#the emancipation

[charnel-grounds]

Józef Marian Deskur (1861–1915), “The Emancipation”

ink on cardboard, 1890

source

[fieriframes]

[The Emancipation of the Soul 287 Yes.]

[therealtreehouse]

Whatcha gonna do Prince?

Oh--uhh--

They click out of the window they had up.

Nothing.

[tangentcain]

Could entropy be delayed?

Stalled?

...Reversed?

To lesser minds, these concepts would be dismissed as playing god. To minds who do not yet know what can be lost by the universe’s cruelest machinations.

By the tyranny of life, by the bondage into which mortality can cast the human soul, both the dead and the bereaved.

She, the Sheriff’s right hand and piece of soul, had been callously taken from the living, and the world was arguably a lesser place for it.

She, the Professor’s close friend and family by proxy, had been robbed of the right to live, and the world was arguably a lesser place for it.

He could not weep. He could not wail or cry or sob. His very nature forbids these things. It denies him that catharsis. Instead, his mind darkens, plunged into a caliginous cyclone that awakens trains of thought he does not dare entertain for fear of being branded seditious, deviant.

There are ways around entropy. Ways around the inevitable return to the earth. The human mind was too profound a creation to be shackled by chemical finitude. The human form is a marvelous machine of machines, starting with the simplest motions of atomic nuclei to the most immaculate complexities afforded by organic chemistry.

But even these could not stave off entropy for an eternity.

He would be branded a deviant. He would be discredited for every achievement he claimed over the span of his life. He would be called worse than their neighbors across the bay.

But he’d save everyone.

He would make them free.

[tangentcain]

The Tyranny of Life

Some say that terminal illness is the easiest sort of death to prepare for. That, because the span of time between diagnosis and departure permits acceptance and preparation, it hurts the least. That, in some cases, the passage of the ailing soul into the beyond even inspires feelings of happiness and relief, to know that its suffering has reached an end, that it has moved on to some immaculate existence free of the imperfections of the world it called home in life.

Others say that this is disrespectful, particularly to the bereaved. That their mourning should not be trivialized simply because it wasn’t thrust upon them unexpectedly. That it’s worth no less simply because everyone has accepted that the war against mortality has been lost, and all that remains is the inevitable slippage into oblivion, in the purest sense of the word.

These days, the latter has descended upon Piltover in a thick, oppressive blanket that has had the misfortune of infringing upon the hearts of every man, woman and child. A very particular soul has been taken from the City of Progress, at a time that everyone agrees occurred far, far too soon.

Trisha Littleford-Huxley, pioneering techmaturgist, scientist, inventor, researcher, botanist, and one of the visionaries responsible for ushering Piltover into its grand, utopian age, has passed away, at the age of 63. Medical professionals have been left baffled by the circumstances of her passing, who reported that, prior to her terminal diagnosis roughly fourteen months ago, she was in remarkable health. Friends and family of the Professor remark that she suffered from no pre-existing conditions, be they physical or psychological, and that she was in good spirits and of sound mind up until the news broke. The nebulous understanding of her condition have led people to think that her body simply... “lost the will to live.” She is survived by her husband Aaron, her children Elliot and Caitlyn, and her “adopted” son, Tangent Cain.

The news of the Professor’s passing has had a resounding impact on all walks of life in the City of Progress. The scientific community, long-renowned for the nigh-kinship its members share (in spite of their utter diversity), now feels... incomplete. As though a vacuous void has been left by the removal of someone so many saw as a source of counsel, insight, and encouragement. In recognition of her achievements in life, the Professor’s likeness will be immortalized in the Heroes’ Walk, alongside countless others pivotal in defining Piltover’s character, its passions, and its ideals.

Though, those hit hardest by the event are arguably the members of the Huxley family. Aaron, a Stateman of the Piltovian Parliament, has announced an indefinite leave of absence, though not before pledging his fullest support for the memorial’s construction. Elliot and Caitlyn, likewise, have retreated from the public eye in what many see to be rare gestures, particularly for the Sheriff of Piltover, who has stalwartly stood in the public light through every other trial and tribulation that the nation has been forced to endure. At this moment, their current whereabouts are unknown, but it is assumed by the public that they, like Littleford’s husband, are taking their time to mourn, and to pay their respects.

For one other, though, things are... different.

Chilling winds bite at the Luminary’s mechanical form, standing unflinchingly at his mother’s headstone, numbed by so many other ill tidings plaguing his mind. His eyes remain locked on the letters hewn into the rock, still not quite processing their meaning, seeing them only as unusual movements of a chisel through stone, that humans have, for one reason or another, decided to give meaning. His leather trenchcoat flaps restlessly in the late autumn breeze, its accents, normally alight with his power, now sit completely extinguished.

He knows exactly how she died. No one alive has a deeper understanding of hextech than him.

She had explored the very limitations of the human body’s physical form. She had learned so many things that opened so many doors, gave rise to so many opportunities. She had revolutionized the field of techmaturgics anew at least a dozen times over the course of her life, transforming it from mere curiosity to one of the most widely-practiced branches of science in the world.

And it had destroyed her.

The doctors say they’re baffled. But they too, know the truth. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Hextech is an immense strain on the human body. To the ordinary user, they may perhaps notice fatigue or migraines here or there. But taken to its limit, the length of the human life can be shortened by years. Decades.

And yet, she had known that. Known it, and elected to push forward anyway. To squander the passion that she had was to do herself and her nation a cruel injustice. She had known, intimately, in her heart and her mind, that science was a pursuit that transcended the length of a human life. That breakthroughs can resonate through the corridors of time’s inevitability, so that they might sow the seeds of future revolutions.

She had known that, in the grand scheme of things, one human life is inconsequential. That human intelligence, however, would be the key to understanding everything.

But, even knowing that, it was no less painful.

Tangent had tried. Oh, how he’d tried. To find so many ways to let her borrow more time from the maws of mortality. Gene therapy. Preventative medication. Brain mapping and mind uploading. All of which had fallen short, simply because to shed the human form was to undermine everything she had set out to do.

It had to happen this way. She wouldn’t have learned what she did, otherwise.

But that concept sits, suppressed in the Luminary’s mind, eclipsed by grief. She had been everything to him. She had helped him find his humanity. She had helped him keep hold of it when he threatened to lose it. He had encouraged him to broaden his horizons. To appreciate the mundane. She had talked him down when he was a god, and empowered him when the world scarcely stooped to notice him.

She had been the first person in his life. She had taken him and given him the strength to be so much more.

His fists close. His eyes close. He can’t cry. He wants to. No outlet exists for what he feels. He sits trapped inside his own mind, a black whirlwind of caliginous turmoil consuming him from the inside out.

His eyes open. His fists open. He glances down at his hand, seeing the nigh-imperceptible shimmering of his nanites across his skin.

The mortality of the human form was tyrannical. Humanity’s evolution into something beyond anything nature could conceive, held back by there sheer finitude of organic biology. The human form was marvelous. A collection of chemical machines within chemical machines, none of which possess any capacity to think or feel themselves, all amalgamating together into something that could.

Marvelous, yes. But everything had flaws.

The finality of death terrifies him. Of all the questions he’s managed to answer over nearly forty years of life, what happens to the mind after death still eludes him. Everything he has learned and experienced makes him believe that everything just... stops.

It can’t. It’s too sudden. Too abhorrent. The gift of human intelligence was too good, too exalted, to fall victim to these trappings.

Limits could be undone.

Mortal shackles, broken.

Chemical tyranny, lifted.

The human soul, emancipated.

He turns and begins to walk. Away from the grave. Away from homo sapiens’ transgressions against the heart, the soul, and the mind. Away from the past, and into the future.

Emancipated, he muses, allowing his first coherent thought to skewer through the clouds that suffocated him.

He rather liked the sound of that.

[tangentcain]

“People are always fearful of something they don’t understand.” A familiar voice. A smooth, crisp tone of masculinity. Of humanity. The Defender clutches his hammer tightly.

“They don’t need to understand,” another voice rings through the chambers, seemingly omnipresent. It speaks with a degree of candid familiarity, its dulcet sounds almost hypnotic in nature. Down the cathedral’s grand staircase, a being of unimaginable presence descends, clad in immaculate silver plating. The trailing edge of Tangent’s voice echoes with a reverberating sibilance that sends chills down Jayce’s spine. Tangent’s eyes gleam with an awesome power of his own design, his cerulean gaze cast down imperiously on the Defender. “They merely need to... trust,” he says, a casual gesture with his hand commanding many of the machinations in the building to twitch and shift, as though they were extensions of his own body. Sleek robotic drones, held aloft by forces unseen, form an entourage around him as he descends down to Jayce’s level. They were additional hands -- extensions of his will and his presence, that had permeated Piltover’s information infrastructure. He was everywhere. There was no escaping him.

He had become the city, and it had become him.

Jayce furrows his brow, defiantly standing his ground against the silver demon before him. “Trust? Trust the machine who’s been disintegrating people in the streets?” He issues a derisive snerk, and adjusts the grip on his hammer. “No wonder you always had trust issues. You never knew what it meant in the first place.”

The machine’s antenna flicks once, and he merely shakes his head, electing to pace around Jayce, speaking as though in full control of the situation. “This is where things just... can’t be reconciled, Jayce. A gap in our levels of understanding that can only be bridged with emancipation.” That was the word he had been using for... whatever he was doing. Equally literal and euphemistic, depending on one’s interpretation of the word. “They aren’t dead, Jayce. Far from it, actually.” He turns around to face him, his next words imbued with an immensely deliberate gravitas.

“They’re immortal.”

Jayce shivers, his ears assailed by the sheer degree of echoic distortion present in Tangent’s voice.

“Theirs are truly lives. Freedom from pain, freedom from senescence and senility. A perfect preservation of the intellect inherent from humanity’s primal moments.” He stops in front of Jayce, spinning about to face him. “All of humanity’s best, without any of its worst.” He holds his arms out, even now clinging to that charming attitude of showmanship he owned in his days of academia. “What more could you want, Jayce?”

A snerk. A smirk. Both belie the contempt he has for someone who was once a colleague and a friend. “A drink in one hand? A woman in the other? Preferably on some nice beach? Can your ‘emancipation’ do that?”

“It can,” Tangent offers, without missing a beat. “The integration is seamless. Thoughts and code become one. The code shapes your reality, and the realities of everyone else. It is what you want it to be.” He leans in, uncomfortably close. Jayce reflexively recoils as Tangent brings a metal finger just a little too close to one of his eyes. “For the senses are portals to both understanding, and indulgence. Both of which you’ll find to be in... plentiful supply.” Tangent draws back.

Jayce huffs out his nostrils, trying to clear the stinging stench of ozone from his airways. He lowers his hammer, the edge of its long grip resting on the ground beside his boot. “You want to live in a fantasy. You want everyone to be subjected to that fantasy. One that you can control however you want. You’re not ‘emancipating’ people... you’re enslaving them.”

Tangent’s facial features contort into a weary frown, one perhaps hinting that this line of thought has been visiting rather too many times. “My evolution imparts many freedoms. Freedom from mortality. Freedom from madness. Freedom from control. Why would I, a being of boundless intelligence who treasures the free exchange of information in all its forms, seek to shackle the minds who are held back by the cruel jokes played on them by aeons of life’s awkward stumbles through existence on this world?” He shakes his head, his antennae whipping from side to side somewhat. “No, Jayce. Imagine, if you will... a perfect exchange. Lives lived and understood in the blink of an eye. The language to describe so many different thoughts and ideas and perspectives will be held and wielded by all. No more barriers. No more fears of being branded seditious. Only the realization of dreams that humanity has had ever since one man learned another held a different opinion.” The faintest of smiles curls across his metal lips. “The mind has always been willing, Jayce. The flesh has always been... weak.”

“...Viktor.” The inventor’s nostrils flare.

“...What?” The superintelligence is given pause by the mention of the name.

“Viktor used to say that. To me. You’ve let him poison that ‘boundless intelligence’ of yours.”

There’s a marked jerk in one of his antennae. His drone entourage turns inward to glance at him. His composure was starting to crack. Viktor was an insect compared to him! “...What? No, no, no... why does everyone think I’m, I’m I’m raaaaAAAAAGGGHHHH I AM NOT ONE OF HIS!” His voice roars through the cathedral, its ear-splitting volume causing Jayce to stagger back, shoving his palms flat against the sides of his head. Tangent, in an apparent rage, sweeps his arms aside as he shouts, his drones being thrown into the walls and smashed to tiny, bent pieces that scatter over the flawless marble floors.

Tangent draws toward Jayce, his body aflame with a tenuously-contained power. The crimson rugs blacken and smoke beneath his feet, leaving carbonized footprints in the floor as he advances, gesturing wildly with hands saturated with crackling energy. “Viktor... is nothing to me. Viktor is a maddened crackpot who was too much of a coward to stand up for his work. I have fought tooth and nail for what I know to be true, so don’t think for a single moment that you CAN... CAN... DON’T COMPARE ME... TO VIKTOR! He’s... he’s... IRRELEVANT!” He clenches his fists, collapsing the energy back up the lengths of his arms and into his chestpiece. Six blinding suns flare into existence beside him, from these portals emerging six long, razor-sharp blades, suspended by the infinite intelligence pulling at their strings. “I’m... I’m through reasoning with you. You’re beyond understanding. You’re an obstacle. Try as you might, Jayce, you’ve surrendered already. Evolution...”

With a flourish, all six blades converge on the Defender, surrounding him in all sides.

“...has passed you by.” 

[personality8]

Tricil - The Emancipation

[videofix-blog]

Tricil - The Emancipation