Under Paris

#INITIATING DISTRESS BROADCAST#

::RECALIBRATING::

-CHANNEL CONNECTED-

To those that can hear me, under Paris, under the view of the tyrants that roam above us, I am Vin Ires, and I have a confession for this world which I've betrayed.

Like some of you, I was born here, in what used to be the beating heart of France. I'm sure some of you still remember the lively streets and the pulsating movement of tourists under the warm summer sky... Some of you, lucky few, that still remember the sky.

I lived most of my childhood in the backstreets of Paris, constantly on the move, always three steps ahead of the law. And like that I survived for many years, until I met a lonely priest in a beautiful yet humble cathedral lost between the endless marble buildings. This man... He used to be someone, he told me. But for as long as I knew him I never got to know his name or his soul, if he even had any of the two.

He taught me that the world was more than it seemed. He showed me first hand how reality stopped making sense the more you look at it. Any sane person would have called it magic or something even grander, but he was no same man. Soon enough, neither was I.

You'd be surprised by how inconspicuous "magic" can be. A suggestive thought here, a missing person there. The human experience stopped feeling tangible to me, and as I lost a grip on humanity I stopped giving it value. It was as if we were living on a parallel existence, casting a perpetual shadow over ourselves.

I admit, I am no good man. I shaw a world beyond my understanding and I used it to take advantage of others, in ways they would fail to reconcile with their own free will. But I need to believe that someone more honourable than a humble magician still remains, out there, in the shadows from which I came.

All this, however, wasn't our biggest sin. The priest, now my mentor, was obsessed with combining the fracturing of reality with the limits of the human mind. He wanted to understand and exploit the entirety of reality. I know, I say it as if reality was just another thing that exists, as if it wasn't everything... I see that now... 

The priest garnered support between the magicians of the city, the dewlers between realms, and managed to find the perfect host for his project. From the corpse of the poor bastard they had selected in their search they extracted a fresh brain, kept alive by a concoction of fluids, constantly seeping in and out of the neural tissue, and methodical alterations to time and space. They didn't just want to keep the brain alive, still thinking alone in the dark, they wanted to infuse our understanding of this "magic" into it. An ultimate intelligence. A god.

I wish I would've done something about it, but the vision was too great, it made me blind. But no amount of pleading will forgive my sin. If there is a loving God out there, beyond this planet, beyond this coil, I'm sorry, please take me to hell.

...It was in that same cathedral that it came to be. It destroyed everything. I could feel it, the rage, the unrelenting hate for the world. It hated how it had been stripped of its existence to be a conscience in the aether, and he punished the city for it. He destroyed our streets, destroyed our hearts and erased our minds. I know it's not soon before he wipes our memories again. I wish I could tell you what it wants, but I don't know. The only thing I know is that there is a chance to stop it.

There is a holographic memory drive in the cathedral. Now it's nothing but rubble, but it's the only chance we have. The code to activate it is 5-6-6-2, I repeat 5-#-€-2. [DATA LOST] h@ve much tIme.

I know most of yOu will FoRG€t this m€ssAge. But tO those who DO. Save us from 0ur SIN.

-END OF TRANSMISSION-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Renowned Lira Crass

The attendant could not give her a satisfying answer. -You are not on the list, miss- he insisted. Lira Crass was not enthusiastic that the attendant kept regurgitating the same response to her cries of confusion. -I ought to be on the list, I paid for the damn ticket. Two hundred koopons, nothing more, nothing less-. The attendant did not seem to budge, and after much complaining, Lira only managed to get a free meal at Spaceport Aweland from the whole affair.  It had been an exhausting day for renowned Lira Crass. Pluri-planetary and multi-solar diplomat Lira Crass. More accurately, publicly humiliated and currently out-of-a-job Lira Crass.  Lira had been going up and down the desert wasteland that was the planet Hume, where days are 50 hours long and the star threatens to erode the thinly terraformed atmosphere apart. Thank the gods for the hovercraft and public space-transports, possibly humanity's greatest innovation- Lira thought -if they ever came on time. But in Hume, ...
Read more

King of Jupiter

Circad 23, Maius, 2345 As of the time of writing this entry, I have just exited Jupiter's moon Ganymede. I normally do not write much during my travels, but I have been witness to such an odd series of events these past few weeks that I feel I must inscribe my experience for, at the very least, someone else's amusement. It was 15 days ago that I arrived with the Solar Express to Ganymede Central Station. The place seemed rather new, with every corner clean and polished. I must imagine that, with the sheer amount of people buzzling about in Central Station that it must have been quite the endeavour to clean up all the trash and urine from every nook and cranny. Regardless, the effort is well appreciated on my part. Ganymede is well known for its mercantile tradition. As a matter of fact, all of Jupiter's moons are. People from all over the Solar System travel to the far reaches of our little domain to trade all kinds of goods, mostly rare metals. This amount of interchange, ...
Read more

A Legend Dies for the Rage of Man

The worn down pocket watch marked midnight, despite its cracked glass and rusty case frame, it still managed to keep Maeve Harlow grounded in the present. Sometimes it felt like the tick tack-ing of the clock was the only thing that made sense, at least in her line of "work". The cold managed to overtake her in the dark, unfiltered night of the Alps. She stayed still, though she knew she shouldn't, she couldn't . At this altitude, and in such solitude, frostbite was the Grim Reaper himself, ready to poach on unsuspecting visitors of these snowy peaks. She had found refuge from the unfavourable conditions outside in an abandoned observatory. But that was not the only thing she was after. She also brought with her a notebook that was as well-travelled as it was degraded -more like a collection of rugged and overused pages of a centuries old novel-, an unsharpened pocket knife and a decent sized bag of salt. But so far, in the last 5 days at least, she hasn't had the...
Read more