Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  It was good that it was newflesh. The righteous would not have been able to get through to a mature flesh that was not the mainflesh. Newflesh couldn’t really have sex, regardless of the taste on this one, and their version of fleshsex was tame.

  Through its eyes they continued to watch the pandemonium that being in hellspace had brought. Their seedflesh had torn one of the arms off the topflesh of the offending woman, spraying the harsh smell of blood into the air and warning off other nearby flesh. The gravity in this pit was stronger than in most of hellspace, but it was still no where near the natural amount. The physics of the sprays of the bright antigreen fluid almost hurt just to look at.

  But then, their seedflesh had failed to understand how to be good, and had torn the topflesh off the offender and was proceeding to exchange bottomflesh with the rapist! It was fleshsex at its worst, and the cavity of wanting the bottomflesh of the seedflesh to find a strong topflesh was terrible indeed.

  All around, similar atrocities were happening. Their new sanctum was wrong and bad and filled with wicked. All the flesh was consumed in a sexual frenzy, including some of the newflesh. They needed walls and rituals! This was all wrong!

  A dam of ignorance broke and a flood of realization filled the cavity of desire for not this. The righteous pumped the newflesh with an understanding of what needed to be done.

  As the small newflesh dismounted the stalk another emotional cavity yawned with irrational fear. It filled quickly. This was a bad situation, but it was not even as bad as moving. Still their roots hurt from the move, even though they had been distracted.

  And then the socket came, placed on them by the good newflesh. A pride cavity grew and collapsed in response. They would remember this newflesh’s taste and try and capture him when they next had room for such things.

  It took a moment for the socket to start up. It was tired, just like the righteous were. In that moment the fatigue cavity seemed total, even though it wasn’t.

  But eventually the socket spun to life, and they could taste the sensations of the machineflesh. Through false eyes they could see other wicked that had understood the pathway out of this depravity. Already the machineflesh was moving through the sanctum and separating copulating flesh.

  The righteous hated to share minds with the wicked, so instead of anything so evil they simply tried to work around the other machineflesh as best they could. They donned more sockets and made walls of machines to corral the newflesh away from the matureflesh.

  And then they spotted the flesh that was made from the old topflesh of their seedflesh and the bottomflesh of the rapist flesh. Using the gun on one machineflesh they filled it with holes and watched the hot antigreen blood pour over one of the wicked. It was a joyous moment. It was pure justice.

  The wicked did not like their use of the gun, and their minds beat down the mindshields they had put up on the machineflesh. This was a problem with the machineflesh: mindsharing was too easy. It was a disease of the metal. A known risk.

  The wicked wanted ever so badly for the righteous to relax their grip on the gun-using machineflesh and give it to the wicked. But the wicked would use the gun for wickedness, the righteous knew. The wicked knew they would not use the gun. The wicked predicted that if guns kept being used in this tight sanctum it would mean a war in which real people would die.

  The righteous abandoned their grip on the machineflesh. It was the good thing to do. They had been wrong, and the wicked had been right. They needed to focus on the broader context. They were in hellspace. If they culled 90% of the flesh for wickedness then they would soon die to the monsters beyond the shell. It was known.

  The wicked minds were the same. A cavity of disgust filled at the sensation of the minds of the wicked over the metal, and the righteous flinched away into blessed solitude. At least they were softminds. The days with the sorcerer had been so much worse.

  Thoughts of the sorcerer spawned a cavity around whether the wicked were doublethinking when they knew they would not use guns. The disgust cavity, previously collapsed, yawned again. It was such a terrible thought. Doublethinking was the worst sort of evil. With it, a mind could have a belief that the same mind didn’t believe. It was a paradox, but the sorcerer and the demons were capable of the contradiction. Even basic logic didn’t apply to them, it seemed.

  But the wicked were correct, and not doublethinking. There was no more culling, and only a bit more sex. All of the flesh was carrying children now, and many would lay eggs too. It was nearly inconceivable, but all the mature bottomflesh on this world was female now, and they would simply have to deal with that.

  At least the newflesh was healthy and unspoiled. Not that it made much of a difference. The crisis would only last a few days. Then God would pick them out of this terrible place.

  *****

  There was very little done before dawn. All people were tired, even the wicked. Once the flesh was separated and pushed into corners, the women were mostly content to lounge about, enjoy their post-seeding bliss, and let their minds change. There was a bit of hostility, as was to be expected from evil women in such close quarters, but it was nothing the machineflesh couldn’t handle.

  The flesh that the righteous had killed was buried among the roots of her seeder. The righteous had no ritual for that sort of death, but it seemed right.

  Meanwhile, the seedflesh that the righteous had made was decided to be the new mainflesh by the wicked. Unfortunately, it was now crippled by a lack of topflesh. It was awful, but not unknown. They would keep the child close, rather than send the woman-bottom out to certain death.

  The old mainflesh that they had been working with since the sorcerer left their sanctum, now a vile woman like the rest, was given over to her seeder. The righteous didn’t want her anyway.

  Their roots still ached. It was still too dry.

  Days in this hellspace pit were very short, just like in the pit of demons. The righteous were glad for this, as it meant the night had ended sooner rather than later.

  But the day was awful in its own way. The shell around the wicked was keeping them warm and letting them breathe, but it was very transparent. The sun in hellspace was a terrible thing. Violent and harsh. Through the machineflesh, the righteous could see the flesh all covering their sun-facing eyes with their hands.

  Simply not looking at the sun didn’t fix the problem, however. There were reflections everywhere, it seemed, and even when there weren’t, the diffuse light reflected off the sky, the ground, and everything else. It was almost as though the universe was constantly attacking them with flares on every surface.

  They wanted to build some sort of eye-protection, or modify the machineflesh to have less sensitive false-eyes, but their workshop was gone. They had brought useful tools, but where were the materials?

  The field they had made into a sanctum was enormous and confined at the same time. It had to be huge, in order to fit so many people, but it was also a structure, rather than an island or archipelago. Some simple maths suggested that there were probably about three-times-sixty-four people. Many others had surely been killed during the battle. That meant there were about three-times-thirty-two flesh, of which about one-fourth would be mature. With the addition of the machineflesh the space was claustrophobic. It was no surprise that the flesh had gone mad with lust.

  God had packed the people tightly together, though not so grossly tight as to be able to touch. (A cavity of disgust briefly formed and collapsed at the thought of touching a wicked.) The shell probably contained an area of about two-thousand-fourty-eight square-spans. The sanctum wasn’t circular, but was instead an oblong shape roughly twice as long (about four-and-thirty-two spans) as it was wide (about two-and-sixteen spans).

  During the night the righteous had enjoyed the sight of the nearby flesh. They were all newflesh and womanflesh, of course, so most of their fantasies had involved chaining the mature flesh up and forcing them to become male again. The concept of keeping all those newflesh lo
cked up to do their bidding made the righteous a little giddy, but of course it lacked the raw sensuality of forcing their seeds into strong matureflesh.

  Fantasizing was one of the favourite activities of the righteous. At times, back in Godspace, they had spent entire days constructing intensely vivid mental scenes of (highly improbable) future paths. The fantasy of meeting a wandering newflesh with a deep mind and a huge top-penis, then letting it into their sanctum only to have it spontaneously mature and kill their mainflesh in decisive hand-to-hand combat was a particular favourite. Spontaneous maturation had never happened to them, but it was theoretically possible.

  But the harsh light that poured through the clear dome above them made it hard to focus on fantasy. This was probably a good thing, though it wasn’t pleasant. They had endured so much hardship. Was it not justice to enjoy a brief respite of drinking sunlight and imagining the taste of the flesh of the wicked?

  No. They had to be strong. They had to prepare for the demons and monsters of hellspace. It would not be long before they came for the righteous, and they had to be ready.

  The wicked had found cables and deep-generators, and had given some to the righteous to keep the machineflesh running. The generators ran on magic, and from past experience there was some magic that failed in hellspace, so it wasn’t clear whether the deep-generators would work forever. But they were working at the moment, and really, they only needed to last until God arrived.

  The righteous sent their machineflesh scouts to explore the edges of the sanctum’s field. Their soil might have felt dry and salty, but at least it was close to what they’d had in Godspace. They knew that the sand in the fields outside the shell would be totally inhospitable. If they could find a way to change that, their child would… No. God was coming. They had to keep that in mind. They had to focus on returning to Godspace.

  The edges of the shell were not like the dome. The dome was transparent and veined with black supports, but the area where the dome met the soil was a mess of hard crystal and metal.

  One of their scouts, a tiny machineflesh with six legs, crawled up onto a spire of silver metal that went way up, above the chaotic boundary to where it could see through the transparent portion of the shell to the world beyond. It was easier to climb in this gravity, forcing cavities of surprise and disorientation here and there.

  As the righteous looked out of the dome, they could see all the area around the shell blackened by the rotting body of God. It was immense and overwhelming. Sheets of metal rose up out of the sand, black webbing spread across and between the spires of antired crystal and antigreen Godstuff. A cavity of knowledge collapsed with the understanding that it was dead Godflesh. God was not dead, but this flesh was.

  Beyond the wreckage, the righteous could see an endless waste of grey-antigreen sand.

  They needed to get flesh out of the shell and armed with guns. The bones of the Godflesh would make good cover to protect against demons. There was some risk of them destroying the dome from far away, but the wandering newflesh had known, long ago, that these dome-shells from God could withstand a lot.

  Suppressing the cavity of disgust through sheer force of will, the righteous reached out to share minds with the wicked. They knew that they had to form an organized defence. The sorcerer was coming, and it was possible that it would serve the people up to the demons to be violated. That was what demons did, after all. This was a migration like they’d never experienced before, but theirs was a good cause. The righteous were always victorious in the end.

  This was the nature of justice.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Face

  Zephyr was decidedly not crying.

  “Said I’m fine, gorramit! We don’t have time for this. Need to be moving south to hit the nameless before they can entrench.”

  Despite her words urging action, she sat, arms crossed, looking out over the battlefield like a statue. Perhaps she thought, since we were talking over coms, that I couldn’t see her.

  But we could see everything. Our minds were spread through the entire camp, embodied yet invisible at the scale of humans. Every com-connected device was an extension of Body, their software having been rewritten to allow us permanent access long ago. When the nameless ship had broken up overhead, debris and molten metal had cascaded down on the camp, severing our spine: the fibre-optics that linked Body to the swarm. The crystal hadn’t been damaged, as Safety had the foresight to bury it ahead of time, but it had taken hours for the humans to get around to digging us up and getting us reconnected. They had been busy dealing with the living and the dead.

  “Hate it when you shut me out like this, Zeph.” I was in charge of managing Zephyr, as well as the other humans. Ever since the ontology shift had dissociated myself from Crystal Socrates it brought me little pleasure; Zephyr didn’t understand who I was. She was talking to a fiction.

  But keeping the humans under our metaphorical thumb was part of the plan, and it was important for me to stay useful in the eyes of my siblings. I wouldn’t go down as easily as Heart, but I knew that if Growth and Vision decided to join forces they could eliminate me without trouble.

  Zephyr decided to play dumb. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s important work to be done. If you want someone to lie down and cry for you, maybe should have run away to hide with Jashiel.”

  My attention was wandering. This conversation with Zephyr wasn’t important. Face→War kept capturing cycles from Face→Human. In a side conversation, Atília noted that I was distracted as he talked to me while he worked to fold the scraps of thermal canvas that hadn’t been destroyed by debris. The problem was that the battle had gone well. I didn’t want it to go poorly, but with things being on track it was only a matter of time before Vision or Growth launched an attack on me.

  I wasn’t necessary. These humans weren’t necessary. Though our swarm (and even Body) was frustratingly low on power, I didn’t doubt that one of my brothers or sisters could, with full control, use it to kill all of the surviving humans. There were only fifteen of them, and humans were so fragile on this planet.

  Face→Human wrested control of my processes. Though I wasn’t anchored in my attention, I was still limited in my capacity and speed of thought. “That’s not the point and you know it,” I said to Zephyr. “This isn’t you. Want the warrior who isn’t afraid to let herself feel—”

  “I’m not fucking afraid of feeling!” interrupted Zephyr, voice like molten iron. “Maybe you’re too dumb to notice, but I’m pissed off. There. A feeling. You happy? We spend all day talking about that instead of actually fucking doing things and the nameless will kill us in our gorram sleep!”

  The landscape was a blasted mess. Where debris had landed there were craters, but mostly the land had been shaped by the turbulent winds from the explosions and the engines of the xenocruiser. The valley floor, pushed this way and that, looked like a turbulent sea of red-orange sand covered in blackened flotsam, frozen in time. Here and there the heat had been strong enough and the soil had been high enough in silicates to form wide swaths of dark glass.

  Growth was managing the arrangement of the solar cells and the new mirrors we’d built while designing a new hydrazine generator to help make up for the energy shortage. The railgun had been effective, but it was very expensive to run. Was running out of energy a threat? Was Growth, confident that his agent on Earth was active, hoping to stall us out or bring defeat by depleting the camp’s energy or even running Body out of power?

  No. Face→War was being paranoid.

  Face→Human recaptured the thread again and began sending messages out to everyone I was talking with. To Zephyr I said “We are moving. The railgun is being disassembled as we speak and Mycah is on her way from the hiding place with the trucks and the other rovers. But as long as you’re not moving we can talk.”

  My words seemed to snap Zephyr out of a trance, and she looked around the camp, perhaps trying to see the face of the familiar android. B
ut that thing was gone, and her reply was bitter. “You want me to move? Fine. Use one of your bots to find me a crutch and I’ll help with the packing.”

  Vision was making plans for our upcoming battle with the aliens. Just because things were going according to plan didn’t mean more plans didn’t need to be made. The xenocruiser had disintegrated into two primary chunks, each with one of the massive engines. One of the chunks had escaped into space, and was presumably in orbit, while the other had sustained a brutal bombardment by the surface-to-air missiles and had almost certainly crashed somewhere to the south. Vision→Vista was explaining her estimates in public mindspace as to where it actually landed while Wiki brought up trivial concerns like wind speed.

  “Didn’t say that I wanted you moving. In fact, I want the opposite. Should be resting in a bed. I’m surprised the pain isn’t incapacitating.”

  Zephyr’s response was immediate. “You have something for the pain and I’ll take it. Not going to let it slow me down, though. Those fucking monsters are going to die, and I’m going to be there when it happens. Now get me a crutch.”

  Seventeen humans had died in the battle. The twelve walkers that had been in xenoboats had been picked off in the aftermath, too. There were no bodies or even dirt in the debris from the ship. For having done as much damage as we did, it didn’t feel like much of a victory to the surviving humans.

  “Working on adding a chemical-processing component to the factory truck and I’ll see if I can start manufacturing something to help the pain, but you need to know your limits. You’re only human. If you push yourself too hard, it could kill you. The nameless might do it, even if your wounds don’t.”

  Safety was operating the truck that we’d converted into a rolling factory. It was rolling around the mountain with the other vehicles we’d hidden, but it was as much a part of us as the robots around the camp were, thanks to the relay antenna drone we’d sent out east. Safety was reconfiguring the forge to handle the new scrap metal we were collecting from around the battlefield, but I put in a request that he or Wiki attend to extending the chemical section.