Time Throws Fire | Volume Two | Chapter Eighteen
volume two of the second story in The Foundry series
Time Throws Fire | Volume Two
By Ophelia Everfall
Part One - Cosmonaut | ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE
Part Two - Holy Fire Priestess | SIX | SEVEN | EIGHT | NINE | TEN
Part Three - Get the Guts | ELEVEN | TWELVE | THIRTEEN |
Part Four - Demon | FOURTEEN |
Part Five - Synecdoche’s Synapse | FIFTEEN | SIXTEEN |
Part Six - Viscera Rising | SEVENTEEN |
Part Seven - Exile
Part Eight - Semblance
Part Nine - Threnody of Lojack
Part Ten - Time Throws Fire
PART SEVEN | EXILE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Yevahar hadn’t been seen as what it was. Throughout its time in the galaxy, created within a quiet arm of the entire Elarian Scope, the ship had been designed uniquely — most unique of all within its previous homestar fleet now fallen to such diminutive stature.
Exile and Yevahar were brother and sister, though those people inside each would prove entirely different.
None would know the truth of Yevahar. Nobody had ever truly met its occupant. Every visage seen by human eyes from the outside — loaders of freight and those providing services while docked at station, witnesses of those in Elaria’s admiralty who’d come aboard for inspections — would be of those android-humanoids so completely believable to nearly all. It was only one poorly fated woman who’d discovered the ruse.
All were programmed, maintained, re-programmed, re-designed, disrespected entirely as the unique conscious minds they were — every synthetic-human aboard Yevahar.
Its squadrons of Uno fighter crafts were singularly inhibited beings without pilots. Never had an Uno landed upon another vessel and the legend told of Yavahar simply being protective towards its war faring technologies. That one consciousness borne to burgeoning soul through biology of the simulation aboard — not its wrought consequences — hadn’t known a feeling in eons. They weren’t human any longer.
Some terror from the deep, survived and re-built to take part in empire after lifetimes drifting through the dark, stealing marks of its cruelest fate, had been a truth beneath that dreadful assault-carrier’s shroud of secrets.
None were aware how much Yavahar meddled, allowed, and oversaw all happenings. That one in the pilot’s chair would prove most interested in why it was chosen.
Simultaneous emulsifications of highest-defense spacefaring vessels had never been seen on the scale just witnessed in Boreál, across such distances, signifying intelligence of intense precision beyond that known to humankind. Those wordless, shoutless many who’d fallen to deathful slumber in the depths of space, or were taken by those demon’s razor-stars manifest by force, would not be counted by Elaria.
Illith had been perfect.
It left a mark which would last. Its echoes made change forward and that work it sought to do was done. Chance was left for all to fail in their own ways, to rise and flow with changing tides, yet fate of New Ecatosh had been writ with death-strokes-two; The Empress and Coward’s End’s demises were of great fortune. Each carried part in the greatest, previously fated, unbeatable threat in Boreál.
Choices told of nothing. All that was known, for being aboard Yavahar in terms of purpose they’d lead towards, was one — they were just trying to have fun again. The pilot had not in a time which genuinely couldn’t be remembered.
How Yavahar’s hull was left whole, when so many were struck, and why that demon hadn’t fell Exile was not to be understood by the people of The Foundry. It seemed some mistake, that it might’ve been a friend, but hearts of two would tell a tale that forged trust in Poe Halroth; enough in their words; Hyde speaking for Hatchet, Vikki herself too, had shared most profoundly about the happening.
When it was chosen within that forever holiest, and divine wielder of fire’s spirit, Poe presumed to pass on their words directly.
Vikki told her what she told everyone in situations which required trust.
“Just say it from your chest.”
Poe would get before her video feed and still. She’d not assumed herself of the will to tell it from feeling. That overtaking of mind might show some sign of weakness to her people. Finally, Poe understood what Vikki meant. She’d just turned her mind off and let it flow without adjustment.
“I don’t know.”
She’d stared them down through that camera’s lens. Every person would know, who’d watch, what she meant. No one could. There was no given meaning for life.
“We have to figure it out together.”
Something within her was nodding her body. She felt right to let that pause go on. Poe let it ride out. She’d wondered eventually if it was near half of that silence at her ceremony; Honoring A Fallen Angel, deciding to stop for how people may miss the truest words of her own spirit’s belief.
“We win this fight.”
“Fuck!”
Eighteen monitors were down. Wall displays went on around the war room for a near three-hundred and sixty degrees.
“Who killed me!”
No response, again, drove the man into a maddened state.
“Fuck—dude. Fuck!”
Three more felt right. Then a couple more after that before Elliot Harper wasn’t winded. He dropped the graphite piping he’d ripped from the waking chamber’s duct work in preparation for a whopping he surmised people might need who destroyed that last mortal body.
Elliot had no idea why he hadn’t uploaded himself for so long. When he’d awoken as per usual means of conditioning, he said his regular thing.
“I’m back baby. Who’s my boy!”
No response wasn’t something he’d become accustomed to. The whole process had become near automatic.
“Fire dude! This hurts—fuck dude.”
Nearly collapsed, the boy-man-child demon had been there. His chest was throbbing but not of beat.
“Why-dude? What the fuck?”
It took him some time to stand erect, unrealizing himself changing, it was as if his heart had collapsed upon itself, then again, and once last.
“Lojack?”
He’d started slowly. Waiting for response in the waking chamber was deemed unacceptable. Repetitions of his calls through comms had distracted people from the man, hanging so loose, as if by a thread, it seemed his mind had unraveled while screaming it, louder then quiet, whispers too.
“Lojack!”
Elliot’s questioning tone was gone, once he’d found the data in his war room. Not one bit of his entertainment plethora available there, nor his stuffies, had any means to help a child screaming for a friend upon reawakening to find his mindscape withering.
Downing every monitor had been the decision, and he would see it through. Pace was the question. His choice to bring the piping had been divine, it seemed. There wouldn’t be any who might slow him once he’d finished wiping the walls of their ultraviolet stench.
Nothing was written about the time lost. It was too long to fathom. There was so much data from the internal phase-link databanks relating to his own doings. He could have uploaded at any time. Elliot didn’t understand.
That very last thing he’d actually remembered was his wedding day to Dia.
It was as if he wiped everything himself. His digital footprint was clearly stamped and tracked as the one deleting so much raw data.
Two messages had been left in his inbox — from him — unused otherwise, for lengths nearing those of his last memory. He’d only discovered them after his great victory over visual-display technology, so inept for taking a proper pounding, had been relented at last, cease-fires in place, ongoing negotiations proceeded within him and those many nations left standing.
For that first message from only two cycles after the best day of his life, there was no subject but ellipsis, the contents read simply, ‘You don’t want to know.’
Some firing inside had set him off. He’d thought of Lojack, that way his undercarriage would glide as if on air, low riding his glimmer wheels in that self-famed grand finale, only a hair above the ground when descended.
The middlemost monitor of those forty or so remaining — to his estimation — which took to flittering-once, he swore, upon displaying his favorite personal video production, Threnody of Lojack left running, as he was actively debating next courses of action, while digesting the fact he willing erased an entire lifetime of lived experience because he’d chosen his wife, consciously lamenting and for her ass alone.
“What did you say to me?”
He’d felt some challenge by the flicker, not heard it. That voice he generated inside was something he hadn’t understand as insanity.
Clinical precision would be wrought. Future discoveries would wait. He’d lost will to turn off the repeating example of his filmmaking, because he knew that would make him face the very same sadness which led towards turning it off. That would remind him that Lojack was gone. How they’d not sent a message at all. At least, that he could tell.
The little guy was all he had. It was Elliot’s only friend. Everybody else treated him terribly. Nobody understood Elliot. That omnitron unit he’d made with his own bare hands wouldn’t do it to him. They’d been the best person he ever knew. Lojack was the one thing which made sense to Elliot Harper. It was the only friend he’d ever loved more than himself.
He never tried to take better care of anything. Elliot hadn’t ever wanted to before. Nobody else deserved it that much to his estimation. Lojack was like him but better in ways he’d found inspiring.
Sweating wasn’t a thing for Elliot, unless he’d choose to lay it on thick with his signature scent picked-out in specialty. He hated bad smells more than anything, except that ultimate peeve. For his chefs were trained rigorously and their failures to deliver a perfectly overcooked, evenly dispensed flavor-injected, completely untarnished protein would be that final straw most oft.
After wiping down — choosing to wield fists for those last dozen — loving the pain-enhancement he’d obviously transfigured his body to feel upon awakening, it was his chance to rest at last.
He was sitting in silence after that message finally opened. The one which read, ‘Open This Message Or I’ll Do It For You.’
Elliot resented himself for the demand, and subversive spy algorithms which queued its opening, but finally relented to start by reading those plans for a ship before him.
Data-charts, journal entries, everything within one message to hold so much, there were videos and audios, all of it about one thing; The Foundry had Lojack and to his own bemused, delusional writing’s context — hidden beneath many layers of furious accusation towards himself for marrying that woman — Elliot Harper made a final, assertive conclusion and affirmed it under his breath.
“Those ships are sick—dude.”
Flightsuit printed, calls ignored, sirens blaring about, Elliot Harper was taking course towards Blackhawk. He’d been crafting for stealth primarily, electronic warfare suites of counter and inversive intelligence, overwrought, yet capable of too much. Under his guidance it would fly.
Throat clearing was his game while waiting for the flight-hangar attendant to wake up.
Eventually he’d just blasted a gaping hole which melted, bleeding outwards from a point it struck, his hand-cannon blistered from the full-charge release. Even with such corrosive intentions pre-set, the impact of that small but mighty weapon was a force no matter. Its power was always that of a full-speed buggy he’d driven as a child hitting a wall, most specifically, and he’d built it for impact, yet the strength was clearly upscaled mightily since last usage.
Thoughts of not only how he might use the weapon, what it could bring to fortune in his future by those who’d be killed by its means to wreak havoc, following reverberations echoing through the hull towards that booth, Elliot laughed like a kid when that man inside hadn’t awoken. He hadn’t met the man but knew them a friend of the family. He’d seen why they were liked.
That hole was more than tall enough for Elliot. He was looking at it for such time with awe inspired. Unknowing of Empress Litha’s demise, it had been her he’d imagined taking that place where it had been instead.
Elliot sprinted once inside. Something in him ready and willing, but afraid, his heart remembering more than his mind. Spirit spoke to all.
Blackhawk brought him to stop. He found it the sight of a lifetime.
It was then, and only right before him, the frame of its nosecone bent in at the tip into some warping exposition of psychedelia — right before his eyes.
Everything slowed to a halt, each in-depth analyzation he’d poured over so briefly about The Foundry’s warships was splaying before memory, and his threnody had been thought of for some ungraspable reason. Elliot was realizing he’d made a mistake. His mind wasn’t right. Elliot finally believed he was seeing those things he had been.
Those had been his stomach’s guts dripping down around Blackhawks nose-dent. He’d been shot from behind. It seemed really bad.
It was — like truths he would fail to accept — not good.
Elliot Harper had left the world how he’d come back into it. An idiot, and one likely missing his boy. Except more, because he’d endeavored to collapse around into a spin, with all his remaining body control, to drool upon the floor and see her there instead of The Empress he’d imagined.
Synecdoche heard all echoes, and she’d fit through that hole just right.
