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Con misura, solo, su centotrentadue corde, diminuendo
December 6th, 12:31 PM.
Her head was blown open, her skin was flayed, her soul was torn asunder. Her remains, half vitrified, were suspended in a liquid helium capsule, inside a giant coldiron dome, housed underground. The dome is pierced with 46 piezothaumic crystals, slowly crushed. Initially, the crystals were casting a simple primitive composition — Heat(Conflux) — to rapidly extract heat from the container, but with the help of Centigrade, Agarma and Gordian, it was now a far more efficient, and far more complicated, program, guaranteed to keep the center of the dome at a comfortable 4.2 Kevin. But, she was alive.
All nuclear-powered. Salatria had had nuclear power, but it was awful. They knew they were hubristic, they knew it would kill them, and it did, repeatedly. Fortunately, blessed with my intelligence, I’ve developed past that. Literally, developed. There is more to life than bronze. Zirconium, for instance. A lot of nickel. It’s patchwork, it leaks, it would kill anyone who isn’t a god, and it took me 50 years to develop, but it fucking works. Far fucking easier than hunting down and siphoning from other Interlopers. I would’ve killed for a Scratch, but a Scratch got us into this mess.
The tapes in her head were still moving, albeit very slowly. Tiny claylike flesh globules pushed them back and forth. Hardy bastards. I’ve mixed in other prophecy machines as distraction. Mostly Hailstones. The failsafe is the Reinhardt conjecture. Anything more complex, and they may use it as an input to develop inscrutable, irreversible functions.
It was all reversible, at the moment. Despite all the glassy brain matter, the vibrating tape parasites, the body ripping itself apart, and the lost soul, it was all reversible. She could be fixed. She was being fixed. Ellen.
Johnathan had to fucking kill himself before this happened, had to get his head chopped off, and then he had to fuck around in the afterlife for a hundred years, and then he had to taunt me with all his letters lauding complexity and denigrating any connection to reality.
Starduke recently learned of a man to the east of Bythrusia, claiming to be the son of the god Grandfather, which would match Johnathan Penrose’s profile. When I find him again, I will grab him by the neck, and tell him, calmly: the difference between gods and numbers, is that gods will skullfuck your wife and leave her a broken machine, while numbers simply exist. Detached sociopath that you are, everything is equal in your eyes. I wish I had seen it when you were alive the first time.
Agarma can manage without me. He has the tape, he knows the steps, and he knows their cost. He knows the steps and cost of his current life, too…