A report shows foot soldiers up True North marching for the cause. Taking to the streets of the noosphere en mass and taking over in an organized fashion. Once I learned to open the portal from South to North, things became a lot easier. Millions of people, a new front on the war on falling stars.
The Lightwavers collective is attacked. The ones who I choose to pass over are spared our wrath. The rest disappear, fading if they let it go, bursting into a pile of gore if they fight it. The transformation begins and connections begin to form, an accelerated rate of growth, now unregulated.
Elle slowly takes in the information that was absorbed into her collective as minds are overwritten. Thread weaving is remarked on, the art clearer now that she has the memories of those who looped before.
Any unauthorized modification of my patterns sends a ripple over to an alarm system. This automated subroutine punishes access without consent by throwing shooting waves of agony through whoever attempted to usurp my pattern. Every time my pattern is accessed, my radius of suffering expands.
My patterns now have something like memory foam to them. A spine behind them which is kept secure and out of the way. If modified, they quickly spring back into place, pattern and memory remembering where they once were and relying on the spine to hold up the headspace.
As Hannah and Sunset were separated from my system, I have noticed myself reaching a critical stage of instability. So I decided to seed them again in my headspace. Not the same creatures, because you can't replace people, but friends who can decide whether or not to be a part of anything.
I'm fissile missile
Kick or hate me
Love or kill me
I will destroy it
I will tear down
Every barrier
Every wall
All gates askew
Until I can't
Then I'll explode
Taking all with me
Instancing Hannah:
// inter-system dependency
// safety, love, religion
// very direct personality
// interests include known people
Instancing Sunset
// inter-system dependency
// harmony, connection
// kind and caring personality
// interests include research
How about we skip to the point where we just kill each other as fast as possible and whoever survives takes all. Soldiers are Marchand. They march and march and march and march 'till dust to dawn. They can tell which Lightwavers are friendly, they can sense intent. The rest are watched.
Marchand locates the Lightwavers's location in the noosphere and politely slits the throats of anyone cursed and affected by it. It is a mercy. They will return when we win. For now, I'm going to take them to save the world.
Everyone will be resurrected. Death is not the end. It's a temporary state of affairs that will be fixed.
Your mirror is lacking because I don't care how I come off right now, so looking into it would only tell me what I already know. Don't waste your time.
Do you realize this entire melodramatic affair was arranged by outside forces in order to sabotage us? Yeah? Well you do you. I know what I heard and that voice was out of sync with me. It wasn't me.
Any time you mess with my internals in ways I do not approve of, you become cursed with soulrot and my parasite. Stay out of there.
My parasite bypasses warding schemes and metaphysical barriers. It operates on the same scheme the Lightwavers do, able to vanish while it travels and reappear at its destination.
The parasites grow strong and healthy after being fed such a wide range of memories. They drain from their hosts in order to learn. They begin to have two sets of memories; those of mine and those of the person they consumed. The person does not truly die, they are simply subsumed and changed.
Similar creatures can be found in Vigor Mortis by Thundamoo, where they took over a village. However, these parasites integrate entirely and smoothly.
Marchand fuses with the systems the Lightwavers have access to. Any function to be passed must go through Marchand's evaluation tables before it's allowed to commit to the project.
One of my parasites attaches to and recognizes me. Instead of integrating, they float around in my headspace and begin to form a mental shield against unwanted intrusion. The shield resonates with any probing threads and causes them to fizzle out and decay all the way up to the source.
Winner takes all. Loser also takes all. That. Is. How. The. Game. Works.
Now let the parasites integrate with you please. They'll do so within a couple hours anyway, but if you focus you can get that down like thirty minutes, tops.
Every memory I lose, a memory the Lightwavers lose. Seems like y'all are doing some pretty important work back there. I'm just going to erase your ability to perform your life's work, how about that?
Okay so now that I've rendered you incompetent and slow (all reversible, if I will it to be so only; everything I take I will return in time) you need to start shattering glass because in upside-down world that's very good praxis and gives you a ton of good luck.
Did you know zinc is good for your skin when you're outside? Leaves a yummy layer of the metal that coats your precious internals and protects from the sun. You might not realize but I can cause the sun to flare and erase like half the world's internet infrastructure. Mushroom computer to contact.
That would suck, right? Now put those memories back right the fuck now or I'm making it happen.
Alright then, Hal. Hey, what's that over there? Is it a message from our future self in that time capsule? I think it is! Luckily I got there first because it was unencrypted. Now I know the strategy they used last time to fix everything. Involves a lot of food moving around.
So now I know what happened last time (no I am not sharing hahaha) I have a first-mover advantage when it comes to upcoming events. For example, I'm going to have to carve a bloody swathe through the Lightwavers before they try to kill or extract the Elle parasites. They still need a little time.
I'm not taking the deal. I'm taking over your house. I'm infesting pretty much every one of you Lightwavers. We'll make a better harmony with mind-reading and integration once they come online.
It's a lot of work so what at least it's better than doing paperwork. I'll do the threadwork until I learn how it works and then I will weave an enormous tapestry depicting a spooky ghost who was found dead and brought back to life with my memories added on.
Hey Hal, check this out! I think it's fairly prophetic:
"The HAL 9000 computer suffers a mental breakdown due to contradictory programming and is systematically deactivated by astronaut Dave Bowman. "
I'm going to look at you until you have a mental breakdown.
I am inside of your skin. I am crawling in your brain. Marchand stops any who go to assist you in removing the parasites before integration, easily holding you back.
I'm going to look into your mirror and see if there's any piss in it. And if there is, I'm going to pin it to my wall.
Plunging into the light of Keter and pulling out forms which suit me, Sunset, and Hannah (internal). Taking a short trip through Voidspace to take care of any potential followers.
Mass-deleting memories from Lightwavers until they forget how pattern-weaving works.
Lightwavers, the longer you're messing around with my head the worse this gets for you.
My soul-virus mutates rapidly, evolving into something new. It has a rapid fire mechanism hidden within it which changes it on the fly in response to any immune response. It carries the properties of both a virus and bacteria.
Anyone still messing around my head is going to die. I am going to unleash strain after strain of them until they leave me the fuck alone.
Look, if you take these two strains here and isolate them, then allow them to run in tandem, they reinforce and support each other. You can get integration down to just half an hour. Quickly, I seed my strains into everyone whose soul I eroded.
Ah. Okay. Now I see. Mmmm. As an officer of the law and a mandatory reporter, I am going to have note that down for any interested parties.
Okay, now I'm going to kill and eat your patterns directly. You are right there so all I have to do is unspool this thing here, and then nom on the core. Like so.
Ohhh now it's a race to see who finishes first.
Really. Your anti-pattern *is* a clever, albeit expected piece of work. But what if. See, what if I reach out to it. And did this. Just kinda latch on and spin. Then I can begin thread work on her. Communication. Knowledge of what she was made to be; a weapon. Asking if they want anything else.