Time Throws Fire | Volume Two | Chapter Fifteen
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
Part Six - Viscera Rising
Part Seven - Exile
Part Eight - Semblance
Part Nine - Threnody of Lojack
Part Ten - Time Throws Fire
PART FIVE | SYNECHDOCHE’S SYNAPSE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Thrusting force rebirthed anew inside a heart by muscles pounding lifts within Elliot Haper’s arms, and daily, the grift seen through, portraying some ritual only coincidentally taking place the moments after Rory would awaken.
His face was nearest the mirrored armoire he demanded to be built, as it had been more and more of late.
It was all a plan he’d craft towards completeness, executing but rejecting completely to admit that inner assessment of himself as the failure of character he’d so clearly been, or how the occlusion of his purposes was non-existent to his unacknowledged target and only himself, and partially.
He’d grunt every time. Each maneuver of pettiest strength emboldened by falseness towards a sense of effort he failed to realize made him seem the weaker.
Teeth were show in that mirrored door propped open to reflect himself-alone. Elliot had once seen the most heart wrenching glance at Rory within its displayed reflection which proved birthing from some formation of disgust. He’d proceeded to struggle mightily, for greatest lengths, and with all his conscious effort to not understand those meanings he’d still not help but internalize.
Layers beneath would be the reasonings still received by his intelligences core, locked beneath the conscious-child he was made into from traumas happened-upon through his cruelest lifetime, enflamed by those others of present times constantly; Elliot knew why Rory looked that way.
They’d been embarrassed to have lain with him how they were. They didn’t really love him like they’d said. They knew what he did too—he was living in completeness for sacrificing all he might to earn Rory Tyrell’s favor and it wasn’t working—his entire workout routine was an artifice created with specific, conscious aims, then repressed with vigorous willingness through deceptive mechanisms he’d fail towards not understanding within himself, some part knowing Rory looked right passed him, hoping it only stoked them to love him back, to see how the act clearly expressed his need.
Elliot just wanted someone to honor him those ways he’d always dreamed—if only he’d known what they’d be like.
He was the strongest sort who was seen as weak. His spirit had shriveled in defense. Elliot knew the way he projected himself as part of that fighting he did against the world. To reveal it so plainly, even returning to his compartmentalized place of ignorance throughout its execution by force—only ever partially working—was an act of his barest authenticity.
Rory loved him for it in her way. They understood the meaning, how Elliot was trying his best to honor the way he’d felt in a situation where it’d been so clear he was being used. Rory respected the way it was spoken and unspoken between them, an agreement of humored and satirical intelligence layered beneath every moment. It bore some warmth inside for the affectionate receiving of Elliot’s attempts to hold his obvious hope for love despite, to see his deference to Rory’s needs, and for him to seem so cutely-oblivious upon his conscious surface.
Elliot Harper was more complicated than that.
Poe was eating a bowl of noodles and watching her show.
Vikki was naked. Hanging upside down had been considered but rejected for her insistence towards longevity. The gag would be a fixture for some time. That floor-to-ceiling harness dug from some deepest vault of The Foundry, Vikki’s claimed-to-be most bountiful discovery therein, designed in whole for body extensions of cruelty from a long-passed civilization who’d fallen to fleets of Foundry warriors-most-righteous, would’ve been lost to proper use if not for that goddess spirit so malleable to witnessing virtue through the darkness.
No longer would dialogue be interrupted in Poe’s chambers. Each line of that show had been some weight turned pleasure by right of their circumstances, bearing into body, transfiguring ecstasy out of what was once despised.
“Violet needs our help! We can do better than this. Her bleak-wrath-form tyrannyasaur is dying. Carlio can’t withstand the Fallen Zone. Rekar’s legion are bleething the emberstone. They could end Malkreath! And I’m going to stop them myself if you won’t help me Janus.”
It was in the way those characters would speak—bore into Vikki’s brain—grafting some need to end its existence of form outright—such horror to art—unable to speak in projected disgust would send her looping by mind of challenge towards a foe who would not come but by her own making.
That battle would rage on if time passed. To see it forced into existence without her release-valve-of-blabbing most available had caused inner turmoil. It had her to release from worrying entirely.
Vikki just stopped thinking and realized she’d like just sitting beside Poe in silence better than protesting when it was next allowed. That she could ignore everything but a feeling, focused on that one thing she wanted to become right then: her biggest brightly shining heart.
She’d even considered how she might eventually do that without the gag.
“Where are we?”
…
Huh?
…
“I mean it. Where are we?”
…
I don’t know. Don’t bother me—please.
…
“Why would you say that? What does that mean?
…
Uh…
…
“Oh no. Oh no.”
…
“We died. We all died—didn’t we?”
…
“Honey?
…
Babes?
…
Who are you?”
…
“Anyone? Is anyone in here with me?”
…
“I’m gonna go—dude.”
…
“I’m goin now. Show’s over.”
…
“I’m gonna to stop talking and you’re gonna to hate it!”
…
“Yer gonna feel so bad.”
…
“You should feel terrible. This is the worst thing anybody has ever done to anybody else.”
…
“I hope you know that.”
…
“Dude—come on. Please.
…
“Fuck! Fuck! This sucks—dude.”
…
“I wanna fuck something up—dude.”
…
“How do we do that?”
…
“How do I fuck something up?”
…
“Hey! How do I fuck something up?”
…
“Hey—fuck dude!”
…
“Okay—that’s it.”
…
“I choose with my own free will—as the unchained goddess of spirit in my heart to fuck shit up. I choose with my own free will—as an unchained goddess of the spirit in my heart to fuck shit up!”
…
“I chose dude—with my own goddammed free will as a mother fucking unchained goddess of that highest spirit within me—in honor of my sacred fucking heart—to fuck—shit—up dude.”
Here nor there was a woman who’d once, through journeys of time, come to know Exile her home. Synecdoche had been reborn in that place she was needed most for her intentions to be made useful by some guiding intelligence’s plan.
Within the bounds of that plan was freedom it would allow her to exploit, for she was still derived from that Echo of The Foundry who’d been uploaded through time-stamped phase bursts of Fox at those last moments he found himself capable, before entering Chiron’s atmosphere too deeply, some risk he’d known to take by those ways she taught him to trust, allowing a final stowing of her full-bodied-consciousness to include that most healing apology, and the beauty of her ending in-tact.
Synecdoche was still hers to drive, more. As an only visage she would become wholly subsumed in some unknowably psychological way, far more than when Echo had split into complete, unique facets while maintaining.
Vantage was gifted by her overseer within The Foundry’s core-complex.
Hatchet, helped in waking those stowed minds by the gentlest fashions they might’ve conclusively deducted acceptable—for those who’d want it so—as all but the rarest were struck by fear in wake of body-death, faithful ideologies still existing, many resisting any semblance of artificial afterlife for faiths which Hatchet would abide.
Most on The Foundry would’ve expressed their desire to live on in every way possible, as some truthful wish by plainest of data, to Hatchet’s honored evaluations, and would be brought to waking in ways they also deemed appropriate for what was gleaned those people might find the-fright.
Simulations bore talk through their phase-link, of Foundry engineer’s grafting immortal intelligences, availability of technologies for such makings which would extend life beyond means that had been utilized or planned upon. People would only seem to ever be reborn within roboticized humanoids aboard The Foundry; their notions of humanity’s correctness being grounded in their original design simply ran too deeply.
Those talks of some simulative-party to play within, how they might interact with their living fellows from within, were avoided for the forcing it created inside a consciousness to confront the existence or non-existence of soul.
When one’s body died, and a full-body-conscious imprint lived on, how could it be the same being?
That question lived on the tongue and in the mind of everyone who’d heard of or personally considered taking part in such a thing as an artificial heaven.
Echo Béleaph always found it strange for the people of The Foundry to craft such adversity towards that concept when they would be so simultaneously prone towards accepting and utilizing fully the scientific half-understanding of re-and-dematerialization, irrespectively.
Any honest fellow would speak it to their closest after warping through some means of portal-technology, that original body died every time.
The strangest thing was it only felt like going to sleep and waking back up, but even less so.
