Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #72 – Metamorphosis

Mimi couldn’t help but feel like crying. Colors. Shapes. Faces. She could see. Everything. Every single one of them. Multiple times. A mosaic, a kaleidoscope of pictures folding into her mind from every corner of her body. Her eyes shone, sparked in the dark, receiving the inputs of the mesh of optical sensors, that widespread mesh that comprised her wings. It wasn’t only shapes or colors either. Heat. Electromagnetic waves. Sound. She could see sound. She could see the pressure waves spreading throughout the air. Her whole body was now a giant array of sensors, sensors that were bombarding her brain with new stimuli, creating pictures she had never seen before. In that sensory bliss, anyone else seemed to move slower. The monsters were crawling at a glacial pace, throwing themselves at the scaffolding. While Robin…

Mimi saw her for the first time.

Robin’s face.

Her delicate features. Her messy green hair. Her shining gem. Her cut earlobes

The blood pouring out of her mouth, of her eyes. Her teeth gritting to quench the pain. All while her implants were overheating. All while her mind was burning.

Mimi gasped. That was much worse than she expected. Much worse than she was ready for. She felt like calling for her, trying to steal her attention for a second, hoping to listen her say that everything was okay, even if it wasn’t. But she stopped herself. Robin had made her choice. Robin was pouring all of herself into it.

So, she had to do the same. She had to give her best.

In a moment, she spread her wings, flapped them under the confused gazes of the creatures, creatures that were frantically recording the whole scene, asking for support, for guidance. Mimi shifted her sight to the electromagnetic spectrum, noticed hot spots around the napes of the creatures. Transponders. All with similar frequencies. She couldn’t read the data, she couldn’t listen to them. But what she could do was

plucking her strings

once again.

The creatures writhed, twisted, as they heard the music, as the notes filled the room, bouncing on the metal and back, echoing, reverberating all around them. And their transponders started popping, breaking down, turning into clouds of fragments and sawdust. All of them. In the middle of the data transmission. Severing their connection with whatever they were trying to contact. Still, that didn’t stop them from climbing, from crawling from trying to reach her.

Mimi bent her leg, almost stumbling on the remains of her cape. She quickly tapped her new bow on her new strings, altering the frequency just a little. She felt bad for Dobrio who almost didn’t sleep to sew her a new one, but she didn’t need a costume now. She didn’t need any costumes. Just her body. Her weapon.

The cape vibrated for a short instant, before being shredded by her notes, followed by her boxers too, turning into nothing but loose threads. With that newfound freedom, she leapt off the pillar, used her new wings to glide, to flutter down with elegance. The music never stopped, a symphony of bright and dark tunes, changing tempo mid-riff to keep the flow going. As her foot touched the ground, her attention turned to the monsters, to their lifeless red eyes, now completely focused on her. She growled, letting her voice overcome the sound of her own music.

“Three minutes. Right, Robbie?”

Robin didn’t answer. She was sweating, crying, shaking, as if suffering from an epileptic attack. Yet, she kept enduring, she kept pushing her way forward into the terminals of the weapon control center. Her mind was completely absorbed by the task, so that she almost shut down whatever other senses interfaced her with the external world. Mimi bit her lips. Three minutes, Robin had said before. Knowing that for certain would have helped her, but there was no way to go through the elf’s sensory isolation. Three minutes was stretching it, for her ‘butterfly’ form. As for every real butterfly, its beauty was short-lived: it drained her energies constantly, causing her to fall into a state of almost unconsciousness after she ran out of juice. It was an experimental feature, one aunt Caro and she tested only twice, in a controlled environment. One she couldn’t use if her nerves were even so slightly out of alignment. Activating that in her previous compromised condition would have been lethal, destroying her own body by means of a wrong resonance. That’s why she had to wait. That’s why she couldn’t unleash it against Lily, back in Aralu. But Dobrio had fixed her, thanks to aunt Caro’s schematics. That let her do that. Let her turn the lights on, let her namesake shine. So, it was time. It was time for her ‘butterfly’ to do what she knew best. She leapt upwards again, flapping her newborn wings to reach a higher elevation, looked at the mass of creatures from above. Then, saw them turn around, rise up, baring their cannons. The noise built up, echoed all over the place. Yet, Mimi had touched it already. Mimi knew which notes to hit. So, her fingers moved on the strings, plucking them once more.

And the cannons exploded in the chests of the robots. A massive shockwave tore through them, making them recoil, fall onto the ground, start shrieking, cursing in a language Mimi could barely understand. She saw how their frames reorganized, how the spikes and wires coiled around them, restoring functionality, spreading new legs, new arms, getting ready to strike again. All while Robin was still plugged to the machine, barely breathing.

Mimi switched her sensors to ‘sound’ again, tried to reconstruct the frequencies of their head cases. That was the only way to spell their end. The only way to finish them off. Her mesh of eyes glanced in the direction of the terminal, of Robin, noted down her frequency, the frequency of every device she was interacting with, set up a mind lock on them. If she started playing them, she would have ruined everything. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford it right now.

Scorpion tails reached for her, swinging in all directions. She ducked the first, avoided the second, jumped the third. Her sensors were sending her a complete picture of her surrounding. She could see, hear, feel everything. Every movement, every extraneous element. But that cost energy. That cost time. Her heartbeat accelerated, right as she kneeled on the ground. Breathe. Breathe. She was almost out of juice. Almost. Turning that mode on after fighting those things for so long was a death sentence, yet one she welcomed with open arms.

She died once already.

One more time was nothing.

So, her fingers plucked the strings again, in an angelic choir of destruction, shredding claws, tails, legs, arms in a wave of devastation that rippled through the creatures, leaving them no way out. In that moment, something clicked.

Their frequencies.

The frequencies of their brain cases.

All of them, every single one of them.

The analysis was over. She had them all.

With a wild grin, Mimi stood up once more, closed her eyes, stopped her bow for a long second, surrounded by an audience of mechanical monsters in the middle of regenerating their limbs.

Silence fell.

An ominous, unexpected silence. One that struck like a thunder, one that did nothing but turn everything else into background noise.

Then, the bow moved.

The music returned.

One head started to vibrate, the head of the creature closest to Robin.

Vibrate. Vibrate. Vibrate. Vibrate.

Before exploding in a shower of gore and brain matter, of metallic shards and shrapnel.

Pop.

Then, a second head too. A third. A fourth.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

And so on. And so forth.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Pop.

As the bow left the strings, silence took the reins of its kingdom once again. Mimi bowed to her imaginary audience, performing an elegant curtsy, while her beautiful wings spread even wider, in the light of the neons. There was nobody left to applaud though.

Only black frames covered in blood and gore, sprayed on the floor, some still twitching, writhing under the control of their secondary brain, fighting against their impending death.

Leaving the stage for her and her alone, just as she wanted.

Her eyes switched off, turning back into their usual, opaque selves.

Her bow went back into her fingers.

The strings on her forearm got reabsorbed.

The nanofabric of her wings folded back into the metal frame, till it disappeared again inside her shoulder blades. Letting her fall to the ground, in a state of exhaustion. Blind, deaf, dizzy, dull. After that whole sensory feast, going back to her normal self felt like losing a limb. Her consciousness was barely hanging on, her fingers convulsing, trembling without an end in sight. Still, she had one thing to do. She still had one thing to do. She crawled among the corpses, slowly making her way to the terminal, to Robin. She couldn’t pass out before that. She couldn’t pass out like that.

“Robbie…?”

But Robin wasn’t answering. Robin wasn’t replying. Mimi’s hand reached for her plugs, touched it.

Just to recoil back for the thermal shock. Scorching. Robin’s plugs were scorching hot. Her forehead too. Her gem was burning. Everything about her was burning.

“Robbie, please…”

Mimi didn’t care. Mimi couldn’t let that go. She hugged her, hugged Robin from behind, pushed her forehead on her nape. Hot. Scorching hot. Her whole body was a furnace. Blood was pouring out of her nose, of her mouth, of her nostrils, of her ears. Her cape was caked in her own congealed fluids, all while her hands were still tapping the controls, moving at impossible speed.

“Robbie, come back. Please, come back…”

In the depths of the digital world, Robin was fighting against the last lock, one that was protected by layers of additional security, one that was being pried open using the last of McAllison’s memories. As she did it, Robin felt the weight of Ray, of Remora, of her siblings. One century of life for each of them. Five hundred years in total, saved in her memory crystal. Two hundred years of McAllison’s memories too, now part of her. And three hundred years of her own memories – one century before getting frozen in suspended animation, two centuries afterwards. A millennium of shared memories, all stored in one person – her. Seven different minds, six just existing as repositories of remembrance, the last coordinating them all. But elves weren’t designed for it. Elves were designed to record at most seven hundred, maybe eight hundred years of data. Their bodies were perfectly engineered for infinite telomeric regeneration, allowing them to survive for as long as their memory crystal held. Hers had reached saturation. There wasn’t a chance to record anything else. All the space was used up. All what ‘Robin’ could see was seen. Elves couldn’t delete memories. Couldn’t overwrite them. Only add. That was their role, living repositories of knowledge. Forgetting was not an option. Losing information was not an option. Storing it was the only way forward, the only one accepted. Still, she endured it. That was it, it was almost over. She had to resist just one minute longer, shut down all of her senses to spare drive space, to keep the little amount of memory she had left from being consumed by trivial moments. Such as a warm hug. Or someone desperately calling her name. She needed it. She needed it more than she wanted to admit. She craved it, since the moment she relived Remora’s memories in the vat, only to relive them over and over in the solitude of her room, replaying her passion, her love for her mechanical partner, letting that ravage her senses, cursing at her incapability to love and be loved. Robin was alone, on a foreign world, among a mankind that wasn’t hers anymore – a pale, barbaric shadow of the civilization she grew up with. She had never managed to mingle with them, never managed to feel at home. That solitude chipped away at her, convincing her she didn’t need anybody. Still, in her heart, envy consumed her. When Mimi and Lacrima had their first night together. When, on Kaitos, everyone except her shared some intimate moments, forcing her to relive the memories of the dead instead to find some solace, some comfort. Now, though, all of that was over.

There wasn’t anything more to do.

Just push forward.

Just dive into that system, unlock the last door.

Pierce through it.

Dive down into it.

A red alert. A sound in the corner of her mind. It was the firewall. McAllison’s account had been deactivated. Still, it was too late. She was already too deep inside. She had overwritten the routines, created a new privileged role for herself, one that was completely separated from McAllison’s. McAllison’s account was now nothing but a honeypot, a lizard tail she left behind her to confuse any potential predators. The predators had fallen into the trap, went for the tail, missing the body. Now, Robin was there. In the menu that controlled the external weaponry.

The anti-impactor cannons. The missile arrays. The orbital rockets.

All of them lay bare under her digital gaze.

She checked their status. All operational. All ready to fire at will.

With something akin to excitement, she went for the anti-impactor cannons first.

And switched them off.

**

Red lights started to flash inside the control room, sirens blared. Xaviella Rubico looked around, looked down at the two rhizomes that were fighting against her crew, looked at the few surviving soldiers, taking shelter in the corridor that led to the room, shooting grenades and rockets to cover for the plants. It wasn’t them. They weren’t the source of that red alert. She connected to the main system, checked the logs. The engineering team, the one sent to the weapon control room.

Had just stopped answering the automated calls.

Around one minute before.

First that and now this?

She glanced at the room, saw everyone being as confused as her. Not only the crew members, the intruders too. What was that alarm? What was that alert? She had heard it, in the past, but when? Where? It was too long ago, too long before that moment. She interfaced with her control system, looked into the status of the ship. There were no breaches, no evident damage outside of the main gate and the hull was stable. The rods from that constellation of satellites were still coming down, true, but none of them damaged the ship, only the external repeaters of the swarm – except those too close to Lagash. Those were protected by the anti-impactor cannons.

That’s when it landed on her.

The cannons.

Were motionless.

Two rods had destroyed the closest antennas just second before.

But the cannons

didn’t react.

Not only the cannons.

The missile arrays.

The rocket launchers.

All of the weapons of the seedship.

Were offline.

[[What]]

Yes, what? That had never happened before. How was it possible? The account of McAllison had been deactivated as soon as she could do that, so how? Confusion took hold of her, took hold of everyone in the control room.

Till the displays opened up again. All the surviving displays at once.

In every room. In every corner of the ship.

All the displays, all the screens turned back on.

The holographic projectors outside of Lagash too.

And a face appeared on all of them, a familiar bearded face on a blue tuxedo.

Anthony Yarramundi.

The President of the Turn.

Started talking once again.