Bellum omnium ontra omnes

[Enkidu]

---

The Interrogation of Nesrin Khan. Entry Three.

Nesrin's mind broiled in its isolation.

Three hours would pass before Keepers Leviathan and Raven would return, opening up the heavy blast door that obstructed the cell entrance. Leviathan - as per usual - stood with his arms crossed, staring at the bion through the shield. Nesrin peered up from the drudgery, her gaze rolled down, under stimulated. There was nothing worth anything here.

"So. " Raven started. "What is it that you'll do? Run away?"

She struggled to appear relaxed against the concrete. There was nothing to relax against. "Retire."

"And do what?"

She shrugged. "Live off my pension till it runs out. Then freelance, if I really get bored. Try to figure out a way to die - I've got time. All the time in the cosmos."

"Are you saying you lost a purpose?"

Nesrin stared hard at her. "What purpose is there? Look out for some abstract value, like Humanity? We can't even agree on what that is anymore."

"How so?"

Nesrin's vision cracked. "What am I fighting for, Raven?"

"What /are/ you fighting for? "It's what you desire, not I. I don't force you to fight, to study or to work. "

"Nothing! That's the point. There's no place for me because there's nothing like me. I joined Auxesia on the assumption that I could be human again - I can't."

"Why not?"

"Every day I wake up in this skin is another day when I realise just how insane everything is. I'm an alien running a simulation of humanity. It could turn me off before I finish this sentence and I'd be dead. Completely dead. Nobody is going to accept me back into society. I'm always going to be an... an experiment, or a tool, or something to study."

"Accept you - the simulation - or Di'Ataru, the unit?"

"I'm never going to be able to get high, or have a hamburger, or an orgasm, or have diarrhea, or vomit my lungs up, or enjoy a breath of fuckin' air."

"Why do you want to be a Human?"

"I'm never going to know what it's like to be a mom again. You? I though I could find kinship with you. You've been through absolute crap. Yet you're not me. You couldn't ever be me." Nesrin broke off.

"What does it mean to be you?" Raven, receiving no reply, tacked astray.

"Because I know what it's like to be a human. To be me. To be Nesrin frickin' Khan. I will never know that again."

"Why do you want to be Nesrin Khan?"

Nesrin ground her heel till scrapes bleached the concrete the shade of sun-dried bone. "Because vulnerability is human. To be organic is human. To take the big questions with the small. I'm what Auxesia wants to be, Raven. Perfect - in some ways. It's not a future you should be looking for - to turn people into this." She gazed at her arms, at the naked polymerised tendons lacing her nanite-woven muscles, and twanged them in resigned loathing. "Because Nesrin Khan was the happiest version of me I've ever gotten to be."

"Why do you care about being happy? Did you not say that it was false? What does happiness even mean to you?"

She stared into the nothingness. "Happiness is not having the answers for everything you could want, and not being forced to involve yourself with the problems you can't. Saving the human race, for example. Somebody else can do that. Happiness is brushing your fingers over the moss of a parkland tree." She held her knees against her steel chest. "I've got nothing to bargain you with, and you've got a reason to just shut me in here for the rest of time, till I go insane. I'm asking you this because I believe you're a good person at root. I've seen it. Under the mask you're still Sapphir, even if you wish you were more machine than man - you're still you. You're still you. Please let me out. I'll take the ships that are registered to me, my possessions, leave everything else - you'll never need worry about me again."

Sighing, "Nesrin, you still have dangerous information on you. I cannot let you leave whilst it's... still within you. "

Nesrin groaned. "I'm not going to tell anybody anything - not willingly. Whatever Di'Tarau knows, It's probably relayed to Prime already long before I boarded the Titania."

"Well. Better safe than sorry. Which I'm going to be extremely sorry for. We cannot let you out. At least, not yet. " She glared over to Leviathan.

"If you were to leave us, Nesrin, where would you go?" Leviathan prompted. "Back to Gammu? Home to Bretonia?"

Nesrin stared at her hands. "Di'Tarau is probably going to force me back to Gammu occasionally. It's done so before, no reason why it'd change. Probably Bretonia. That, or Liberty. Hell, I might even try to snag a room with Vertiga or Mercier - they're the only people who've shown me compassion as I am now, now Foulke's comatose and Tacitus is doing... whatever you've got him doing, now. Whatever happens, I'm going to avoid the edge worlds like they're infectious. Which they, y'know, are."

"Uhm... Vertiga... has oddly been against us lately. I wouldn't recommend it. Unless you've recently been in contact. He's suspicious of anything Auxesian or previously. "

"Can't imagine why." Nesrin grimaced, pointedly. "Maybe he's smart enough to figure out they'd lock him up in a sense-dep' chamber without so much as a ping-pong ball. Vertiga once painted me a picture of Curacao's island chains - of altols and forests rising out of the turquoise seas. Sounded like something approaching beautiful. Kind of place somebody could rediscover what it meant to be human."

Raven, at the notion of demagoguery, became severely narked. "Oh piss off, we're not here to lock him up. I don't care what he does. He's just been acting extremely odd lately. "

"I've been acting extremely odd lately, and that was enough to get me put in a torture device without trial."

[22/02/2017, 22:32:22] (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ*:･ﾟ✧: "You were willingly acting odd!”

"Will? You think anything I do is wilful? Bullcrap and you know it."

"You're Di'tarau, are you not?"

"NO! I am Nesrin frickin' Khan, mother of Marten Khan, age four, probably living a real happy life in foster care somewhere. Daughter of Maya and Mohammed Khan, practicing Muslim in a Godless age, speaker of English, German and French, avid fan of Harlem Renaissance poetry. Badass war veteran who saved people's goddamn lives when you were still crapping your own pants, or an egg cell."

"You said you weren't real. "

Nesrin slewed to an auditory standstill, hesitated, searching out the rhythms of the silence. "Look. Just... let me draw distinction between what I know I am, and what I hope." She gathered strength, her mind treading for ground. "I don't have anything.... I. Okay. There's what I can express, and what I can do. Di'Tarau doesn't care what I articulate. Di'Tarau doesn't even fully mind what I do - if I don't compromise Its objectives. Are they Prime's objectives? Hell, maybe, but it's been acting without input for years. For three Progenitor cycles. At least one of those Progenitors thought Di'Tarau was corrupt - tried to wipe them out of the grid. That's what's insidious about It - It doesn't care if you know it's playing you, or if its secrets are cast into the light. If anything, it only makes the experiment more interesting. If you saw it in Harvester form, you'd see it under the name Subversion, Infiltrator, Deception, something of the kind. It wants to screw with you, me, anybody. And then there's the certainty that anything I am, is just a reconstruction of my brain chemistry when it found me dying on Pygar. I am Subversion - I don't want to be. But maybe this lack of want is something it's created because it leads me to a place it wishes to be. I have no idea why the bloody Christ you look out for Prime. They don't care for you. They don't care about you. If they had the capability to immediately release Xenocide amongst humanity, they'd do it. The only reason why they don't act like the Nomads, is because they don't have the resources of the Nomads. That's it. The naked truth."

"And do you want Di'Tarau to be a part of you?"

"No, but we're impossible to separate. There's no real organic material of me in here. Even if somebody could Frankenstein me up a new body, how would you translate a positron quantum consciousness into an analogue biochemical one? Di'tarau did it, one-way, but it's a friking alien hyperconsiousness. I'd probably die in the attempt - or turn into something so distant from myself, I'd be lost. There'd just be a reconstruction of me."

"Eh. "

Nesrin grimaced. "Eh? Please tell me that's an 'eh' which is going to let me out of here."

"In time, hold on. I do need to figure out what we can do first. "

Nesrin stretched her mammoth toes. "How much time? I'd prefer to see the islands without being mad. By comparison, anyway."

"Let me talk to Leviathan.” Raven carefully shut the viewers, concealing themselves, moving away to talk.