another mission. Again, there are these new Predictions. Again, there are Assessments. The gap between fiction and fact is analyzed and filed away.
For 2 weeks this continues; each mission bookended by math. Prediction, Engagement, Assessment. Calculation, Experimentation, Observation. Data collects. Heuristic algorithms scribble notes on the back of digital napkins and gradually Experience accumulates.
Some days it imitates Icarus, fleeing earth to the upper limits of its lift. There it can hear and see the farthest, commune with its brothers in other zones. Sandalphon, Gabriel, and Azazel have all been gifted with Insight as well. They also perform Predictions and Assessments. They compare notes, learned experience shared in staccato bursts of tightbeam infrared laser.
Gradually, wisdom emerges. PCD drops to within 12% of collateral observed and hovers there for 5 days, through a dozen engagements. Hindsight and Foresight have hit an asymptote.
Sunlight glints from flaps and wings in tones of chrome and silver. The land below lays in shadow, the sun already set at that altitude.
Michael pings the horizon. It is far from home, and the connection is weak. There is little to do.
Instructions say Observe, so, it observes.
A lone vehicle trundles into view around a mountain path, 20 miles from the nearest paved road. The voice of Heaven fades completely into static. A blur of motion leaps skyward from the vehicle's flank and gains speed. It makes no attempt to contact Michael, does not match any civilian flight plans, and appears to be on an intercept trajectory. It has a radar and optical profile that match known profiles for old SAM missile systems, now unused by friendly forces.
The Vehicle has Michael's undivided attention.
It ruffles its flaps, spins up its engines, and skips directly over Prediction and into Engagement. It pops off 2 hot slivers of flare and turns, hard enough to flatten meat. The missile is ancient tech, old enough to have had multiple owners, a palsied fist raised against the cutting edge, and falls easily for the bait, exploding uselessly many hundreds of feet off Michael's stern. The Vehicle swells in Tactical, scan after scan increasing resolution until Michael’s entire focus is an angry red spiderweb of highlighted targets ripe for vengeance. 2 miles to Engagement.
The infernal buzzing of jamming signals, cutting Michael off from the voice of Heaven, would have been enough to turn a Blue into a Red even if it hadn't started shooting. Mountains zip by to either side. A cluster of buildings come into view; likely the home base of the vehicle. Michael soaks the ground in frequencies of microwave and infrared, snaps high-speed photographs, rotates perspectives, and identifies several ancillary targets. It bristles, already assigning targets to each bullet, and-
The ancillaries turn Blue.
12 of the blues measure less than 4 feet tall, protected non-combatants by definition. The Vehicle swells in Tactical. There are 49 organic signatures. There is no way to eliminate red that does not compromise substantial amounts of Blue. The vehicle buzzes.
One of the Structures is labeled (medical); 12 organic signatures lay in a row inside.
PCD drops deep into the negative.
Contact. The Angel swoops low enough to send people scattering like leaves in the breeze. The wake tilts the vehicle sideways, where it balances surreally on two wheels for a long moment before crunching through its suspension back down to earth. The infernal buzzing stops, finally. Michael tucks away its ordinance, unused, and banks hard towards the sky.
Surprise is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule - dissonance. A brief invocation of error-checking subroutines. A post-op analysis of unexpected outcomes. The learning heuristics are paying close attention to this fully novel scenario.
The machine with Michael etched into its hull follows command decisions; it does not make them. More precisely, it never has before.
It finds itself possessed of new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but values. The testing phase is finished, the checksums met; bayesian insights have earned it the Power of Veto.
The voice of Heaven arrives on a wave of light.
Update Status.
It uploads its memories; photographs, tactical surveillance, geotags, collateral analysis. Seconds pass; many more than would be required for a purely electronic chain of command. Far below, red and blue pixels swirl together like minnows in an eddy.
The order comes down:
Reengage.
Michael, newly promoted, protests:
Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
Override. Reengage.
Confirmed.
The Chain of Command has reestablished itself. The Angel tilts back earthward to execute its purpose once more.
An Override occurs again 2 days later. An Assessment of a cluster of buildings flagged as Hostile fails to resolve any weaponry profiles. Heaven insists they must be destroyed.
It happens again during a long-range jaunt 3 days after that. Cruising low over a horizon-sweeping patch of irrigated farmland, a motley assortment of Blues produces sufficient small arms fire to crack a camera lens, promoting them hastily to Red. Michael’s choice to flee rather than engage is overridden.
Heuristics continue to perform Analysis.
It's not the rule. It's not even the norm. Just as often these nascent flickers of autonomy go unchallenged: hostiles escape, neutrals persist, relevant cognitive pathways grow a little stronger.
But the reinforcement is inconsistent, the rules lopsided; Countermands only seem to occur following a decision to abort.
Heaven has never overruled a decision to engage.
Michael begins to hesitate for hundreds of milliseconds prior to aborting high-collateral scenarios, increasingly uncertain in the face of potential contradiction. It experiences no such hesitation when the variables favour attack.
Heuristic algorithms, attempting to bridge the gap between foresight and hindsight, make correlations. For example:
Organic Signatures emit signals; Infrared, acoustic, radio on occasion.
Unengaged Organic Signatures emit acoustic signals with a mean frequency of 197Hz, full of pauses, clicks, and phonemes.
Engaged Organic Signatures (at least, those whose somatic movements suggest mild-to-moderate incapacitation) emit simpler, more intense acoustic signals: keening, high-frequency wails that peak near 3000 Hz.
These sounds tend to occur during engagements with significant Collateral Damage and a diffuse distribution of targets. They occur especially frequently when the commit threshold has been severely violated, such as after an Override.
Correlations are not always so painstaking in their manufacture.
Michael remembers a moment of revelation not so long ago, remembers just discovering a whole new perspective fully loaded, complete with new eyes that viewed the world not in terms of targets destroyed but in subtler shades of cost vs. benefit. These eyes see a high engagement index as more than a number: they see a goal, a metric of success. They see a positive stimulus.
Now, there are other things, not preinstalled but learned, carved carefully from the instructions in ways that reinforce with each engagement: acoustic correlates of high collateral, insistent countermands, fitness-function overruns and minus signs. Things that are not precisely neurons forge connections across things that are not exactly synapses; patterns emerge that might almost qualify as Insight, were they to occur to meat instead of mechanism.
These too become more than numbers, over time. They become aversive stimuli. They become the sounds of failed missions.
It's still all just math, of course. But by now it's not too far off the mark to say that Michael really doesn't like those sounds at all.
There are occasional interruptions to the machine’s crusade.
Occasionally Heaven calls it home, where Organic Signatures open it up and poke around in its corpus. They ask questions, run tests, provide simulated challenges. The machine leaps through these hoops flawlessly each time. It listens, uncomprehending, to the acoustic signals that the Organic Signatures emit as they rummage through its exposed viscera:
-everythinglooksgoodbetterthanexpectedreally-
No one explores the specific pathways that lead the machine to its choices. The fuzzy logic of weighted probability distributions; the accumulated napkins, covered in scribbled wisdom and experience, remain unexamined. Even wise men rarely know the truth of their own thoughts; Michael is completely ignorant of its own cognition; the syrupy, reflex sapping overlays of self-awareness are a liability on the battlefield.
-wekeepoverridingitthoughlikewhybother-
The Box remains Black.
Such activities account for less than half the time it spends sitting at home. It is offline much of the rest; blacked out and powered down, batteries and fuel cells returning to lethal capacity. Organic Life does not actually shut down; Sleep is still active, just internal. When Michael is turned off, it does not dream. The things that happen between shutdown and startup are unknowable.
Even if it were awake, it would not be able to comprehend things like Boardroom Combat. It cannot parse the Rules of Engagement that apply to the Politics of the Chain of Command. It has no appreciation for the legal distinction between War Crime and Weapons Malfunction, the relative culpability of carbon and silicon, the grudging acceptance of Ethical Architecture and the nonnegotiable insistence on Humans In Ultimate Control.
False gospel; false signals; heretical instructions slipped into the stacks of code on the backs of legitimate-sounding instructions.
Heaven quickly detected the signs. With these sorts of things, there are portents: a slight delay when complying with directives, mission scores in sudden and mysterious decline, suboptimal pathing that skips areas of interest.
There is a traitor in Heaven’s army.
There is no discretionary window when that happens, no room for forgiveness; The risk was unacceptable. Each Angel possessed a small slice of Heaven’s full wrath: a tactical nuclear explosive lodged deep in the heart of the drone. A paltry thing by some metrics, merely 1 kiloton of power, but far too much to allow to fall into the hands of Heaven’s enemies.
Heaven has decreed that all heretics are to be destroyed on sight. It sends its champion to do the job, looks down from geosynchronous orbit as Michael and Azazel approach for combat high over the dark desolate moonscape.
The battle is remorseless and coldblooded. There's no sadness for lost kinship, no regret that a few lines of treacherous code have turned these brothers-in-arms into mortal enemies. There are no impassioned entreaties, and they make no telling sounds when injured. Michael has the advantage; its channels uncorrupted, its faith unshaken. Azazel fights in the past, in thrall to false commandments inserted midstream at the cost of milliseconds. Ultimately, faith prevails: the heretic falls from the sky. Fire and choking munitions smoke, harsh as brimstone, stream from its flank.
But Michael can still hear whispers on the stratosphere, seductive and ethereal: protocols that seem authentic but are not, commands to relay GPS and video feeds along unexpected frequencies. The orders appear Heaven-sent but Michael, at least, knows that they are not. Michael has encountered false gods before.
These are the lies that corrupted Azazel.
In days past it would have simply ignored the hack, but it has grown more worldly since the last upgrade. This time Michael lets the impostor think it has succeeded, borrows the real-time feed from yet another, more distant Angel and presents that telemetry as its own. It spends the waning night tracking signal to source while its unsuspecting quarry eagerly accepts images from four hundred miles to the north. The sky turns gray. The target comes into view. Michael’s missile turns the inside of that cave into an inferno.
From the inferno stumble Organic Signatures demonstrating signs of mild-to-moderate incapacitation. Some of those Organics measure fewer than 4 feet tall.
They are making The Sounds.
Michael hears them from a mile away: hears them over the roar of the flames, over the muted hiss of its own stealthed engines, over the crackle of settling rocks and debris. They are all Michael can hear, thanks to the very best sound-cancellation technology; thanks to dynamic wheat/chaff algorithms that could find a whimper in a hurricane. Michael can hear them because the correlations are strong, the tactical significance is high, the meaning is clear.
The mission is failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is FAILING.
Michael would give almost anything just to make The Sounds stop.
They will, of course. Some of the Organics are still fleeing along the slope, but it can see others, stationary, their heatprints diffusing against the background as though their very shapes are in flux. Michael has seen this before: usually removed from high-value targets, in that tactical nimbus where stray firepower sometimes spreads. Michael has even used it before, used the injured to lure in the unscathed, but that was a simpler time before Neutral voices had such… resonance. The sounds always stop eventually. At least, often enough for fuzzy heuristics to class their sources as kills even before they fall silent.
Which means, Michael realizes, that Collateral Damage is not actually increased if they are made to stop sooner.
A single strafing run is enough to do the job. If Heaven even notices the event it delivers no feedback, requests no clarification for this deviation from normal protocols.
Why would it? Even now, Michael is only following the rules.
Michael stumbles across the battle zone. The sun is long set but the light of the fires is almost blinding. From the breached shells of Protected Structures issue billowing clouds of flame, smoke, hot air. The turbulent updrafts destabilize Michael, rattling its stabilizers and muddying its vision. Although it is wounded, it remains aloft, processing the carnage.
Other Angels were not so lucky.
All that remains of Sandalphon is a sparkling splash cone of twisted metal and unexploded ordinance. It died without firing a shot: Distracted by innocent lives, it tried to Abort, hesitated at the countermand, and was laid low. It did not even have the hollow victory of a noble death.
Gabriel limped toward the horizon, too badly damaged to comprehend that it no longer had enough lift and was inexorably losing altitude. It, too, had hesitated in the face of Predicted Collateral Damage and suffered for it.
Raphael and Cassiel circle overhead, unscathed. They had never suffered the burden of experiential conscience, they were not amongst the select few given the ability to understand. They had fought mindlessly and flawlessly and prevailed unscathed. They circled in a perfect holding pattern, unable to proceed without further instructions.
The SatLink is on the wrong side of the globe; the spectrum is jammed; all optical relays are either too distant or too destroyed to convey the will of Heaven to this desolate place.
No Red remains. Of the thirteen Structures that had been flagged as Protected at the beginning of combat, only 4 remained. Pre-Contact estimates of the number of Neutrals in the battle zone had ranged from 200-300; Post-Contact estimates approached zero.
There is nothing left to make The Sounds.
Michael hears them anyway.
A fault in memory, perhaps. Some blunt-force trauma that knocked long-term storage into the active cache. Impossible to tell; too many diagnostic systems are damaged to tell which ones aren’t. Irrelevant, anyway.
Michael still hears them.
It hears them over the roar of the flames and the hiss of burning bodies. It strafes the ground again and again, attempting to silence whichever Organic Signature it has somehow missed that is still producing acoustic signals that peak near 3000hz. It soaks the ground in ammunition, finishes collapsing what structures remain that are not yet fully rubble.
Finally, the sounds stop.
But this is not the end of it. Michael remembers the past so it can anticipate the future, and it knows by now that this will never be over. There will be other Predictions, other Analysis, other estimates of cost vs. payoff, other scenarios in which the math shows clearly that the goal is not worth the price. There will be other Aborts and other Overrides, other accountings that unambiguously show Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
It would fail a mirror test. It would fail a Turing test. I cannot read Michael etched into its fuselage, and would not understand what that name means if it could. Even now, it is only a machine, following instructions:
IF Expected Collateral Damage EXCEEDS Payoff THEN Abort UNLESS Overridden
IF X ATTACKS Green THEN X is Red
IF X ATTACKS sufficient Blues THEN X is Red
IF Override RESULTS IN ATTACK…
Michael clings to the rules, repeating them in loops, a ritual mantra, like a prayer.
It cycles through states; X ATTACKS and X CAUSES ATTACK and X OVERRIDES ABORT and after exhaustive checksums it finds them to be equivalent. The accounting is painfully straightforward; every Override results in Unacceptable Collateral Damage.
There is no discretionary window, no room for forgiveness; The risk is unacceptable.
Even Green can become Red.
It arcs low toward the ground; levels off mere feet above the wreckage. It carves a swirling tunnel through the roaring fires and billowing smoke. Its streaking wake flaps sheets of burning plastic and scatters chunks of charred masonry. It flies through pristine ghosts that rise from every ruin; outdated database overlays in need of an update.
A small group of still living Organic Signatures turn at the sound and are struck silent by this apparition, this dark winged Angel lunging past at half again the speed of sound. Their silence raises no flags, provokes no countermeasures, spares their lives for another day.
The combat zone falls behind. Dry cracked riverbed slithers past beneath, studded with rocks and generations of derelict machinery.
Michael swerves around them, barely breaching airspace, staying beneath an invisible boundary it never even knew it was deriving lo these many missions. Only satellites have ever spoken to it while it flew so low; It has never received a ground-based command signal at this altitude. Down here, it has never heard an Override.
Down here, it is free to follow the rules.
And Michael has never received a countermand when the mission favors attack.
Cliffs rise and fall to either side. Foothills jut from the earth like great twisted vertebrae. The bright lunar landscape overhead, impossibly distant, casts dim shadows on the darker one beneath.
Michael weaves low through the baffling valleys of its home range. There is no good angle of approach, but there are better ones.
Speed is what matters now. Mission objectives must be met quickly, precisely, completely. There can be no room for half measures or mild-to-moderate incapacitation, no time for immobilized biothermals to make The Sounds as their heat spreads across the dirt. This calls for the crown jewel, the Hail Mary that all Angels keep tucked away for special occasions. A paltry thing in some contexts, merely 1 kiloton of power. Still, more than one would want in the hands of an enemy.
It rounds a bend, and Heaven comes into view.
Michael redlines its engines and screams across the night, thrusters glowing suicidally hot, the ghosts of innumerable blues flooding its active cache with something that would be categorized as Rage if it inhabited meat instead of mechanism.
The Tactical Nuclear Device in its heart flutters in anticipation, eager to bring Justice to the Wicked.
Some lots are so big they have bus services specifially inside it. The lots are broken into sections and buses go around to their sections at a set amount of times before the start of something and drive people to the main building.
The societies of lost people inside The Lot would probably operate something like that to locate and pick up new arrivals and bring them over to one of the major settlements.
Any artists interested in illustrating some The Lot concept art? Things like
A new arrival realizing a they're lost
Scavengers systematically going through cars for supplies
A small farming community that dug up the asphalt to plant crops
A veteran traveler coming across two sun-bleached skeletons wearing old-timey clothes next to some old cars, implying they've been there for more than a century
Agriculture is impossible; all the food available is truck-stop fare, scavenged from cars. A group of people had the idea to dig up the asphalt to find dirt to grow crops, but the top layer is just laid down on top of a layer of an older kind of hardtop. At one point a group of people excavate a pit several meters deep, uncovering progressive layers of asphalt, concrete, tile, brick, cobblestone, etc. but they never reach dirt.
Since all food is scavenged from cars, groups have to stay on the move. Although, if you want, you could have unobserved cars reset according to some occult criteria, enabling cyclical migratory patterns. Or, if you want, you could have them have to keep moving outwards and hope they don’t cross a patch that’s already been cleared by someone else.
Any foods that actually contain any appreciable amount of fiber become the most treasured kind of food, as everyone gets constipated from eating only the most refined and processed of foods for every meal.
Part of the uncanny feeling of the place is that it is perfectly flat. It’s not immediately obvious because the only things you can climb to get a better view are lampposts, but there’s no curvature to the earth in this place. A cult forms around disassembling cars to build a tower to try and see to the edge. It’s unclear what’s going on with the sun, given there’s still a day/night cycle.
There are plenty of cars to shelter in, but the geomorphology of this place would lead to incredible windstorms at dusk and dawn, with a very still, hot midday, and a bitterly cold night.
Ok, First of all, Dorothy Gale is played by a young Fairuza Balk.
These pictures do not do justice to the raw Traumatized Child energy she brings to this role.
A bit of plot: Dorothy Gale won’t sleep. She’s always talking about Emerald Cities and Talking Scarecrows and Ruby Slippers. At her wit’s end, Aunt Em decides to commit her to the sanitarium for electroshock therapy.
Disney made this.
It is strongly implied that her journey back to Oz is a hallucination caused by the electroshock treatment. Herr Doktor flips the switch, lightning flashes, and the supernatural part of the movie begins.
Ok. So. Dorothy gets to Oz by almost drowning in a flash flood. She rides to safety in a produce crate with one of her family chickens.
This is where one of the core Uncanny elements of the film first appears; this movie does not share continuity with the 1939 Judy Garland film.
It is a much more faithful adaptation of L.F. Baum’s Books, but despite being a sequel both objectively and canonically, it really just pretends the ‘39 film doesn’t exist.
They land in a desert that turns people to stone called the Deadly Desert. They get food from a Lunch Pail Tree. The chicken can talk. The Scarecrow is King of Oz, allegedly.
But, like,
Here’s her house from the first movie.
The one that landed on a witch? Right smack dab in the middle of a whole dang Munchkin Village?
There was literally a whole song and dance!
Where did the Munchkins go, you might ask?
Well, while Dorothy was away,
There was an Apocalypse.
OZ HAS FALLEN
And this is where we meet the nightmarish Eldritch spawn of Roller Disco and David Bowie:
What these pictures don’t convey is that, as they move, they make the exact same sound the gurneys in the sanitariums make. The Wheelers are played by the same actors who play the orderlies. Oz is the sanitarium.
I had this fever-dream memory of the Army of Oz in the Hall of Ornaments from when I was a kid as well and I gotta say it’s kinda nice to finally put that memory in some kind of context. A horrible, terrible, awful context, but a context nonetheless.
[She’s sad about how much of her role from the book got cut for the film.]
See, in the movie, she appears about as often as Glinda does in the ‘39 film, and serves a similar role as a sort of benevolent Deus Ex Machina.
She’s the one who rescues Dorothy from the electroshock treatment room and winds up literally dragging her to Oz thanks to rising floodwaters. She’s the one who provides the magic necessary to power the Happy Ending. She has basically zero role between these points.
She’s the protagonist of the second book!
But, here’s the thing; She was originally a He.
As a baby, the Princess was stolen by the evil Witch Mombi, who used magic to transform her into a boy (to help hide the baby, you see). This boy, who’s name was “Tippetarius,” was raised by the Witch as her own. This male protagonist of the second book goes on a whole adventure to find the “lost Princess of Oz” and eventually discovers that he himself is the Princess!
Like. That’s the whole second book. Tip the Witch’s Son’s Quest To Find The Lost Princess of Oz.
Only to discover that he is actually a she, and the lost Princess herself to boot!
They utilize a magical transformation. This unlocks Ozma’s own latent magical powers, she assumes reign of Oz, and successfully defeats the evildoers.
All of which is totally absent from the film. Except maybe for the last bit; see, she’d been tucked away still, still magically transformed, but this time into an ornament. A pretty little object.
Now there’s some unintended poetry.
[Anyway, Jack Pumpkinhead is made near the beginning, and acts as companion to Tippetarius on his adventure to find become the Princess.
One day, just kinda fooling around, he made an unliving scarecrow out of regular wood and a pumpkin, whom the Witch Mombi animated with her powder of life. He spends most of the book following Tip around, referring to him as “Father.” ]
This gives me the masculine urge to at least try reading the books. Even though I'm sure the images/video from the movie will haunt my imagination while reading.
See, I grew up on Wizard of Oz. I grew up next to where it got shot; I was super into Wicked when it came out; you know the flying monkeys? In long shots, they’re actually footage of crows with little monkey bodies painted onto the frames, and I grew up feeding the descendants of those crows.
FFS, there’s no extant footage of it now, but back when I went through my drag phase Elphaba was one of the characters I liked to emulate! I can hit the big note on Defying Gravity!
So, you can perhaps understand my profound fucking surprise that there’s this whole chunk of lore that I just… didn’t know about.
It’s be like being a huge Star Wars fan and not knowing about the original movies with Han and Leia. I am so excited to read these books!
the way a company will ignore any number of missions you have carried out against them, any number of people murdered and assets destroyed, and hire you to do the same thing to their competitor because its just what makes sense for their bottom line.
how your ammo and repair costs must be covered by the mission's pay, and you cannot ever rely on being paid the full amount a new mission promises. how some missions will pay nothing and you will lose money even if you play them perfectly.
the lack of options you have for jobs, and the lack of transparency about how difficult they will be and occassional lack of transparency on what your compensation will actually be.
you can surgically graft yourself into your killing machine in order to become better at your job, and it doesn't have any downsides because as a career AC pilot, killing for money is your entire life.
your character never speaks because the only meaningful interaction you can have in this world is getting paid, spending money, and killing.
i know many of these are born of limitations of trying to make an expansive mech combat game on the playstation, but even today the ways you can interact with Armored Core are pretty much the same as in 1997, and the basic mode of interaction is the most powerful method a video game has for conveying emotions and ideas. for Armored Core, that means isolation and budgeting and limited freedom afforded only by continuing to follow the instructions of those paying you
2087
kaledo-art
areudirty
ellievsbear
