Etymology (Digital Devil Saga, Roland/Argilla, Roland->Greg)
ROLAND. IF YOU EVER DO THIS AGAIN I WILL KILL YOU.
Well, no, I won't, but I didn't expect this thing to get so -- um, devouring. And it doesn't even have sex in it.
I think I like it, though. I really do.
Also, I wrote something that isn't fuck-all depressing, for once. In this fandom, no less! Yay!
Title: Etymology
Author: puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language, implied sexual content
Wordcount: 7,000
Prompt: Roland/Argilla - education - the pursuit of memory
A/N: So late. D: And apologies for deviations from the prompt. This, um, kind of went its own way. Roland's last name was mithrigil's idea first.
The back of his hand sears, burns white-hot, and the sensation keeps jerking Roland awake just as his eyes get ready to drift closed. He sighs, rubs his throbbing head, tries to soothe the voice screaming underneath his thoughts. Indra. He doesn’t know how he knows it’s-he’s-called Indra, can’t explain it, definitely can’t rationalize it because this is the opposite of rationality, this is so insane that it goes around full-circle and becomes sane again, acquires some twisted kind of logic in the process. Or maybe this is something older than intellect, older than reason, older than sense, and by thinking about it at all, he’s getting it wrong. He has to understand it some other way.
-He’s hungry. He didn’t know he could be this hungry. Hell, he’s not even sure if hunger’s the word for it, since hunger’s a pang but this is sheer torment, pain and emptiness twined together and ripping him up from the inside. It claws at his stomach, roars in his blood, this-this drumbeat, it’s almost atavistic, this incessant pounding, this demand for food and slaughter and devouring. Colored lines pulse outward from his atma and scorch his veins. He doubles over, his hands gripping the edge of his desk and trembling at the effort or trembling at something else entirely or both; his stomach seizes and lurches and twists and he cries out, braces himself against the change. His ears fill with white noise, his eyes with red clouds. Not here, he thinks, not now, fuck. Maybe he says some of it aloud. He’s going to break his goddamn desk in half and that makes him wheeze with laughter for some reason, forces hot harsh air out of his lungs. He’s turning into a monster and he’s worrying about breaking his desk. Humans are really fucking incongruous sometimes.
“Have you been eating?”
Argilla. Roland wrenches his head towards the door and hopes his face isn’t as contorted as he thinks it is. “I didn’t know you-ah-didn’t know you had to do it so regularly.” Another spasm of hunger ripples through his body, sends him to his knees.
She nods once, her lips thin and drawn. “If you don’t devour, the virus takes control. You transform, and you don’t come back. You go mad.”
Her words knock the wind out of his lungs. He barely manages an “oh.” Then he laughs, because he just remembered-“We’re all mad here,” he says, because even though he’s not human anymore he’s still a facetious bastard.
Argilla frowns. “What?”
“It’s from a book. A children’s book. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.” Is the roaring in his blood dulling any? The lightning seems to be ebbing from his veins, retreating back into his atma. Or maybe he’s imagining things. Or maybe if he imagines hard enough, it’ll become real. It might be true, anything might be true these days, and isn’t that how the AIs (his comrades, he adds, and it’s almost starting to feel right to think of them that way) came about in the first place. “And we’ve been down the rabbit hole for a while now.”
She stares at him like he’s the weird one, crossing her arms over her chest. “Down the rabbit hole?”
“It’s a feeling you get, sometimes. A feeling that you’ve entered a world where nothing makes sense, where everything’s inverted.” He bucks forward when the hunger pangs surge and surface again. His forehead collides with the edge of the desk with a sharp crack, and that’s a distraction from the other pain at least. Sharper, localized. “Sometimes it’s a metaphor for drug trips. But not this time.”
Argilla, it seems, doesn’t know what to say to that, so she settles for grabbing him by the back of his shirt-fuck, she’s strong-and pulling him away from the desk, prying his hands off the wood in the process. “You need rations,” she says. “Stay here. Think-” Her voice trails off. “Do you know what music is?”
“Yeah, I know what music is.” He clutches his forehead, rakes his nails across his hairline, feels his atma sizzle under his skin. God almighty his head’s on fire; it feels like he’s bathing in a sea of it. He flushes all over, shakes.
“Think of a song.” She clears her throat. Her voice is husky, low, almost more breath than sound and what sound there is quavers instead of sounding clearly, but there’s something familiar about it, about her hand resting on his forehead.
“Light shines on heaven,” she sings. She draws away from him (stay, he wants to tell her, but the words get caught up in his throat) and moves towards the door. “I don’t have Sera’s power, but if you think of the song, it might help.”
“Right.” He closes his eyes, sees yellow lines stretching across the insides of his eyelids. He hasn’t sung in he doesn’t know how long. The last year he spent working on his Masters, when he and Greg went camping and-no, even though it happened years ago it’s still too close, so he hisses and pulls away from that memory. “Light shines over heaven,” he sings instead, trying to match her about an octave lower.
“I’ll be back,” she promises.
Indra shrieks, and Roland drowns in the sound, sinks closer to it, falls-
***
They have an outing club at Reed College. Their whole thing is student-run and -organized trips: kayaking on the Santiam River, hiking up Mt. Hood, spelunking in the Ape Caves, climbing around on the glaciers on Mt. Adams, things like that. Real discover-yourself-in-the-wilderness stuff-it’s you with the pounding rapids and towering peaks and dank caves and craggy ice, not against it. Roland’s mostly doing it because Greg’s involved, which is an apt description of most of the things Roland’s done over his first semester-and-a-half at Reed. And Greg-
There’s no one like Greg, Roland’s decided. Greg sees things-it’s not just the pseudointellectual college bullshit that Roland’s so good at dealing in, it’s clarity, it’s insight, it’s passion burning under his skin with a slow and steady flame and he’s the moth in the analogy. Oh, is he ever the moth. To belabor the point even further, it is the east, and Greg is the sun. He sounds like an idiot teenager when he phrases it that way, not to mention “Greg” doesn’t scan properly, but hell, the idiot teenager part’s apt, too. He’s still vaguely surprised that Greg puts up with him, this reedy little underclassman with three boxes of books under his bed and a bigger vocabulary than he knows what to do with.
(Well, Greg mostly puts up with him. Greg hasn’t said anything about the bottles of vodka Roland keeps stashed in the air duct, but his silence says more than words ever could; it’s the only thing cold about him.)
“Why do they call it Saddle Mountain?” he asks Greg. The pack digs into his shoulders; he throttles his walking stick until his knuckles turn white around it, digs it into the soft soil and uses the leverage to propel himself forwards. He should be glad Greg decided not to do the Saddle Mountain hike in the middle of winter.
“The shape.” Greg raises his sunglasses. “There are two peaks, and the valley between them looks like a saddle, therefore.”
“Not very creative of them,” Roland says.
Greg shrugs. “Accuracy over creativity.”
Roland rolls his eyes, fights the urge to thwap Greg with the walking stick. “You have no facility for poetry. Or any appreciation for etymology. Which peak are we climbing?”
“The taller one. You can’t get to the lower peak from the trails.”
Roland groans. “Fuck.”
“It’s worse in the winter,” Greg says.
“Bad enough in the spring.” He tries to step forward, but his leg has other ideas. He catches his foot on a rock and overbalances, falls funny on his right ankle, shit, just what he needs, get a faceful of dirt while Greg’s watching.
Greg grabs him around the wrist, hauls him to his feet, pack and all. “Are you all right?” he asks.
Roland shifts his weight to his right foot as gingerly as he can. A twinge of pain flares in his leg, but nothing bad. “Yeah. Might’ve bruised my ass, but nothing I can’t handle.”
“The trail gets steeper,” Greg warns him.
“Can’t we climb a mountain with a gentler incline or something next time?” Roland’s foot still protests and knots up when he steps forward, but he ignores it, puts it at the back of his mind, glares at the spring foliage instead. Tiny buds cluster together at the end of a branch; the calyx curls back from one of them, exposes the raw green underneath. It’s pale enough to be sickly, though he’s sure Greg will reassure him that the color’s healthy, that he should check out some of the wildflowers in bloom, that the season’s progressing the way it should. He rubs his forehead. He’s not exactly Thoreau; the idylls of nature are well enough, but he misses electricity and showers and microwaved popcorn. Still, he guesses he could whip all this up into a poem for his 201 seminar. His professor makes a habit of ragging on him for being too derivative, masking his voice in the affectations of other writers or whatever that means. He tries to defend it as allusion, but he’s losing the war. He’s won a few battles, but he’s losing the war.
“Mountains with gentler inclines are hills, Roland.”
“So we can be noble Dukes of York,” he says, partially because Greg hates it when he engages in what Greg calls “Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome.”
This time, though, Greg just snorts. “Where are you going to find ten thousand men?”
“That’s your problem,” Roland says. “You’re the one in the leadership position, aren’t you?”
“…yeah.” Greg squats, runs his finger under the petals of a wildflower just starting to peek from its bud, its petals a brilliant dappled yellow in the afternoon sun. “Development of student leadership. Roland?”
He hunkers down next to Greg, gives his legs a chance to rest and waits for the stabbing pains in his chest to ease. The air’s thinner up here; he still hasn’t completely acclimated yet. “Yeah?”
“I’d planned on leading another glacier hike at Mount Adams,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t. The glacier’s retreated too far. It isn’t stable anymore; there are faults in the ice, crevasses, whole chunks sliding away...”
“Global warming’s a bitch.”
Greg nods, rests his chin on his fist and stares at the yellow flower. “Ecological change, yeah. It’s getting severe. The world’s changing. I know every college student comes to that conclusion eventually, but-” He hesitates. “I think there’s more to this than personal maturity.”
“Surely some revelation is at hand,” Roland quotes.
Greg frowns. “Is that TS Eliot?”
TS Eliot. Roland stares at him, mouth agape. Yeah, Greg’s knowledge of poetry could charitably be called minimal, but come on. “It’s ‘The Second Coming,’” he says. “Yeats. It’s famous. You must have read it in English class. I can’t believe you’ve made it through your entirely scholarly career without coming across that poem. It’s a classic. Come on. ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’? ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’? ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’? This is a goddamned deficiency. This is cultural ignorance.”
Greg shoves him facefirst into the wildflowers. He coughs, splutters, and the petals tickle his nose. “You asshole,” he says when he stops choking down pollen.
“Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome,” Greg counters. “It’s worse than Cuvier’s.”
A memory stirs-his aunt’s hand knotted into a club at her side, stiff and unmoving. “Is that what they’re calling it?” Roland asks.
“After the woman who discovered it.” He smiles. “Accuracy over creativity.”
“You’ve killed poetry,” Roland says. “You’ve butchered it, dismembered it, and buried its corpse beneath the wildflowers.” Well, the flowers make it a fitting kind of funeral, he guesses.
Greg shakes his head. Roland tends to elicit that kind of response in him.
“Cuvier’s, though.” Roland rubs the last few smudges of pollen off his glasses. “I thought it was a hoax at first. I still sort of do, I think.”
“I’d have thought it would appeal to you,” Greg says. “People turning to stone.”
“Yeah, but that’s metaphorical.”
Roland barely hears the next part, Greg says it so softly: “It isn’t.”
Roland’s torn between asking What? and How do you know that? but the latter implies that on some level he believes it, so he guesses the former question’s useless. It makes a twisted kind of sense, doesn’t it? The world might end in 2012, if the Mayans were right. Or a few years later. Or not at all, though the last seems the most unlikely case these days. Maybe thoughts of impending apocalypse are another symptom of Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome, but he’s starting to doubt it. He’s starting to doubt a lot of things.
“The stone doesn’t form until the last stages of the syndrome,” Greg says. “Most recorded cases haven’t progressed that far. I checked.”
“Most cases,” Roland echoes. I checked, Greg said, and maybe that’s the part he should be asking about.
Greg sits back on his heels and stares up. Roland follows his gaze. It’s a clear day, unblemished sky and beaming sun, and sprigs of green carpet the mountain’s peak, dotted with yellow blossoms. “A man I knew reached that stage,” Greg says, and Roland doesn’t press the issue further. “I saw his arm.”
“It was stone?”
“Mottled grey skin, cold petrified flesh…” Greg trails off. “I didn’t conduct tests, but that’s what it looked like.”
“I should be more skeptical about all of this, shouldn’t I?” Roland asks.
Greg’s stare is level, unblinking, and Roland can’t turn away. “Should you? Maybe the problem with the world,” he says, “is that nobody believes in anything anymore.”
***
The stench of raw meat hits his nostrils. Raw rotting meat, he amends. The fact that the smell doesn’t make him sick makes him sick-fuck, that makes no sense, but neither does anything else, so he’s all right. For certain definitions of “all right,” none of which can be found in a conventional dictionary.
Argilla-no, Prithvi, she tunes with her atma as she walks in-drops the meat in front of his nose; he lurches forward with a strangled gasp, claws at it-human nails, for now, the song or something about it might’ve held Indra at bay for a while but smell’s too much and Indra’s hunger sears him to the core, surges under his skin and forces its way out, shoots to the surface-
rend slaughter devour your enemies
-ribbons of flesh between his teeth and blood saturating his tongue and it feels right-
More, he needs more, he laps the last of the gore from the floor and it’s not enough, nothing’s enough, he lunges at Prithvi (Argilla, he remembers, she’s Argilla) and tries to bring her flesh to his mouth, but she twists and dodges and wraps her whips around his head, halts him and flings him to the ground. His rage shakes the floorboards.
“Stop it,” Prithvi’s mouths growl. “You’re not just Indra, you’re Roland.”
Roland. The word slams against his consciousness, cold water breaking over fevered thoughts, and he remembers. The lightning leeches away, and then he’s just Roland again, Roland with the coppery taste of blood still thick in his mouth and rotten meat stuck under his fingernails.
“Thank you,” he coughs more than says, pulls himself to his knees.
Argilla kneels next to him. Human again, he notices. “You have to devour to survive,” she says; the words twist her mouth, ruin its perfect symmetry. “That’s-part of who you are.”
He coughs again. Water streams from the corners of his eyes. Not tears. He isn’t crying. He isn’t making a complete emotional idiot of himself in front of this woman (and he can call her that now, because if she’s not human he isn’t either, the definition of humanity is really a matter of semantics now). Right, if he keeps telling himself that it might stick someday. “But it isn’t everything.”
She bows her head. “I don’t want it to be.”
“You’re-” He shakes his head, swallows. “You’re more than that.”
She tilts her head to the side; the gesture’s almost birdlike. “Are you crying?”
Shit. “No. A little bit. I’m sorry you had to learn about that one.”
“I think…” Argilla hesitates. “I think knowing that you can hurt makes the moments when you don’t better. You can appreciate what they mean.”
Roland closes his eyes. “You’re probably right,” he says, because she is, and he doesn’t need any more justification than that, not right now. “It’s a balancing act. Even now-Indra and me, Prithvi and you-that’s a balancing act, too.” There’s a more elegant way to phrase it, but he’s tired, tired down to his bones, and resting like this with his back propped against his bed is easy, letting his mind leap wherever it wants to is easy. “Argilla?”
“Yes?”
This might sound entirely too pathetic. The hell with it. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you?”
“Show me how to manage this,” he says. “How to keep from losing myself.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she says after a pause. “Before I transformed, I didn’t know I had a self to lose.”
“But now you know. And you wouldn’t want to lose that.” He lets his head loll back, flop against his mattress. “Neither do I. I’ve seen what other men become when they change. I’ve seen what they lose. I don’t want that. I won’t be able to fight if I’m like that,” he adds; maybe she’ll get that line of reasoning. “I’ll be of even less use,” if such a thing is possible.
“I think it’s something you need to find within yourself,” she says.
“Then help me look.” He reaches for her hand; she lets him. Her skin’s smooth, hairless, unbroken, nothing like his, not worn down and leathered from all work and no play. (Makes Jack a dull boy, his brain supplies, and well, King’s probably appropriate right now.) “Please.”
She hesitates, then nods. “All right.”
***
Roland comes up with the name.
“Lokapala,” he says. “It’s a Hindu term. Means ‘guardian of the gods,’ or, and I think this is the translation we’re going for, ‘guardian of the world.’” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Well?”
“I like it,” Greg says.
It goes without saying that the Lokapala is Greg’s idea, Greg’s child-Greg’s only child Roland wants to acknowledge, certainly. He’s happy Greg’s going to be a father, really he is, but goddamnit, a preying mantis would make a better mother than Ruby would. Fuck, Ruby is a preying mantis-looks just like one too, tall and brittle and bug-eyed. He’s surprised Ruby hasn’t bitten off Greg’s head during sex yet, not that he wants to think about Greg having sex with her, to picture her acid-green nails raking down his back-
Beware, my lord, of jealousy, he knows, and fuck that, this is a different context anyway.
Anyway, the Lokapala started out as a bunch of them sitting around and playing video games and talking all kinds of self-important political bullshit. It was Roland’s junior year, the first year at Reed he spent without Greg; without Greg isn’t strictly accurate, but though Greg was a presence he wasn’t cohabitating, he was working on his Masters at Portland State until he decided that he was needed more elsewhere, until the proto-Lokapala stopped goofing off and followed him to the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, recently stripped of its status and sold to a logging company. They spent three weeks that summer living in the trees and hurling insults (Greg wouldn’t let them hurl beer cans) down at the loggers until the media got wind of what they were doing and twisted the company’s arm, made them back down and abandon the operation. Saving the trees was great, worthwhile and noble and netted him a thousand bucks when his essay about the whole thing won the Atlantic Monthly student writing contest-he still can’t believe he did that, even if Greg keeps assuring him he deserved to-but the best part about it was Greg. He keeps a picture in his wallet from those days: Greg leaning against Serenidad the tree, eyes half-lidded to shield him from the glare of the sun overhead, back straight and one leg stretched out in front of him. He looks like a king, or something even older than that.
The world kept changing, seas rising and earth scorching, and they tried to keep up with it, stay one step ahead of the people who wanted to make it worse. The whole thing still makes him feel like a superhero, sometimes-by day Roland Marks, mild-mannered English grad student, by night Super-Roland (he needs a better name for his alter-ego, but he has time to work out the etymological kinks), defender of the planet. It’s like that fucking awful kid’s show from the nineties, except pollution really is the villain now if Greg’s to be believed, and Roland believes Greg. Roland believes in Greg. He can’t envision it any other way.
And then Jenna Angel-speaking of etymological appropriateness-released her findings on God, and Greg…Greg wasn’t at a loss, Roland can’t imagine him being directionless like that, but Greg was recalibrating. Adjusting his internal compass. That’s when he met Ruby, fucking Ruby with her sharp-toothed smiles and insinuations, she’d never live in a tree for three weeks, so clearly something went wrong when he magnetized the needle.
He called them together again, though, seven months after the wedding. Roland was best man, of course. Who else. Is there a word in the English language for “standing next to your best friend as he displays a lack of foresight for the first time in his life and wishing like hell you could shove aside the conniving demon he’s marrying and take her place by his other side, be with him the way you’ve wanted since you were a skinny bespectacled freshman and he was something even your prodigious vocabulary couldn’t quite describe and it’s been like that ever since”?
Well, there’s always fucked, but he only wishes he had the other connotations associated with the verb.
They’re in Greg’s basement-Ruby’s out, thank god-sprawled across the overstuffed sofa and chairs just like old days, but the TV’s off and they can afford better beer now.
“If God has hardened towards us,” Greg says, “we must prove ourselves worthy of his trust again.”
“How?” That’s Adil; he double-majored in chemistry and art back at Reed, and he’s never stopped wearing that stupid beret he found for three dollars in a thrift store in downtown Portland.
“Three things,” Greg says. “We preserve the Earth where we can, restore it where it’s been destroyed, and oppose anyone who aids in its destruction.”
“But we’re not doing that crazy ELF shit, right?” Samantha asks. She’s new, a friend of Adil’s from work. She scratches the swollen skin around his nose ring; she just got it in yesterday. “I mean, I don’t want to set fire to SUVs or anything.”
“I don’t think those tactics are necessary yet,” Greg answers.
Roland hears him. “Yet.”
“I can’t say what the future will bring.” Greg stands up, looks at them all, and to a man (and woman) they look up at him. “But I want to make it a better one, and I’m willing to do what’s right and what’s necessary to ensure that. I want my child to grow up and prosper, and I want my child to face his life without fearing what the next day might bring. I think we’re capable of bringing that about. I wouldn’t have called you here if I thought otherwise. I won’t force you to follow me, but I do need your help.” He folds his arms over his chest.
Fuck the sun, fuck Jenna Angel, fuck God, if Roland has to believe in something, let it be this. “I’m with you,” he says. “You know that.”
The stern lines around Greg’s mouth fade. “Thanks.”
“It’s big,” he says. “The scope of this-” He runs his hands through his hair. “And I’m scared as hell. But I’m with you.” Because that won’t change, that’ll never change between him and Greg, Greg will be there and Roland will be with him, dragging his feet and complaining the entire time but with him all the same. And yeah, he can already envision what might happen to them, how they might get ground into pieces by woodchippers or set on fire by angry SUV owners or any number of other gruesome fates-you can’t say he doesn’t have an active imagination-but maybe, maybe Greg’s enough, maybe together they’ll all be enough.
“There should be something orchestral swelling in the background right now,” Roland says. “Something suitably revolutionary. Probably percussive, too.”
Adil throws a pillow at him. It catches him in the face.
“Seriously, though,” he says once he’s pulled the pillow away. “We do have a plan, right?”
“We do,” Greg says. “And we won’t be reliant on the press this time. Come here…”
***
“Fred brought it back, I remember.” Roland eyes the glowing red terminal. It’s humming to itself peacefully enough, washing his and Argilla’s skin in pulsing light. “But I didn’t think it served a purpose.”
“It’s a karma terminal,” Argilla says. “They were everywhere in the Junkyard. It’s hard to explain…we just knew how to use them. We didn’t question it until later.”
“How do you use them?” he asks.
“You insert your tag ring-but we don’t have tag rings here.” She worries at her lower lip. “The way this one is shaped, it looks like you might be able to press your palm against it, here.”
Roland follows her instructions. The console throbs under his fingertips, not just the warmth from the lights cycling through, but something else, some other rhythm entirely, one his atma’s humming in time with. He shivers but doesn’t pull back. He’s doing this now. He’s committed to this course of action. He’s made his choice. No turning back. “What do I do next?”
A thought occurs to him-“Will this work? It sounds like the terminals you used were designed for, well, raw data. Can humans-those born human,” he amends, “can they access it in the same way?”
“You told me that humans were data, too,” she says.
“Yes, but-” He struggles to form the proper objection. “Yes, but we can’t download raw data. We’re not built to be conduits, we don’t have that kind of direct access…”
Argilla purses her lips, hums, considers. “If everything is data,” she says, “and humans interact with their surroundings and take things from them-physical things, and thoughts and memories-then aren’t they accessing and processing data? You’ve never tried it this way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I think so, anyway,” she adds. “I sound like Gale.”
He shakes his head. “You sound like yourself.”
She smiles. It’s real.
The screen drones and lightens. Strange characters swarm over it, snippets of languages he only half-recognizes in bright green and cold white, and when they resolve there’s white text set against a marbled blue background, lists of-he squints. Lists of skills? Data sets? Enchantments? Are they all the same thing at heart? There are three or four of them bundled together in each hexagonal package. Some of the hexagons are dark-those are closed off to him, he guesses-but others glow, beckon, invite inspection.
“Why can’t I see them all?” he asks.
“Some of the skills build on previously existing knowledge,” she says. “I think there are better ways to explain it than that, but…”
“No, it makes sense,” Roland says. “You can’t write a novel if you haven’t learned to spell first. Unless you’re me. But skillsets build, knowledge accumulates and feeds off what’s gone before, that’s very human.”
She nods. Is that the same smile from earlier, or is that a new one? “Others require-I think the word is currency. The currency we used was different, but I remember…” She trails off. “I remember exchanging currency for things.”
“Goods and services, generally,” Roland says.
“Yes. Those. These karma terminals must operate by those principles, too.”
“You don’t get anything for free.” He sighs. “I guess that’s a constant.”
“I think you’re right.”
He flexes his fingers against the console again, feels them skid across the heated glass. “And I can learn any of these? Anything I can afford?”
“Yes.”
He shakes his head again. “It still seems so Gibson to me. Downloading knowledge. I guess I’m used to it being tangible, I never thought this kind of technology would be realized, especially given-well, everything.” Though cyberpunk usually does go hand-in-hand with dystopia, and if this doesn’t qualify as dystopia, then nothing does or ever will.
Argilla blinks once, twice, three times.
“I must sound like a lunatic,” he says.
“No. It isn’t that. Your knowledge is different than mine, that’s all. I was just thinking about that.”
He shrugs. “Maybe your knowledge is what I need.” What the Lokapala needs, what the world needs now. Efficiency, lethality, straightforwardness. No quandaries, no philosophical debates, just-fact. Data. Zeroes and ones, binary values, it is or it isn’t and that’s all there is to it. Or all there isn’t to it.
She looks down, takes her time before she speaks. “There’s something true about your way, though. I can’t explain it any better than that, but I-I feel it.”
He turns towards her, takes her hand again. Maybe there’s something incongruously innocent about holding hands with an AI-turned-human at the end of the world, but maybe he can use a little of her logic here, see this for what it is. Him holding her hand. No grand statements, no implications about the human condition, just the two of them here. Maybe. It’s a change, certainly, and he’s not quite sure what to make of it.
Or maybe it can be both. True in his head and in his heart. Synthesis, two halves working in concert for something greater.
“What do you think I should learn?” he asks her.
She closes her eyes. “You have things that you’re good at.”
“I wouldn’t go that far-”
“Affinities,” she continues. “Strengths. Attachments to different elements and fighting styles-I think I’m explaining this correctly.”
“I’m following you,” he says. “Go on.”
“Eventually you’ll need to cover your weaknesses. But right now, I think you should build on your strengths.”
I don’t have any springs to mind, but he suppresses it. “How do I know what those are?”
“Indra knows,” Argilla says. “Listen to him.”
He nods and closes his eyes, doesn’t tune with his atma, exactly, but taps into it, finds Indra’s consciousness sizzling under his and listens.
The pulsing, he realizes. The pulsing of the karma terminal. The rhythm matches my heartbeat.
“Lightning,” he says, half in a trance. “Weather and war. Strength, overpowering, conquering. A curse,” that one’s deeper than the others, some primal truth unrelated to fighting. “Atonement…”
“Open your eyes,” Argilla says softly. Her hand travels up his arm, rests at the crook of his elbow.
“These abilities,” he says, gestures to the appropriate hexagon with a twitch of his fingers. “I need to devour to be able to use them?”
She nods.
“I’ll do it,” he says, and kisses her. Her mouth’s warm, soft, not pliant but-comfortable, the way his tongue slides over hers feels right, sends soft sparks showering down his spine. She slides her other hand along his cheek, cups the back of his head and pulls him closer. The gesture’s deliberate, almost experimentation; has she done this before, he wonders?
He breaks away to ask.
“Yes,” she says, “but not with you.”
“Right,” he manages before she leans in and presses her lips to his again.
***
“Fuck,” Roland moans, “fuck, fuck fuck…”
There’s blood on his sleeve, on his cheek, sulfur clinging to his hair and clothes. He’s shaking, singed, drenched in sweat and clinging to the wall because if he doesn’t his legs will give out from under him.
“It’s my fault,” Greg says, ash under his dark skin. “They didn’t have a guard posted when we scouted them out. I should have ordered more reconnaissance-”
“Fuck,” Roland says again, because greater coherency escapes him right now, thanks. “Greg, what the fuck are we doing?”
Greg squeezes his eyes shut, presses his lips together in a line. “What we have to.”
Roland inches towards him, wants to march but his legs are still shaking too badly to do that. His fists tremble. “Samantha,” he says. “Samantha’s burned-Greg, her face, she burned off almost half her face. And for a bunch of rhesus monkeys?”
Greg turns away, doesn’t slam his fist into the wall because he’s too fucking composed to but the effect’s the same. “You said you were with me. You said that wouldn’t change.”
“Fuck you,” Roland says. “Don’t you dare try to guilt-trip me. Rhesus monkeys, Greg. We don’t have unlimited manpower, all right? We have who we have, and I don’t want to lose them,” I don’t want to lose you, “we have to think about who we can risk and how we can minimize that-”
“You think I don’t consider that?” It’s hard to see the spots of color flaring on Greg’s cheeks, but Roland knows they’re there. “Do you think I don’t know what their lives are worth?”
“I don’t know.” Roland looks down, refuses to meet Greg’s eyes. “Do you?”
“Life is sacred-”
“Life. The general term. Not their lives, just the concept of life. If life-the concept, not theirs-continues, then you’ve succeeded, you think. But life isn’t equal like that, it means more if they die than it would if a bunch of lab monkeys did.”
Greg stares at him. “No,” he says, quiet disgust simmering underneath the word. “If I make those kinds of judgments, if I say that some people have more of a right to live than others do, then I’m a hypocrite. I’m no better than the people we’re opposing.”
“So you’re a hypocrite,” Roland spits. A spasm of pain shoots down his arm, knots up his shoulder; he grits his teeth against it and barrels on. “We’re all fucking hypocrites, Greg, that’s the goddamn human condition. Do you want to die?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Because there’s no honor in death,” Roland continues, “there’s no glory or nobility of spirit, there’s just pain and mess and-”
“I know.” Rims of white flare around Greg’s nostrils. “I don’t want any of us to die. I-” He sighs. “I don’t want you to die. Does that make me a hypocrite?”
And fuck if Roland’s stupid heart doesn’t start to beat faster at that, throw itself against his ribcage in a frenzied fit of lust-excitement.
“Because it would be different if you died,” Greg says. “Maybe not to the world at large, and I know that’s what I have to consider, that’s what I have to keep in mind, but it would be different to me.”
“Greg,” he whispers. Is this-is it finally-
“And I’ve been fighting against that,” Greg continues, “but I haven’t been very successful.”
“Why the fuck are you fighting against it?” he finally manages, once his lungs remember how to draw in air again. “Greg, for the love of Christ, you know-”
“Because I can’t,” he says.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
Greg sighs again; if he wasn’t Greg, Roland would say he shrinks against the wall, but he can’t imagine Greg shrinking. “I have responsibilities,” he says. “That doesn’t change. To the Lokapala, to Ruby-”
“Oh, fuck Ruby,” Roland snaps.
“She’s my wife,” Greg says. “The mother of my child. I have to honor that.”
“Then divorce her.” He doesn’t add she thinks you’re screwing me, anyway because he’s pretty sure Greg and Ruby have already fought about that one. Or done that terse clipped thing that passes for fighting between the two of them, where they speak in strained voices and Ruby hisses insults at Greg until it’s enough to drive him out of the house. “You won’t be the first man to get a divorce.”
“I have to try and make it work.” Greg sounds tired, bone-tired. “I gave my word that I would.”
Greg and his word. Forget about your word, he should say, but he knows Greg better than that.
“So what do we do?” he asks instead.
“What we have to,” Greg says. “That doesn’t change.”
“Yeah.” His legs jerk out from under him and he gives into it, slides down the wall until he’s sprawled out at the foot of it. “Where to next?”
“You’re still in this?” Greg asks.
“That doesn’t change, either.”
Greg smiles, crouches down next to him. “You know the Karma Society.”
“Yeah, I know the Karma Society. Everyone in Portland knows the Karma Society.” Vaguely. Everyone knows about it, but everyone works from hazy outlines and half-remembered details; no one has a complete picture, and the Karma Society seems to like it that way.
“Adil knows some of the delivery men working there.”
“Adil knows everyone.”
“Yes,” Greg agrees. “But we have a possible in, if we want to try infiltrating it.”
Roland shakes his head. “I still can’t believe we’re doing this, sometimes.” Definitely taking the road less traveled by, and it has made all the difference, but he’s pretty sure this isn’t what Frost meant by the poem.
“I know,” Greg says, rough and soothing at the same time, probably like the way Greg’s arms would feel if he wrapped them around Roland and meant it. “But we’ll be all right.”
***
“What do you remember?” he asks Argilla, trails his fingers down the line of her stomach. He kisses the skin above her navel, tasting it, tasting her, learning what to expect.
She half-hums half-sighs, arches her head back and rolls her hips. “Fragments, mostly,” she says. “I know what things mean, sometimes, but I don’t know why I know them. Or how.”
“You don’t have context,” he says. “That’s the difference between the way you acquire knowledge and the way I’m used to doing it. You get it all at once, I-have memories associated with the process, tangential to it, I guess, connections that aren’t logical, that don’t proceed directly from the facts.” He sighs, drops a kiss to the hollow between her breasts. “It’s like-what’s one of the things you know, but you aren’t sure how?”
“Children,” she says. “I knew what the word meant, but there weren’t any children in the Junkyard. I didn’t realize that until Lupa pointed it out to us.”
Lupa. His chest constricts. Speaking of connections and associations. “Child, to me, means Fred. There are other children, of course, even now, but he’s the strongest association I have with the word, the concept. I remember changing his diapers when he was a baby-Ruby didn’t like it when I’d try to do other things for him, but she didn’t mind it when I took that job off her hands.”
“Ruby?” Argilla asks.
“Fred’s mother.” A dry laugh forces its way out of Roland’s throat. “She hated me. Really hated me. It was entirely mutual. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else being close to Greg, and I couldn’t stand the thought of her being close to Greg.”
“You loved him,” Argilla says.
“Yeah.” He rolls to the side, props himself up on his elbows. “For years. That never changed. A lot of things changed. I did, he did, the world did, it felt like there was too much going on and not enough time to learn it all, but that-that was always the same, and I clung to it. And then he was gone, and I didn’t have that anymore, just-uncertainty, panic, never knowing who’s going to be taken away next.” Never knowing who he’d end up sending to their deaths, never knowing how badly he’d screwed up until the damage was irreversible. “I had booze. That was about it, that was all I could call familiar. So I clung to that next, and you saw how that turned out.”
“You never saw yourself as a leader?”
“No. Leader meant Greg. I think it still means Greg, in some ways. Could you imagine anyone other than Serph leading you?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t think that’s-programming’s your word for it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think that’s programming. I think it’s just Serph. We talked about that, back in the Junkyard. How none of us would follow any of the other Tribe leaders if they vanquished us, even if the rules told us we had to.”
“Humans never found a rule they couldn’t break,” Roland says.
“Then we’re human?”
“You’re perplexing, challenging, sometimes irrational, and utterly impossible to describe,” he says. “You’re human.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It is what it is. But in your case?” He smiles. “I think it’s good. Or it has the potential to be good.”
She grabs his hair and pulls him down for another kiss-slow this time, not like the rushed breathless kisses from before, almost languorous. He brushes his fingers along her neck, across her collarbone, feeling the movement in her blood and breath.
“So what do you think you’ll do now?” she asks him, her voice warm against his ear.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s new. But I can learn.”
Well, no, I won't, but I didn't expect this thing to get so -- um, devouring. And it doesn't even have sex in it.
I think I like it, though. I really do.
Also, I wrote something that isn't fuck-all depressing, for once. In this fandom, no less! Yay!
Title: Etymology
Author: puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language, implied sexual content
Wordcount: 7,000
Prompt: Roland/Argilla - education - the pursuit of memory
A/N: So late. D: And apologies for deviations from the prompt. This, um, kind of went its own way. Roland's last name was mithrigil's idea first.
The back of his hand sears, burns white-hot, and the sensation keeps jerking Roland awake just as his eyes get ready to drift closed. He sighs, rubs his throbbing head, tries to soothe the voice screaming underneath his thoughts. Indra. He doesn’t know how he knows it’s-he’s-called Indra, can’t explain it, definitely can’t rationalize it because this is the opposite of rationality, this is so insane that it goes around full-circle and becomes sane again, acquires some twisted kind of logic in the process. Or maybe this is something older than intellect, older than reason, older than sense, and by thinking about it at all, he’s getting it wrong. He has to understand it some other way.
-He’s hungry. He didn’t know he could be this hungry. Hell, he’s not even sure if hunger’s the word for it, since hunger’s a pang but this is sheer torment, pain and emptiness twined together and ripping him up from the inside. It claws at his stomach, roars in his blood, this-this drumbeat, it’s almost atavistic, this incessant pounding, this demand for food and slaughter and devouring. Colored lines pulse outward from his atma and scorch his veins. He doubles over, his hands gripping the edge of his desk and trembling at the effort or trembling at something else entirely or both; his stomach seizes and lurches and twists and he cries out, braces himself against the change. His ears fill with white noise, his eyes with red clouds. Not here, he thinks, not now, fuck. Maybe he says some of it aloud. He’s going to break his goddamn desk in half and that makes him wheeze with laughter for some reason, forces hot harsh air out of his lungs. He’s turning into a monster and he’s worrying about breaking his desk. Humans are really fucking incongruous sometimes.
“Have you been eating?”
Argilla. Roland wrenches his head towards the door and hopes his face isn’t as contorted as he thinks it is. “I didn’t know you-ah-didn’t know you had to do it so regularly.” Another spasm of hunger ripples through his body, sends him to his knees.
She nods once, her lips thin and drawn. “If you don’t devour, the virus takes control. You transform, and you don’t come back. You go mad.”
Her words knock the wind out of his lungs. He barely manages an “oh.” Then he laughs, because he just remembered-“We’re all mad here,” he says, because even though he’s not human anymore he’s still a facetious bastard.
Argilla frowns. “What?”
“It’s from a book. A children’s book. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.” Is the roaring in his blood dulling any? The lightning seems to be ebbing from his veins, retreating back into his atma. Or maybe he’s imagining things. Or maybe if he imagines hard enough, it’ll become real. It might be true, anything might be true these days, and isn’t that how the AIs (his comrades, he adds, and it’s almost starting to feel right to think of them that way) came about in the first place. “And we’ve been down the rabbit hole for a while now.”
She stares at him like he’s the weird one, crossing her arms over her chest. “Down the rabbit hole?”
“It’s a feeling you get, sometimes. A feeling that you’ve entered a world where nothing makes sense, where everything’s inverted.” He bucks forward when the hunger pangs surge and surface again. His forehead collides with the edge of the desk with a sharp crack, and that’s a distraction from the other pain at least. Sharper, localized. “Sometimes it’s a metaphor for drug trips. But not this time.”
Argilla, it seems, doesn’t know what to say to that, so she settles for grabbing him by the back of his shirt-fuck, she’s strong-and pulling him away from the desk, prying his hands off the wood in the process. “You need rations,” she says. “Stay here. Think-” Her voice trails off. “Do you know what music is?”
“Yeah, I know what music is.” He clutches his forehead, rakes his nails across his hairline, feels his atma sizzle under his skin. God almighty his head’s on fire; it feels like he’s bathing in a sea of it. He flushes all over, shakes.
“Think of a song.” She clears her throat. Her voice is husky, low, almost more breath than sound and what sound there is quavers instead of sounding clearly, but there’s something familiar about it, about her hand resting on his forehead.
“Light shines on heaven,” she sings. She draws away from him (stay, he wants to tell her, but the words get caught up in his throat) and moves towards the door. “I don’t have Sera’s power, but if you think of the song, it might help.”
“Right.” He closes his eyes, sees yellow lines stretching across the insides of his eyelids. He hasn’t sung in he doesn’t know how long. The last year he spent working on his Masters, when he and Greg went camping and-no, even though it happened years ago it’s still too close, so he hisses and pulls away from that memory. “Light shines over heaven,” he sings instead, trying to match her about an octave lower.
“I’ll be back,” she promises.
Indra shrieks, and Roland drowns in the sound, sinks closer to it, falls-
***
They have an outing club at Reed College. Their whole thing is student-run and -organized trips: kayaking on the Santiam River, hiking up Mt. Hood, spelunking in the Ape Caves, climbing around on the glaciers on Mt. Adams, things like that. Real discover-yourself-in-the-wilderness stuff-it’s you with the pounding rapids and towering peaks and dank caves and craggy ice, not against it. Roland’s mostly doing it because Greg’s involved, which is an apt description of most of the things Roland’s done over his first semester-and-a-half at Reed. And Greg-
There’s no one like Greg, Roland’s decided. Greg sees things-it’s not just the pseudointellectual college bullshit that Roland’s so good at dealing in, it’s clarity, it’s insight, it’s passion burning under his skin with a slow and steady flame and he’s the moth in the analogy. Oh, is he ever the moth. To belabor the point even further, it is the east, and Greg is the sun. He sounds like an idiot teenager when he phrases it that way, not to mention “Greg” doesn’t scan properly, but hell, the idiot teenager part’s apt, too. He’s still vaguely surprised that Greg puts up with him, this reedy little underclassman with three boxes of books under his bed and a bigger vocabulary than he knows what to do with.
(Well, Greg mostly puts up with him. Greg hasn’t said anything about the bottles of vodka Roland keeps stashed in the air duct, but his silence says more than words ever could; it’s the only thing cold about him.)
“Why do they call it Saddle Mountain?” he asks Greg. The pack digs into his shoulders; he throttles his walking stick until his knuckles turn white around it, digs it into the soft soil and uses the leverage to propel himself forwards. He should be glad Greg decided not to do the Saddle Mountain hike in the middle of winter.
“The shape.” Greg raises his sunglasses. “There are two peaks, and the valley between them looks like a saddle, therefore.”
“Not very creative of them,” Roland says.
Greg shrugs. “Accuracy over creativity.”
Roland rolls his eyes, fights the urge to thwap Greg with the walking stick. “You have no facility for poetry. Or any appreciation for etymology. Which peak are we climbing?”
“The taller one. You can’t get to the lower peak from the trails.”
Roland groans. “Fuck.”
“It’s worse in the winter,” Greg says.
“Bad enough in the spring.” He tries to step forward, but his leg has other ideas. He catches his foot on a rock and overbalances, falls funny on his right ankle, shit, just what he needs, get a faceful of dirt while Greg’s watching.
Greg grabs him around the wrist, hauls him to his feet, pack and all. “Are you all right?” he asks.
Roland shifts his weight to his right foot as gingerly as he can. A twinge of pain flares in his leg, but nothing bad. “Yeah. Might’ve bruised my ass, but nothing I can’t handle.”
“The trail gets steeper,” Greg warns him.
“Can’t we climb a mountain with a gentler incline or something next time?” Roland’s foot still protests and knots up when he steps forward, but he ignores it, puts it at the back of his mind, glares at the spring foliage instead. Tiny buds cluster together at the end of a branch; the calyx curls back from one of them, exposes the raw green underneath. It’s pale enough to be sickly, though he’s sure Greg will reassure him that the color’s healthy, that he should check out some of the wildflowers in bloom, that the season’s progressing the way it should. He rubs his forehead. He’s not exactly Thoreau; the idylls of nature are well enough, but he misses electricity and showers and microwaved popcorn. Still, he guesses he could whip all this up into a poem for his 201 seminar. His professor makes a habit of ragging on him for being too derivative, masking his voice in the affectations of other writers or whatever that means. He tries to defend it as allusion, but he’s losing the war. He’s won a few battles, but he’s losing the war.
“Mountains with gentler inclines are hills, Roland.”
“So we can be noble Dukes of York,” he says, partially because Greg hates it when he engages in what Greg calls “Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome.”
This time, though, Greg just snorts. “Where are you going to find ten thousand men?”
“That’s your problem,” Roland says. “You’re the one in the leadership position, aren’t you?”
“…yeah.” Greg squats, runs his finger under the petals of a wildflower just starting to peek from its bud, its petals a brilliant dappled yellow in the afternoon sun. “Development of student leadership. Roland?”
He hunkers down next to Greg, gives his legs a chance to rest and waits for the stabbing pains in his chest to ease. The air’s thinner up here; he still hasn’t completely acclimated yet. “Yeah?”
“I’d planned on leading another glacier hike at Mount Adams,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t. The glacier’s retreated too far. It isn’t stable anymore; there are faults in the ice, crevasses, whole chunks sliding away...”
“Global warming’s a bitch.”
Greg nods, rests his chin on his fist and stares at the yellow flower. “Ecological change, yeah. It’s getting severe. The world’s changing. I know every college student comes to that conclusion eventually, but-” He hesitates. “I think there’s more to this than personal maturity.”
“Surely some revelation is at hand,” Roland quotes.
Greg frowns. “Is that TS Eliot?”
TS Eliot. Roland stares at him, mouth agape. Yeah, Greg’s knowledge of poetry could charitably be called minimal, but come on. “It’s ‘The Second Coming,’” he says. “Yeats. It’s famous. You must have read it in English class. I can’t believe you’ve made it through your entirely scholarly career without coming across that poem. It’s a classic. Come on. ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’? ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’? ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’? This is a goddamned deficiency. This is cultural ignorance.”
Greg shoves him facefirst into the wildflowers. He coughs, splutters, and the petals tickle his nose. “You asshole,” he says when he stops choking down pollen.
“Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome,” Greg counters. “It’s worse than Cuvier’s.”
A memory stirs-his aunt’s hand knotted into a club at her side, stiff and unmoving. “Is that what they’re calling it?” Roland asks.
“After the woman who discovered it.” He smiles. “Accuracy over creativity.”
“You’ve killed poetry,” Roland says. “You’ve butchered it, dismembered it, and buried its corpse beneath the wildflowers.” Well, the flowers make it a fitting kind of funeral, he guesses.
Greg shakes his head. Roland tends to elicit that kind of response in him.
“Cuvier’s, though.” Roland rubs the last few smudges of pollen off his glasses. “I thought it was a hoax at first. I still sort of do, I think.”
“I’d have thought it would appeal to you,” Greg says. “People turning to stone.”
“Yeah, but that’s metaphorical.”
Roland barely hears the next part, Greg says it so softly: “It isn’t.”
Roland’s torn between asking What? and How do you know that? but the latter implies that on some level he believes it, so he guesses the former question’s useless. It makes a twisted kind of sense, doesn’t it? The world might end in 2012, if the Mayans were right. Or a few years later. Or not at all, though the last seems the most unlikely case these days. Maybe thoughts of impending apocalypse are another symptom of Overeducated Underclassman Syndrome, but he’s starting to doubt it. He’s starting to doubt a lot of things.
“The stone doesn’t form until the last stages of the syndrome,” Greg says. “Most recorded cases haven’t progressed that far. I checked.”
“Most cases,” Roland echoes. I checked, Greg said, and maybe that’s the part he should be asking about.
Greg sits back on his heels and stares up. Roland follows his gaze. It’s a clear day, unblemished sky and beaming sun, and sprigs of green carpet the mountain’s peak, dotted with yellow blossoms. “A man I knew reached that stage,” Greg says, and Roland doesn’t press the issue further. “I saw his arm.”
“It was stone?”
“Mottled grey skin, cold petrified flesh…” Greg trails off. “I didn’t conduct tests, but that’s what it looked like.”
“I should be more skeptical about all of this, shouldn’t I?” Roland asks.
Greg’s stare is level, unblinking, and Roland can’t turn away. “Should you? Maybe the problem with the world,” he says, “is that nobody believes in anything anymore.”
***
The stench of raw meat hits his nostrils. Raw rotting meat, he amends. The fact that the smell doesn’t make him sick makes him sick-fuck, that makes no sense, but neither does anything else, so he’s all right. For certain definitions of “all right,” none of which can be found in a conventional dictionary.
Argilla-no, Prithvi, she tunes with her atma as she walks in-drops the meat in front of his nose; he lurches forward with a strangled gasp, claws at it-human nails, for now, the song or something about it might’ve held Indra at bay for a while but smell’s too much and Indra’s hunger sears him to the core, surges under his skin and forces its way out, shoots to the surface-
rend slaughter devour your enemies
-ribbons of flesh between his teeth and blood saturating his tongue and it feels right-
More, he needs more, he laps the last of the gore from the floor and it’s not enough, nothing’s enough, he lunges at Prithvi (Argilla, he remembers, she’s Argilla) and tries to bring her flesh to his mouth, but she twists and dodges and wraps her whips around his head, halts him and flings him to the ground. His rage shakes the floorboards.
“Stop it,” Prithvi’s mouths growl. “You’re not just Indra, you’re Roland.”
Roland. The word slams against his consciousness, cold water breaking over fevered thoughts, and he remembers. The lightning leeches away, and then he’s just Roland again, Roland with the coppery taste of blood still thick in his mouth and rotten meat stuck under his fingernails.
“Thank you,” he coughs more than says, pulls himself to his knees.
Argilla kneels next to him. Human again, he notices. “You have to devour to survive,” she says; the words twist her mouth, ruin its perfect symmetry. “That’s-part of who you are.”
He coughs again. Water streams from the corners of his eyes. Not tears. He isn’t crying. He isn’t making a complete emotional idiot of himself in front of this woman (and he can call her that now, because if she’s not human he isn’t either, the definition of humanity is really a matter of semantics now). Right, if he keeps telling himself that it might stick someday. “But it isn’t everything.”
She bows her head. “I don’t want it to be.”
“You’re-” He shakes his head, swallows. “You’re more than that.”
She tilts her head to the side; the gesture’s almost birdlike. “Are you crying?”
Shit. “No. A little bit. I’m sorry you had to learn about that one.”
“I think…” Argilla hesitates. “I think knowing that you can hurt makes the moments when you don’t better. You can appreciate what they mean.”
Roland closes his eyes. “You’re probably right,” he says, because she is, and he doesn’t need any more justification than that, not right now. “It’s a balancing act. Even now-Indra and me, Prithvi and you-that’s a balancing act, too.” There’s a more elegant way to phrase it, but he’s tired, tired down to his bones, and resting like this with his back propped against his bed is easy, letting his mind leap wherever it wants to is easy. “Argilla?”
“Yes?”
This might sound entirely too pathetic. The hell with it. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you?”
“Show me how to manage this,” he says. “How to keep from losing myself.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she says after a pause. “Before I transformed, I didn’t know I had a self to lose.”
“But now you know. And you wouldn’t want to lose that.” He lets his head loll back, flop against his mattress. “Neither do I. I’ve seen what other men become when they change. I’ve seen what they lose. I don’t want that. I won’t be able to fight if I’m like that,” he adds; maybe she’ll get that line of reasoning. “I’ll be of even less use,” if such a thing is possible.
“I think it’s something you need to find within yourself,” she says.
“Then help me look.” He reaches for her hand; she lets him. Her skin’s smooth, hairless, unbroken, nothing like his, not worn down and leathered from all work and no play. (Makes Jack a dull boy, his brain supplies, and well, King’s probably appropriate right now.) “Please.”
She hesitates, then nods. “All right.”
***
Roland comes up with the name.
“Lokapala,” he says. “It’s a Hindu term. Means ‘guardian of the gods,’ or, and I think this is the translation we’re going for, ‘guardian of the world.’” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Well?”
“I like it,” Greg says.
It goes without saying that the Lokapala is Greg’s idea, Greg’s child-Greg’s only child Roland wants to acknowledge, certainly. He’s happy Greg’s going to be a father, really he is, but goddamnit, a preying mantis would make a better mother than Ruby would. Fuck, Ruby is a preying mantis-looks just like one too, tall and brittle and bug-eyed. He’s surprised Ruby hasn’t bitten off Greg’s head during sex yet, not that he wants to think about Greg having sex with her, to picture her acid-green nails raking down his back-
Beware, my lord, of jealousy, he knows, and fuck that, this is a different context anyway.
Anyway, the Lokapala started out as a bunch of them sitting around and playing video games and talking all kinds of self-important political bullshit. It was Roland’s junior year, the first year at Reed he spent without Greg; without Greg isn’t strictly accurate, but though Greg was a presence he wasn’t cohabitating, he was working on his Masters at Portland State until he decided that he was needed more elsewhere, until the proto-Lokapala stopped goofing off and followed him to the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, recently stripped of its status and sold to a logging company. They spent three weeks that summer living in the trees and hurling insults (Greg wouldn’t let them hurl beer cans) down at the loggers until the media got wind of what they were doing and twisted the company’s arm, made them back down and abandon the operation. Saving the trees was great, worthwhile and noble and netted him a thousand bucks when his essay about the whole thing won the Atlantic Monthly student writing contest-he still can’t believe he did that, even if Greg keeps assuring him he deserved to-but the best part about it was Greg. He keeps a picture in his wallet from those days: Greg leaning against Serenidad the tree, eyes half-lidded to shield him from the glare of the sun overhead, back straight and one leg stretched out in front of him. He looks like a king, or something even older than that.
The world kept changing, seas rising and earth scorching, and they tried to keep up with it, stay one step ahead of the people who wanted to make it worse. The whole thing still makes him feel like a superhero, sometimes-by day Roland Marks, mild-mannered English grad student, by night Super-Roland (he needs a better name for his alter-ego, but he has time to work out the etymological kinks), defender of the planet. It’s like that fucking awful kid’s show from the nineties, except pollution really is the villain now if Greg’s to be believed, and Roland believes Greg. Roland believes in Greg. He can’t envision it any other way.
And then Jenna Angel-speaking of etymological appropriateness-released her findings on God, and Greg…Greg wasn’t at a loss, Roland can’t imagine him being directionless like that, but Greg was recalibrating. Adjusting his internal compass. That’s when he met Ruby, fucking Ruby with her sharp-toothed smiles and insinuations, she’d never live in a tree for three weeks, so clearly something went wrong when he magnetized the needle.
He called them together again, though, seven months after the wedding. Roland was best man, of course. Who else. Is there a word in the English language for “standing next to your best friend as he displays a lack of foresight for the first time in his life and wishing like hell you could shove aside the conniving demon he’s marrying and take her place by his other side, be with him the way you’ve wanted since you were a skinny bespectacled freshman and he was something even your prodigious vocabulary couldn’t quite describe and it’s been like that ever since”?
Well, there’s always fucked, but he only wishes he had the other connotations associated with the verb.
They’re in Greg’s basement-Ruby’s out, thank god-sprawled across the overstuffed sofa and chairs just like old days, but the TV’s off and they can afford better beer now.
“If God has hardened towards us,” Greg says, “we must prove ourselves worthy of his trust again.”
“How?” That’s Adil; he double-majored in chemistry and art back at Reed, and he’s never stopped wearing that stupid beret he found for three dollars in a thrift store in downtown Portland.
“Three things,” Greg says. “We preserve the Earth where we can, restore it where it’s been destroyed, and oppose anyone who aids in its destruction.”
“But we’re not doing that crazy ELF shit, right?” Samantha asks. She’s new, a friend of Adil’s from work. She scratches the swollen skin around his nose ring; she just got it in yesterday. “I mean, I don’t want to set fire to SUVs or anything.”
“I don’t think those tactics are necessary yet,” Greg answers.
Roland hears him. “Yet.”
“I can’t say what the future will bring.” Greg stands up, looks at them all, and to a man (and woman) they look up at him. “But I want to make it a better one, and I’m willing to do what’s right and what’s necessary to ensure that. I want my child to grow up and prosper, and I want my child to face his life without fearing what the next day might bring. I think we’re capable of bringing that about. I wouldn’t have called you here if I thought otherwise. I won’t force you to follow me, but I do need your help.” He folds his arms over his chest.
Fuck the sun, fuck Jenna Angel, fuck God, if Roland has to believe in something, let it be this. “I’m with you,” he says. “You know that.”
The stern lines around Greg’s mouth fade. “Thanks.”
“It’s big,” he says. “The scope of this-” He runs his hands through his hair. “And I’m scared as hell. But I’m with you.” Because that won’t change, that’ll never change between him and Greg, Greg will be there and Roland will be with him, dragging his feet and complaining the entire time but with him all the same. And yeah, he can already envision what might happen to them, how they might get ground into pieces by woodchippers or set on fire by angry SUV owners or any number of other gruesome fates-you can’t say he doesn’t have an active imagination-but maybe, maybe Greg’s enough, maybe together they’ll all be enough.
“There should be something orchestral swelling in the background right now,” Roland says. “Something suitably revolutionary. Probably percussive, too.”
Adil throws a pillow at him. It catches him in the face.
“Seriously, though,” he says once he’s pulled the pillow away. “We do have a plan, right?”
“We do,” Greg says. “And we won’t be reliant on the press this time. Come here…”
***
“Fred brought it back, I remember.” Roland eyes the glowing red terminal. It’s humming to itself peacefully enough, washing his and Argilla’s skin in pulsing light. “But I didn’t think it served a purpose.”
“It’s a karma terminal,” Argilla says. “They were everywhere in the Junkyard. It’s hard to explain…we just knew how to use them. We didn’t question it until later.”
“How do you use them?” he asks.
“You insert your tag ring-but we don’t have tag rings here.” She worries at her lower lip. “The way this one is shaped, it looks like you might be able to press your palm against it, here.”
Roland follows her instructions. The console throbs under his fingertips, not just the warmth from the lights cycling through, but something else, some other rhythm entirely, one his atma’s humming in time with. He shivers but doesn’t pull back. He’s doing this now. He’s committed to this course of action. He’s made his choice. No turning back. “What do I do next?”
A thought occurs to him-“Will this work? It sounds like the terminals you used were designed for, well, raw data. Can humans-those born human,” he amends, “can they access it in the same way?”
“You told me that humans were data, too,” she says.
“Yes, but-” He struggles to form the proper objection. “Yes, but we can’t download raw data. We’re not built to be conduits, we don’t have that kind of direct access…”
Argilla purses her lips, hums, considers. “If everything is data,” she says, “and humans interact with their surroundings and take things from them-physical things, and thoughts and memories-then aren’t they accessing and processing data? You’ve never tried it this way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I think so, anyway,” she adds. “I sound like Gale.”
He shakes his head. “You sound like yourself.”
She smiles. It’s real.
The screen drones and lightens. Strange characters swarm over it, snippets of languages he only half-recognizes in bright green and cold white, and when they resolve there’s white text set against a marbled blue background, lists of-he squints. Lists of skills? Data sets? Enchantments? Are they all the same thing at heart? There are three or four of them bundled together in each hexagonal package. Some of the hexagons are dark-those are closed off to him, he guesses-but others glow, beckon, invite inspection.
“Why can’t I see them all?” he asks.
“Some of the skills build on previously existing knowledge,” she says. “I think there are better ways to explain it than that, but…”
“No, it makes sense,” Roland says. “You can’t write a novel if you haven’t learned to spell first. Unless you’re me. But skillsets build, knowledge accumulates and feeds off what’s gone before, that’s very human.”
She nods. Is that the same smile from earlier, or is that a new one? “Others require-I think the word is currency. The currency we used was different, but I remember…” She trails off. “I remember exchanging currency for things.”
“Goods and services, generally,” Roland says.
“Yes. Those. These karma terminals must operate by those principles, too.”
“You don’t get anything for free.” He sighs. “I guess that’s a constant.”
“I think you’re right.”
He flexes his fingers against the console again, feels them skid across the heated glass. “And I can learn any of these? Anything I can afford?”
“Yes.”
He shakes his head again. “It still seems so Gibson to me. Downloading knowledge. I guess I’m used to it being tangible, I never thought this kind of technology would be realized, especially given-well, everything.” Though cyberpunk usually does go hand-in-hand with dystopia, and if this doesn’t qualify as dystopia, then nothing does or ever will.
Argilla blinks once, twice, three times.
“I must sound like a lunatic,” he says.
“No. It isn’t that. Your knowledge is different than mine, that’s all. I was just thinking about that.”
He shrugs. “Maybe your knowledge is what I need.” What the Lokapala needs, what the world needs now. Efficiency, lethality, straightforwardness. No quandaries, no philosophical debates, just-fact. Data. Zeroes and ones, binary values, it is or it isn’t and that’s all there is to it. Or all there isn’t to it.
She looks down, takes her time before she speaks. “There’s something true about your way, though. I can’t explain it any better than that, but I-I feel it.”
He turns towards her, takes her hand again. Maybe there’s something incongruously innocent about holding hands with an AI-turned-human at the end of the world, but maybe he can use a little of her logic here, see this for what it is. Him holding her hand. No grand statements, no implications about the human condition, just the two of them here. Maybe. It’s a change, certainly, and he’s not quite sure what to make of it.
Or maybe it can be both. True in his head and in his heart. Synthesis, two halves working in concert for something greater.
“What do you think I should learn?” he asks her.
She closes her eyes. “You have things that you’re good at.”
“I wouldn’t go that far-”
“Affinities,” she continues. “Strengths. Attachments to different elements and fighting styles-I think I’m explaining this correctly.”
“I’m following you,” he says. “Go on.”
“Eventually you’ll need to cover your weaknesses. But right now, I think you should build on your strengths.”
I don’t have any springs to mind, but he suppresses it. “How do I know what those are?”
“Indra knows,” Argilla says. “Listen to him.”
He nods and closes his eyes, doesn’t tune with his atma, exactly, but taps into it, finds Indra’s consciousness sizzling under his and listens.
The pulsing, he realizes. The pulsing of the karma terminal. The rhythm matches my heartbeat.
“Lightning,” he says, half in a trance. “Weather and war. Strength, overpowering, conquering. A curse,” that one’s deeper than the others, some primal truth unrelated to fighting. “Atonement…”
“Open your eyes,” Argilla says softly. Her hand travels up his arm, rests at the crook of his elbow.
“These abilities,” he says, gestures to the appropriate hexagon with a twitch of his fingers. “I need to devour to be able to use them?”
She nods.
“I’ll do it,” he says, and kisses her. Her mouth’s warm, soft, not pliant but-comfortable, the way his tongue slides over hers feels right, sends soft sparks showering down his spine. She slides her other hand along his cheek, cups the back of his head and pulls him closer. The gesture’s deliberate, almost experimentation; has she done this before, he wonders?
He breaks away to ask.
“Yes,” she says, “but not with you.”
“Right,” he manages before she leans in and presses her lips to his again.
***
“Fuck,” Roland moans, “fuck, fuck fuck…”
There’s blood on his sleeve, on his cheek, sulfur clinging to his hair and clothes. He’s shaking, singed, drenched in sweat and clinging to the wall because if he doesn’t his legs will give out from under him.
“It’s my fault,” Greg says, ash under his dark skin. “They didn’t have a guard posted when we scouted them out. I should have ordered more reconnaissance-”
“Fuck,” Roland says again, because greater coherency escapes him right now, thanks. “Greg, what the fuck are we doing?”
Greg squeezes his eyes shut, presses his lips together in a line. “What we have to.”
Roland inches towards him, wants to march but his legs are still shaking too badly to do that. His fists tremble. “Samantha,” he says. “Samantha’s burned-Greg, her face, she burned off almost half her face. And for a bunch of rhesus monkeys?”
Greg turns away, doesn’t slam his fist into the wall because he’s too fucking composed to but the effect’s the same. “You said you were with me. You said that wouldn’t change.”
“Fuck you,” Roland says. “Don’t you dare try to guilt-trip me. Rhesus monkeys, Greg. We don’t have unlimited manpower, all right? We have who we have, and I don’t want to lose them,” I don’t want to lose you, “we have to think about who we can risk and how we can minimize that-”
“You think I don’t consider that?” It’s hard to see the spots of color flaring on Greg’s cheeks, but Roland knows they’re there. “Do you think I don’t know what their lives are worth?”
“I don’t know.” Roland looks down, refuses to meet Greg’s eyes. “Do you?”
“Life is sacred-”
“Life. The general term. Not their lives, just the concept of life. If life-the concept, not theirs-continues, then you’ve succeeded, you think. But life isn’t equal like that, it means more if they die than it would if a bunch of lab monkeys did.”
Greg stares at him. “No,” he says, quiet disgust simmering underneath the word. “If I make those kinds of judgments, if I say that some people have more of a right to live than others do, then I’m a hypocrite. I’m no better than the people we’re opposing.”
“So you’re a hypocrite,” Roland spits. A spasm of pain shoots down his arm, knots up his shoulder; he grits his teeth against it and barrels on. “We’re all fucking hypocrites, Greg, that’s the goddamn human condition. Do you want to die?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Because there’s no honor in death,” Roland continues, “there’s no glory or nobility of spirit, there’s just pain and mess and-”
“I know.” Rims of white flare around Greg’s nostrils. “I don’t want any of us to die. I-” He sighs. “I don’t want you to die. Does that make me a hypocrite?”
And fuck if Roland’s stupid heart doesn’t start to beat faster at that, throw itself against his ribcage in a frenzied fit of lust-excitement.
“Because it would be different if you died,” Greg says. “Maybe not to the world at large, and I know that’s what I have to consider, that’s what I have to keep in mind, but it would be different to me.”
“Greg,” he whispers. Is this-is it finally-
“And I’ve been fighting against that,” Greg continues, “but I haven’t been very successful.”
“Why the fuck are you fighting against it?” he finally manages, once his lungs remember how to draw in air again. “Greg, for the love of Christ, you know-”
“Because I can’t,” he says.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
Greg sighs again; if he wasn’t Greg, Roland would say he shrinks against the wall, but he can’t imagine Greg shrinking. “I have responsibilities,” he says. “That doesn’t change. To the Lokapala, to Ruby-”
“Oh, fuck Ruby,” Roland snaps.
“She’s my wife,” Greg says. “The mother of my child. I have to honor that.”
“Then divorce her.” He doesn’t add she thinks you’re screwing me, anyway because he’s pretty sure Greg and Ruby have already fought about that one. Or done that terse clipped thing that passes for fighting between the two of them, where they speak in strained voices and Ruby hisses insults at Greg until it’s enough to drive him out of the house. “You won’t be the first man to get a divorce.”
“I have to try and make it work.” Greg sounds tired, bone-tired. “I gave my word that I would.”
Greg and his word. Forget about your word, he should say, but he knows Greg better than that.
“So what do we do?” he asks instead.
“What we have to,” Greg says. “That doesn’t change.”
“Yeah.” His legs jerk out from under him and he gives into it, slides down the wall until he’s sprawled out at the foot of it. “Where to next?”
“You’re still in this?” Greg asks.
“That doesn’t change, either.”
Greg smiles, crouches down next to him. “You know the Karma Society.”
“Yeah, I know the Karma Society. Everyone in Portland knows the Karma Society.” Vaguely. Everyone knows about it, but everyone works from hazy outlines and half-remembered details; no one has a complete picture, and the Karma Society seems to like it that way.
“Adil knows some of the delivery men working there.”
“Adil knows everyone.”
“Yes,” Greg agrees. “But we have a possible in, if we want to try infiltrating it.”
Roland shakes his head. “I still can’t believe we’re doing this, sometimes.” Definitely taking the road less traveled by, and it has made all the difference, but he’s pretty sure this isn’t what Frost meant by the poem.
“I know,” Greg says, rough and soothing at the same time, probably like the way Greg’s arms would feel if he wrapped them around Roland and meant it. “But we’ll be all right.”
***
“What do you remember?” he asks Argilla, trails his fingers down the line of her stomach. He kisses the skin above her navel, tasting it, tasting her, learning what to expect.
She half-hums half-sighs, arches her head back and rolls her hips. “Fragments, mostly,” she says. “I know what things mean, sometimes, but I don’t know why I know them. Or how.”
“You don’t have context,” he says. “That’s the difference between the way you acquire knowledge and the way I’m used to doing it. You get it all at once, I-have memories associated with the process, tangential to it, I guess, connections that aren’t logical, that don’t proceed directly from the facts.” He sighs, drops a kiss to the hollow between her breasts. “It’s like-what’s one of the things you know, but you aren’t sure how?”
“Children,” she says. “I knew what the word meant, but there weren’t any children in the Junkyard. I didn’t realize that until Lupa pointed it out to us.”
Lupa. His chest constricts. Speaking of connections and associations. “Child, to me, means Fred. There are other children, of course, even now, but he’s the strongest association I have with the word, the concept. I remember changing his diapers when he was a baby-Ruby didn’t like it when I’d try to do other things for him, but she didn’t mind it when I took that job off her hands.”
“Ruby?” Argilla asks.
“Fred’s mother.” A dry laugh forces its way out of Roland’s throat. “She hated me. Really hated me. It was entirely mutual. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else being close to Greg, and I couldn’t stand the thought of her being close to Greg.”
“You loved him,” Argilla says.
“Yeah.” He rolls to the side, props himself up on his elbows. “For years. That never changed. A lot of things changed. I did, he did, the world did, it felt like there was too much going on and not enough time to learn it all, but that-that was always the same, and I clung to it. And then he was gone, and I didn’t have that anymore, just-uncertainty, panic, never knowing who’s going to be taken away next.” Never knowing who he’d end up sending to their deaths, never knowing how badly he’d screwed up until the damage was irreversible. “I had booze. That was about it, that was all I could call familiar. So I clung to that next, and you saw how that turned out.”
“You never saw yourself as a leader?”
“No. Leader meant Greg. I think it still means Greg, in some ways. Could you imagine anyone other than Serph leading you?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t think that’s-programming’s your word for it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think that’s programming. I think it’s just Serph. We talked about that, back in the Junkyard. How none of us would follow any of the other Tribe leaders if they vanquished us, even if the rules told us we had to.”
“Humans never found a rule they couldn’t break,” Roland says.
“Then we’re human?”
“You’re perplexing, challenging, sometimes irrational, and utterly impossible to describe,” he says. “You’re human.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It is what it is. But in your case?” He smiles. “I think it’s good. Or it has the potential to be good.”
She grabs his hair and pulls him down for another kiss-slow this time, not like the rushed breathless kisses from before, almost languorous. He brushes his fingers along her neck, across her collarbone, feeling the movement in her blood and breath.
“So what do you think you’ll do now?” she asks him, her voice warm against his ear.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s new. But I can learn.”