| Private Archive | - Civil Servant

[Civil Servant]

PL03-04 |

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ShellSys01: PrivateArchive.Prog
> Reading Automated Playback Transcript File PL03-04
> Translating...
> ▓

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Matter of Perspective

CS was quiet and dormant, his helmet removed within his quarters, sitting at a desk and twiddling his thumbs while glaring at the broken artifact on the table. His quarters were not as typically spartan as one would imagine but he at least had some furnishings for comforting familiarity. He was occasionally sipping from a glass of soda and snacking from a bag of rations he'd been grazing through all day. The soda was a rare indulgent extra since usually around this time he'd spoil himself on something if the challenge required a relaxed approach. But for now he was too enchanted by the artifact recently, an almost alluring mystery puzzling his mind had him locked silent as his eyes darted over every millimetre of that golden wrapped crystal.

He'd been here for the last hour, almost half an hour since he deactivated a majority of his augments, and only five minutes since he'd logged off the DM comm network. He almost needed absolute peace to work his understanding around the artifact. "But... Why?" He questioned it's silence, holding such a gem up to his face as the purple polished quartz was dark and dim within, a crack had shot itself deep inside of the gem that almost looked like a spiders web reaching out. Although the fracture never seemed to reach the edges, the surface was still as smooth and uninterrupted as a perfect glacier, the sounds that run silent to others keeps his dreams and heart rate unsettled at night. Sometimes the tapping and the clicking can be heard in his wall safe, distinctive to any other sound, yet it's hollow echo gives a feeling as if it was both there to him and absent to anyone else. Any attempt at further investigation like this morning, as soon as it was removed from its secure compartment... The sound stopped.

"This isn't me suffering hearing loss, I know no one else can hear you..." He talked to it like it could hear him, it had been with him long enough and like with any other functional possession he has... He will talk as if he respected and expected it's action in return. Although the notion of expecting anything from it has disappeared long ago, instead his mind queries if it demands something from him. The crack could be less of a sign of deteriorating wonder, but more of a opening. "Especially how it the web funnels down to..." The finest webs of the crack began to shimmer, his hand froze like the thoughts had taken over as he attempted to verify it through his own mind if he wasn't hallucinating, he observed closer as his eyes squinted into the shimmering purple...

"The Void." At a near instance his face froze of utter realisation, those cybernetic retinas whirring as his eyes blackened completely and his legs rose him slowly off his seat. The ambient hum of Tennsdedt was drowned out by the angelic chorus the web of cracks harmonized, rotating slowly as it funnelled the purple void into itself. Cupping the artifact in hand up to his face, his other hand proceeded to grace his bare digits onto the surface... It was like the hairs on his body elated and stood with a field of energy that he could feel surging though his body, but as rhythmic as the pulsing flow of the shifting tunnel within the artifact. "She knew, she..." He stumbled backwards gripping the artifact in hand, knocking the chair over his desk before narrowly catching himself as he scrambled over to his couch-bed. Swiping from under the pillows a steel necklace... Kissing it, praising it and thanking it under his incoherent mumbling as he struggled to segregate his constant calculation from an overwhelming pain that made him weak to the knees. "I'm so sorry I... Thank you--" the necklace pendant... Or hollow computer data card was held close to his heart as if it eased the flourishing grief that had concealed itself for years. His breathing struggled out of sync, there wasn't a rhythm anymore, a sequence of emotional distress and cold sunken despair. "I wasn't there... I'm so sorry, I said I would be..." His betrayal, not out of choice of his own, one unseen by them both that could not be possibly rectified before disaster; but as far as CS's logic was concerned it was his own betrayal.

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"I know we both couldn't stop the strike, We didn't know about the attack until they were there." He was talking to the empty chip while hiding behind crossed arms and resting on his raised knees, he knew very well it wasn't talking back but he'd like to imagine, willingly letting his woes out at it for the past 30 minutes. "I just wish if all the power I have, I could have done something." "You still can." CS' face shifted from smiling melancholy to stoic annoyance to the presence of that voice. "I don't need you providing me options." "But that was the option I gave you, many times, absolute and certain violence for survival: The Valhalla failure, Fall of New Berlin, Slaughter of Camp Haus." A voice of true conviction, but one no difference from CS in any shape or form. CS was in no mental shape to argue, he knew that in a fragile state of mind, he couldn't prioritise the feelings of- "Don't even find an excuse for it, you lost her..." "Don't you dare speak about--" If his eyes could well up, they would do it by now, the prior shock of his departed other and now this condoning wasn't what he was expecting from the crystal puzzle. "WE'RE THE SAME PERSON...! You couldn't bare the thought of a human being the teacher of unethical killing, questioning your actions meant questioning what you have passed on... You manifested me, to remove your responsibility for the consequences of their orders and your actions." A exact copy of CS stood there, helmet bound in his bloodied, oil stained and torn flight suit, dripping his stains and essence that sizzles on the carpet into nothing... Misery, desperation and defiance. "This universe took her from US! The life was always dangerous and you knew that, I've known that, always known... But the message is clear. She told you to--" A sudden grab to the neck of the manifest, yet it was nothing more like attempting to strangle a statue. "GET THE HELL OUT OF MY MIND!" CS' eyes had blackened until the whites had vanished into an empty void. His own hand, leeching the blood and oil from the neck of the manifest as every human muscle in his arm bulged from the force of his grip.

"--Find what she left you." The manifest had both artifact and chip in hand, hovering the hollow centre over the purple gem to see what the vision had hidden in chosen sight.

There she was, hidden under all sight except through those that know. A black ship with a broken bridge, piercing the hole with the brightest of lights as its bow endlessly collided with a fury of ricocheting streams of energy. As if all his work still remained intact and looping in function, stuck with no command.

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CS woke up, sitting on the floor with head tucked between his knees. The manifest was no longer present and whatever stains had scarred the floor were gone, a mental lapse would be the most obvious answer, the traumatic loss, and the regret of inability and inaction. Although the suspicion remained, "dream or not?" Lifting the artifact up with slow anticipation only to widen his eyes as the lungs tremored with air, the void remained.

| End of File

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"Thuringia, my home, my tomb."