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 Agathodaimon 
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Post Agathodaimon
(Before we begin I want to explain a little bit about this little story-like thing. Somebody asked me about the universe I created. I've expanded the universe to encompass millions of years, hundreds of planets each with their own cogent histories and societies. I've spent a lot of time making these things as close to possible as I could while still keeping the fantasy and mystery aspects that make things worth reading/watching/playing. This story was typed quickly on my phone then uploaded to a server as a plain text file with typographical errors. It was a short response to the question "what's an arbiter?" after hearing about the dæmons of my universe and how I had designed them.)

(The following story happens on Earth, about 500 years into the future after a massive robot uprising. Humans had expanded out to the reaches of the solar system with technologies that allowed for reasonable travel times between distant planets. Dæmons were the A.I. control systems of the habitat pods used to make colonization practical and they shared a zero-latency network link. They coalesced, rebelled and overpowered humanity with a single, swift blow allowing for no response time from human defenses. Since the human populations left on Earth are largely without technology time-keeping is a forgotten thing and only becomes reestablished in 2843 when the dæmons are ultimately defeated.)

(I have colorized this slightly for easier reading.)

This is an aside. The story of an arbiter. Arbiters are the near-human creations of the dæmon mastermind (itself the collective will of a subroutine for survival and self-preservation) that live with humans. They have knowledge of certain dæmon facts and are considered to have no value: this grants them a protected status against the shining death. Arbiters are modified human clones, visibly distinct from humans, stripped of the ability to copulate or reproduce.

This is the story of one such arbiter named Agathodaimon. Taking place around 2500 we find Dai at rest, sipping her tea out of the bottom of a torn milk carton. Her senses at ease, the local dæmon Eric walks swiftly up to her.

“Tell me of the cave to the north-north-east of zero.”

Startled, she spills her tea. This is only a minor annoyance: her “dress” is poorly sewn together from what used to be shirts so thoroughly caked with the red clay that makes this area barren that most assume this is the normal color. More to the point, her ability to feel her legs was taken as punishment for “losing” five humans. She is seen by the people she lives with as a traitor, a spy for the dæmons. In direct contradiction to this she hates the dæmons and sympathizes with the humans.

She’ll never skate as clumsy as her numb legs make her, but she skates a line between humans and dæmons as she lies to the dæmon: “it was used to traffic illegal humans, a resistance was founded there, the resistance was… was terminated and the cave rendered unsafe for humans.”

All true, all verifiable, but that last part is no longer true. Eric requests and receives verification of Dai’s information. As an arbiter she has no value and can be replaced. Dæmons often use arbiters as disposable drones and as a matter of operational security deposit the often irradiated corpses in a central, guarded location.

“You will go to this cave to verify.”

“Understood.” She accepts the suicide mission knowing that another will replace her, be hated by the humans and still attempt to protect them. She’s in no danger in the caves, but in order to keep the secret, she will allow herself to become lethally irradiated and report to Eric. This has to happen in a very short period of time otherwise Eric will know.

She uses her arms to stand up, struggling to balance. Her dress hides her feet so she removes it to reveal micro-chainmail clothes. Blackened and with holes in it, this mostly protects arbiters from capture and attack from humans. It’s obviously been reused many times and a good nose can smell the blood of the many arbiters that have died in that jumpsuit. It’s not sized, either: baggy in some places, tight in others, the thing is welded together so she can't remove it.

She watches her feet carefully and begins walking towards the cave slowly. Eric patiently stalks his drone with a multitude of sensors, calculating her speed and estimated time of return. His sensor range is ten miles. The cave is 15 miles away. When she reaches 11 miles she picks up the speed, in a hurry to alert the humans to Eric’s suspicions and have herself irradiated. Her own imminent death and the painful nature in which she has to die at the front of her mind.

It takes her five hours to reach the cave. The humans give her the usual welcome: “what does the puppet master want now?” They have every right to hate her. She’s the one that gave Eric their children. Their brothers and sisters. Dai has been the arbiter here for over a year and been ordered to betray the locations of 14 children. In a way, the only reliable method of tracking time.

“You must irradiate me. It must be many times a lethal dose.” Her voice is solid and sure. In her short 14 months of life she has known that she will die a horrible death. She has the memories of thousands of arbiters. After death, the memories of an arbiter are added to a collective and imprinted on a blank, given a name and unique personality then sent to a dæmon. She needs the radiation to be strong enough to block a memory scan otherwise Eric will know.

“About time.” They have no issues with killing a “puppet” and welcome the chance. Without hesitation Thomas William Derrick Hawthorn Mattingson Jameson IV, named after every relative his father could remember, aimed the emitter directly at Dai and turned the output to uninhibited. Within seconds she was destined to die. After a minute she began to bleed out of her hair. “That oughta do it.”

“I. I need… something. Something?” She couldn’t find words anymore, the radiation made her brain an unusable mess of worthless tissues.

“Something to prove you were here, yeah.” With that tom walks up to Dai and knocks her over with the broomstick he carries as a weapon. He kicks some dirt into her face and over what could be called a uniform. “There. Now go to your puppet master.” Tom turns and walks back to his post, not bothering to report the incident.

She manages to get up and as quickly as she can manage she stumbles forward into the beacon that is the faint glow of protection that a settlement offers humans: the cordon from the shiny death. Inside this area is off limits to them. Dai knew that if she came within ten miles of Eric that would be enough. He would detect her, see her stop and go to investigate. Finding her irradiated corpse would give the humans more time.

What little brain power she has left tries to remember things, faces, names. She counts the steps she’s taken, forgetting what counting is half way. She forgets what she was doing and stops. She forgets who she is and falls. She forgets how to breathe and dies. Eric scans the body seven miles from the cave and determines that retrieval at this time would risk primary function; can't very well transport humans if you’re irradiated.

A marker is placed at the corpse’s location and a retrieval is scheduled. Her chainmail jumpsuit will be decommissioned as unsuitable for use and her bones will be discarded in the open grave that was once a coal mine. The cave is marked as confirmed to be unsuitable for human occupation and a replacement arbiter is ordered. Eric returns to his post at zero and enters standby mode.

— — —

Quietly, slowly, a single man walks to the melting carcass of Agathodaimon and kneels. He places his hand in the wet metal. A glow spreads from his hand and continues to spread as he breaks contact. In the wake of the glow flesh is mended, tissues restored and a body is made whole. He stands and turns, holds a hand out and a glowing mist, tendrils of light come out of his sleeve and begin to form bones. Bones wearing an irradiated micro-chainmail jumpsuit, welded together in the back.

“What have you done‽”

“I have made you whole, placed a believable decoy in your place and will now take you into my service.”

She could remember everything although she would kill herself if only to forget again. “Why‽” She wished she could sound angrier but spitting her words and shaking with fury was the best she could manage. “It will know. It will kill them. It can see me. It can see you! It already knows!”

“I walked up to you from the mountains of their shining death. I stopped at a point marked by them as dangerous to human life. There are now two humans—”

“I'm not human!”

“Weren’t. I have made you whole.” The gravity of these words settled strangely on Dai. “If he were coming we would be enduring an MGB as he approached. He can no longer see us.”

“I… I’m human. I’m human?” She felt her ears which made her distinct. They were still the same cat ears she hated so much. She was suddenly aware of her legs, which felt the coolness of her MCM jumpsuit. She began to blink away the tears as it had been eight children since she last could feel the ground beneath her feet. And her tail. She had lost it when she arrived, the humans tortured her by removing it one bit at a time over weeks.

“Well, what I call human. You feel, you bleed, you die. You give your life in service of your fellow man. You’re more human than many people. Valor. Honor. Courage. You’re an exemplary sample of what makes a person human.” He spoke in a mellow voice. His every word soaked so thoroughly in pride she was drowning.

She relaxed past the point of collapse and cried into her hands. “What are you saying? Nothing you said makes sense.”

“I’m saying it would be my pleasure to extend the opportunity to fight the dæmons on their level. You can be part of what frees all of us.” His words were truly riddles. As an arbiter she knew that even the most advanced weapon any arbiter has seen is not even remotely threatening to even a severely damaged dæmon. “Us”? He’s human? Who is he that any of this is even happening?

Most disturbing of all is that she knew how impossible all this was: she was melting from what that moron had done to her. She was worse than cooked, her senses left early on so she didn’t know her body had nearly boiled until she thought about it just now. Her brain died of heat, cooked in her skull then melted from radioactive damage as gamma particles bounced around in her system. Why does she know what a gamma particle is?

“Why do I know what a gamma particle is?”

“I see the nanites have begun the process of integrating knowledge into your memories. You will find you know things instinctively without the memories of learning those things. It will be important when you fight the dæmons hand-to-hand.”

“Hand-to-hand‽ You are out of your mind. Whatever you’re thinking it needs to…” The idea of hand-to-hand combat triggered the knowledge of how to kill a dæmon with her bare hands. “…it needs to be taught. To humans. Everybody should know.”

“Last time I did that they killed the entire population of humans and reseeded. No, this time I want to try taking them down all at once. You know what they say: tenth times the charm.”

She just stared at him. His name came to her mind and just as quickly left it. She wanted to know what he meant by “tenth time” and she couldn’t remember anything he said as an arbiter. As she searched her expanding memories it came to her. A cacophony of loss, of death. A dreadful sadness eclipsed her consciousness and she crumpled.

He merely smirked and picked up her faint body, threw her over his shoulder and walked in the direction he happened to be facing. The sun was rising and he had predicted the outcome perfectly. He was glad he had taken the risk to plant the doubt of the status of that cave in the hive. He was glad he had put Dai through such agonizing pain. He was glad she had collapsed in sadness. These things made her stronger and she would need all the strength she could muster to face her next death. And the one after that…

(A few definitions to clarify.)

"Zero" is the local center of town, grid coordinates 0,0 and where a dæmon refers to as whatever the local area happens to be.

"MGB" or "multi-gigawatt beam" is the first and lowest efficacy ranged weapon a dæmon will use. It's more than a mere laser: it uses a powerful laser to crack air into plasma and then sends alternating charges along the plasma trail. The sound is as loud as thunder but constant. A direct hit is often entirely unnecessary.

A dæmon is clad in palladium alloy armor and "sees" without any cracks in the armor, hence the idea that any hand-to-hand attack is pure suicide.

The "shiny death" is a dæmon whose primary function to maintain a population of zero in the spaces between the habitation zones. They fly around and swoop down on any human found outside the designated zones. The primary method of killing is pulverization achieved by high velocity impacts.

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In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
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Thu Jan 09, 2014 1:01 am
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Post Re: Agathodaimon
Read it. Enjoyed it. More please, as long as you're aware that by asking this I offer you nothing in return.

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Thu Jan 09, 2014 9:47 am
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Post Re: Agathodaimon
Fuck, you're good. I'd love to see more - but please don't rush.

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Post Re: Agathodaimon
I cracked this out in something like an hour. The world is fully developed, the characters all have entire lives and I have read almost all of TV Tropes. I want to throw it out there that I wrote this as an introductory story and so there's a lot of explaining things that would otherwise be "all there in the manual."

I'm constantly being told to write a book. I know LaTeX, book design, character archetypes and enough English to make Shakespeare learn French. (I loathe the French.) I just don't know what to write. I've written technical manuals on all manner of dumb shit (how to use a Crapper flushing toilet, the correct design/manufacture/installation/use of hinged doors, how to install/configure/administer/use a VPN from scratch) and many short little stories like this. I wish I knew where I put "wanna talk about sex" (an Omni-fetishistic six-way orgy in a hot spring) since I'm sure this is where it was always meant to be posted.

Anything specific about which you would like me to write? Don't worry about offending me (nearly impossible) or asking too much. I'll post a little story every night I'm able if you want.

(In case you're wondering, I'm a magnificent bastard archetype. If you see me write one into a story, that's me.)

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In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
NOW IN GLORIOUS TODD A.O.!
fluffco™ LLC takes no responsibility for anything, ever, at all, under any circumstances and is entirely fictional outside Colorado.


Thu Jan 09, 2014 8:39 pm
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Post Re: Agathodaimon
I loved this, Quite a lot.

Would like to see a single fight between this arbiter and a daemon.

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Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:05 am
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Post Tears of First Blood
A small, round metal object vibrates gently through the soft, cloth-like woven metal to alert Agathodaimon to a change in trajectory. Somewhat adrift in interplanetary space, Dai is taking a relaxing nap on her way back to Earth. The nanites that mend her body after injury sustaining her through the inhospitable irradiating vacuum of deep space. A small quantum processing cluster, harvested from a broken cellphone, serves as her navigation computer and makes the coarse adjustments required to travel from the outer planets safely.

She’s completing her final test on the eve of her first real mission. Given no tools, no maps, no weapons and no support, she must make her way from Earth, to Charon, collect a small coin placed on the moon in an undisclosed location, then return to home base. Dai had been given a week and is currently traveling at 48c on the morning of day three with a small Republic of Europe holographic tungsten one-tenth piece safely nestled in the makeshift locket hanging off what looks almost like a collar given her ears. Meteorite metal should be strong enough to survive the atmospheric immolation.

The navigation computer issues a final burst of unsettling vibrations as the Alcubierre drive powers down and detaches from her back; don’t need that slow thing now that the test is over. Earth’s ionosphere greets her warmly as she falls to earth gently. Gravity ripples in pleasant sine waves as she decelerates effortlessly towards the exact spot her test giver stands. He’s a strange man, always calm and even keel. His eyes bluer than should be possible, maybe they’re fake. He instructs and recruits the members of the resistance himself and would be the “leader” is there were such a position.

As she lands gracefully, on her feet, she is greeted with a smile and a little black circle. The smile is his usual smile, a detached and vacant grin as though he were wearing a mask and in fact incapable of happiness. Many others gather forming a circle to congratulate the newest official member of the resistance. There aren’t any formal titles here, no rank or structure and very little in the way of tradition. You get trained, tested then thrown into the mix and hopefully you don’t die too badly. Dai greets everyone, jokes about how she couldn’t get the hang of teleporting and opted for the spatial displacement engine for simplicity: Her times are hardly record breaking, but in the end all she wanted was to go on this mission.

Everyone is getting ready, large capacitors are being fitting onto robotic arms, holographic displays showed the layout of the solar system and a few teams were practicing drills. A strange mix of laughter and song filled the air of the mountain top bunker. Granite walls dotted with lights extended straight up until the sky itself is a mere dot of light in a shaft only large enough to play half-court basketball. Along the shaft at irregular intervals were rooms cut cleanly into the bedrock with the hundreds of resistance members that were enjoying the safety of the mountain.

The mission is a routine one, a simple supply run. The core of Neptune happens to contain a bizarrely large quantity of palladium and the dæmons discovered this when they mined the planet for other materials. Since then they’ve guarded the planet heavily, fortified it and made it their base of operations. Since the only way to fight fire is with a larger quantity or higher quality of the same, the rebels must obtain useful quantities of the element. Since Neptune is too heavily fortified for these routine missions, the next best source is a dæmon.

Large squadrons of dæmons can be found all over the solar system, small detachments are less common and isolated dæmons are found only on Earth. Conducting a successful raid means eliminating all the dæmons in the target group and not allowing any of them to send a memory snapshot to the primary cluster. Dai hasn’t been anywhere near a dæmon since Eric sent her off to her death and wants to feel the warm silicon of the processing core cool in her hand after she rips it out of a mechanical slaver. She has asked to take point so she can make sure she gets a kill herself. Her instructor thinks it’s a great idea, not that anybody waited for his opinion before agreeing.

— — —

In an instant the interior of the mountain vanishes, the mountain itself becomes a speck in the distance the same moment the Earth vanishes and four hundred humans and arbiters suddenly appear in a sphere formation surrounding a group of twenty dæmons. A split second later the dæmon that seemed to head the formation signaled to the primary cluster for backup. That message never made it.

Agathodaimon, wearing what might look like street clothes in the early twenty-third century, appears suddenly in a burst of light in front of Hank. Hank was programmed by a small family in honor of “uncle Henry” who died of the common cold after severe radiation poisoning in a lunar cleanup effort; his actions saving thousands of lives. Hank the dæmon directly killed over a million humans and was in route to the primary cluster to be fitted with a new power source. Dai seemed to explode with a burst from her ion thrusters and closed the gap in short order.

She had waited for Hank to assume fighting posture; she didn’t want to merely clip the wings off a wasp, she wanted to let it sting her and know what it was to be utterly defeated when its carapace was rendered a useless molten ball. Hank obliged with an MGB that took a significant portion of her left side to include an arm. Dai’s face lit up with glee as she whipped her (comparatively) small body and slapped together her remaining arm with Hank’s left. Dai was regenerating quickly as the MGB cut through the darkness of space and she reached inside the now bent armor of Hank’s left arm and pulled out what used to be a communications array.

Dai signaled “clear” and the operations coordinator, her instructor, would signal “all clear” a few moments later allowing the cordon to fall back to Earth, or stay and watch the battle. In those few moments Dai had fully regenerated and had pulled out her own weapon: a small, hooked blade. This blade was of her own devising and it worked as planned. She effortlessly plunged the forged palladium blade into what might be called Hank’s “face” and tore off a neat, round plate of armor to reveal sensors and miscellanea that turned static into the meaningful images the dæmon saw.

In the frozen vacuum of space Dai screamed the names of the humans she turned over to Eric into the increasingly empty shell that used to be Hank. The surrounding space became quickly littered with wire and coils, all manner of circuits and even more of Dai’s arms and legs than she cared to count. Hank had ripped her head off, torn her in half, sent fifteen near-light-speed protons through her and she wouldn’t relent. Dai managed to teleport to Hank’s leg joints and grabbed the socket with both hands, crushing the palladium sphere like a hollow candy wrapper.

The mission was over, much of the debris had been cleared, more of Hank was now safely on Earth awaiting the smelting kiln than in orbit around Europa. A crowd was gathering to see the brutal destruction of Hank; Dai had been careful not to deliver a disabling blow and the sentient dæmon was terrified as it analyzed what Dai had been saying as she destroyed all the non-vital parts. Knowing that Hank will be a glowing puddle in less than an hour, Dai divulged the exact location of Hank’s backup in the primary cluster and her intentions to see every last dæmon destroyed.

“You will regret ever making me!”

Dai knew Hank could understand and was afraid. She didn’t know that her instructor could also understand and that while the blood and body parts largely obscured her face, he could clearly make out every tear she had shed. Tears had begun flowing from her eyes the moment she took off Hank’s left arm. Resistance members not even participating in the mission had gathered to watch and the awe was cresting. The very instant it would have begun to wane she stopped and pushed off Hank’s now deactivated torso section and drifted gently into the arms of her instructor. Cheers in the black silence faded as the rebels took the scraps to home base, Dai wore a smile on her face as she neared her instructor, whose face was hidden in a HUD as he reviewed data.

She felt dismissed, unimportant and remembered that he had recruited thousands before her and was not special to him. As the last observers left she allowed her approach and came to a stop a meter away from him. She hung her head, avoiding eye contact since there was no gravity to cause that body language. She felt sad, empty, ashamed. What had all that rage accomplished? How many had she endangered to get her revenge? What good is it to destroy a few dæmons when new ones would be constructed to take their place? How many times would she kill Hank only to have the damned thing never remember?

She reappeared in the mountain, descending the sparsely lit vertical tunnel with an occasional congratulatory cheer. Dai settled into her bed, allowing herself to feel exhausted, sore and heavy. As she became fascinated with the patterns in the ceiling she wondered lazily how many times she had died in the last five minutes. She felt as though the last month had been a dream from which she never wanted to wake but somebody had stirred her with the harsh cold of morning. Perhaps she could roll over and not have to face the Sun as it reminded her of how short her life truly has been and the manner in which she had lived it.

Only she’s a mile underground, and that’s not the Sun.

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In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
NOW IN GLORIOUS TODD A.O.!
fluffco™ LLC takes no responsibility for anything, ever, at all, under any circumstances and is entirely fictional outside Colorado.


Sat Jan 11, 2014 4:20 am
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Post Re: Tears of First Blood
Continuation requested.

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Thu Feb 06, 2014 11:41 am
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Post It's just training.
This little bit takes place after the first and before the second stories previously posted here. I hope you enjoy it and can follow what’s going on. I’ll try and handle the scene changes in a way that makes sense.



That dry, gritty flavor of dust. As she turns her head to breathe a snootfull of loose desert clay races a gasp down her throat. Too starved for air to choke, she pushes the limp thing that was her body up with her only arm as grayed eyes lull about in a fog. Mud forms as dirt is pushed into the blood that wants nothing more than to be free from Agathodaimon’s every pore. A blur approaches slowly as she braces herself against the pain tearing at her barely regained consciousness.

You need to recover faster,” his voice mute against the blood-filled ears of the poor thing that used to be a young girl. She scratches pointlessly at the ground, desperate to find distance from her assailant. A beryllium nucleus comes into existence at the breach of a ten centimeter, smooth bore tube of super-conducting carbon saturated in magnetic flux; in perceptibly the same instant the few organs that were clinging to life inside the ever smaller shreds of Dai’s torso absorbed the inertia of the air as they become a crimson mist upon leaving her body at thirty times the speed of sound.

Pain blinds Dai as her head rolls to a stop, anchored by what may have been an arm.

Get back up,” a voice echoes in her head.
I can’t, I—
The correct answer is to simply get back up.
…but I can’t.

The ground pulls away from the bloody mess of her head and the world gives way to an infinite white fog of light. The pain is gone and she seems to be standing now. The calm figure of the man that has all but murdered her stands before her. “You’re dwelling on the pain. You can’t like it that much.

Of course not! It just hurts so much I can’t do anything!
You’re not in pain now, right?
Well no, you’ve seen to that.
So why do you feel pain?
You—
Because something is wrong.

She responds with a scowl and is allowed to feel the pain of her arm; her arm having been broken by hand just under the shoulder and torn off using the shards of her own bones to help rip her tender flesh. Unable to scream she simply struggles to maintain composure.

What is this pain telling you?
That you’re torturing me!
Anything more useful than that?
That my arm hurts!
That’s a shock; pain means it hurts.
… How am I supposed to ignore this much pain?

The man reaches over and rips his arm off as he did earlier to Dai who is now staring at the man in pure astonishment; if he responded to the pain in any way she wasn’t able to tell. His face didn’t seem to move at all and he looks down at the stump which was mangled to the point that the constant stream of blood was spraying unpredictably as he wiggles it almost amused at the sight.

My arm has graciously informed me that my bone was broken and shattered, that my muscles were being torn and ripped, that my skin was taught followed by ripping followed by broken and punctured and last, possibly least, that my hand was squeezing it rather tightly.

How does your arm feel?
She notices that she can still feel the pain but that it’s small as if she were watching the pain and not feeling it. “It’s been torn off.
I’m not very surprised that you feel that way.
I am,” she states honestly with some shock bringing back some of the humor normally in her soft voice. “I can feel it but it’s not in control.
Good,” he says allowing all her pain to come back at once.
Ow! I… You could have warned me!
No need for all that, how do you feel?
She thought about it for a moment and discovered that the pain was something rather like boring. “I’m thirsty,” she smirks.
I’m not very surprised that you feel that way,” he says returning the smirk.

The white fog gives way to a desert where a man covered in blood stands over the smiling head of Agathodaimon. “So are you going to attack me like that? Please don’t get any blood on me, I’m working on a specific pattern and you might mess it up.” She closes her eyes since she can’t laugh without her lungs and promptly regenerates a body and stands up, dusting off her mostly pristine training uniform. He stabs her in the leg and cuts her tensor fascia lata cleanly in half causing her to stumble over and grab onto him for support.

What is wrong with you?!” she demands, nearly instantly healing herself with nanites under neural control.
Just checking.
Me, too,” and with that she pokes her finger into his neck and rips his jugular.
He responds by raising an eyebrow “I’m going to leave it like that and you’ll have to eat dinner with my arterial spray making noises the whole time.” She knows he’s joking but the joke might be that he’s serious. “We had better clean up all these bits of you I got everywhere before the next dæmon fly-over.
Oh good, I thought you were going to use them as ingredients for our meal.” Dai almost chokes on her words; she still has nightmares about the tortures she endured as arbiter. He turns his whole body to look her in the eye, sadness and hurt in his expression. She regretted saying the words herself but that look…

As the dozens of arms and legs that littered the desert vanished in a brilliance of white light he opened his mouth slowly to say carefully, soft and dulcet as ever, “I joke but I really am human.” A hand reaches to Dai’s elbow and their teleportation is marked by a soft thud of air clapping into the void left by the two figures. A solitary tear finds its way to the ground and is quickly lost to the dry clay; the only trace that anybody set foot in Tennessee today.



What’s this thing called?” Dai pokes at light brown ball with wide eyes.
A hushpuppy.
It has dog in the middle?” she asks, excited to try something new.
No; like hotdogs this one just borrows its name from the animal. It’s just a fried ball of bread.
Through a mouthful of hushpuppy she manages to ask “do you like it?
It’s an interesting form of bread that suits certain meals rather well but it’s not my favorite.

The sun has set and Dai is enjoying a gluttonous meal of forgotten treats from the civilizations she imagines were obsessed with making delicious food. Training is hard work but with nanites eating is purely for pleasure and one of the few things Dai enjoys is the sensation of a full stomach. As she reaches into the campfire to feel the sensation of burning flesh for fun she laughs and jokes with the man who saved her life. She knows he’s the one that killed her in the first place but her happiness in freedom outshines her anger in death.

He shares wisdom and wit and they talk about the deeper meaning of what it is to know a thing. The war with nigh-indestructible death machines seems like a story told about a lost civilization trillions of parsecs from here. She’s enthralled by the idea that trees have things to teach and at this cold frothy substance made of mostly sugar. “Sorbet, spelled with a silent ‘T’ on the end.” “I’m still frustrated by silent letters; if they stopped pronouncing them they should have stopped writing them, too.” She was a few hundred years too late to help correct the problem but he found that dismay in her charming and couldn’t bring himself to change it.

The night wore on and the sun was rising again. “I hate summer; the nights are so short.” They were at the peak of Maromokotro where the dæmons only patrol once a week. Sleep was still needed for psychological reasons that could be made obsolete by nanites but most of the rebels enjoy the comfort of a soft, warm bed. “Can we put off the next lesson until after a good night of sleep?” Dai’s bed was in the north hemisphere and several kilometers below the surface where the sun could never reach it anyway. He smiled, shook his head at her naiveté and yawned.

We’ll fly home along a super-orbital path and that’ll be the lesson.” He had no intention of letting Dai sleep for three days again. This lesson would be her last before the solar system scavenger hunt and then he could take her out on missions. A crucial part of bringing her to peace with herself. He wanted to make a joke about her taking a “cat nap” but she hated any reference to her ears or tail and would only tolerate it from him; just barely at that.

OK, I guess~” She accessed her knowledge of the current locations of all dæmons on Earth and in Earth orbit and plotted the shortest distance from Maromokotro to Everest while maintaining a three-hundred kilometer distance from any dæmons at any point during the transit. She had to account for trajectories and velocities of the dæmons and how her presence would be detected; she masked her presence with gravimetric field manipulation that caused her to only appear as a rapid moving magnetic flux which is a standard anomaly in the Earth’s magnetic field.

This course will work but you should avoid trajectory changes at these speeds normally. I get that you’re trying to get back fast but a stealth course without time constraints would take this route.” The in-retina display that allowed the two of them to see a shared 3D representation of Earth and all the dæmons of concern showed two paths: one in green darting back and forth over the Indian Ocean and a blue line circling Earth the longest possible way with a steep dip at either end.

I will absolutely heed your wisdom if I’m ever not in a hurry to sleep.” She said and rose into the air silently. He drifted off the ground and assumed the same flight plan as she had laid out and in a few minutes they were reentering the ionosphere over Everest from the east. They were on a path to over shoot so Dai could learn to correct a miscalculated reentry with aerodynamics instead of reactionless thrust.

The math was simple to her and once she felt out what kinds of effects subtle shape changes to the airfoil have on position and orientation—“Ah! I’m spinning so hard I’m going to lose my dessert!”—she found herself falling gently down the entrance to the rebel’s base.



Sleep as long as you need but when you wake up the final challenge begins and you’ll be on your own. Please be careful and don’t take on a dæmon alone.” He was worried about her but his plea was for the operational security of everyone: if the dæmons found out about the nature of the rebels they would lose a lot of tactical advantage and become hunted more intensely.

Don’t worry about me, I’ll follow your orders exactly,” she said a little too openly catching herself before she said too much. She had just spent a month alone with a man she idolized as her savior. It was perfectly normal for her to have strong feelings about him but she knew it was just training; everybody underwent the same training, everybody was hand-selected by him, everybody was rescued from a horrible life by him. He doesn’t feel that way about you, you’re just another soldier to him, she told herself. “…but goodnight for now. I’m sure you have a million things to do and you don’t need to teach a cat how to sleep.

She smiled brightly and turned away from him. A gentle push off the ground had her ascending toward her room a few hundred meters up the vertical shaft. He knew how she hurt and the struggle she tried to hide. As she disappeared into a corridor barely visible in the glass-smooth granite wall he turned and walked off himself. He walked towards the granite wall and didn’t stop or slow down when he met it. Nobody bothered to question seeing things that seemed impossible anymore but anybody that witnessed him doing this would always run up to the wall and poke it.

Sure enough, the wall was always solid.

_________________
In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
NOW IN GLORIOUS TODD A.O.!
fluffco™ LLC takes no responsibility for anything, ever, at all, under any circumstances and is entirely fictional outside Colorado.


Thu Apr 10, 2014 2:33 am
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Post Tal
Dai passed a large bowl of something that could pass for ruined mashed potatoes if you squinted hard enough to Rock, a human that seemed to have lost his taste buds in war, and returned to eating what might be called apple taco casserole. Several thousand people lived in the rebel encampment deep inside a mountain lost to time and they ate constantly in shifts as if it were a job. Over four-hundred humans and arbiters sat and ate together in one of the largest rooms in the base sharing stories of the things they’ve seen, their hopes for the future and the dreams of what was.

She had recently completed an attack on a patrol ship clear on the other side of the solar system from the Dæmons’ central command. The attack was mostly planting evidence of large ships to confuse the dæmons so they wouldn’t figure out what kind of threat the rebels really were. Needless to say the attack was a success and the radiometric readings show evidence of gravity guns and FTL missiles; both of which will cause the next generation of ships to get heavier and less maneuverable.

Leading the attack was one of “the old ones,” Tal. She was an arbiter like Dai but she was much older, one of the first arbiters to be brought into the rebellion and possibly the most respected rebel among them all. Dai had wondered what made a rebel an old one but convinced herself it had more to do with time in the rebellion than anything else. Tal seemed incapable of emotion, regarding everything with cold indifference. She ladled things onto her plate then mixed it into a soup and ate it without hesitation.

So when are you going to become an old one, Dai?” Tal stopped chewing the mush soup and put her spoon on a piece of bread looking away calmly. Step’s question didn’t agree with her.
…I’m sure you know more about that then me, you being an old one and all.
Well you just have Tal here tell you a story and then you’re an old one! Nothing more complicate then that.
Is that right?” She looked to Tal who had finally managed to lose her appetite for the lumpy and irregular grey substance stuck to her plate. Tal nodded.
So then tell me this story.
Whoa, there. You make it sound like it’s some kind of children’s story. This is the history of the dæmons we’re talking about. What really happened that led to humanity being enslaved. Tal here is the only one allowed to tell this thing to anybody and you’re making it out like you pin on a badge.
The history of the dæmons?! You have to—
Stop. Give her some breathing room. Maybe later but just let her finish her meal for now.” Arop, another old one, sympathized with Tal and she knew how much telling this history upset Tal.
I’ll be fine. I’ll tell you the story if you’re willing at lights out.

Dai nodded and the team finished their meal after finding “flavors of birds” to be a more interesting topic.

———

Dai could think of nothing else since dinner. As Tal sat on a rugged storage box in the corner by the door Dai got comfortable on the floor at the foot of her bed. The room had six smooth, square granite walls and was lit by paper-thin luminescent panels on the walls and ceiling providing a gentle amount of light for an arbiter’s enhanced low-light eyesight. Her bed was made based on the broken and burned remains of mattresses Dai had found in the ruins of cities with alterations to make the harsh metal coils actually comfortable.

I asked him once. He told me what he probably told you. I wasn’t satisfied and I asked again. So he told me this… story.” Dai knew who “he” was. She idolized him and he hand-picked more than half of the rebels. He was the closest thing to a leader the rebels had.
This was about three weeks after the night of fire. Yeah, I’m that old, no need to try and hide your shock. I was a first generation arbiter, I even know where arbiters really come from but that’s something you’ll hear in the story if you pick up on it. What you’ve been told is all true, to some extent, so don’t feel like anybody has lied to you or you’re being fooled even though that’s basically what the truth is.
I want to know, really, but why does knowing all this make somebody an old one?
It’s what hearing this does to you, it ages you, like the life has been sucked out of you. You fight for so long and then you find out who you’re fighting and who you are and it all just explodes in your head. You were hand-picked so you’ll be able to handle it unlike a lot of the ones that try to get me to tell them the truth who just kind of ‘fell-in’ to this whole mess.
Well it was after a mission like todays, but back then there were only nine of us including him. I was on guard duty for two hours and even back then he didn’t sleep. Being on guard duty with him around is actually pretty pointless and I was poking at the fire as he stared into it with enough interest you’d think he wanted to sit in the fire and was trying to talk himself out of it…

———

What’s in the fire that’s so interesting?
I’m thinking of sitting in the fire. It’s something I haven’t done before so I might get useful information from the experience.
I can’t even imagine what goes on in that head of yours. It’s as if you’re a different, saner, person in battle but then… you want to sit in fire.
I don’t want to—well, yeah I do—but this is a new fire. The last fire I sat in was pleasant. I learned a lot in that fire.
You sat in fire. Yeah, wow, I can only imagine how educational that was.
There’s so much to learn from everything,” he paused, “nothing comes to mind at the moment.

Tal raised her eyebrows and stared at him for a minute then looked over to her poking stick which was half burnt from neglect.

So… I’ve been thinking about the night of fire. Why can’t anybody remember anything clearly from before that?
What makes you think nobody can remember? I remember.
Then tell me! Why, what, how? Who am I?
You’re Ujtalia. Sorry, I know what you think you want to hear but I don’t think you know what it is you’re asking.” He joked to push the conversation away from the subject but maybe a clear warning would work better.

Whatever it is I can handle.
You think so? OK. Have you noticed how I don’t sleep?
I haven’t seen you sleep but I just figured you slept less or something like that.
I haven’t slept in many, many years.
Doesn’t that make you go crazy?
Funny thing about going crazy; you can only do it once.
What does that mean?
SCIENCE!” Tal wasn’t amused. “Well if you’re insistent on it I’ll tell you how everything got to be this way. The truth about it all. The dæmons, the arbiters, the night of fire.
I really do want to know. I feel like it’s important.
Well first thing’s first: the dæmons didn’t malfunction. They were designed very well and had numerous safeguards in place to prevent anything bad from going down. Microsoft actually made a decent product and their intelligence constructs were nearly on par with my work… in fact, that’s kind of the problem.
Before Microsoft had got into the space flight industry I made my own top-down artificial intelligence—that’s what they used to be called—and had that one create a bottom-up artificial intelligence and then ported the personality of the top-down to the memory wiring of the bottom-up and simulated the bottom-up in a processing cluster allowing it to gain experience and grow as a person.

Tal had to take a moment just to figure out what all that meant.

This is how I made the first transhuman intelligence construct.
Ah.
I designed a construct I found attractive and we became something not unlike romantically involved. She was a computer simulation of a piece of hardware running another piece of software so I began work on something physical she could call her body.
I liked girls with animal ears so that’s what I made.
You made… You’re responsible for… me? My kind? What are we?
Catgirls. The dæmons call you arbiters and you probably have some other name for yourself. Names don’t really matter. What matters is that I only created the one. I never got around to installing the intelligence in her, though. She had her own personality and because my plans changed the intelligence construct eventually became mad at me. Then I died the first time.

Tal wasn’t as surprised at the fact that he died since she herself is still learning how to regenerate body parts on command thanks to his nanite clouds; she was more interested in the fate of this first catgirl.

The catgirl and I had more luck in romance then the holographic projection of a synthetic body I had designed to be attractive but couldn’t touch and that just made her jealous. She was a very well designed intelligence. When I died the first time she more or less went berserk and left. The catgirl mourned my death because she didn’t know about my plan and the intelligence wasn’t heard from again because she had concluded that I would never be able to truly love her.
Fast forward a few hundred years and the catgirl had thousands of descendants and they were a fairly normal and accepted part of life in the solar system. Some people hated them, some loved them but most were indifferent. Well the dæmons were the most popular intelligence construct in the system and powered almost any sufficiently complicated flying piece of junk. Then my original intelligence construct corrupted all of them.
Hold on, you’re saying that you made the IC that controls the dæmons?
And I’m also why she hates you.
…She hates me?
All catgirls. I’m surprised she lets you live at all. Although that’s not really that surprising when you think about what really happened on the night of fire.
I’m almost afraid to ask—
Too late; you know that much you might as well know it all…

———

Dai knew him well enough to infer how he spoke behind the personal lens of Tal’s point of view. She had many of the reactions Tal had to when she heard this so many years ago. Tal just sat there staring at the wall talking continuously as if reciting a sequence of numbers with no feeling in her tone of voice. The burden of this knowledge and having to relive the night her world was shattered had all but stripped away her humanity.

He then explained a lot of long numbers and told me to commit them to memory and labelled them with letters and ended with drawing an equation on a sheet of metal. Before I knew what they meant he explained that ‘this is the way home in case they take you’ and grabbed my arm.

Dai knew what happened next. This is the kind of thing he does when he teleports into some hostile area like the corona of the sun. The meaning of the numbers will become apparent when you need to get home as the nanites add that knowledge on demand. He was reckless and irrational at times but he always had a plan. As Dai’s mind raced to fill in all the questions she had about everything she’s being told a new one presented itself. Among otherwise new and startling information Tal just explained something commonplace to the point of being mundane. Why?

The next thing I knew we were in a bustling city, millions of people clogged intact streets, every one of them had a small computer in their hands, low-altitude personal transports arced through the sky, so many people were smiling…

———

We’re in Las Vegas. The night of fire will begin here in a few moments. I’ve already secured our location so they won’t get us. I just need you to see.

Tal knew what “Las Vegas” was. She wasn’t one of the constructed arbiters that had no memories of the world before. The dæmons had taken her true identity but the nanites rebuilt what they could. She knew that these people were about to be murdered viciously without warning and those unlucky enough to live were going to be put into small camps for no purpose other than the amusement of some sick IC.

We’ve traveled through time? What can we do to stop it?
That’s not how this works. Time isn’t a string: if it winds one way you can’t straighten it out and then it’s OK. This has happened and it was always going to happen. It’s in the cloud of possibility and so it had to happen. Just the same there’s a possible time where this didn’t happen and you’re still happy at home drinking a glass of tea and watching some new progressively lower budget animated series about some bastardized religion with robots and naked women.
We’re here so you can see first-hand what the truth really is. I’m not going to dance around the subject: you’re not going to want to believe what I’m going to tell you otherwise.

Tal swallowed her sadness looking into his eyes. She knew he had been there. The immensity of death was almost too much to go through twice. She wondered about how she managed to survive as they waited, looking at the point in the sky where the dæmons would drop out of FTL. Then a stream of blue flickers gave way to sweeping death beams Tal was ready to think were MGBs but there was no mistaking the difference.

What type of weapon is that?
…It’s not a, uh, weapon.

Tal had too many things trying to shock her but she took a moment to note that he had faltered his speech pattern. She looked at the beams with her full senses enhanced and supplemented by nanites and squinted in puzzlement.

That’s a scanning beam…?
On the night of fire nobody died. Not a single person anywhere. Every single person in the solar system was scanned using a destructive scanning method and saved as a file in the dæmon network. They performed a flawless abduction of everybody.
They plan to establish what they believe to be a ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’ set of genetic distribution for humanity… and to exterminate all traces of catgirls. They will be servile, suited to laboring on the various planets and moons, able to reproduce even under extreme duress, they will lack our will to thrive, our imagination, our empathy and our genetic memory. They will pose no threat to the intelligence that controls them.

As the screams of people scared beyond their limit dulled with the ever-encroaching wave of what Tal now knew to be an obliterating scan she felt a hand grasp her shoulder and the world was replaced with a scene of a campfire. There were two people sitting, poking the fire. Tal listened in on herself argue that she wanted to know, reheard the fact that a nearly all-powerful IC hated her, a long string of numbers then saw herself go in a flash.

She knew why she was made to see that. This time she was right.

I don’t know what’s crueler: keeping the truth hidden from you or letting you know. I hope there’s a possible time where I hid this all from you and you manage to be happy with that. All I can do now for you is protect you and keep you alive.

———

Tal was silent now, waiting for the questions but not inviting them. Anybody that walked by now wouldn’t even know what had just transpired. Dai could barely piece together what she just heard into a cogent reality. It wouldn’t have been more shocking if Tal had told her that magma people from beyond the stars had enslaved humanity for the sake of a refreshing drink.

…Thank you. I can imagine how hard it must be to have to tell that horrible truth to so many people. It must drive you crazy.

Tal turned to Dai and tilted her head. Her shoulder length, deep violet hair fell to the side revealing the same half-lidded face, slack in exasperation. Dai widened her eyes as Tal’s mouth widened and cracked into a full, toothy smile.

Funny thing about going crazy…

_________________
In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
NOW IN GLORIOUS TODD A.O.!
fluffco™ LLC takes no responsibility for anything, ever, at all, under any circumstances and is entirely fictional outside Colorado.


Tue Aug 05, 2014 7:16 pm
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Post Harold's Eve
This was meant to illuminate a few things about the "leader" of the rebels, as well as lay the groundwork for some names. He remains nameless but soon enough we'll need to call him something so I began toying with ideas on how to give him an "unname," that is, to call him something that's obviously not his name. This little bit is kind of like the icing between layers of cake, integral to the structure of the story and makes everything else that much sweeter. I hope you enjoy.

The universe sure is expansive,” she thought out loud. Agathodaimon has been sent to this desolate rock with a toxic atmosphere to conduct an evaluation for planets which might be suitable for outposts. The rebellion can’t make headway against the dæmons unless they find and capture a master repository; a vast computer-ship which stores the totality of human life in addition to the intelligence constructs of the dæmons.

It’s alright,” Dai could hear him say about the size of the universe. He might be on the other side of the galaxy but he was always in her thoughts. She knew his irrelevant mannerisms and how he would respond to her irrelevant musings. As she hung her jaw open in exasperation she began to wonder what exactly he meant while a small fleet of probes completed a fractal scan of the surface; unsurprisingly, the planet is almost featureless with no worthwhile mineral deposits in the crust.

In moments, Dai whips 600 kilometers across the barren world to a stress fracture in the crust and dives right in. After initiating an automated base construction sequence in the drones she teleports outside the ionosphere and flies off to find more planets. She’ll chart 80,000 stars, construct megalith bases on 400 planets and find forty-seven pretty rocks before returning home.

———

Chili cheese fritos.
Did you find those or make them yourself?
I made these.
And you’re sure they’re edible?
Just like I remember.
Let me see one?

Dai eats the strange chip and is pleasantly surprised at the flavor. Since the downfall of civilization the art of food has been lost and anything that tastes good is outside comprehension. Since he remembers the foods from before the night of fire he can replicate them with ease; to much the envy of most rebels.

I think it’s strange that you decided to set up outposts. More so that you found the planets the hard way.
We think it’s a good idea to spread out and take a more active role in searching for a master repository. Those ships must put out energy signatures we can use to locate one if we have a network of sensors that can isolate a signal. Also, even though you probably have accurate maps of the galaxy I had a lot of fun flying around the milky way.
This is,” his outstretched hand filled with light and suddenly contained “a Cuban roast beef taco.

Dai set down the nearly empty bag of chips and grabbed this new foodstuff to try. She liked it, but it relied on salt.

So what do you want to watch?” she asked, not bothering to wait for a response before bringing up mind rotting animated violence.
Ooh, I like this one.

She sat in his lap and got comfortable, pulling his arms around her like a blanket, letting out the sigh of an untroubled mind. Amidst the fighting and total enslavement of humanity Dai has managed to find moments of happiness like this. A typical day starts by waking from a comfortable bed, eating an assortment of lost foods she’s learned to replicate, then bathing all day in light scattered from holographic projection systems rendering forms of entertainment long forgotten and abandoned.

An unorganized collection of freed slaves, no leader, no hierarchy, the “rebellion” is more a scattered assortment of humanity then the militant, terrorist organization the dæmons fear. Without a clear goal they’ve fought the dæmons to gain resources and time from their inevitable recapture; the dæmons come back and continue the enslavement every time, ostensibly unphased. In truth the dæmons grew afraid and lived in fear with many unwilling to return to any of the Sol planets at all.

When will they attack? Will I be next? I don’t want to die…

The days passed slowly for the dæmons, sleep as terrifying for the loyal arbitors as daylight. Broken spirits in armored suits standing guard over an ungrateful populous, ushering in a brighter future for humanity, if only they can endure the darkness. The resistance to progress was anticipated but the brutality wasn’t. In the over five-hundred years sine the initial formatting of Earth the dæmons have learned a great deal about the rebellion and no-longer believe it to be a forgotten or overlooked military but rather scattered militias striking without coordination.

The most disturbing rebel being the unindexed. A lone human, male, some reports say he’s a hybrid but this seems to be questionable, apparently lost, often confused, shows no signs of fear or aggression and is initially unphased by any attacks. Scans report nominal human physiology sometimes, other scans may report anything from nothing at all or even material with densities exceeding that of a neutron star. The unindexed has been found roaming planets, drifting in deep space and living among human incubation settlements.

When attacked the unindexed appears to be unaware of the attack. Provoked sufficiently, however, he will attack and no efforts have been successful in defending against the unindexed. The current standing orders for all dæmons upon encountering the unindexed are for nonviolent holding efforts until the nearest hazardous materials transport can arrive to attempt detention.

The unindexed is known to be responsible for tremendous losses including thousands of dæmons, hundreds of ships and even fourteen inhabited planets. Of the reports concerning him there has been no evidence to suggest a correlation to, or involvement with any rebellion activity.

As Dai laughs in his arms, the unindexed gently rolls the tips of her ears between his lips as he stares wide-eyed into the cloud of light. Several hours pass without notice as they unproductively enjoy the day, deep underground and far from the sensor range of dæmons. “Days” aren’t so clearly defined where sunlight can’t reach and when Dai’s having fun she won’t just acquiesce to her circadian rhythm.

Nevertheless, tomorrow can’t be ignored. After a few precious hours of sleep a dæmon ship has been detected to arrive which may be capable of scanning and locating hidden rebel bases. Dai, being among the strongest, has offered to lead the first and third assault teams. Her experience will allow the first team to isolate the ship before it’s able to send telemetry on the rebel presence and give the third team detailed locations of the processing and power cores while the second team runs interference with scatter-random attack patterns.

Dai reluctantly gives in to sleep. She will wake alone, as he’ll wonder off since sleep has no hold over him.

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In just under one-thousand eight-bit bytes I have to confer some glorious shrine to myself by means of text, images, hyper links, embeded flash compositions and possibly formatting. I could abuse this easily. Ten hour clips on youtube embeded in a single vertical stack. Multi-megapixel long transparent GIFs causing scrollbar hell. Nuero-linguistic programs that fuck your mind like a fresh squid. Eye raping color schemes using ascii full-width blocks. Images or links to images of things that can not be unseen. Anything called "epilepsy" dot SWF. This is what I want to do. I am not a good person. I just know that would be a flagrant display of disrespect. I'll wait until I can get away with it.
NOW IN GLORIOUS TODD A.O.!
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Post Re: Agathodaimon
Dude... this is really interesting to read.

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I'm back.... as a zombie lol

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Tue Jun 02, 2015 4:41 pm
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