Histaff

by Andries Louws

  Frozen again, Katare’s sight is locked onto Solan’s face. Slowly the rage comes back. Slowly, the forceful way of keeping her mental faculties pliant and relaxed lose their grip, and Katare spirals into an even deeper hole of madness, depression, fury, and rage-fuelled insanity. The half startled, half-guilty look on Solan’s face only speeds up the process.

  It was all true then. She had believed her entire life that she was one of the few truly ever-living beings. Most sapient species in the galaxy can live to be a thousand years, no problem. Only a bit of money is needed to keep bodies alive. It’s only when people start living for tens of millennia that the truly difficult problems appear.

  Bodies are essentially biological machines, and eventually, everything wears down. Most sapients work on DNA - or a similar principle - and those systems tend to become more and more unstable as time moves on. Diseases start hitting harder, cancer grows faster, and weakness comes on quicker despite the body itself being in top condition. Small errors accumulate, and unless people are willing to spend their time permanently inside molecular reconstruction vats, these errors tend to cause quick onset death.

  That’s just the physical side of the story. Keeping people sane for millennia is an even tougher job. There are entire planets dedicated to mental therapy specialized for a single racial species. Entire solar systems are housing projects that care for old, insane people, often paralysing them and locking them in some form or virtual reality to minimise cost.

  And yet, there are some people who just keep on trucking. These one in a quadrillion soul somehow have the ideal combination of mindset, body, and soul that won’t break easily, even after hundreds of millennia. Solan is one of these people, his true age probably only known to him.

  Katare thought she was one of these people.

  Apparently not. So by all rights, she should be dead right now. She should not be some form of parasite inside a cloned vessel. She should be dead.

  And were it not for Douglas, she’d never have learned this.

  So let her be dead. She will welcome death, then! LET THERE BE DEATH.

  Katare’s mind devolves rather swiftly. She holds out commendably for the first few hours, only mulling over her past life, trying to put everything in perspective, but the lack of regulatory processes cause her mind to enter another spiral, circular reasoning leading her to dive deeper and deeper into madness and rage. And so it is, stuck staring at who she thought to be her father, mad with anger and spite, that a new goddess of death is born.

  [ Congratulations on becoming this frequency’s first deity, remember; FIGHT ENTROPY ]

  [ New POSITION gained; lesser deity of Death ]

  [ Physical form dissolved into pure energy to expedite this process, please stand by ]

  Katarenin’s physical form turns into pure power as each elemental particle of her body is forced into pure energy. The ship, currently between stars and half phased out of reality, disintegrates into plasma a couple microseconds later, the faster than light bubble keeping it between reality breaking and adding to the outpouring of pure power. All sapients onboard - whether they be biological, technological, or other - are vaporised along with the entire ship.

  A light brighter than any supernova appears for a few microseconds after the explosion. Then a blue haze catches up with the expanding ball of superheated plasma and implodes the entire thing into a single point. Another immensely bright burst of radiation across the entire spectrum escapes, beginning its slow travel through the void of space at the relatively glacial speed of light.

  Katare observes this all. She gained a partially omniscient perspective over the entire procedure, somehow understanding all that happens but not really caring about it. She also gained a bit more understanding of her own being. The knowledge that her own boredom was the death of her original body leaves her a last trace of wry emotion. The cryosleep she insisted on taking every hundred years or so played havoc on her cells. She had been one of the few true immortals of this galaxy until she decided that she wanted to take century-long naps.

  Then the clinical perspective needed to do her godly duties takes over and the last traces of emotion fade. She does raise a proverbial eyebrow at the fact that her own soul is missing. The space around her swarms with the things. She now understands that each new sapient born generates a soul and that the lack of any supernatural forces in this plane of existence has caused them to wander for eternity. Her own soul is missing, however. She coolly reasons that she must be templated off the photonic chip inside her body’s head. The small, metal box was a light-based processor capable of simulating a human brain. Her original brain was linked through an entangled particle, allowing her to remotely control bodies. She feels it far off now, stirring awake slowly. She will get to that eventually, she reasons.

  Then all her ties to her previous life fall away, deemed useless in the new duty that she has taken on. She somehow expected a few billion souls at most, the expectation coming from somewhere old and deep. She finds a billion souls in her current area of influence alone, and this area of the galaxy is extremely thinly populated compared to the centre worlds.

  She then turns to the blue boxes, who are only now letting her see the full glory that is truly behind them.

  [ Souls in range; 1,634,718,551 ]

  [ Souls processed; 0 ]

  [ Souls consumed; 0 ]

  [ Souls reassigned; 0 ]

  Her non-existent fingers pluck one particular soul from real space, studying it in a detached manner. The man who used to be Solan is one of the brightest souls here, his long life giving the soul a rather tasty vibe. She idly licks it, unimportant memories flooding her mechanical mind. She shrugs her mental shoulders and starts idly chewing the tasty morsel.

  What used to be Katare ignores the blue boxes and keeps chewing, enjoying the feeling when the bundles of memories pop. She can feel her own reach spreading by the second, although something as mundane as seconds no longer really means anything to her. The feeling of absolute wrongness that causes all the souls around her to scurry away from where she focuses her attention in real space does not have any effect on the deity at all.

  [ Souls in range; 4,214,209,284 ]

  [ Souls processed; 4 ]

  [ Souls consumed; 4 ]

  [ Souls reassigned; 0 ]

  [ Take note; only eat souls deemed malicious. Only consume the souls needed to sustain your construct. Process and reassign all others. Forming new souls causes this frequency's energy to weaken, speeding up entropy. Queue souls for recycling by DIETY of life. Remember; FIGHT ENTROPY ]

  Chapter Twenty – Of Endings, Epilogues, and Re-entries

  Far away from magical skeletons, monstrous bone beasts, or mad deities of death is a planet. This entire planet is off limits to all but a single man. This single man just so happened to be recently deceased, his soul obliterated and consumed by a mad figment of his own daughter.

  On this forbidden planet are many wondrous things. It contains vaults that span continents and hangars that house ships capable of wiping away stars with their weakest weapons. Many rare, ancient, and expensive items are stored there, either for the good of the rest of the galaxy or because the item’s owner simply wanted them all to himself.

  In the innermost core of the planet, behind massive, locked doors and guarded by one of the galaxy’s most advanced security systems is a machine. This machine is made up out of two parts. One part is a massive energy sink, using a sizable chunk of the planet’s total power generation to empower a philotic link. The other side of the machine houses a single brain, a massive array of sensors keeping track of the organ’s state.

  A jungle of wires, probes, cables, and biomolecule fabricators keeps the brain in top condition. A towering stack of temperature control systems and storage tanks house a wide array of hormones and nutrients keeping it fed and healthy.

  Then the philotic link shuts down, causing a massive overload of power. The single elemental particle inside the magne
tic housing suddenly turns to energy. This happens at the same moment its counterpart - many lightyears away - does the same. Even though this explosion is relatively small, it’s enough to completely wreck the containment machine.

  The massive condensers responsible for dampening power spikes in the energy supply no longer have an incredibly unstable split particle to support. They immediately explode and trip half the electrical fail-safes on the planet, causing power outages across a major part of the mechanical world. This includes the life support system keeping the brain alive. In response to the lack of power, it switches to its backup power supply and goes into its shutdown procedure. Wires are pulled from the ribbed sphere of pink matter and nano swarms are recalled. The towering life support systems are swapped for portable versions. This entire process is finalised as a complex weave of armour plating and supporting systems are placed around the fragile organ.

  The procedure ends with a rather impressive looking amount of mechanical parts coming together. The explosion in the philotic linking machine right next to the brain cage warped some of the structural support, however. Instead of landing on mechanical legs and moving towards a redundant brain life support system, the ensemble plops onto the metal floor with a rather sickening squelch, brain juice spilling through the gaps.

  The armour plating unravels, life support parts fall off, and the brain is exposed to the open air.

  Katare’s true soul doesn’t realise any of this. The last thing she knew, she had chosen to become a god in what was - in hindsight - a rather moronic move during a panic attack. Her mind is oddly calm for someone who just had their worst fears confirmed. The blue dot blinking at the bottom of her vision is still present and this surprises the woman slightly. She asks what horrors it has in store for her this time, and the blue screen happily obliges.

  [ Name: Katare ]

  [ Race: Human ]

  [ Level: 1 (0/100) ]

  [ Class: None ]

  [ HP: 1/40 ][ HP/h: 0.042 ]

  [ MP: 150/150 ][ MP/h: 14 ]

  [ STR: 1 ]

  [ AGI: 1 ]

  [ CON: 1 ]

  [ VIT: 9 ]

  [ INT: 14 ]

  [ WIS: 13 ]

  [ Brain in a jar; -100STR, -100AGI, -100CON ]

  [ Universal Language ]

  The amount of health she has is extremely worrying and is probably why she is completely unable to sense anything at all. A quick bit of mental math tells her that she will only need forty days to fill up her hp bar.

  [ New skill learned; Basic Math lvl 3 ]

  She mentally blinks at this new form of box. She has seen her status before, but skills are entirely new to the woman. She quickly does some more mental calculus, her mind feeling the clearest it has in centuries for unknown reasons.

  [ Basic Math lvl 6 ]

  Odd thoughts about needing paper to do even the most simplest of calculations are trying to interfere. Her vivid memories of learning all kinds of tips and tricks in order to work with large numbers on the fly are in direct opposition to this fact, however. The methods these tips seem to want to teach her are incredibly primitive to boot.

  Ignoring the odd sensation of being given hints from inside her own head, she wonders what all this extra stuff she is feeling is. None of her senses function, but she has gone to enough weird spas and wellness centres to be completely familiar with this lack of sensation. Instead, she relaxes and tries to feel what is so off about her new situation. To her, it feels like a new layer of existence is somehow present, an odd presence indicating that the universe is now more than it was before. She tries probing and touching it, trying to hone in on the feeling.

  [ New skill learned; Mana Sense lvl 1 ]

  A whole world opens up for the woman. Also, it feels like there is nothing outside her head? Even her face seems to be missing somehow … She would have thought that mana flows through the entire body? Confused, she asks what the blue box meant with 'brain in a jar'.

  [ Brain in a jar; you are but a brain in a jar, your entire body removed and kept alive artificially. -100STR, -100AGI, -100CON ]

  Katare freaks out again.

  ⁂

  While a certain bodiless brain is panicking over her rather dire circumstances, many lightyears away, a skull is doing the exact opposite.

  Douglas spent a rather relaxing time piecing his body back together again after they flew away from being stomped flat by behemoths. The fact that his spacesuit ran out of power after a few days of floating around inside the ship’s bridge did put a damper on his mood. The fact that Katare froze over, her flesh refusing to grow back across her blackened skull dampened his mood a bit further, but by this time, Douglas had pieced his entire skeleton back together and mended all the bones, so he didn’t really care.

  Douglas instead decided to spend his time waiting for something to happen while studying his spell shapes. Floating weightless through the partially ruined cockpit, the deep-frozen skeleton continued puzzling out the many mysteries of mana. He even started applying the same runes he scribbled on the ship to the inside of his skull. In a flash of inspiration, he had filled the empty space in his head with a single mana stone. He was pretty annoyed at the fact that the small stone kept rattling around inside his cranium. Then he realized that nothing was stopping him from stuffing more stones inside his skull.

  For days, the skeleton did nothing but form mana stones inside his head and engrave his own skull with strengthening runes. While he was at it, he used all his spare mana to try enchanting Katare’s horn too. He switched focus to full time enchanting after every single hollow space in his skull was filled with mana stones. The skill popups got annoying after a while, so he told the blue boxes to scram, and they did.

  By the time the blue blinking dot at the bottom of his vision started blinking faster than he could see, things suddenly happened. The only light source inside the ship’s bridge had been his eyes at first. The holographic displays surrounding Katare vanished around the time she froze. Sometime while Douglas was lost in his magical studies, the mana densities in his skull and in Katare’s horn became so dense that they started casting a blue glow all the time. Douglas even noticed that his eyes started blazing brightly every time he even so much as thought about mana.

  This blue glow got annihilated by the amount of light suddenly streaming into the ship. Then the light got brighter. Douglas’ adaptive eyes failed to compensate for the immense change in luminosity. Then his bones were gone. Then his skull glowed red hot, the mana he had been storing inside his skull vanishing at an exceedingly rapid pace.

  Then everything was dark again.

  ⁂

  Standard spacefaring regulations rule that all efforts must be taken in order to keep space as litter free as possible. This is not limited to physical refuse and also covers the subjects of warfare. Randomly shooting highly energetic weapons everywhere is seen as a larger offence than casual murder by a lot of organizations. Even while fighting something as menacing as a Histaff infection vector, these regulations are to be obeyed lest the offending party be fined. These fines tend to be in the scale of multiple solar systems’ yearly revenues, so every single being manning guns know to line up their shots so any remaining weapons fire will hit a nearby object.

  The gunner of the stationed Histaff containment crew had communicated with the navigator, guaranteeing that the beam weapons destroying the white vessel would eventually reach the nearest planet.

  All of these factors combined had caused Douglas’ body - now merely a skull once again - to be launched towards the red planet he just came from at high speeds.

  So now, many days later, a single-horned, metal skull slams into a red atmosphere, painting a white trail of superheated air in the foggy sky. The rest of the skeleton is scattered to the winds, its physical components burned up during re-entry. The object lands after an otherwise unassuming descent, slamming into a mountain face and causing a minor rockslide.

  Another smaller meteorite plunge
s towards the planet moments later. The bone and tissue surrounding the stubby spike of metal is burned up during the fall. It loses its momentum a lot faster than the solid skull, finally slamming into an endless stretch of red dunes.

  High up above, the soul of a certain captain wonders what he should do and what route he should pick.

  Up higher, a soulless being continues snacking on wandering spirits while ignoring the proper rules.

  Even further out, alarms go off in multiple offices, informing a select collection of individuals that yet another one of the immortal ones has fallen.

  Further still, a brain is sensing for an otherworldly power. Unaware of the chaos that her actions have caused, the bodiless perpetrator of the power vacuum is working very hard to stay alive.

  Afterword

  We hope you enjoyed Histaff! Since reviews are the lifeblood of indie publishing, we’d love it if you could leave a positive review on Amazon! If you scroll through to the end of this book, you’ll easily be able to leave a review, otherwise, follow this link to be redirected to the Skeleton in Space: Histaff Amazon product page to leave your review: geni.us/Histaff.

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  About Andries Louws

  Andries Louws is an avid reader of fantasy, science fiction and pretty much everything interesting since a young age. He is still thankful to the nice ladies at the local library that let him check out all those violent action thrillers, epic fantasy books and encyclopaedias without enforcing age requirements. He also studied multimedia design and computer science while devouring as many novels, audiobooks, and video games as he could get his hands on. He then started writing his own stories after reading one too many badly translated Chinese novels and hasn't stopped since.