502. Pragmatic flesh, 9

(Blume)

Myls is still helping the mindless calamity to sit down and stand up.

She doesn’t like her, but she still helps her.

This is not going well. I feel... dark? Nauseous. Murderous...

That ship we salvaged will never fly into space.

I wasn’t able to voice that concern out when I realised it. The thought got stuck.

I opened the shelter doors with brute strength.

Myls felt inferior, pointing out that I’m the only one able to do everything that brings actual progress to our aim.

She believes I could have gone this far without her; just because she wouldn’t have without me. She’s petty sometimes.

We reached the underground facility, including the reactor and the synchrotrons. The tunnels with the machines aimed at producing the powerful magnetic field.

Everything was old and unfit to work again. The reactor itself was far too complex for just us.

Knowing the basic principles of what things are doesn’t make you an expert on every field at their use, especially in here.

I was at a complete loss.

Machines and pipes everywhere. Wires and computers too old to lit on. And even if they were, I would never replace an entire team of engineers.

It took me days in the ruins of the sun to understand how to start a back-up generator and use the power on a single system.

Starting a nuclear power plant that has shut down in the past is an insanely bigger level of complexity. And let’s be honest, back then, I was lucky enough to have things working in the end. No cut wire on damaged system.

Here, I face the limits of my powers and knowledge against human technology. I’m no match.

If scientists that worked there in the past had left their brains intact for me to read, maybe I would have been able to learn. But even then, it wouldn’t have mean I would have been able to do...

Nothing will work here.

The ships themselves wouldn’t probably withstand supersonic speed and friction anymore, after decades of ageing in a pool of seawater.

Travels to space have always been a high technological challenge for humans. This place teaches my kind some humility against these meat bags of the past.

They may be gone.

But they achieved things we hardly could match.

~

Myls curses Magenta around, waiting for me to restart the power plant and get the spaceship loaded with the remaining nuclear warheads.

I still haven’t told her this will never happen that way...

Ironically, had I left Snake or Sanïssia to die, I might have enough power to reach space on my own now.

Not enough to fight fairly, but possibly enough to carry the bombs out there.

That chance is gone right now, like the brightness of Calamity.

I think I know what happened to her and why she doesn’t speak. But I don’t care enough about her to go verify it inside her brain. The brightness and the true hatred inside of her past self, it was probably Magenta’s mind itself, using her as a proxy, as a possessed marionette. She might never have a mind of her own. Now all that is left is the mindless marionette.

Her brain works well enough to keep her alive, but maybe not enough to even understand language. She’s probably completely empty inside, of any knowledge and memories. All she knows are the acts and thoughts that Magenta perspired through her, like footsteps.

I don’t care...

I went back to the roof that night to look at the sky.

I know what to do.

Our options are really reduced to that only one truly.

Only one thing in the entire world can still go into space, and reach Magenta. That is Magenta’s fishing power itself...

What it did to feed with the rains at first, and later on directly drinking from the ocean.

How long has it been since it’s out there? I remember wondering how it could manage to produce so much organic materials in so little time. How much of the oceans has it drank already?

It lost a lot of itself when we blew it up, but I bet it recovered quite well in the absence of gravity. I’m sure it doesn’t regret its past ziggurat at all now...

I still wonder if it might not have been better to let it blow Eurasia in half, creating a super volcano and starting a volcanic ice age. At least then, that god would be dead for sure.

Had Rose chosen to let it be, sooner or later, something big as that would have had to blow up or crumble on itself.

It was on its way to drain all T.I. and all organic materials on Earth. Nothing had stopped its growth and progress until we arrived. It’s hard to say if it would have eventually succeeded in draining the entire biosphere or crumbled along the way under its own weight.

Now I will finish this alone I guess... I feel lonely when I think about it.

It’s been fun with Myls. She’s a bright black rose. They were good reasons for you and your friend to be proud of her. It’s been fun...

She doesn’t need to come with me into the next vacuum toward that god’s mouth and stomach. I can go alone.

All I need to do is to make sure the remaining nukes destroy it well.

They don’t need to be there for that. Because it’s practically suicide, first. Because she wouldn’t be of much help as a human, unfortunately that is true. And to be a little more selfish now, because it’s a matter for Rose Blume and our lights to finish this off.

Magenta will reappear soon; I can feel its aura rising in the distance.

Sanïssia will carry me to wherever it feeds as soon as we can figure it out.

Then she and Myls will have to survive one last rain of calamities on their own.

I know they will manage.

Meanwhile, I’ll hide as I rise with the bombs into the fishing net.

Out there, my flesh may die, what’s essentially me will still be able to trigger the bombs from a distance.

If I play it right, I might even survive.

If I play it wrong, Magenta will survive...

I can make it. I will.

I won’t make everything right.

But at least I will draw a final curtain on the magenta tragedy.

~