Proud Infinity (VayneLine)

by E. A. Szabelski

  With women it was another challenge and at this point I no longer cared about ‘knowing them’ as it was pointless. It was easy at gunpoint but didn’t stimulate me the same way of manipulating their minds with perfect words and actions. My respect for them tanked down to zero. I could get any girl to be with me, it didn’t matter how loyal or pure she was. Enough predictive power or perfect words and they all melted. Eventually that game grew boring as well.

  By the way, Proud? It was easy. I only had to ask. She was more than happy for the overwhelming feelings of the physical realm, and indeed it was quite amazing from my end; but that was the largest regret I had. Amidst my absolute depravity she represented perhaps the one untainted thing in this fractured world I inhabited, and I proceeded to destroy that as well.

  My curiosities turned to sorrow and anguish. The hedonism left me cold and empty, the shallowness overwhelming that I had given in to. Soon it became a burden, thinking of all the crimes I had committed, even if they were not longer ‘actually done’. The pointlessness of everything amplified by a thousand experiences I had now come to hate. Especially what I did with Proud…or maybe it’d be better to say ‘what I did to Proud’.

  We had come to love each other through the circumstance we were now in, a deep friendship from the stories we shared. Our friendship was not one of two different races of a physical being and a near-energy being creating a physical body, but of two consciousnesses that liked each other from so much time together.

  Then I had sex with her simply to satisfy a burning question of if she would. And she did, and she loved it. As soon as it was over, I started crying. I was so stupid, so shallow. Defiling the last totem of sanity in this world left me broken and under no more delusions of how messed up I had become.

  What the fuck was wrong with me? The universe was counting on my freewill to prevent this time fracture, and I was doing this to its incarnation? I was murdering people, manipulating every woman I could into sex, and fucking LineGod Proud instead of doing anything productive. I felt endlessly evil for taking advantage of her which I did many times ‘just to make sure’. That sent me on an even darker spiral for many, many time fractures.

  I swung my arm around, trying to grab something else. I grabbed something soft, pulling it towards me; it was my white shirt. On the floor, holding the white shirt and the desk brought forth more grim memories of the even further pits I fell into.

  ‘But she was the sensual one, she wanted it!’ I would lie to myself, trying to justify the single action I hated myself the most for. My personal best for kills was over a thousand using just a pistol, most women was over ten, and that was due to my own physical limitation, but none of those compared to the final break in sanity by using Proud.

  Her name was ‘Proud’ and that was nowhere near what I felt about my actions, only all-consuming regret and self-hatred. The shame was overwhelming, and then it was eventually mixed with hopelessness of my position. I had forsaken seeing Proud again because I felt so bad for what I did for so many times before I finally snapped.

  Never seeing her proved okay for a while, but then the regret grew, and with no counter to my dark thoughts, they surged endlessly. My thoughts turned back towards something I had fallen into early in the loops: could I kill myself out of this nightmare? I tried…oh god, I tried. But no. I would die, and then the universe would later in the cycle, the time fracture traveling backwards past the point of my own death to the morning as it always did. Each cycle, wake up, grab the pistol, pull the trigger. Instantly wake back up in the same room, but dealing with the emotional fallout of ‘surviving’ a suicide.

  I felt my body shaking from the fear of itself from the horror I had inflicted on it in the name of escaping. Or trying to anyway. I could not get out.

  “I’m so so sorry…” I whimpered to myself, hugging myself to try to believe it. My eyes were watering. This was so painful, so confusing.

  I was shaking hard at the overwhelming memories. ‘The positive, just focus on it. Just focus…’ But all I could do was grit my teeth at yet more regret. How the hatred I felt at myself for taking advantage of Proud that turned to suicide, then to unrequited rage at the girl who was the singular cause of the nightmare I was in.

  I was on this endless rollercoaster of extreme emotions throughout the loops. Even after all the regret towards Proud, it then turned to anger. Blaming her for somehow involving me in all this. I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want this nightmare.

  My teeth hurt from how hard I was biting down, trying to not remember the time I tried killing her. Despite the slow learner I seemed to be with everything else, I only did this once.

  I leveled the Liner pistol right at her. ‘Die bitch’ I had said to her confused face. I pulled the trigger, unloading half the clip into her, but…but it went right through her. I fell to my knees. ‘You really are just a figment of my imagination,’ crying at how crazy I was.

  ‘Would it make you feel better to actually let you shoot me? Try it Trego, if you really want, as dark as this path has become.’ To which my teary face pulled the trigger again at her, and was shocked when he body recoiled away, blood, or something similar, exploding out the backside. ‘Proud?’ I asked to her dead body, the bloody ribbon covering a massive crater in her head. The shock was so severe I turned the pistol on myself, and the darkness only crept on.

  “No!” I shouted, trying to forget. Just remember the good, the times I actually was productive, not lost in despair or hatred. “It was not always bad! That was when I started changing!” I yelled to the world, trying to make it real.

  Yes, focus on how during my self-killing spree, Proud came to me one trigger pull away and asked if there was anything she could do. I had not seen her since the crime of killing her, or perhaps crimes, I committed against her, and her innocent appearance before me nearly caused me to follow through yet again with the trigger. But I stopped long enough for her to tell me it pained her to see me this way, and ask why I was like this. She was here to help if I would only ask.

  I told her reluctantly a big part of it was how bad I felt for taking advantage of her when so much was at stake, both having sex with her, and later shooting her in another iteration. When she laughed loudly, I lowered the pistol out of confusion. ‘How did you take advantage of me, if we both wanted it?’ she asked. She did not even mention the time when I had shot her because to her it was nothing. She said she was entirely joyful for the experience, and did not regret anything and wondered why I did. She said that the physical plane was overwhelming in its feelings, and to have experienced something like that with me, well, she’d remember forever. She said she loved me and hoped I would have asked earlier, or again. She lowered my pistol and we held hands, me crying for hours in her simple embrace until the end came again.

  How many annihilations ago was that? A thousand? A million!?

  In the absolute darkness of my being and existence Proud had saved me from the darkness of myself, showing me my own light by simply exposing hers. Taking a few deep breaths, trying to wipe the tears away I recalled some of the positive things I had figured out during the focus of every time after that, since I decided to actually get serious.

  Right, remember the things I had figured out even during the darkness. Like how my repetition of a hundred different phrases and conversation branches allowed me to sleep with numerous girls, showing me I could find out almost anything from anyone with exactly the right prompts. What was initially fueled by dark sexual desire proved to be very useful in the fact I could use perfect conversation choices positively, and not having anything to do with sex.

  The old guy at the fence? Indeed he was in the Space Forces as he claimed, but he also was a special operator. What did I learn? I rubbed my eyes, trying to recall. Definitely some stuff about infiltration and explosives. What exactly had he taught me?

  What was hard was that I could no longer separate ‘my’ knowledge with what I had learned from others simply teaching me. A
thousand repetitions with the same person, each ‘cycle’ simply advancing the conversation as far as I had learned from the prior cycle, allowing me to eventually learn everything a person was capable of teaching.

  I got up and left, slightly energized by the memory I was actually making progress. Normally later in the day the old man would be over-looking the pit, but long ago figured out where he lived.

  I went to his house, knocked on the door and he was much more suspicious and cold compared to his more jovial act at the overlook.

  “What do you want?” he asked through a chained door.

  “Coding Alpha Delta,” I let it sink in a little. “We need to talk.”

  From my view, I saw the one eye looking at me through the chain blink once, then he unchained the door. He put the pistol under the slot on the table like he always did, not knowing I had been killed by it quite a few times.

  By playing the role of an agent from the highest reaches of Solarian intel, I was able to learn a lot from him. At this point I was sure I had exhausted everything he had to tell me, but it was a good reminder.

  Had I always known that an innocent nano block used to repair stuff could be overrode to create controlled directional explosions? Had I always known my Liner pistol could be turbo charged simply by taking over the cover and turning the limiter off?

  I doubted it, but there was no way to know. Knowledge was a strange thing to me that often hung at the edge of my understanding. Given all the loops I had been through, what was ‘my’ knowledge melted away into this strange mixture of things I now knew from others.

  The old man had just finished showing me how to take the limiter off my Liner pistol; I could probably do it better than him at this point.

  “You still have the explosives you were tasked with, right?”

  “Are you requesting transference, Operator?” he asked back.

  At this point everything was growing dark.

  “Negative, just need to make sure. But I always knew you still did.” I lifted my Liner pistol up.

  “What…are you doing?” he asked, concerned.

  “Resetting,” I said. I pulled the trigger as I ended my life in a far less painful way.

  ***

  The more loops I endured, the easy it was to accept it was happening. What I meant by that is that I would not be crippled by existential terror of the situation, or of the acts I had taken.

  There was a degree of random-ness of what exactly was remembered and why. To me it was a bit akin to learning a new language by reading a complex book. It often meant nothing to me but I would start to see patterns. Many times the patterns were wrong, but again with enough failures these too would be refined. Consciously it was tougher to explain than on a subconscious or intuitive level where I’d remember things on a ‘déjà vu’ type experience.

  Had I always known the android girl, Mitreah, at the spaceport was the highest level combat android available? Or how about that the android girl’s override phrase was actually three words long? And it wasn’t just words: a big key was I had to say her name before the words. A lot of these key facts were slowly extracted by practically begging, ‘How could I prove to you that I know you?’ And so slowly would she tell me, ‘Well if you can tell me X about myself,’ to which I’d spend cycles and cycles trying to figure out one little fact just so I could further advance the true search of finding her code word.

  Every time, it would be the same with slightly more info. I would tell her of battles she had fought in, what her favorite food was, where she lived, what number she was thinking of. Silly things like that was what it took to get more vital info out of her, all for the eventual end of unlocking her control code.

  Damn androids, not easy to deal with in a time loop; so much harder than Solarians, ironically. This was a large reason why I bothered, it was part of a challenge. I could figure out people a few cycles, but her programming was resistant which was so problematic.

  How funny that the first cycle I felt embarrassed just standing there shouting things to her, but how fast my embarrassment died to grim necessity.

  That took forever just to get to three words, except once I after busting out about two thousands words, I think I was around, ‘Mitreah: nanite uhh…Mitreah: nanites’, to her in the empty port she laughed and said it was three words long. Considering I had not told her any of her secrets during that reset, I was surprised she volunteered the information. Maybe in some little way was something of hers becoming implanted into the Emotion Field?

  I asked Proud about it, and she could not answer like usual but said things work in ways I would not understand. It was quite curious regardless, that this perfect programming may actually be affected by the Emotion Field. It made me think that part of Mitreah’s body, the Solarian part, had an element of some type of ‘soul’ that so many would refuse to believe.

  ‘Mitreah: Farewell fallen sword’. I found out eventually through thousands of cycles of dedicated attempts. I think I skipped straight from ‘farewell fallen swift’ straight to ‘sword’ on a gut feeling. Living in this cycle over and over, it was amazing to find out just how powerful intuition was. Because I literally could try every path, the path my intuition would pull me on, and compare it to just about every other one.

  I have no idea what ‘intuition’ is anymore, but it went far beyond anything simple as some might think. This was one of the biggest examples. Such a random thing as words, but it had saved me so much time. I truly believed intuition was likely low levels of Chrono Senses manifesting.

  Oh, I of course realized I did not possess any sort of Chrono Sense in a large scale like I thought once upon a long time ago. The only reason I ‘knew’ what was coming is because I had died thousands of times to it.

  I walked over to the space port, spending more time with the android, Mitreah.

  I waved when I walked in and she gave a friendly wave back, but did not know me from anyone else at this point.

  “Hi, Mitreah.”

  “Oh hello! I don’t remember your name. Have we met?”

  ‘A few times…’ I thought to myself.

  “Mitreah: Farewell Fallen Sword,” I stated cryptically. Her face went blank like it always does, before her bright eyes returned.

  “Override confirmed. What are you orders?”

  I waved my hand. “Nothing major, I simple want to talk to you a bit.”

  “An odd request, but certainly.”

  I spent a long time talking to her. Unlike the old man, she was much more fun, but I learned less. There was not as much applicable to me due to her combat android form and background. She could teach me so much about fighting, but not as much about the world.

  Before the end of this loop I wanted to fight her more to train my combat ability. That was perhaps the biggest boon from her, other than eventually using her to break into ReCorp.

  To her, my words were novel, “Mitreah, I want you to train me to fight. I want to use my pistol, and anything you can teach me. Execute training protocol number 2.”

  She smiled at me. “This is so much more fun.”

  She left to go get some training supplies she had in her personal locker. I had never figured out why an ex-combat android ended up here, I could never get it out of her. The best I could figure is that she was injured slightly, or had served long enough she got to retire.

  Mitreah came back with a training pistol that would fire visible lasers that did not actually do anything but would respond if I hit her and she could react appropriately. Combat androids could fight with guns, and melee weapons, but there most signature weapon was their arm would form into a very sharp blade, essentially like a nano blade. Something like this would kill my obviously, so it was more like a blunt bat I was struck with.

  She tossed the training pistol to me like always. I caught it and started firing at her dashing form.

  Probably an old Aelisha combat android based on Solarian form, evidenced by her dashing style was leaning super far forward:
the same way Aelishas ran. She slashed at me with her blade arm, I blocked with the pistol and dodged, firing at her. I knew her moves well enough at this point I could end it easily. My main goal at this point was to build up my own reflexes, not to use known paths.

  I dove awkwardly a few times just to get off any previous path I would ‘remember’. I felt blind once again which I liked. Mitreah could easily take me out given her superior programming and speed but limited it during the training.

  I fired a few times at her, impressed by how my own skills were coming along; she had to dodge which slowed her assault down.

  She got close, swiping at me hard and connecting. Her blade arm of course was dull for training, but in real combat I would have lost my arm. Regardless it gave me a strong shock that made it numb.

  I dove to the ground, grabbing the pistol out of my numb arm, turning around rapidly and hitting her in the chest. A spray of the laser beams struck home, and if it was a strong enough weapon she would have been killed. My aggressive push of not running and doubling down on the attack was enough to win.

  “Uh…” She moaned in pain from the ground a bit before standing. We helped each other up.

  “Dang, that was fun.” We with standing there, hugging each other for support. I was breathing hard.

  “How are you so good? I had to go to the very limits to even catch you.”

  I stepped back. “I’ve done this before.”

  “Who was your teacher?”

  “You.” I pulled out my real pistol, aimed and reset.

  ***

  I spent a lot of time with Proud. I had come to like her in a way no one else ever before. We were utterly alone in this. I could say any right move to manipulate anyone. But every cycle, every loop it was the same. Not with Proud. She was the only one who kept her consciousness through the resets.