It has been 5 hours, 47 minutes and 18 seconds since I

  started reading. There are a total of 200 thousand words contained

  within these seven treatises, and most of them are impenetrable

  scientific and mystical terms used to make the author seem smarter. My

  eyelids feel like they are holding up weighted dumbbells, yet I press

  on. My pride refuses to let me stop.

  I

  put the sixth essay down. This essay started as a rambling one about

  how all concepts and phenomena arise from the primes and primordial

  mathematical symmetries but then devolved into mindless rambling about

  Shakti, entropy, and how things can only be defined by the boundaries

  between them and their assigned opposite phenomenon.

  It reminds me all too well of what my father taught. Always remember. I hear him in my head—constantly. Creation

  exists in the dividing line between Absolute Infinity and Absolute

  nothingness. One IS and the other IS NOT. One gives and creates and the

  other takes and winnows. Yet both are necessary. Do not give until

  nothing matters anymore, and do not take until all is depleted.

  SHUT

  UP! SHUT UP SHUT UP! I banish him from my mind as I roll over onto the

  bed, grabbing the cover and burying my face in a pillow. The comforting

  warmth of my sheets and the coldness of the pillow mixed with the chill

  in the room causes me to let out a pleasant sigh. I set my biological

  clock for 8 hours of sleep. That's all I need, surely.

  I

  roll around in the bed and slowly drift off to sleep. I have to impress

  my Lord in battle. Though I won't be on the frontline along with the

  Oghuz and Astral Knights, this will be a chance to test my spiritual

  construct in action.

  My consciousness sinks, my limbs lose the motivation to move, and my thoughts become a numbing buzz.

  I enter the world of dreams—the storehouse where the world's memories are kept.

  It hurts.

  ACCESSING SOUL BAND…..

  ACCESSING RECORD OF CHOICES….

  Needles

  penetrate my skin. I wince a little. Part of me wants to scream.

  Another wants to cry. Tears pile up at the edge of my eyes. The needle

  extracts, pulling out…. something. It isn't blood. It's an inky-black

  and white fluid that behaves like Ferrofluid rolling off red flames. A

  man dressed in a white scrub suit with his face covered in a surgeon's

  mask examines the Ferrofluid, his eyes disguised by glasses, yet there

  is the glint of fascination beneath them.

  "Thank

  you for your compliance, Oh Lord of ours. Does this material vessel

  suit you? We are afraid that we have made this body of yours too frail.

  Feels like a stiff breeze could break all your bones. Hah."

  What

  is he talking about? Why did he call me Lord? He takes my frail hand in

  his, and my legs feel like jelly. We pass through sterile white

  hallways and a sign reading "Cognitive Research and Development."

  greets me.

  This is

  our destination. "Omnipotence is useless if you don't know how to use

  it." That is the motto written on the insignia of this department. An

  all-seeing eye with the alchemical symbol of the mind inscribed upon its

  retina.

  They

  drag me by the hand and throw me into a blank white room with a mattress

  for a floor, built to prevent the inhabitants from hurting themselves.

  There are two guards, faceless and concealed in flowing dark robes. They

  stare at me with blank faces, still as statues, I can't help but detect

  the contempt beneath their gaze.

  Then

  I hear a voice, booming and deep, ring through my soul. It sounds cold.

  Clinical. Scientific. "Greetings, illustrious lord of ours. Our past

  experimentations with you have proven fruitful yet we require your

  humble cooperation. We ask of you. Teach us the truth of the world. Tell

  us about what lies beyond and before this world. We demand the truth

  of creation."

  His

  voice is loud. So loud. My head hurts. Everything is so bright. A wave

  of heat runs through my body and I can't handle it anymore. "I DON'T

  KNOW!" I yell out into the empty white room, trying to suppress the sobs

  in my voice. "Please. I don't understand. What are you talking about?

  Why do you do this to me? What am I! Please make it stop!"

  A pause. I curl into myself and let my body sink into the soft floor. There is pause then the voice continues.

  "I

  apologize. You are a blind thing fettered to a blind god, flesh made of

  its flesh, eyes made of jewels and breath hideous with vanilla, we

  thought you would be an abomination of ambition but it seems we failed.

  There is still use to your existence. Grant us knowledge and truth, and

  we will guarantee your happiness."

  Then

  a great light shines through the walls of my mind. It illuminates the

  dark metallic halls that I had known when I was young.

  The

  world starts growing. Flowers and plant-life spring from concrete walls

  and metallic hallways. The scent of vanilla strikes my nostrils as

  crimson and vermilion flowers bloom around me. I feel growth at my feet

  and gaze down to see white and black flowers alike growing at a rapid

  pace.

  Then I notice the shards of bone growing out of my legs, piercing through flesh cancerously growing as well.

  I

  try to scream, but the words don't come out. My irises are diverging

  and forking as blood pours from my eyes. I try to run. Sharp pain bursts

  through me as my legs attempt to move but to no avail.

  No.

  NO! This isn't natural. This growth—no, this cancer. Things are meant

  to die for a reason. The flowers and plant-life are growing too fast.

  They are now at my chest, vines weaving into my open wounds, buds

  plunging beneath my fingernails. I can't move. I can't move! The world.

  It's beautiful. Everything is so bright and colorful with white roses

  and red flowers, yet my body bloats and decays.

  Eventually life starts blossoming inside of my veins. Roots extend out of my retina, and flowers grow in my brain.

  I'm in a bad place and I'm not going to get out.

  The soil is too warm—like blood.

  Now I understand. Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to you.

  The vines grow more dense.

  There's too much life here.

  I can't breathe.

  Or think.

  I don't want to live.

  I want to die.

  Why can't I ever get what I want?

  Then—

  A hand reaches out to me, and a trowel starts peeling away the cancerous overgrowth and bloat surrounding me.

  A voice reaches out for me as I wake from this hell.

  Hail,

  comrade in Darkness. We offer you our guidance in these troubling

  times. Our knife plows the field, severing rot and winnowing away the

  overgrowth. Our hands work tirelessly to cleanse the rot so that new

  life may bloom, free of decay and corruption. You

  are one of us. We live on in the fungal afterlife, our souls encoded in

  mycorrhizae as our gods were in mathematical axiom. We may be departed

  but our memories are yours, our will, experience, existential weight and

  mystical might. They are yours to take, our lord.Our

  enemy deems existence superior to experience. It brings down showers of

  silver ruin, hyperfertility and superbloom, where the world grows

  beautiful and so utterly cancerous. It deems that our deaths must be

  inane, our pain without purpose and our story without a conclusion. It

  creates a horrific world where nothing ever ends, always rotting and

  decaying but never truly dying, where those with power and wealth have

  the right to do whatever they wish on the poor and destitute and we can

  only smile as we suffer and die.And

  it calls that a blessing. It deems us insane for denying eternal life

  without meaning, suffering without end and pain with no closure.We

  ask of you since we lack the power to carry out this task. Will you

  deny this abomination of a world where nothing ever ends, suffering and

  pain infinite in the name of variation? Will you vindicate our deaths

  and give our lives meaning? Will you carry on our will? You don't understand now, fettered to this powerless shell, but in time you will.

  I

  wake up drenched in sweat. A fierce heat sweeps through my body, one

  which meets the bitter air of the room and sends goosebumps up my spine.

  I saw it again. That place. My earliest memories were of it. Of being

  hunted by the living, thinking nightmares and repressed desires of a

  trillion-trillion dead and living species in overgrown yet dilapidated

  cyclopean labs and hallways. I see them in my dreams, the hortensias and

  the bloated and decaying monsters that tend to them.

  Sometimes

  I get glimpses of what happens before. Of men in lab coats poking and

  prodding at my circuits and nerves. Treating me like a lab animal. Like a

  science project instead of a person. But I never see the full picture. I

  do understand one thing for sure. They converted my nerves into Radial

  Circuits to store something—something massive. Sometimes I hear what

  they call it: A blind god.

  I

  gaze at my palms, they are ruddy with sweat, and I can see the

  intricate lines of my radial circuits beneath my flesh lighting up in a

  cold blue hue. I should take a shower. My hoodie is ruined from all my

  sweat. I swiftly remove my clothes, and my body shakes as I gaze upon my

  desiccated figure.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I will

  never be as tall as guys like Argetlam or my father or most of the

  Astral Knights—never could have been. My growth was too stunted to grow

  tall and strong. Yet I could also never be curvy like a woman, even as

  my subconscious desire influences my flesh to grow a pathetic set of

  breasts and slightly expanded hips.

  I

  open the door to my room's bathroom and enter the shower, setting the

  water to a warmth that creates a thick fog. The heat that bites into my

  flesh is dampened by numb nerves, yet my skin crawls. I let out an

  involuntary shudder as water runs down my skin, clinging to exposed ribs

  and a gaunt, boney chest. I swallow down my discomfort and lather some

  shampoo on my hands before rubbing it into my greasy hair.

  Like

  soap, I rub the shampoo deeply into my skin as well. I am not quite

  sure this is how people—normal people—do it, but I don't feel confident

  enough to ask. I grab an exfoliating sponge, lathering it in the

  shampoo, before I start scrubbing the dead skin off my body. Then I move

  to towel myself off. I dress in a loose white undershirt and put on a

  pair of tight black panties, one of the few feminine garments I allow

  myself, before collapsing onto the bed. I spent five hours sleeping.

  There are 12 hours left until combat. I have some time left.

  What

  must I do with that time? Humans are born aimless, purposeless. They

  are born without reason. They grow, suffer, and die meaninglessly after

  ensuring the continuity of the species. Thus they seek out or try to

  create order and meaning in their lives, attempting to enforce structure

  and uniformity onto the chaos of their existence. These are the stars

  of man, those trailblazers who shine a path for others to follow. Those

  who find meaning and die without regrets.

  Then

  there are the failures—those who take the inherent meaningless of life

  as a cue to rot away and indulge in mindless, frivolous junk. Those who

  become addicts to pleasure and disgusting hedonism, never quite

  achieving true fulfillment, eternally chasing their next peak. Content

  to rot away and exist in life without a purpose to guide them.

  I am more than content to rot.

  "Get up," my father says in my head, his voice thick like the bourbon he drank. "You are still alive. You can still change. There is always a second chance. There is always time."

  He

  is right. I was unnecessarily rude to Adelle, and I ran away from

  Oliphael and her posse when I should have explained to them that I

  was….. I was…. I still don't know how to describe it. It's just

  something that happens whenever I suffer too much physical trauma or my

  emotions get too strong.

  I should apologize to both of them.

  Adelle's

  room is filled with photos of beautiful women in elaborate poses and

  extravagant dresses. It's overwhelming, the flood of bright lights and

  intoxicating smells that assault my senses. The strange otherworldly

  colors that fill the large room. It becomes hard to breathe. I try to

  put my hands to my ears and close out the sound of loud idol music.

  "TURN

  THAT OFF!" My voice is drowned out by the heavy bass and pop vocals,

  yet I press on to Adelle, her back hunched over her computer, her silky

  long greyish purple hair dishevelled, her eyes firmly locked on the

  computer and her ears covered by large headphones.

  "TURN THAT OFF!" I tap her shoulders as I finally reach her.

  She

  presses some keys on her computer, and the noise ceases as she unplugs

  her headphones. Her baggy eyes meet mine. I gaze behind her at the video

  playing on her computer. A video of a beautiful nude woman with long

  red hair in a bun, buxom breasts, and luscious legs posing on a bed. A

  voice speaks in the video, Adelle's voice.

  "Just

  stay like that for a little while, honey. Right, now, let me see your

  smile…. Allow me to see that colourful smile… Mhmm. Beautiful. Now,

  where were we…? Ah, that's right. Come on, the night's still young. Take

  your time. Together… let's make this one special night, shall we? A

  memory that we can look back upon for eternity."

  "Hehe…

  I'm not just being sentimental. It's true. I will recall our encounter

  again and again. I… will never forget you. This I promise you. In

  exchange, I just need you to show me your true colour."

  Adelle

  smiles and turns the video off while I stare, my lips parted slightly. I

  had heard…. rumors of her preferences. Across her desk were monitors

  with the newest in video editing, computer imagery generation, and

  visual manipulation software downloaded, pre-recorded videos of idols

  dancing and singing being edited on her computer. Adelle breaks the

  silence between us, taking her eyes off me and buttoning up one of her

  undone pajama buttons.

  "You know, allow me to tell you something," she says. "I know for a fact you don't like women, but everyone—"

  "Yo-You don't know that!" But it's pointless. Everyone knows. It's just that no man would take a pathetic failure like me.

  "I

  can smell it on you," she says with a smile in her voice. "Anyways,

  everyone can appreciate beauty. True beauty. True transcendent divine

  beauty. The kind of beauty that warms up every heart from hateful

  Rakshasa to greedy Auruk to mindless Outer Patterns. You know, the

  philosophers and sages argue that there is an essence of Arch-Beauty

  that all beautiful things imitate or perhaps participate in. Just as all

  wheels participate in the arch-circle."

  "What

  do you think that perfect beauty would be like? A beauty inscribed into

  the soul of creation. What do you think her smile would be like? The

  touch of her hand. The smell of her hair. Her everything. The beauty

  that could seduce even Karma and Fate."

  Her

  voice is low like mine yet tinged with…. sadness. Yes, sadness. "I know

  such a thing is impossible in the real world but I just want to imagine

  such a thing. What it would be like. And I want to claim it and engrave

  it upon the universe's soul."

  Adelle

  is a titan in the Panhuman Sphere of Entertainment. She's involved in

  everything—talent scouting, management, camerawork, visual design,

  fashion, choreography, etc. She seeks to construct idols and celebrities

  as modern-day divinities, hoping to tap into their artificial divinity

  to actualize her magecraft. I look around and see the photos of pop

  stars dressed in elaborate costumes and I can't help but find myself…

  disgusted by the idea.

  Not

  by her preferences, of course. That would be hypocritical of me, even

  if my stomach hardens in jealousy at her romantic success. But by the

  idea of the popstar as some modern divinity.

  "Man

  shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the

  mouth of God." Such is the word of the Messiah who sacrificed himself to

  defeat All The World's Evil. A later addition to the doctrine of the

  Messiah is the Middle Path—between extreme asceticism, until there is

  nothing left to give, and extreme indulgence, until there is nothing

  left to take. One is allowed to be frivolous and indulge in mindless

  junk as long as they know when to stop. Things like candy and popcorn,

  or more abstract things like games and music, are needed for life to be

  fulfilling.

  Yet the entire

  idea left a bad taste in my mouth. Simply the idea of being parasocially

  obsessed with someone else to such a level that they ascend to

  divinity. The idea of never again possessing privacy and having your

  every word the subject of cultish overanalyzing and obedience.

  Still,

  I restrain myself from voicing my complaints. "I see… So why are you

  reminiscing over your past trists? Shouldn't you be preparing for the

  coming battle? Us attendants don't fight on the frontlines, but you

  should prepare for worst case scenarios."

  She

  stands up as I speak and moves over to the coffee machine on her desk,

  pouring water in and activating it. Her posture is bent over the desk as

  she wipes some gunk from her eyes and speaks. "Hey, want to know why I

  am here? Why this good little idol manager who clearly shouldn't be here

  and has better things to do volunteered for some routine clean up

  mission against a Rakshasa overgrowth?"

  "Y-yes,

  sure," I say, though I'm not clear how she had a choice. I didn't

  really have much of a choice when I came on this expedition. I joined as

  an attendant for the Knights of San Sophia because I wanted to achieve

  something glorious with my life, or at least die trying to do something

  glorious. Why would someone so much more beloved by others and so much

  more talented than me want to be here? Someone who people will mourn

  upon their departure.

  "What

  do you know about the Rakshasa?" she asked. "Well, let me tell you. The

  Rakshasa are an idiot species of head-in-the-clouds optimists that are

  somehow really damn good at organized warfare. Sustained organized

  warfare, at that. Little bastards love the 'low and slow' approach to

  mass-extinction. They love the theater, and the theater loves them.

  There are hundreds of thousands of plays by them written over millions

  of years."

  She leans in on

  her desk as she tells me this history. "For all their writings, there is

  one stupid play that reigns supreme above all the others: The Songs of

  Joy. Said to have been written by the God of Chaos and Birth himself.

  The Songs are a comprehensive history of the Rakshasa, from the hideous

  pupatation to the millions of years of divinely-inspired conquest."

  Her

  coffee's done, and she takes a short sip of it. "I want to capture a

  copy of the Songs of Joy. And I want to perform it in the Panhuman

  sphere. It's stupid, I know, but I see it as a tragedy, and I want to

  show it to everyone. It's a historical retelling of what might be the

  Rakshasa's history. Liable to make you roll your eyes back into your

  skull. Everything is sunshine and rainbows. Nobody dies that didn't

  clearly deserve it. Happiness and goodness reign forever." She shakes

  her head. "But I want to tell the tragedy of a species seduced by the

  promise of beautiful fineries and eternal life and corrupted into cruel

  monsters obsessed with beauty and pageantry who simply smile and pretend

  all is right in the world as they butcher us and turn us into rotting

  cancerous things. This may be liable to treason against humanity and it

  would likely get me arrested and executed, but I just want it."

  Her

  voice is heavy and filled with tension, her face scrunched into a

  scowl, and she moves her hand to wipe something from her face.

  "Just

  change the topic," she says, taking a longer sip of coffee. "Don't

  bother responding or telling me I am stupid. I already know I am. Talk

  to me about literally anything else."

  I

  sit down on her bed and watch as she moves to put on her work clothes. I

  turn my gaze as she undresses; she still thinks of me as a man after

  all. She puts on her clothes, pantyhose, a long skirt that stretches

  down to her calves, a thick jacket—all purple, of course, to complement

  her purple hair.

  I should

  say something but I can't. I can't call someone foolish and stupid for

  wanting to know more. Knowledge of any kind is a gift, and even

  knowledge which is forbidden or dangerous can be repurposed for good,

  like forging a sword into a plowshare. Yet there is something else I can

  call her stupid for. Something which the voice in my dreams told me.

  Remember that beauty is not a measure of goodness. A predator will make itself seem beautiful to lure in prey.

  But I don't.

  "So I read those essays that you—"

  "Lord Argetlam," she interrupts me.

  "Er, Lord Argetlam sent to me and I would like to apologize for being rude to you yesterday."

  Adelle

  wraps a scarf around her neck before simply stating, "Yeah, it's fine.

  Happens to the best of us. Especially after you nearly died yesterday.

  So what do you think of it? Of the books I got?"

  They

  were mostly stuffed with obscure references to mythology, historical,

  popular culture and borderline incomprehensible Theurgical and

  scientific jargon that signalled the author's descent into madness. But I

  can't complain. Knowledge is power, as my father would say, and the

  thought of Lord Argetlam gifting these to me sends butterflies to my

  stomach.

  Yet there was one factoid in it—one clue—that bothered me, that ached at the back of my brain.

  "There was one thing," I say.

  "Tell me." Adelle shrugs as I collapse onto her bed and raise my hand up to the ceiling, palm open as if to take flight.

  I

  cough and sputter a bit, words escaping me, before I regain my

  grounding. "Why do you think orderly structured systems fall into chaos?

  To be more specific, why do separate physical systems—in the sense of

  an assembly of physical objects that relate to each other beyond

  contingency in space and time—have trouble melding harmoniously, in the

  sense of producing a final system that is in itself organized, and

  capable of being used to achieve some subsequent purpose?"

  Adelle quirks an eyebrow, and I mentally prepare myself to be berated for my question. "Why do you ask exactly?" she says.

  I

  cringe inwardly and part of me wants to bury myself into the bed. "I-I

  ask this question as, it seems to me that whenever two such systems

  interact with each other, the result tends to be either chaos or

  something that is not as capable of retaining its initial degrees of

  organization as its predecessors were."

  She

  takes a sip of her coffee and looks at me with a skeptical look. "I

  don't think you need a theory of everything behind integrating complex

  systems being relatively involved. That's just a feature of complex

  systems. Besides, can you give me an example?"

  I don't speak. I now realize that this question deals more with my general outlook on existence than on anything I read.

  "Thought

  so. The long and short of it is that the difficulties here, beyond the

  basic laws of thermodynamics, are particularized and practical."

  "And no general solution can be found to them?" I ask.

  "Not

  unless you have some truly insane Theurgy, are an enlightened being

  that has transcended the cycle of change and decay, or you are so

  powerful you may as well be a 'capital G' God. Humans are cognitively

  limited, technologically limited, temporally limited, etc. It's not

  that there's a magical operating principle that makes this hard, again,

  beyond the most basic thermodynamics. It's just that really complex

  systems are hard for us to understand and control."

  My

  lips curl down into a frown, and I give a dejected look. Reality really

  is a bad case. Meanwhile Adelle stares at me like she is staring at a

  wet puppy, a look of pity in her eyes.

  "Aw!

  Don't look so sad. Listen. You're only human. Humans are so weak and

  fragile. Humans aren't perfectly ordered and unified in pursuit of a

  common goal like the Tian'Chao or monsters who grow with battle like the

  Rakshasa but we're trying our best." Her voice cracks slightly. "And we

  are strongest when we are fighting with nothing to regret. Besides, by

  existing, and by thinking about these problems, you are a complex

  emergent system that demonstrably solves these integration issues."

  A

  tentative smile cracks across my face as my mouth dries. I toy and

  fidget with my fingers as I look down at my pale hands. Life really is

  amazing, now that I think about it. Sage Schrodinger argues somewhere

  that life is a process where entropy, the great slide from order to

  disorder that will one day take the universe's life, is temporarily and

  locally reversed. Humans are fragile, their lives are short, and they

  can only grasp for so much, but we have gotten so far.

  My

  tentative smile becomes a real one, and Adelle smiles back before

  taking a sip of her coffee. "You truly are a weirdo, you know that? What

  even made you ask that?"

  "Well,

  it's something about the way the standard model of physics is derived

  by taking a very basic mathematical framework, that of a metric space

  with additional algebraic structure, and simply adding every bit of

  structure one can to every metric space imaginable. Any structures which

  are self inconsistent, are discarded. Any structures which, in

  conjunction with other structures, produce inconsistencies, are

  discarded. Any structures which produce mathematical ambiguities are

  discarded and any such systems which do not produce well defined

  solutions are discarded."

  "Now

  the fascinating thing is that if you do this thoroughly, you find that

  the only metric spaces with well-defined outcomes are 3+1 and 7+1

  dimensions. And the field theories of the 3+1 spacetime happened to be

  nearly identical to our observations, and also produced tested and

  verified predictions about particle properties. Meanwhile the 7+1

  spacetime has its own field theories, but the solution to them is

  trivial everywhere, so they're uninteresting. Now there's some messiness

  involving the fact that field theorists have only managed to make this

  work for quaternion algebra, and no one's been able to extend it to

  octonion algebra with much success. Ther—"

  "You're rambling again." She snaps me out of my physics haze.

  "Oh.

  Sorry. But the part about inconsistent mathematical structures made me

  think of this. Because I can easily imagine creating two different

  mathematical structures of physics using slightly more flexible

  justifications, which are independently consistent but which have

  logical errors when merged together. Or I can imagine something a little

  bit less fundamental but still catastrophic, like a physics which has

  electromagnetism but not weak force, and vice versa, somehow merging.

  What had moments before been stable muons and taus in the EM only system

  would spontaneously decay. The new system would be stable ... but not

  exactly healthy for existing inhabitants."

  Adelle

  rolls her eyes and mutters, "Weirdo," in a sing-song tone while sipping

  coffee and strapping her gemstone-lensed camera around her neck. "All

  right. No more naval gazing. It's time to fight."

  Her

  words startle me. How long has it been since we started talking? Shit…

  Just 45 minutes, but it will take time setting up tactical Exorcism

  rites and apologizing to Oliphaele and her crew.

  KNOCK-KNOCK

  "Hold on," Adelle says. "Stay here. I'll handle this." She slinks over to the door.

  Two

  Goliath cybernetic figures greet her when she opens it. They are

  massive, inhuman. The taller one has a single cyclopean mechanized eye

  on a blank face and utterly dwarfs her. The second one has a cybernetic

  death's head skull for a face arranged in a grin. They are both dressed

  in thick forest green camouflage and wield firearms I am quite sure

  would kill me from the recoil should I attempt to fire them.

  "I

  am Mikhail of the Oghuz people," The Cyclops says. "This is Tugril.

  Our Lord, Chagri, arranged for us to guard you in the coming battle on

  the behest of his ally… for some reason. We advise that you follow us

  for your own safety."