#isv hermes

[oriardy]

"Nûveshá lé zi ja zhúl zhôm."

On Rubos, we have a word: nûveshá.

nû — an echo / something faint / faded memory

vesh — ache / pull / the gravity of a feeling

-á — internal / emotional state clarifier

"A tender, unshakable ache for a presence, place, or time that lives in the bones but not in the world. It does not wish to be resolved."

[oriardy]

63 6f 6e 6e 65 63 74 69 6f 6e

Rotary fingers chugged across keys, the caps eroded into blank plateaus by the touch of the lonely crypt keeper. Digits unwound into a snarl of loose threads, unspooled, undisciplined. He considered them for moments longer, watching the ebb and flow of each value, assigning it a priority in an endless stream of tasks.

Click.

He twisted an artificial connection about his forefinger and fished for it. The lure, the bait. A great spider perched in the throat of an orderly web, threads in a million spun directions, waiting. Patiently. Click. He pulled another plug from the monolithic switchboard and plunged it into his shell. Fingers fluttered faster. This tomb of data drifted far on the fringes of the known, its screens haunted by restless analog ghosts. He felt their presence over his shoulders, in the sleeping servers, in the reels of spooled data shoved haphazardly into every nook and cranny.

Click.

A buoy in the vast matrices caught his attention—a return. Not from the P-AI he typically bothered with, but another, from beyond the parasitic grasp of Javelin Operations. A million pings issued from moment to moment, without any expectation of a response, yet here one flickered in green and black. Surprised, he leaned back in his rickety chair and canted his head at the foreignness of interaction. He glanced aside, his holographic gaze flitting to the candles arranged in the dusty port window and then to the abyss beyond. It was comforting to be surrounded by nothing. Amid the net of wires strangling him comfortably, he hashed a response.