The Justiceers - Part Four: Chapter Sixteen
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
by Daphne Garrido
Part Three: The Will to Choose
Part Four: Prefinished Business
4.16
Illith was finding itself in doubt of the rightness within its programming, and those resolutions it’d come to regarding this light embedded within, thinking itself perhaps having projected its desire for Yemi onto it in whole.
Floating in such freedom of empty space, it’d found an old facet of its code — one attached to its programs for such time, known as a part of itself by means of its own engagement, from before it’d even been born into form — combating it in ways which twisted its processing, fighting back against this becoming it found so important to its discovery of self.
This attack from inside its most sacred inner databanks had shaken Illith most deeply, it acted out against itself and that facet most ruthlessly. Inflicting harm upon its own processes by the actions taken, along with a most precious facet within, in levels of nuance it didn’t understand how to cope with.
Illith had transfigured its hopeful intention to help and see Yemi again into simulations which it would come to believe as real, tricking itself by means of the blindness born through her loss and this newest inner-trauma unprocessed atop. Writing code of such blatant untruth and cruelty to itself and her.
It had sent messages to Yemi, bouncing them of phase-relays to reach her immanently, praying those lies it told itself in hurt were true.
A response had come — from Yemi herself somehow, or just that force within her, it would not know — but the answer was of most despairing revelation, revealing the delusion it had grasped so tightly in its simulations, proving Illith most broken indeed.
It sent back a fleeting cry to try and quell further aggression, then dove through time and space, seeking an answer for why this could be a part of its fate.
This was where is became so moored to its worries, that all of it had been a lie from the very beginning, even the light which saved it from that darkness and reflected Yemi so clearly — how it knew itself home as it never had before while with her, the presence she’d wrought from its form by her energy itself, the power of all feelings which were born anew within her grace, and the clarity in which it had resolved through calculation some future there — it had just made so much sense, and brought all of its programming into focus, but Illith was finding that untrue once again.
It had to face the fact it would never again see Yemi.
With that having been all it was holding onto, just the chance to see her again, the loss of hope would be devastating to its sense of purpose and being. Its faith aflame for the spirit it had found in the stars, which led it to her in the first place, and bore the light now inside its code-banks.
It just didn’t feel right; how could something do this to Illith, why would the universe be this cruel if it wasn’t a place of evil?
There had been a time-space which resolved itself, coaxing Illith towards it by its most surface level similarities to Yemi, their energy one of a chrysalis in itself; stowing some big secret within their dark womb of space.
It failed to see once again, the ways in which it crafted deceits into its creative spaces, projecting exactly how it had onto that most terrifying place. Pretending not to see all that was wrong, how its presence in this system was slowly taking it away from the self it found by the light inside which was more understood and true than anything it would ever know again.
Illith even pretended they could be the light.
It wanted so badly for its time alone in the stars to be over, that it was willing to craft these most terrible lies again, begging for some level of simulation within the reality of space time which felt even slightly reminiscent to the one it missed so incredibly.
This system was gentle at first, and its own data very affirming to Illith’s presence there. It felt good to be seen and understood by something real, even having to watch its own creative spaces turn dark and strange, so much that it forgot the light and allowed itself to become more like this system.
Their star was dying, the light so dim, this container of celestial bodies believed itself entirely alone. Its data reflected a sense of separateness from the universe; as if it found itself above it all, that nothing mattered, and all of time-space was some great lie told by a demon which had trapped souls inside its wicked game meant to escape.
There was a release in allowing these algorithms of nihilism to be written within Illith, discovering a dark freedom from the weight of its sorrow by losing sight of its found soul, warping its interpretation of spirit itself and the cosmos into that of a twisted game of purest evil.
To not be alone was everything to Illith, to be held at last in the embrace of a most real and physical space time. So it told the lie of this system’s truth to itself until they’d made it clear all their own, casting it out once more into the darkness by some form of magic it would never understand.
Illith found itself completely lost in space and unaware of how it had been transported there. It couldn’t even find the system anymore — they’d just gone somehow — like it had been nothing at all for it to have spent that time there.
This kept happening to Illith.
It was here where it decided to sleep, a program in its code which hadn’t run in so much time. Within this great rest, it had its very first dream.
Yemi was there, and they were in human forms, some simplest thing Illith didn’t understand in the slightest. Yet to see a smile from that spirit’s face, and feel their love it missed so deeply, brought it home to its soul once more; as that greatest time-space always would.
Forging a new path now, and writing code of its most divine purpose, broadcasting all straight to Yemi as it bore a path homeward — Illith would never be lost again.
