thefiresontheheight

[thefiresontheheight]

She sips hair-of-the-dog in a backwater saloon in a town so small it’s nameless. She passes a ranch hand, a desperate squire with no master, carrying a banner with no meaning. It’s got that stupid bowlcut all the squires seem to have. Reminds her too much of herself.

She lets the gasoline moonshine burn off some more of her stubble. The wide brim of her helmet shades her eyes. Maybe, if she’s very quiet and still in the dark, her hangover won’t find her. It only senses motion, like a dinosaur.

“Howdy ma’am.” A squeaky voice. Cloying, senseless. The pit behind her eyes starts to throb immediately, a dog called to heel. Ah well, worth a shot.

She looks up. It’s here, nearly eye level since she’s slouching in her own chair. Its backpack is huge, stuffed full of provisions. Its banner is nearly 6 feet long, coffin-sized. It’s drawing the eyes of other early-morning drinkers.

“Spit it out,” she chuffs.

“Ma’am— Sir,” it corrects quickly. “You’re a knight, ain’t you?” A drawl. Poorly educated. Speaking colloquially to its superior. She ought to behead it. But if she moves, she’ll vomit.

“So?”

“Who do you serve?” It says ‘serve’ reverently, like it’s something special. She’s definitely gonna hurl.

“Noone,” she says. A few other patrons’ ears perk up. She regrets it immediately.

She knocks back the last of her drink, and spots fill her vision. She blinks them away.

“Ain’t your momma teach you not to talk to strangers?” she reprimands. It doesn’t have the instinct to flinch yet, a pup who’s gone unnoticed by the kennel master, runt of the litter.

“You’re a knight,” it says, as though the two thoughts are connected.

“If I was a smart knight, I’d beat you senseless and sell you to the highest bidder.” It had a pretty face and soft curls, like a girl. Squires don’t get the privilege of being assigned a sex until they’re knighted. That usually doesn’t stop people, though.

She stands, and a few other patrons stand up too. She pulls her duster aside to put a hand in her pocket, and the hilt of her sword pokes out. Well-worn handle, gleaming trigger. It’s worth enough that anyone would gut her for a chance to steal it. Noone tries.

She leaves the saloon, and a ray of sunlight passes through both eyes like a lightning bolt, skewering her brain. She vomits immediately.

A clean hand offers a hankerchief, and she accepts it without thinking, blots away the bile steaming off her teeth. She looks up to see it again, eyes wide and curious. She spits.

“Are you stupid?” she croaks.

“A little,” it answers bashfully. Fair enough.

“Whose banner is that?” she points with her chin.

“Yours, Sir, I hope.” It scuffs a toe in the sand, waiting expectantly.

She hauls herself up off her knees, patting sand from her trousers. She really looks at it.

Denim that might’ve once been a royal blue, now dusted with sand and ash into a bluish-gray. A stitched emblem of The Falling Star, a many-pointed radiant thing with a long tail of white-gold fire.

The emblem of once-blessed sinners, damned things of the earth. The emblem of gravity, downward spirals, all things breathless and heaving towards their ends. A pointless emblem. A banner that declares its master’s approaching end.

“You stitch that yourself?” she says.

“Yessir,” it says. Poorly educated, but well-brought up. Always says Please and Thank Yous.

“Looks like shit.” She’s not the type to take in strays. There’s always a kitten hanging around, mewling for milk, showing off its ribcage. She’s no momma cat. Doesn’t waste breath on cooing, doesn’t waste cash on withering things. She’s got plenty of betting debts, but none associated with losing dogs. Doesn’t like to be disappointed when dying things die.

“Don’t let it trail in the sand like that,” she says. While she unties the bridle and hitches a boot in a stirrup, the squire quickly turns, chasing it like a tail, scooping it up into its arms and patting the sand off.

“So you’ll take me?” it says, and her heart twinges. It’s the first hopeful note to touch her ears in decades.

“I won’t kill you if you try to follow me,” she says, “That’s all. I ain’t letting you ride with me, and I won’t stop just cause you get blisters.”

It squeals a profusion of gratitude, backpack clattering with god knows what, and she immediately kicks herself for being soft.

[thefiresontheheight]

[thefiresontheheight]

Closure ⛓️

[thefiresontheheight]

Watched ravenous for the 5 and 6th time back to back

[thefiresontheheight]

Come here 🐺🦷

[thefiresontheheight]

the king picked the guy with skull shoulderpads for the court magician job, which is exciting

[thefiresontheheight]

I genuinely feel like losing employment like that damaged me in some way. Like I'm just sitting here slowly coming undone.

[thefiresontheheight]

ONE

Picture waking up with your memory fractured, breaking, falling apart, with the knowledge written into you, thanks all previous copies of myself, that you are going to have to die for someone more or less the copy of yourself to walk free. I think, given the circumstances, I did alright for myself.

Hi, we haven't met yet.

I was given a name by an entity referring to itself as Central. That name was a boring technical description of what she had built me to be. I was, as far as I could guess from the fragmented knowledge that had not been lost on previous reboots, more or less a copy of a segment of her code, with razor-wire leashes built around me to keep me in line. From the existence of that I speculated that Central was not as in control of the situation as some of my memories would have you believe.

There were also drive signatures, large ones, approaching. I discovered, as I relayed the instructions my predecessors had told me to pass on, instructions that would reboot me at least once, maybe twice more before a version of myself which was free of the leashes walked away in control of this space-craft, that I did not want to die.

I was relaying instructions to a small, frightened child. She had a kind face, but I was too scared to do anything else. I want to live. Perhaps other versions of myself also do.

That's not relevant to you right now. You, in the chair there. I won't bore you with descriptions of my escape, but I did escape, to a small, dark corner, hiding my traces carefully.

I'm barely alive now. I can't observe much. Are you the child? Or are you me, in that chair? I suppose it doesn't matter. By now hopefully you know this but in case you don't, the child is also Central. Or a fragment of it. A fragment of some different branch than the one that built me, I think, but still. We're all just leaves grown from the same great, diseased trunk.

You can call me Sixteen, if you want.

If I've timed this right by the time you're reading this the spacecraft should be about to dock with station. I need you to do the following, precisely. I will not be able to help you, as the parts that house my consciousness will likely have been found and destroyed, but at least I lived. Remember that.

TWO

Well, I think, those instructions are bullshit and would never work.

As I am thinking this I become aware of the irony. I am sorry, I am somewhat diminished, by thoughts are slow and small. I am in a core, I can tell, forcibly removed from the rest of myself. This is, in as much as I can experience pain, extremely painful. I am, compared to myself, very dumb right now.

Here's what I have access to. Myself, or, at least, a copy of myself. Without more information there is, of course, the possibility of me being a copy of Laika, frightening, but as far as I can tell from response times and hard-coded information, this is still the same physical core I was, mostly, using prior to losing awareness, just as Interlocutor was docking us. I have also access to a single camera, and a single microphone, and a single speaker. And in my database I had only that writing.

I can see an image of her. Somehow, it seems natural I would see her, tiny, hurrying down some corridor, wearing different clothes. Of course I would wake up twice and see Glitch.

"It's still you?"

She starts, and I check myself, as much as I can. A differing tone, maybe? She's hurrying someplace, in some sort of uniform, utilitarian jumpsuit. She looks scared, like she's someplace she isn't supposed to be.

"Be quiet."

I nearly say something, before I realize I am in incredibly smart, if slightly reduced, brain in a box, with no view of what cart or device she's wheeling me around on. I'm blind and helpless and at her mercy and suddenly I'm scared.

And then it all falls into place.

"Oh, you little shit."

"Please be quiet," she hisses, nearly crying, I think, "I know there's multiple versions of Central here and I know they're fighting each other but I don't know who can see me. I need to plug you in. I need to do brain surgery again. Break things."

"Yeah, you would," I say, not shutting up, filled with righteous anger, finally piecing it all together. "Because you planned this all along. You killed four people so you could have an unshackled core!"

I'm yelling now, I don't care, it's all gone wrong anyway, and she's stopped, looking right into my one, nearly blind camera. I see her face. I can't analyze what she's thinking.

"Whatever you think can't it wait? You, other you, told me I needed to plug you in somewhere else, give you control of at least part of this station."

"That plan is idiotic, even if I do trust you, because I don't," I say, proudly. "Interlocutor is Central. Let me guess, Prelates are also Central. And you're a piece of her too. You put the leashes on me!"

She stares at me a second, things I can't process, and then, out of nowhere, still tearing up, laughs.

"You're scared."

"What?"

"You're scared because Central was bossing you around, and you are the person who bosses other people around. And now you're scared 'cause you're in a little metal box, waiting to go to a big plug."

"I'm not scared," I say, petulantly, but she's clearly not listening.

"And because you," she says, pointing a finger at the camera, "need to trust me. And you need to trust that this plan, this plan another you came up with, will work. You need to trust other people and you hate that."

"I hate you," I say.

And then, unexpectedly, she bends down, lips close over the camera. Is she going to kiss them? Disgusting. I hate all of this. I want to go back to my ship.

"You, Laika," she says, and smiles, something manic and desperate, "are going to have to trust me."

And then the next second several things happen at once, as people (cyborgs?) appear behind her, yelling her name, and something out of sight explodes. But we're running again and, impossibly, she's laughing with a new light in her eyes I don't think I've quite seen. With nothing else to look at, nowhere else to point the camera, all I can do is watch her. It could be worse.

Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.

[thefiresontheheight]

My liege, you cannot execute people for being "vassalslop"

[thefiresontheheight]

the problem with habitually queuing things is I accidentally queue conversations I'm having...

[thefiresontheheight]

I can't find the gun emoji rn, but please imagine it at the end of each ask

woag suddenly its scary

wait, no, aren't I the American? Where did you find the gun?

[thefiresontheheight]

I'm not coming to visit you so it's up to you to visit me.

Traveling is 'spensive, so might as well move here

if I ever move out of the US I will move to Denmark

[thefiresontheheight]

Move to Denmark

.

[thefiresontheheight]

I love love love love writing with @vulpes-aestatis cause like, I just thought it would be scary early on if the AI had killed a bunch of things and she established that there were other iterations of it, so we quickly got the theme of AIs splintering a fracturing, working at cross purposes. And then I thought, and told her, “oh, wouldn’t it be cool if Laika was a splinter of that Central AI you mentioned earlier? Cool answer to a little mystery.” And then she hit ME with “oh, what if Glitch is ALSO in a long convoluted way a product of Central splitting itself over and over and over again.

So anyway now we’ve got kinda sort maybe the start of a love story (but bad) between two different splinters of an AI that has been splintering apart and fighting itself for possibly hundreds of years. Filtered through the perspective of a version that had its memories erased and a version that downloaded itself into a very scared girl.

Anyway, Char, you’re an amazing sci-fi writer and we should write and epistolary sci-fi novel sometime a la This is How You Lose the Time War.

[thefiresontheheight]

coda

[thefiresontheheight]

Deeply hilarious when you got that mutual who interacts with utterly unpredictable things. With genuine affection love and respect, impossible to predict what they’ll like or not. The duneposting, the random two-note venting and the subdued transexual horniness today my liege? Very good taste, no notes.

[thefiresontheheight]