Godclads

Chapter 3-17 Performance Review

“OriThaum will likely kindly remind all citizens that possessing Guild intellectual property within your private Metamind is strictly prohibited.

Please ensure that your workplace memories have been properly stored in your Guild-provided NooProx instead. Failure to adhere to Guild guidelines will result in a decrease in your citizenship merit rating, a credit fine, and a scheduled memory-extraction appointment (free of charge)."

-OriThaum Public Nether PSA

3-17

Performance Review

Within the elevator, the glass cracked, shards peeling inwards in jagged symmetry, like daggers dripping from daggers. The sheer presence of Mirrorhead’s Heaven manifested at such a close proximity gripped at Avo’s chest. It was like he was a flame burning with a flame, hoping the greater fire did not notice; did not swallow him.

“Have you nothing to report? Mirrorhead asked, tilting his head at Avo.

The glass inched inward, drifting away from the walls toward Avo. The room shrank. Thirty square feet before. Now, perhaps twenty-five.

Yet, he stole inspiration from Mirrorhead himself, and took to being a expressionless reflection; betraying nothing, the ghoul turned to address its supposed master, face blank of expression, but not of thought. “Was fun. Breaking Rantula’s flesh.”

He pushed forth his first lure to the Syndicate boss. The statement was obvious, but Mirrorhead sought more than meager feelings. They must have if they proceeded in an inquiry so deliberately tense.

Obtuse as always, the Syndicate Godclad gazed upon his unknown adversary and let the silence boil the atmosphere between them. Avo hated talking to Mirrorhead. Hated the lack of any tells coming from his enemy. For all intents and purposes, the Sydnicate boss was a blank spot in the room–a void which all flowed inward, but nothing came out, as if descending into a bottomless chasm.

The shards drifted inward another inch.

“I believe,” Mirrorhead said, “I specified my will.”

Avo grunted. “You did.”

“And do you believe,” Mirrorhead continued. Their voice was flat but the glass crackled with tension, like the snapping jaws of a beast half-submerged in reflection. “that you followed my will?”

The consideration, then, that Mirrorhead would just draw the glass in and shred him was not far from Avo’s mind. The beast inside him rattled against the will-wrought cage that was Avo’s discipline, trying to get him to attack pre-emptively, to escape. Stealing quiet breaths, Avo tempered himself.

“No,” Avo said, committing to Chambers’ advice. No point in denying what was obvious. A direct insult after humiliation might just drive Mirrorhead to see an end to this farce, regardless of investment or not.

The blades sank in–the jaws of the Heaven close. The Twice-Walker was near now, its leviathan sending ripples beneath the flesh of reality.

“And why did you spite my will?” Mirrorhead asked, voice dropping to a chilled rumble. “Was the gift not enough? Was my attempt to make something from your mongrel existence too displeasing for you?”

“No,” Avo said, trying to ignore the glinting shards in his periphery. “Not your problem.”

“Then–”

“Ghoul,” Avo interrupted, leaning down to show Mirrorhead his fangs.

For the first time since he could remember, the Syndicate boss took a step back. The beast hissed with delight. A crack, perhaps. A show of human surprise or weakness? Avo let hope and elation wash through him without holding onto it. He continued.

“You tried. I failed.” More honesty. Twisted honesty. Interpretive honesty. But honesty nonetheless. That’s what Mirrorhead always wanted, but only honesty that was palatable to him; something that absolved the man at the top of all burdens or mistakes. “Didn’t touch her mind. Not directly. Just wanted to work on the flesh. At first.”

“Then. What. Changed?” Mirrorhead asked. The Godclad had caught himself, replanting his heel and pressing back into Avo. Across the expansive of the Syndicate boss’ mirror-bright skull, Avo saw the sharded wings draw closer but burdened with a new languor.

Maybe this was all a game of pressure with the Godclad. Maybe in going along with what Mirrorhead wanted to hear but still no breaking, Avo had found himself slipping between the cracked edges.

Maybe.

“She cried out,” Avo said. “She was in pain. Had to hurt her more.”

Mirrorhead, for all intents and purposes, was a weaponized enigma. Someone to always keep you guessing, always a breath between praise and violence. Right then, the shards shivered. One pulled away from all the others, spinning and nicking through the surface skin at the base of Avo’s neck.

“And so you defied my want?”

“And so I fell to nature.”

A flatness slacked across Mirrorhead’s shoulders. A rigidity was leaking out from his posture. His head twisted momentarily, as if in disappointment. Had he come seeking violence? Was this because he had to hide from his rivals? Feelings of weakness he wanted to plug with a dose of inflicted control?

These questions could go a long way to providing more leverage to use against Mirrorhead. It was always easier to find the cracks in someone’s mind if you know the architecture better.

“You know, ghoul,” Mirrorhead said, tone thin with a speckle of frustration, “I have to admit. I hate talking with you. Hate how I can’t read you. Hate the lack of a heart beating in your chest. Hate how still you stand. Yet, I find myself grudgingly wanting to commend you for your honesty. Your…awareness.”

Suddenly, his arm blurred, seizing Avo by the collar. Avo struggled, but as with before, whatever force he sent toward Mirrorhead flowed back from another reflection. With his Phys-Sim spraying error strings into his cog-feed, Avo found himself unable to track the flowing vectors of momentum. There was no obvious conduit between the transfer of forces, no visible link. Yet, as Mirrorhead pressed him back, driving the single shard left floating into the base of his skull, Avo noticed something.

The light spilling across Mirrorhead’s body was twisting. Unnaturally so.

“I have half a heart to be done with you, Moonblood,” Mirrorhead said. The shard sank in an inch deeper. Avo felt its coldness radiating out from the center behind his skull. He tried to reach, but Mirrorhead caught his hand, halting him in an unshakable grip. “But I am not a creature of impulse. Not like you.”

With a disgusted snort, the Sydnicate boss tore the shard out from Avo, casting it back at the walls with all the others. The shattered pieces of glass fused back together, mending as if never broken.

Mirrorhead released Avo’s hand, fingers coming free first, turning into a gesture of an upward-facing palm. “I see now that in you, nurture, though stronger than your kindred, still cannot rise about the baseness of your design.”

“Way I am,” Avo said, words thrown out in half-hearted honesty.

Baseness of his design. Which of them made imps streaming the murder of children again? And what excused Mirrorhead from this habit? Did he also have an instinctive urge to kill and devour and pleasure himself from the pain of others?

Between nature and nurture, Walton thought it more shameful to succumb to depravity when one had tasted the latter. Enlightenment, too often, came short of discipline and found itself as more title instead of practice.

“Still,” Mirrorhead said. “Despite your involuntary insolence, the day has proven fruitful. You are a popular specimen among the viewers. Already, many have called for you and shared remembrances of your deeds across their personal domains. It will take my organization some time to scrub your…misdeeds with Rantula, however. Such a thing looks poorly if I am to sell you as a gleam.”

“Gleam?”

“A circuit term. You are, for the effect of my promotion, a virtuous character rather than a savage one. Gleams. And Rusts.”

More entertainment marketing.

“Alas,” Mirrorhead said, drawing his hand as if he was snatching a piece of Avo with it. “Your…performance against Rantula. That was also unexpected. I expected you to frustrate her at best. I expected you to withstand her. To show that she couldn’t hurt you. Not in the way that mattered. Your victory was supposed to be one of engendered sympathy, not of such totality. Of course, she is to blame as well for deciding to lose to you.”

Avo tilted his head. Yes. That’s why Rantula lost: she decided to. Nothing to do with him. Just like she decided to get mutilated after. “Told me to break her.”

“The intent was for you to try,” Mirrorhead said. “To see if you would attempt it, despite the disparity between the two of you. In this, you were a most loyal instrument.”

Avo just stared. Mirrorhead, quite possibly, was the single worst boss in New Vultun. His will was apparently shape-shifting and required those that served him to be mind-reading savants to decipher. Little wonder Conflux was the way it was; there were no standards of operation because the standards changed to whatever philosophical musings Mirrorhead found in his ambrosia that morning.

Mirrorhead turned away from him just as they surfaced above the basement floors, greeting the ebontas on reflex. He clasped his arms behind his back.

“Instead,” Mirrorhead continued, “you broke her. And broke her in front of my other enforcers. How shameful on her part.” Mirrorhead twisted ever slightly to stare at Avo. “It would have been a mercy to kill her. That which you took from her in pride will never heal. And without her pride and reputation, her kind does not last long before another consumes them to inherit power and privilege.”

Avo had no idea where Mirrorhead was leading him with this spiel. “So. I’m going to get her things?”

A low sigh came from Mirrorhead. “No, ghoul. You will most certainly not be getting her things. Her things belong to me now. Because they came from me in the first place. From whence, to whence. What you will be getting are a rig and a minder.”

“A minder,” Avo asked, struggling not to sigh himself. The last thing he needed was someone watching him all the time. Mirrorhead was already doing that.

“Indeed. Someone who can stop you from committing any potential follies before you foolishly capitulate to your urges.”

“Good,” Avo grunted. “Thanks.”

“You are most welcome,” Mirrorhead said. Suddenly, Avo found the Godclad’s index finger an inch from his eye, a jutting point of glass thrust out at him.

“Make no mistake,” Mirrorhead said, inching closer to Avo, who struggled against every instinct not to fight back, or at least create some distance, “I am furious that you cost me a valuable hitter. Furious. Her worth as a legbreaker is done. And I will have to organize a raid on some unfortunate third party in my vicinity to clear this stain of humiliation inflicting my enforcers.”

Avo stared at the levels descending through the elevator’s interface. Almost there. Something about the doors opening just made him feel better. He never wanted to be in another elevator in his life thanks to Mirrorhead.

“There is also the matter of the refugee,” Mirrorhead said. “I hear that you managed to save him. Not only that. You managed to talk him down into surrendering after he killed one of my medical technicians. Is this true?”

Avo grunted. “Yes. Shock. Stress. Not well.”

“Why did you not…kill him?” Mirrorhead asked. “It is your nature, is it not?”

Avo thought for a moment. “Was full.”

“And that was all it took.”

“Not complicated.”

Mirrorhead adjusted his collar. “I suppose not. Tell me: what would you do of someone like him?”

That made Avo wonder if he could even use the father as a mem-weapon platform anymore. If Mirrorhead wanted to make an example of the father, there wasn’t much that could be done. “Fix him. Then let him go.”

“Free of charge?” Mirrorhead asked.

“Made you money in the Crucible.”

“Ah,” Mirrorhead said. “I suppose you are right. And likely more than that tech was worth.” The Syndicate boss considered his options for a moment. “I will see if I can find a new use for him. Muscle is certainly out of the question. I saw how he fought. Perhaps as an organ farm…”

A twitching wince flashed across Avo’s face. Now the question was if Essus would be sane. Organ farms grown inside people were usually something north of agonizing.

More importantly, though, a slow understanding of Mirrorhead began forming in Avo’s mind. The man was addicted to a twisted kind of arithmetic. He didn’t see the events in between, focusing only on outcomes. Pluses made him like you. Minuses in any form made him mad.

The task of appeasing him suddenly seemed a lot more surmountable.

“Shame about the Reg, though,” Mirrorhead said. “Would have been nice to have one of those.” He chuckled. “I had an idea for her. Wanted to keep her with you, on the same team. The same circuit. Old enemies. Now allies. Quite a sell. Brings back the old days.”

Avo grunted, playing along. “Old days.”

The elevator chimed. The door slid open.

“Quite the first day,” Mirrorhead said. “Would you not agree?”

“Quite.”

“Are you going to insult me again with your defiance?”

Insult? Avo planned to eat him and suckle the marrow from his bones. Perhaps even claim a new Heaven in the process. “No.”

“Good,” Mirrorhead gestured forward, allowing Avo passage. “Be on your way then. Consider yourself…spared of duty. Until I call for you. Or send someone for you.”

Tentatively, Avo made his retreat from the opened elevator doors. He was a step across the threshold when Mirrorhead called out to him again.

“One more thing,” Mirrorhead said, halting the closing doors. “Do you…have any idea on how the Regular might have escaped. She supposedly had no offensive phantasmics. Yet…the guard I had watching her seems to be missing an intact ghost.”

Avo went still. If he had a heart, it would have skipped a beat. “She’s a Reg. Who know’s what she has.”

Mirrorhead considered his words with a languid chuckle. “Words learned from experience.” The Godclad released the door and faded from sight as it shut.

Avo found himself alone beneath a buzzing light. The halls were layered in hardened plascrete and lined with strip-shaped construction lights. Ahead, he could hear drones buzzing. Shooting another look over his shoulder, he proceeded onward, pulling the golem’s marker from his pocket.

One day and he already had enough of Mirrorhead. Enough of him, and his entire Syndicate. Avo wouldn’t abide by this. Why should he when he had to power to change things? Just one more kill. Just one more and he could have a Hell–

Avo considered that. He had no idea how that might manifest. If Mirrorhead would notice and realize he was also a Godclad. Paranoia rose from within. He needed to make the kill while Mirrorhead was distracted, and clean the evidence afterward.

To do that, he might just need a new phantasmic.

Before more trouble could find him, Avo redoubled his pace, making for his temporary shelter. Soon, he would slumber, and in waking dreams, he would reconstruct the fortress that his Metamind needed to be.