Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #74 – All for What?

Lacrima emerged from the rubble, coughed, retreated her vines. The command room of Lagash was unrecognizable, a mess of broken tiles, of crashed displays, of cracked scaffolding. The alarms blared, blared over and over, under the flickering lights, under the remains of heavy machinery. She dusted off her dress, groaned at the holes, the rips in the black fabric. She heard a ringing sound through her ears, a continuous high-pitched ringing that invaded her brain, made her dizzy. She glanced around the room, gauging her surroundings. Whatever that place once was, it was now just a wasteland of broken metal, of torn panels, of shredded pipes. Sparks blinked in and out of existence, electric arcs between the wires, cracked screens showing digital noise. Her gaze stopped. A white face, expressionless, almost made of ceramic. Its eyes were dark, red no more. Its whole body was motionless, crushed by the machinery that fell from above. Other shapes dotted her vision. A white-gloved hand. A blue helmet. Another crushed black frame. More human shapes, sprayed all around. Some of them were moving, moaning in pain. Some were crawling out of the mess of twisted metal, helping each other recover. Some were completely still. Lacrima inhaled. Exhaled. Her vines, her tendrils saved her. They were the cage that prevented her to be smashed by the debris, the net that deflected the falling pieces, that made her survive the shockwave. Not everyone had been as lucky as her. Not everyone had a shield like hers. So, she stood up, towered over the devastated control room, looking around from her vantage point. A movement caught her attention, right on the other side of the room, close to what once had to be a wall.

Rubble moving, vines, tendrils slamming thrashed displays out of the way. Under her eye, a thin silhouette emerged from the destruction, wrapped in the ripped remains of her blue Peacekeeper uniform, letting her white hair flow down to her waist. A white flower shone under the flickering neons, as a human hand wiped lymph away from the scratched skin on her cheeks. Lacrima gritted her teeth. Of course she survived. Of course. There was no way Lily could die like that. After all, she was her better, an improved version of her. If the faulty original lived, how could the enhanced specimen kick the bucket there?

Lacrima’s hand instinctively went for the handle of her plasma knife, ignited the blade. Or, at least, that was what she wanted to do. The injectors fizzled, the edge remained dull gray, marked by a web of cracks. Out of juice. Broken. Useless. She threw it away, cursed, without losing sight of her target. Lily was standing outside of her range, still wielding that long black sword of hers. Her entire body was covered in wounds, lymph was pouring out of every gash.

They locked eyes, all while the alarms blared, all while the neons flickered. The red rotating lamp shone on Lily’s face, then on Lacrima’s, then on Lily’s again, in a sequence of chiaroscuro, of light and darkness. Nobody else stood up. Nobody else emerged from the piles of broken metal. It was Lacrima and Lily. Only them. Their gazes aligned, their irises met. Then, Lacrima began to talk.

“You know why I was woken up by Father’s machines, right?”

Lily nodded, raised her blade.

“To dispose of me, I guess.”

“…that was what Father – well, his recorded message – told me. He told me that, if I were listening to it, it meant that something went wrong. That the chemical sensors installed all around the city had registered an excess of lymph in civilian population. That ‘someone’ was using rhizomes for their own goals. And that that ‘someone’ had to be stopped. Now I know… that that ‘someone’ was you.”

“My ‘goal’ has been freeing all rhizomes from slavery... all rhizomes, including you. We are on the same side, Lacrima.”

“Yes, you are correct. I should be grateful for it, but…”

“…but?”

“You reached this point by killing hundreds of innocent people. By torturing Mimi. By murdering aunt Caro. And by pruning the most beautiful part of me.”

Lily snickered, condensed her vines back into a mockery of a human arm.

“Bloodless revolutions are a thing of fairy tales. You can’t change a system from inside without becoming part of the system. It’s a serpent eating its tail – we needed to cut the serpent’s head directly, if we wanted to succeed. You’ve seen them, the… the horrors we were subjected to, right? The herbicide. The pruning. No, we couldn’t win this without shedding blood. This is a fact.”

“Maybe, but the way you did it…”

Lacrima gritted her teeth, crunched her fist.

“…pissed me off to no end.”

“So, you’re just angry at me because I mistreated your girlfriend. Is that it?”

“Mimi is not my… girlfriend. She’s my watering can. I’m her house plant. And you… you made her life hell.”

“…is that it?”

“…”

“So?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Lily shrugged, waved her sword in a wide horizontal arc, slowly panning through the devastated control room.

“There’s no need to clash right now. We did what we came here for. Can’t we settle this another time?”

“Except I want to. You’re wounded. You’re leaking lymph. If I want to kill you, it’s now or never.”

Lacrima bent on her knees, glanced at her reflection on her blade. In the emergency lights, Lily’s flower looked as red as hers. A mirror image, one that used to scare her. One that scared her no more. So, she started talking again.

“You are too dangerous to be left alive. You will not stop until rhizomes are the dominant species on this planet. And… and you will hurt Mimi more to reach your goal. I’m sure of it. She’s your fixation, you want her to suffer by your hand. I… I don’t care about your goal. I don’t care about anything. But… but I can’t forgive you for what you did to her! I can’t let you hurt her again!”

Lily smirked, almost clapping her hands at the metaphor Lacrima used shortly before. Watering can. A creative way to define a human in a relationship with a rhizome. That was nice for Lacrima, but didn’t change the substance: Lacrima wasn’t coming at her because of the last will of their Father. No, Lacrima was doing that for herself. That was more than enough reason, one Lily could relate to. No grandstanding. No higher goals. No universal good. Just a plain, simple grudge. Like the one she held against the Peacekeepers who forced Oleander to almost turn into a plant. The kind of grudge that made every fight personal. Almost like a human. No logic. No rationality. Plain emotions. Lily wiped her lips from a drop of lymph, waved her vine arm at Lacrima.

“And? Do you want to finish me off, sister?”

Lily towered over the debris, waved her hand in a gesture of challenge.

“… or, rather, do you think you can finish me off?”

Lacrima went for her left arm, grabbed one of the vines, ripped it off. A black blade emerged from it – smaller, thinner than the one Lily had but still shining in the red lights that bathed them.

“Won’t know till I try.”

Lily raised her weapon too, smiling at her shorter mirror version.

“This will end exactly like in Aralu: with you broken in half and crying like a baby.”

“So be it.”

Lacrima dashed forward, running on the debris, jumping from tile to tile. Lily dashed too, raising her blade above her shoulder, slashing the air with a diagonal strike. The sword smashed a pile of machinery, as Lacrima turned at the last second, avoiding the impact. Then, she leapt, striking vertically down. Lily pulled back her sword, met the attack half way, recoiled for the impact. Lacrima spun around, delivering a kick to her belly, pushing Lily further back. She stepped inside Lily’s guard, raised her elbow, hit her chin. Lily stumbled, put all her weight on her back foot, kicked at Lacrima. Their legs met, a roundhouse kick against the other, staggering both of them. Lily stood up first. Lacrima followed, just an instant later.

An instant too long.

Lily’s flying knee struck Lacrima’s forehead, made her tumble down once more. The massive black sword turned above Lily’s head, falling down like an axe on Lacrima’s neck. Lacrima swept Lily’s fore foot, diverting her momentum, causing the blade to miss its target, to hit the ground instead. Giving enough time to Lacrima to recover, to put some distance between her sister and her. She sprinted in once again, waving her sword in a horizontal slash. Lily deflected it back, kept turning, her blade plunged down in a wide arc.

Slashing Lacrima in the middle of her chest.

Ripping her dress open.

Gashing her skin.

Lymph erupted out of it, soaked her clothes, poured around the wound, covering completely in green slime. Till the outburst ended, all of a sudden. Lacrima wiped out the lymph with her vines, reabsorbed it with her tendrils, her roots. Lily gritted her teeth.

The wound was already closed.

As if it never existed in the first place.

“…what…?”

That shocked her. That shocked Lily to the core. No rhizome could regenerate that fast. Healing a wound of that size in that little time would have required inordinate amounts of lymphs. So, how? How did Lacrima do it?

“I told you I was topped up.”

Her voice broke the impasse, answering the question Lily failed to ask. Before dashing in once again, swinging her sword in a horizontal arc. Lily blocked it with her weapon, sparks flew from the point of contact, the two edges clashing. Lacrima’s blade cracked, fragments chipped away from its body. Lily recoiled, planted her feet deep in the ground. Lacrima’s weapon was frail as usual, but she looked like she was still full with lymph – despite fighting the crew members, despite being almost buried by the falling debris, despite being slashed in the chest. She caught a glimpse of something, a strange play of lights on her opponent. A glint among the redlit walls, ethereal twinkled all around Lacrima. Her tendrils. Her roots. They were thin, almost transparent, betrayed only by those infinitesimal sparkles, and were spreading like a web on the floor, inflating and deflating, sucking water, bringing it to her. Lily followed their profiles with her eye, trying to get a full picture. Then, all became clear. The corpses. Lacrima was feeding off the corpses. Constantly. Slowly, but constantly. She was keeping her lymph reserves high by taking advantage of the dead, by draining their nutrients. A war of attrition. The only way she could win in a direct confrontation with her better sister. Lily raised her blade, a deep breath escaped her lips. She had to sever them. She had to sever those roots, if she wanted to finish the fight quickly. So, she directed all her attention at those sparkles, at those glints. Her sister made her tendrils thinner, spread them out like hair, sticking them everywhere. A very ingenious tactic, one that Lacrima couldn’t have envisioned on her own – no, someone else helped her devise it, that was for sure. Nevertheless, it was only going to prolong her agony. Lily loaded all the weight on her fore foot, prepared to prune that concealed network of tendrils before striking down her sister for good.

A noise surprised her.

A noise from the rubble.

Panels moved, slid down. An array of damaged spider legs peeked out of the cracks. A gigantic, gashed black frame emerged from the sea of wrecks. A long spiked neck, a damaged white face marked by tears of blood, her flashing red eyes overshadowing the emergency lights, making them dark in comparison.

[[Anthony…]]

The massive shape of Xaviella Rubico burst out of the damaged floor, shrieking, screaming as loud as her loudspeaker could. A mesh of words, of wails, of grieving sounds, all focused in a single name.

[[ANTHONYYYYYY!]]

A name she cursed with all of her being. Lacrima stepped back. Lily aborted her lunging charge. They both turned to the woman crying in pain, a human that lived for countless millennia in a mechanical body, one that severed her connections with what she once was. A woman that believed in the words of a man she trusted. A woman fighting to keep her sanity, to keep going forward in a world that wasn’t hers anymore. That woman, the broken remnant of an age long gone, was now swinging her scorpion tail, her claws, her manipulators in a frenzy, crashing more and more displays, destroying pipes, ripping wires in her blind rage. All while blood kept flowing out of her wounds. All while her once white mask was now completely bathed in her own congealed fluids. Her chest opened up, a cannon emerged from it. That familiar bellow. That harrowing song. Louder. Louder. Louder.

A white flash burst through the room, a luminous spear obliterating the red, rotating emergency light, piercing through the ceiling, breaching the core of the megastructure. Crumbles of Lagash fell into the control room, pieces and parts of lost machinery, of the beams keeping the ship together. The sirens stopped. The alarm stopped. Silence fell.

Till the bellow started again, the pitch began to rise.

Higher. Higher. Higher.

Lily moved preemptively, wrapped her vines around a broken pipe, climbed it up in the blink of an eye.

A white javelin hit the place she was standing on seconds before, disintegrating the floor tiles, sending rubble, dust, metal scraps flying all around. The shockwave made Lily twitch, ripped off some of her tendrils, forcing her to swing like a pendulum, regenerate them as soon as she could. She let her grip go, landed with a loud thud, stared at the biomechanical construct that was running amok in front of her. Her gaze met Lacrima’s, their red irises locked. They both nodded, almost in sync, almost at the same time. And started dashing forward, towards the skeletal figure, the cracked simulacrum that once was a human. The cannon brightened up one more time.

The noise started again.

Louder.

Lacrima moved on the left, raised her sword. Lily ran on the right, leapt with all her strength, left the ground.

Louder.

The black blades impacted with the spiked neck, closing in from both sides. The metal shrieked, sparks flew in the darkness. The scissors closed, in a combined assault, carrying all the momentum of the two rhizomes.

Louder.

The wires began to yield. The main hydraulic pipe cracked. The spiked frame broke open. Xaviella Rubico screamed. Screamed from the bottom of her soul, as her neck swung, as her limbs writhed.

Lou…

The black blades met.

The neck severed clean.

Her head fell off.

The body stumbled.

A white flash.

The cannon shot up, smashing again through the ceiling.

Causing all what was still undamaged to fall off too, crumbling on her frame, thrashing her secondary brain, smashing her legs, her tail, in a rain of scrap metal.

Her eyes blinked, as her decapitated body opened up, spraying blood all around her, tainting the metal, the poor remains of the control room. The loudspeaker turned on one last time, crackling, the sound slowly fading.

[[An… thony… was it all… for… naught?]]

Two figures towered over her still functioning head, over her expressionless white face. Two figures with flowers in place of their eyes. Two figures with vines and tendrils where a left arm should have been. Two figures holding blades in their hands. Two figures looking down on her.

But none of them answered her question.

Nobody answered it.

The last thing Xaviella Rubico saw, before her brain started to switch off, was the edge of a massive black blade.

And a the flash of a shorter, cracked blade.

Almost cutting a leg off the taller silhouette.

Slicing her at the thigh, while she was glancing at the fallen head.

Before the taller one retaliated, waving her sword at the assailant.

In that moment, the moment she was expecting to be bisected, Xaviella Rubico saw the two shapes starting to fight again.

Never going to relieve her pain.

Never going to answer her question.

Or, rather, answering it in the only way that made sense to them: trying to kill each other, even in front of a common enemy.

Xaviella Rubico would have groaned, would have cried if she still had a throat, if she still had functioning eyes.

In the end, that new mankind was still a bunch of violent savages.

Their creatures reflected that.

In the end, her task, her task of her crew was… successful, in a way.

After all, they ushered a mankind as vile and ruthless as the one who sent her crew to die in the depths of space with a bunch of lies.

What better ending than going full circle?

That was the last thought of Xaviella Rubico.

Before her brain, a brain that survived for more than five millennia, a brain the followed five iterations of mankind, a brain that never lost faith in the words of a man she trusted

finally

switched

off.