I.

July 14th, 4018-B, Komekrat'r Plains

It had been a week since our encounter with Bolthro, and we had just about entered enemy territory. This was the final point of no return at the end of what seemed like a long string of such points. We were only a few more weeks of travel away from the Kingdom of Christ, located further east still, and all along that path we would be taking detours to take out various targets. These were five former associates of Cardo located at various points in a roughly straight line along the path - Delth, Ethae, Hetod, Oddity (also spelled Odhte), and Nightshade. Some of these were quite odd names, and we thought they could be pseudonyms, which would support our basic assumption - given Zsuius' background - that these were more hitmen who worked with Cardo in the past.

We had definitively gotten out of the woods, now. From here to the Kingdom was a rather barren set of plains, lined with caves and patches of forest, which seemed to be where our targets were hiding. Looking at our book, we knew that we'd be coming up on the first of those targets tomorrow. There wasn't much to note about the plains. The grass was a pale green, few trees or flowers grew, and very few people lived in the area. A week and a half ago we were in a lush, if creepy, forest - then the trees had begun to thin out, then broken entirely, and then the plains grew weaker and weaker over the week as we travelled. The sky's color itself seemed to pale the further we went. It was as if the Kingdom was draining the life from its surroundings. A dull, moonless night had begun to settle in, and so we stopped for the night and again set up camp. A thick, humid heat sat on top of us already, so we didn't set up a campfire, instead simply sitting around a lamp as we talked. I'll record part of this conversation here.

Maine: Yeah, I've been getting close to the end of that book recently. The one about FCA.

Matt: Took you a while!

Maine: Well, I had to take a few breaks. That kind of historical writing gets really dense... you know how it is.

F.P.: So what's happening in the book?

Maine: Well... I'm around the Second Collapse, which was in the 2700s, or like the middle of that century. At the time pretty much the whole world was controlled by this one guy, his real name got lost at some point along the way but he called himself Sol, like the sun...

Matt: The Second Collapse? There had to've been more than that!

Maine: Yeah, the naming convention is pretty stupid. People were calling it that at the time because it was reminiscent of what had happened around the turn of the millenium. Later when stuff got even worse, around the turn of the next millenium, they were calling it the Third Collapse, but it ended up not being quite so dramatic. Still gets called that, though. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

Sefgh: Yeah, like weren't there things before like the... what was it? Bronze Age Collapse?

Maine: Yeah, that. So they were calling it the First Collapse and Second Collapse even though there were at least a good few collapses before that. But anyways, Sol had pretty much the entire world united under one state, and he kept it like that for maybe two hundred years before everything started splintering and falling apart. Long story short, a bunch of factions started going to war with each other, bombing each other, and they had this ridiculous level of technology that led to some places getting basically wiped out. Some places still haven't really recovered even hundreds of years later.

F.P.: Jeez...

M-Bot: Yeah, China really got screwed there.

Maine: Yeah. Big parts of it where you still can't even grow anything. It was technology Sol didn't even let anyone know existed until he used it.

Sefgh: I bet Cardo'd do something like that, too.

F.P.: Isn't he trying to destroy the world, not control it? That's what you guys told me.

Sefgh: Well, don't you think he'd want to control it at least a little first? Have a reign of terror, and all that? I guess we don't know that much about him, but it seems like it'd make sense to me.

Matt: Nah, he'd definitely jus' destroy it. Just a guess, but from what Zsuius said, he seems like a pure nihilist type.

M-Bot: Not even a little reigning?

Matt: Nope! Not even a lil'.

Sefgh: What would you do if you could control the world? The whole thing, absolute power.

Maine: Well, I don't think it'd work out very well, because-

Sefgh: Hey! No overthinking! I'm just asking like, how would you help people, what would you outlaw, stuff like that.

M-Bot: Oh, just the usual. Outlaw murder, outlaw stealing, outlaw romance.

Sefgh: You're not taking this seriously either!

Matt: Hmmm... well, you'd probably want some kinda centralization, right? Easy transportation, surveillance, stuff like that. Maine, did Sol do stuff like that?

Maine: Yeah, pretty much all of that.

Matt: Then I'm on the right track!

Maine: Wrong track. Transportation let everyone organize more easily, and surveillance pissed them off. You'd have to be more covert about it.

Matt: Like a shadow gov'rnment?

Maine: Exactly. Let people think they're separate, but control all their leaders.

Sefgh: Sounds a bit underhanded.

F.P.: Yeah... I mean, maybe I'm naive, but if you just helped people, wouldn't they trust you? Like, just give people what they want, right? Give them transportation if they want it. Give them food, water, shelter, stuff that basically anyone wants, and why would they be using the transportation, another thing they like, to turn against you, right?

Maine: Well, that's basically what Sol thought too. He ended up doing stuff people didn't like, though.

Sefgh: Hard to please everyone, right?

Maine: Sure. It's also just hard to stay reasonable in a position like that. I mean, think about it... if nobody could ever stop you from carrying out every idea you had, and you had no real metric for if it worked or not, wouldn't you eventually start doing stupid crap everybody hated but was forced to put up with? It's one of the reasons people started getting sick of him. That and the environmental stuff, but most of that went over my head.

M-Bot: I don't get why you humans want to live around trees and water and crap so badly. We had that city right across the sea from us, and I watched videos of it. It looked great.

Sefgh: Before and after people stopped living there?

M-Bot: Both. Preferably after.

F.P.: Hold on, hold on... but couldn't you get, like, advisors? To tell you if things were working, or if something was a bad idea?

Maine: Sure, but who wants to be the one to tell an all-powerful god-king that they have a bad idea?

F.P.: Well I wouldn't be like that! You know, a god-king!

Maine: You wouldn't be in this situation, then. Only people who call themselves god-kings try and become god-kings.

Sefgh: Maine, you're taking this too seriously again! It's just a hypothetical!

Maine: Sorry, I know. I guess if I had that sort of power, I would... well, aside from the obvious stuff, I would try and help the animals. People treat them badly.

Matt: Now that's somethin' worth becomin' god-king for!

Maine: Again, though, I wouldn't really want to be a god-king. I mean...

Sefgh: What?

Maine: I think about what we're doing now...

Matt: Here we go.

Maine: I already feel weird about what a big impact we're going to have.

Sefgh: It's for a good reason!

F.P.: I wouldn't like being destroyed or ruled by that Cardo guy!

Maine: Yeah, I know, I know, we've been over it. It's just... I don't know. What if we get in a position to do the same thing? Not destroy, but rule? I don't even know what I'd do. Because I probably wouldn't be good at it!

Matt: Do you really think killing this guy'd let us do that? Most people don't even know who he is!

Maine: I guess. Just anxious, is all.

[After that, the conversation got less interesting. F.P. was just asking Sefgh and Matt some stuff about their lives before all this started, which I've written about before. I'll just skip all this since it lasted a while. At some point, Sefgh got up to take a leak. I excused myself and followed.]

Maine: Hey. Sefgh. There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about.

Sefgh: Yeah?

Maine: M-Bot thinks you might've installed some chip in it, like a, I think it was a control chip or something, like an override. Did you do that?

[Sefgh stood still and didn't say anything for a while.]

Sefgh: ...Yeah. I did. I don't mean to use it, but... I mean, like...

Maine: What?

Sefgh: Well, what if it's going to do something that'll hurt it, like jump off a cliff or something, or like it's trying to hurt someone, or something like that? I mean, wouldn't you want to stop it, too?

Maine: No, not really. It should be free to make its own decisions.

Sefgh: Well... Look, it's just a precaution! It's what you're supposed to do when making robots. I mean, the technology's not perfect... I mean, it can make them do stuff they wouldn't otherwise if there's warps in the... oh, you wouldn't know what I'm talking about.

Maine: Sorry.

Sefgh: I'm not going to do it unless I really have to, OK? And, probably not even then, at this point. At this point, I honestly agree a little, but there's not much of an easy way to take it out. It's not like it'd agree to surgery "just because"...

Maine: Right, I guess not.

Sefgh: Just don't tell it, alright?

Maine: Alright. Just because it's you, though. Anyone else...

Sefgh: Yeah... yeah, I know. Shit, I don't know what to do now.

Maine: ...So how's your arm doing?

Sefgh: Good! It's, yeah, it's doing as good as you'd expect. I don't have much pain there anymore, and the prosthetic is working nicely. I wish I could feel stuff on it, but the technology's not quite there yet, I don't think. Makes it hard to operate, sometimes, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Maine: Good, good. I'm, uh... sorry I wasn't there.

Sefgh: Yeah, I know, but you were doing your own job, and it turned out... mostly fine. Don't beat yourself up about it, Maine.

Maine: Sorry, you're right. I'll, uh, go back now.

[I went back to the lamp and sat with the others until Sefgh returned.]

Matt: I'm 'bout ready to hit the sack. Big day tomorrow.

Maine: Do you think we're ready?

Matt: Hell, who cares at this point. Even if we ain't ready, we're gonna do it anyways, and we're gonna do it good.

Sefgh: We're not gonna let them run this time...

M-Bot: No dumb stuff where they knew we were there the whole time...

Matt: No more farces!

Maine: Looking pretty inspired.

Matt: You bet I am! We're gettin' this done. Someone dies tomorrow!

Maine: Someone dies tomorrow.

And with that, we went to bed.

That night, I had a strange dream. I was trapped in a maze which stretched horizontally and vertically. It looked like a circuit board, and I was trying to find a way out through its wires. I had no body - from what I could tell, I was a disembodied consciousness. The second I had this realization, the world around me began to change. I could feel a hundred other ghostly consciousnesses jostling around me, taking up my space, breathing in my air. One by one, they began to force their ways into my mouth. As this happened, the circuit board was changing. The wires wrapped and unwrapped around me in spiralling patterns, and began to break apart. I was freed from it, but not in the way that I hoped, because now I was in the middle of the ocean, or at least that's what I thought at first until the knowledge came into my brain that it was not the ocean but the Dead Sea. That knowledge came in before I had tasted the water, which was incredibly salty. Once the ghosts had finished entering my body, I floated away into the sky, and eventually burnt up in the sun. After that happened, I was back in the circuit board. This happened one or two more times before everything went hazy, the dream ended, and I woke up. The others were already packing camp up. Time to get a move on.