Godslayers

After the third day without sleep, Kaelen admitted to herself that she had a bit of an obsession problem.

She’d always had issues with overfocus, even before immigrating to Veles and purchasing a body that could turn off the feeling of exhaustion. It was part of the general cloud of unfairness that made up her world. It was a sick joke—one she had vowed to rectify—that she wanted to deep-dive into the paracausal resonance mechanisms of consciousness for seventy consecutive hours but her body start protesting for maintenance after a mere twelve. Someone was going to answer for that.

If you’d asked her a week ago, she would have said that someone was going to be a god on some heterocausal planet, felled by a minor scientific principle she’d discovered. Now, she was wondering whether it might turn out to be someone closer to home.

There was an audit coming. She was going to take down Maxwell.

The impotent anger and indignity burned in her chest like a hot stone. The contempt on Shay’s face as he listed off the scientific horrors from the depths of Theolytics’s twisted imagination. He’d known it would hurt her. He’d put her in this situation on purpose! And for what? Stupid political games?

Because now, Drafar cannot have you. You know too much.

Reliving the memory was simple, a habit that was almost unconscious now. Kaelen could picture Shay’s face, hear the exact tone of his voice—the naked aggression shining through as he used her, hurt her for stupid reasons.

The memory helped. It kept the anger going, and the anger kept her going.

Something, somewhere in this database would cross enough lines that SecEnf could take action. Kaelen had no doubts about that; by now she was intimately aware that the Theolytics code of ethics amounted to “who’s going to stop me?” All she had to do was find the evidence that one of these horrible research proposals had been implemented illegally and hand it over to SecEnf.

Kaelen sifted through another page of experimental notes, status updates, and study designs. She should probably stop. Even with her personal medical translator running full blast to remove the need for bodily concerns, her soul needed rest. She didn’t know of a tool to solve that problem, but if it existed, it was probably somewhere in this pile of information.

She kept at it, alert, energetic, and utterly drained. There was too much to go through. Eifni’s Theolytics division alone was larger and better-funded than some interplanetary companies and it produced enough paperwork to build monuments.

It would have been impossible to sift through, but here Kaelen was assisted by the necessity of sticking to her cover story. She was supposed to be finding a project team that suited her talents and interests, after all.

Eifni Org had her personality profile; they could match her actual access patterns against what she was expected to access. But Kaelen was prepared for that, since she had her profile too.

Kaelen would probably never describe herself as a people person. She wasn’t all that successful by Velean standards, either. She might not hold up under fifteen minutes’ light questioning, but burning heavens, she was a Velean, and at least she knew how to scheme.

She retrofitted her anti-baffler server by uploading her own personality imprint. Now instead of simulating the emotions of people she talked to, it would simulate the emotions of a baseline Kaelen who hadn’t decided to betray the Eifni Organization. Now she could see what Eifni could see about what she saw.

So how would this heterocausal, loyal Kaelen look for a reseach team to join?

She started by filtering the incoming deluge of information by whether it aligned with her etheric interest matrix. But that was still millions of white papers, experiments, updates, addendums, memos, findings, proposals, retractions, reviews, replications, and meta-analyses. She excluded project codes that had been terminated, codes with no funding attached, codes with proposed experiments that took too long to start data collection.

She set up a secondary filter to check for good personality matches with each project’s research team, and if the match was poor—such a useful piece of math—she restricted output to titles and abstracts only. In these cases she read exactly three results and then excluded the project code from further consideration.

That was important. It would look like she knew the team match would be poor, but was reading the research anyway just to make sure. It signaled predictability and conscientiousness, both of which were prominent features on her personality profile.

She had to be careful not to match her personalty profile exactly—they’d be looking for that, especially since they knew they’d put her off balance—but deviating from her personality profile in ways that were characteristic of her personality profile would give her some cover for what she needed to do.

Which was to dig up Eifni’s dirt and sell it to Secular Enforcement.

With her body in perfect medical condition and her soul deteriorating like ice under godfire, Kaelen skimmed report after report of transgressions against morality and common sense—the darker minds of Theolytics seemed to treat both with active spite. Comically evil experiments, like splicing memories into children to observe the impact on their spiritual development or testing methods of human sacrifice to encourage a god to develop a destabilizing aspect of death.

Kaelen knew, on some level, that this was a kind of self-harm. She was defiling herself for—for what? Revenge, for what they’d done to her? The greater good, all those billions that would be sacrificed to captive oracles and scientists who’d long left their humanity behind?

She didn’t know. Answering those questions would have meant taking her eyes off the endless stream of data, and she really did have a bit of an obsession problem. What she knew was the world was Wrong, that Maxwell and Shay and Eifni itself were Wrong, and she had to do something or her soul would rip in godflaming half.

You know too much.

Not. Yet.

She drowned herself in scientific filth for two days and three nights. The time passed unnoticed; the windows were off and office lights were the same, day or night. Gheresh hadn’t contacted her since Shay had shooed them out of Kaelen’s office. The isolation was another thoughtless cruelty they’d inflicted on her, but it meant there wasn’t anyone around to stop her from pouring herself into her task.

It was the morning of the third day—as the sunlight reached the all-consuming black shell of the arcology—when she found it.

It was one of the projects Shay had told her about: the proposal to secure an oracle for research purposes. According to the project database, the project wasn’t even active, but that had to be a lie—just recently, a commander Aulof had submitted a report commending the project’s primary author for extraordinary commitment to a secret mission.

Kaelen’s heart beat heavily as she read the announcement, then dug up the referenced interrogation transcript. There was context she was missing—although the team commander had helpfully attached mnemonic recordings—but this was it. In one of those recordings, the ship’s technical officer announced his intention to indoctrinate a god rather than kill it. Her weapon against Eifni was right there, hiding in footnote to a footnote.

It was done. Everything left her in a rush. The adrenaline, the anger, the bone-deep revulsion.

She had to keep going. If she stopped now, they’d know she was after this and not a position on a research team. It wasn’t like they were hiring proskuneologists on Theria.

She scrolled listlessly through a handful of entries, unable to focus on the words in front of her, fretting all the while about whether the change in her emotional state would be legible to Eifni with a statistical analysis of reading speed and entries per minute. The momentum was gone.

Only now she began to worry about what she’d done, what she was planning to do. Couldn’t they have predicted this? Personality models were stochastic, they wouldn’t have perfect information about her reactions, but the fact that she did react this way implied that it would have been a significant probability on their charts.

Her work wasn’t even done yet. Now she had to get the information into SecEnf’s hands. But there she faced a formidable barrier: the research infrastructure of Veles itself.

Ancient Velean scientists had determined that paradigmatic differences in research methods could lead to blind spots in discovery. But because they were Velean, they would allow neither natural law nor the limitations of the human form to stand between them and their goals. They established five independent research silos—red, orange, yellow, green and blue—with a sixth silo, white, to synthesize their outputs.

But preventing the spread of information through sociological means was an impossible task. The incentives for researchers to smuggle information out of other silos for personal advancement were too great. So several parties—the Planetary Council of Discovery, the Ministry of Reincarnation, the Ministry of Memetic Affairs (later known as Secular Enforcement), and a young, upstart Eifni Organization—collaborated to produce the most ambitious infrastructure project in all of human history.

They called it the Archive. It was the product of a thousand years of effort, a repository of all human knowledge, but it was more than that. It was the final hermeneutic authority, a semiotic arbiter more powerful than even the collective understanding of humanity. Semantic engines the size of skyscrapers parsed every scrap of information that entered the complex, tagging each datum with associations powerful enough to stain the planet and everyone on it.

At the same time, reincarnation clinics across Veles introduced modifications to the comm sockets of new bodies, linking them directly to the Archive. Now every thought, every experience could be labelled, sorted, and judged. Memetic filter augments—a new requirement for academics—could prevent forbidden knowledge from spreading at the cognitive level. At last, the scientific process could continue unfettered.

There were holdouts. There were always holdouts. But as Archive functionality became more integral to Velean society, all but the zealots eventually conformed.

Bodies grow older, and Veles is patient.

Theolytics scanned every device that left their campuses, cross-referencing against the Archive’s interpretive matrix to ensure nothing forbidden escaped from their control. Kaelen’s own memetic filter would prevent her from sending forbidden information over comms.

Kaelen didn’t think she could outwit Theolytics’s information control procedures. She couldn’t get the information out from here.

But there was an audit coming. There would be SecEnf agents here, inside the firewall. Gheresh had already informed her that plans were in motion to keep her from encountering them, but what if something went wrong with those plans?

Her eyes turned to the millet growing next to her desk.

No. Absolutely not. That was a stupid idea. That was what had landed her in this mess to begin with. She needed a better plan.

Her eyes didn’t leave the millet.

*

The refreshment cart broke the uncomfortable silence of the audit room. A menial staffer distributed muffins on paper plates to Gheresh and the two scowling auditors. Gheresh nodded to him.

If the auditors bothered to check, their comms would tell them that the muffins were home-made. Gheresh had spent all last evening baking—a manifestly useless act of hospitality toward the Eifni Organization’s enemies.

They would not bother to check. And if they did, it wouldn’t change anything.

The crisis struck just as the staffer was leaving. The SecEnf security guards reacted first, jumping to attention and drawing disruptor weaponry. The auditors leapt to their feet, one of them glaring at Gheresh like it was their fault.

Gheresh’s own comm was screaming at them to evacuate to a secure area.

WARNING: DIVINE MANIFESTATION.

Utterly unthinkable. Here? In the heart of Theolytics?

On reflexes honed by constant drills, Gheresh’s legs were already propelling them out of the room.

Even at their security clearance, Gheresh knew there were projects delving into matters best left untouched, but to think Theolytics was experimenting on a captive god—behind Secular Quarantine!? Burning heavens, what were those idiots thinking?

Their comm released a firehose of information as they hurried down the corridor to the conceptual shelter. Gheresh almost filtered out the technical details, but something about the divine signature snagged at their memory. Where had they seen that frequency before? If this was from a black academia project, there shouldn’t have been any hint of it at Gheresh’s level.

Then the memory clicked and they slammed to a halt mid-stride.

Technically, emergency quarantine prohibited using one’s comm to process divine frequencies, but the Eifni Organization was a place for people who knew when to break the rules. Gheresh was fairly certain that this divine frequency was anything but.

After all, they’d helped attune it to Kaelen’s millet.

They turned around and sprinted for Kaelen’s lab. SecEnf had a head start—Gheresh had been heading for the shelters, which was the opposite direction from the lab—but they still had to try. Maxwell had asked them to keep Kaelen away from the auditors, and if there was anything they could do—

As they drew close, they heard loud voices. Two men were shouting orders, their voices overlapping and incoherent. Kaelen’s frantic apologies cut between them.

They rounded the corner and saw the scene laid out like something out of a play. Two uniformed SecEnf guards were frogmarching her out of the laboratory. Behind her, the wreckage of a deicide-grade amplifier lay smoking on the laboratory floor, riddled with bullet holes from disruptor rounds.

“I’m sorry!” Kaelen sobbed. “It wasn’t supposed to be that big! I’m so sorry!”

Another security guard leveled her gun at Gheresh, who immediately dropped to their knees and raised their hands.

“Stand down.”

Strolling behind the captive researcher, a woman with close-cropped hair eyed Gheresh speculatively. Her irises were bright gold, the pupils shaped vertically like a hawk’s, and she wore combat boots that gave off so much authenticity they had to be fake. A red dagger had been pinned carelessly to the label of her open SecEnf blazer.

At her command, the guard lowered her weapon.

Gheresh nodded their thanks and stood up. They knew this woman, even if her comm hadn’t been broadcasting it in warning: Celerne, head of the Operations division at SecEnf. Widely regarded as Drafar’s second in command.

She should not have been here.

“Brave of you,” Celerne commented idly.

“Sure,” Gheresh said, turning to Kaelen. “Are you okay?”

“Gheresh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Kaelen sobbed. “I’m—I’m a mess, it wasn’t supposed to be that big, I didn’t mean to—”

“We’ll get you out of this,” they reassured her, frantically alerting Maxwell over comms. They did not receive a response.

“No, you won’t,” Celerne said with open amusement. “Your girl here just violated Quarantine right in front of my face. Tell Max if he sticks his fingers after her, I’ll break ‘em.”

Kaelen wailed. Celerne gestured and the guards carried her down the corridor. Gheresh just watched, flexing their hands uselessly. They switched to messaging Security, warning them that an Eifni employee had been detained, but the dispatcher told them there was a queue and they’d get to it soon. Alarms had gone off all over the campus; Security was being flooded.

“Word of advice,” Celerne said companionably. “Next time you sprint toward a divine manifestation, you’re probably chow.”

Gheresh weighed what they knew of the woman. She was an old Velean, but didn’t seem to carry any of the aloofness that marked the unapproachable ones. She was still incredibly dangerous, but Maxwell had put Gheresh here to represent his interests, and one of those interests was being dragged out the door.

“That wasn’t a divine manifestation,” they chanced. “We can prove it.”

“Of course you can,” Celerne said. “Once we officially get her into custody.”

She flicked her head to the side, a smirk playing over her lips.

“Gotta tell you, Gheresh,” she said, “my job would have been a lot harder if your guys had shown up before we got here. Guess this place has really gone down the tubes the last couple millennia.“

Gheresh gritted their teeth and forced themselves to remain composed. “If you say so.”

“I’m sure Eifni’s security will show up eventually,” she said, grinning openly. “My men say they haven’t been accosted yet, either. Maybe you should submit a complaint.”

“Thank you for the suggestion,” Gheresh said, weathering her implications with no outward sign of distress. “I’m grateful for your guidance, but please don’t feel obligated to remain on my account. In the spirit of institutional cooperation, I will observe that Eifni security is unlikely to have abandoned the campus’s exits. Perhaps your presence will ensure your men can exit smoothly.”

Celerne’s eyes wrinkled in a genuine smile, her eyes briefly flashing pink. “Good one, Gheresh. I suppose if you’re not afraid of getting eaten by a god, the likes of me wouldn’t scare you either, yeah?”

She leaned in, peering into Gheresh’s eyes. They met her stare without a change in expression.

“Sure enough,” she said.

Gheresh said nothing.

Celerne abruptly turned around, waving a hand in farewell as she strolled away. “Bye. When Max liquidates you too, try to look me up before you disappear. You’ve got my comm now.”

Gheresh knew how this worked. Old Veleans messed with each other’s pawns for fun, and Celerne wasn’t the first one to have noted Maxwell’s favor toward Gheresh. Still, for all that Gheresh knew Maxwell was loyal to a fault, her implications felt harder to dispel than usual.

Where was Security?

And why wasn’t Maxwell answering his comm?

In a daze, Gheresh wandered into Kaelen’s lab and began putting the desks back where they belonged. The millet had been thrown all over the ground again—was this just going to keep happening? They straightened Kaelen’s terminal workspace, bringing up previous images to help place all the items.

There was a gap in the items on her desk. Kaelen’s auxiliary cognitive processing server was missing.

The server with no memetic filters installed.

That was connected directly to her comm.

While she spent the last three days reading through every black-level project in the Theolytics database.

Godfire.

Gheresh sprang into action, sprinting after Celerne and Kaelen. “Get me Security!” they yelled over comm.

“Please wait—”

“Emergency!” Gheresh yelled. “Top-level priority! SecEnf is walking out of the building with all of our classified projects! We need a lockdown now!”

“Shit,” said the dispatcher. “Delay them if you can. I’ll handle the—”

He hung up mid-sentence. Gheresh kept running.

There was an exit not too far from here. Was Celerne the kind of person to take the closest exit, or would she fake them out? Gheresh hadn’t realized it at the time, but she must have been stalling them to delay the lockdown. Was that enough time to get Kaelen to the exit by the signal degradation labs?

Gheresh called ahead to the closer exit.

“Gheresh,” they panted. “Priority. Did SecEnf take a woman out through your exit?”

“We’re talking to her now,” the guard assured them.

“Don’t let them leave! Lock it down!”

Gheresh didn’t get a response.

The first thing they noticed was the blood. Six bodies lay on the floor, one of them wedged in the door to the outside. Not disruptor kills—they were legibly bodies.

Celerne stood over the dead, wiping off a combat knife with a strip of cloth the color of an Eifni Organization security uniform. As they drew closer, Gheresh saw one of the casualties had a sliced-up sleeve. Celerne looked up at Gheresh with an expression of amusement.

Gheresh heard a car taking off outside the door.

“No,” they breathed.

“Obstructing a SecEnf operation is illegal,” Celerne informed Gheresh solemnly. “I’ll have to add this to your audit.”

“Kaelen is in possession of classified material,” Gheresh said. “You need to return it to Theolytics.”

Celerne smirked and sheathed her knife. “Sure. We’ll comply fully with all relevant laws. You’ll get it back in five to ten business days. Goodbye again, Gheresh.”

She stepped over the corpse in the doorway and left.