Dream and Reality (//Dunc- and me)

[Enkidu]

“why don’t you tell me?” Nishi replies in quick-fire antiphony, her mind drifting on cruise control, her focus curled inwards. It took a conscious, sapping effort to keep her jaw up towards the provocateur. “…There’s nothing more tiring than a one-sided conversation.”

The back of her throat tickled; the gentle, playful, dancing irritation of a child. She tried to cough, but couldn’t ward the sensation away. As the idea germinated mind the first thorns of the bloom started to prickle against her neck, and she bit her dry lips shut.

Nishi wasn’t accustomed to being thirsty. God damn.

She was tempted to fiddle with the restraints. The strap behind her fell loose around her wrists - a millimetre of movement here, a stretch of torsion there - begging her to squander her time. She snorted, breathing gently through her nose, trapping vapour.

“I don’t like you, you don’t like me, and yet here we are, stuck in a room together like two wizened spouses because of our respective sense of duty. Look at me, here, doing the goddess’s work. Look at you, playing H.H.Holmes down to a tee, right up to the murder castle. Did you know this is the closest any member of the Sisterhood has come to an agent of the Order Overwatch, barring the godless whores in the sisterhood of Light. I’ve been tantalised by the thought of this day for months; getting to know my enemy. There’s something etherial, something otherworldly about staring down a machine. A flash of particle tracers, the odd bang of a missile smacking against your hull plates, and then nothing. You focus on destroying a machine, not a human being. This is the fundamental distinction between a freedom fighter and a cereal killer.”


“I am a human being, girl.” Nishi grins, leaning back against the spartan headrest, staring languidly into the light. “Ultimately, I fight against the machine for the sake of humanity, be that machine material, or geopolitical - I don’t care about the meat that flies the ship. People are never the enemy. People can be broken, and people can be rebuilt. People can be twisted, and people can be turned. They can burn and they can heal. They can murder and they can procreate. A machine is dangerous because it only knows what it’s programmed to do - humans? Humans are pliable. You can bend them into what ever shape you wish and they’ll call it ‘free will’. Humans are essentially virtuous. They have factory settings. Machines? It’s the machines you’ve got to watch for. Nobody stabs anybody without a knife. Nobody ties anybody to a chair without the chair to bind them to.”

“…Which are you? I look at you, and I see a machine. What kind of living do you render for yourself? What do you fight for? Essentially, I’m little more than a well-armed civil rights activist - yet I have freedom of will. Obviously, by the going logic, I’m a human. Yet, what are you? A tool of a faceless shadow organisation lacking a house or a cause. An organisation so obsessed with the metaphorical big picture you have the hubris to title yourselves the ‘saviours of humanity’, whilst merrily trampling over whoever you wish to suit these objectives. You’re clearly low-rung, else I’d be crushing my buttmuscles somewhere cleaner. You’re disposable, darling. A minutia of a facet on a cog in a machine that is infinitely larger than you are, and has all manner of built-in redundancies. Right now, you serve no purpose other than as an over-glorified lie detector, and since I’m obviously not going to volunteer anything compromising to you over my own volition other than my little missive from the escape pod, you can quit wasting both of our limited time in this mortal coil and shoot me. Preferably somewhere expedient, but whatever works.”

“Think about it. What do you have to threaten me with? My life? God-awfully rich of you if so; the law of probabilities dictate I should certainly be dead by now - I’m far more useful to my goddess as a corpse whilst I remain in your possession. Pain? Really - pain wouldn’t prevent me from lying to you, now, would it? I could seed you with whatever misinformation I wish, and you’d have nothing to verify its validity against. Be under no allusions that I won’t attempt to slit your carotid open the moment you release me from this chair - so what to do with me? As for releasing me; please refrain from doing so, the intel I’m gathering from you is truly killer. So that leaves you with an impossible choice, doesn’t it?”


“Please, continue to waste your time in the manner to which you are accustomed. Or, you could refrain from being a complete jackass and get me a canteen of water or something. Oh, and a change of clothes - this jumpsuit is getting as reesty as a neglected pork scratching. Hop hop.”

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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