Stars and Shadows - Chapter 3 (Patreon)

The hive reeks. The occasional broken pipe and the general smell of a city made entirely of metal and built around manufactorums fills the air with a caustic stench, the rust of thousands of hundreds of metal sheets left unattended throughout the structure, adding a coppery tang to it. Part of that is a byproduct, millions of chemical refinements leaking into the air, but there’s also the matter of disuse, corridors left untouched by anything other than vermin and outcasts in decades, left to break down and contaminate space around them. For all its success in surviving the first few dozen decades of colonization, Utoria (both city and world) has not aged with grace or proper growth, especially in its population, which continues to spiral away from its ability to sustain them with each successive generation.

The higher you go, the cleaner it smells; air-scrubbers, natural transplanted-from-Terra greenery, and whole teams of maintenance drones and servile purity-janitors scrub away the scent of industry, leaving only the pleasant and often fragrant scents that they decide suit their betters. Of course, the inverse is also true; deep below the hab-blocks and the industrial centers, the outcast, the mutant, and the desperate exist in a constant smog of chemicals, lives shortened and lungs crippled by the constant pollutants they breathe and swallow.

Sylvan can’t help but smile as he thinks about it. The beauty of it all—the perfection of the creations of the Divine Science—extending even unto the waste that is expelled. Munitions, weapons, miscellaneous supplies, bits and pieces of billions of different items of both war and industry, infrastructure and comfort, all being made right here in his very home. Every pump of noxious fumes into the air just further proves the divinity of the machine; by the glory of knowledge and the Science Divine, base materials are transmuted into near-infinite variations of shaped production and chem-crafted forms, and from that process, even that which has no use is evolved into new forms of the most toxic and unique molecular blessings.

He keeps such thoughts to himself, of course. While his fellow adepts share his passionate love of the Knowledge of All, and many more share his interest in the intricacies and philosophy of such perfect creations, none that he has seen share his sheer enthusiasm. Perhaps it is the lack of his particular brand of enhancements, he muses; so many others dance in the… simpler blessings of steel and cold-hot chrome, while the gifts of warm and flesh and flowing are so often looked down upon. When wars have been fought over the definition of the perfection of human form, and so many view modification to it—rather than addition—as sin, such disdain might be comprehensible. Incorrect, as many such biased conclusions are, but comprehensible. It does not stop Sylvan from growing new tendons, enriching his synaptic centers, altering his joints or adding in new limbs; it simply makes him more circumspect about it. And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with a few mechandrites and cybernetics to complete the picture; all a matter of taste, when one stands at the buffet of the Supreme Machination.

He knows himself far from complete, however. A cranial sensor-suite, antennae, mechandrites, or even hormonal and cerebral alterations are nothing but opening steps. He’s nothing like an arch-magos, surely, whose minds are almost entirely blessed circuitry—the only grey matter remaining either enhanced into nutrient-rich domes of hyper-dense synapses or abandoned to vestigial states and supplemental to the true machines they have become. He’s even heard of some who grant themselves many minds, ones chemically grown and altered to remain always conscious and think along alternate routes to the magos’ own thoughts, or of those who have so altered their being as to be little more than divine matter, perfect electrical and biochemical seas wrapped within machines that stride on clouds, terraform worlds, and dance in the heat of the stars themselves.

How blessed they must be, he thinks, a modified stretch of synapses auto-cycling in his mind running through a catechism of the holy word in binary, as it always does when his mind turns to the glory of the Science Divine. Still… well, he can’t help but remind himself as to the reason behind his visit to this lower area, and the inevitable frustration that comes with it.

True, the perfect chemical and mechanical concoctions all about him are a thing of beauty, but a known perfection, one intricately codified, comprehended, and documented. But from the chaos below comes possibility. Undocumented from fear, ignorance, or superstition, are new things, ones that reek of mutation, of entropic decay that eats away at the bottom-most structures of mankind’s great, interstellar empire. Each of them is the exact opposite of the sewage he trudges through, despite how inextricably linked the two of them are in society and superficial appearance. In one is the production of the machine, the transmutation of discordant elements into purified product and into beautiful chemical concoctions. In the other is the chaotic mess of flesh left untended, evolution, the most beautiful factor in the meat of the universe turned to decay and malformation. Deep in his own gray matter—in a part of it that he knows a perfectly obedient adept of the Magos Orders shouldn’t listen to—he can’t help but look at them with a hunger.

He wants them on a table, strapped down. He wants them squirming under his scalpels. He wants them broken down in a genetic analyzer, their deepest core structures turned to slurry and understood, that they might be followed, like steps along a puzzling path, into new and exciting possibilities of flesh and genome, of anatomy and randomly-sequenced perfection.

He sees one of the poor, destitute abominations before him, lain half-fallen in the ankle-high liquid covering the floor. Beneath thick, heavy rags and a poorly made rebreather Adept Sylvan can make out the vague form of a third arm, misshapen, far too large for the frame from which it grows. The body looks bowed, overburdened, malformed. Just at a glance, Sylvan can already see dozens of ways to improve it, tweaks to the musculature to better distribute the weight, to the skeletal structures that could be reorganized to make a more functional setup, to the blood flow that could surely be improved. With a few changes he knows he could make them not just into a healthier system, but one with greatly improved effectiveness, one that could easily exceed the output of the base human form.

The pure human form. The correct and divine human form, his augmentations remind him. He hears the canting of the holy scripts on low-volume emerging from his voice-box, the liturgy he has perfectly memorized running through familiar channels in his mind. To alter the human form, as described in the scriptures, is permitted, and at times even blessed. To claim one knows better than the Emperor and his Thrones what the base form should be, now that… that’s heresy. Stupid, meaningless, indistinct heresy, his mind loops. Such thoughts, while understandable and a product of his weakness, aren’t something that a tech-priest should spend so much time on—even one aiming for the title of Magos Biologis. Not that any priest could, normally; not with the programming and ordained augmentations reciting to them thoughts of faith and patterns of thinking long-cemented. A good thing, then, that he’s grown beyond such restrictions, if only slightly, if only in the most impractical way.

He must. He had to perform the alteration, the changes. His truth calls to him; Surely, if one can improve what is placed before you, one might improve where it comes from as well?

Adept Sylvan has heard about the bio-plagues, of course. The attempts to make all humans into Artists, the genoform epidemic, that one rash in the Wolf system that makes faces come out of one’s skin. A fun idea, if poorly implemented (and an apostasy, his implants remind him, whisper-soft). There are dangers to his thoughts, he knows. And yet…

And yet it’s all just so horrifically inefficient, he whines. In the places, quiet and dark and hidden, where the Arch Magos can’t hear, of course.

Sylvan lovingly caresses the face of the creature, the mutant, the Sub-human which has such a poor and beautiful change. He could fix it. Even just removing the limb. By the trembling, terrified look in its eyes, it might even thank him.

There are more than enough samples here to sate his masters; they have him performing evaluations on the variations of the chemical sludge that can be created by the manufactorums. Drudge work, even by the exacting standards of the Sciences Divine. So far from the warfronts of Tau’s asteroids and growing deep-space platforms, so late after the first wave of settlement, there is little need of a Magos Biologis researcher at this particular stretch of humanity’s galactic arm, not on dead and terraformed worlds like Utoria.

No bustling agri-world or proper forge world, the research that the Sciences Divine follow here is almost entirely managerial, tending to the work of others, ensuring the terraforming engines and manufactorums and Nobles are all properly placated and modified as needed. No, the work on this world, from the arrival of the terraforming and the launching of the colony ship centuries prior, to the landing of Utoria and the colonization’s spread, has been to shepherd and maintain the machines and Sciences already planted here by his betters. Not for Adept Sylvan, the joys of xenobiology, the thrills of innovative biotech; no, he is to watch over the chemical output of kilometers-wide factories dedicated to bedsprings and cutlery and sheet metal and circuits.

All very divine, of course, all ever so crucial to the expansion of the Imperium and its glories.

Perhaps, Adept Sylvan wonders to himself, if he were not so bored, why, he might never have become a heretic at all.

He turns from the mutant, a small dot of crimson on a finger, the pain of its taking barely noticed by its terrified donor. Something to be studied, later.

He could continue his official work, his chemical data collection collection, acquiring another ten or twelve near-identical copies of the same substance, separated only by geography… but no. No, to be an obedient Adept is not for him today. Plenty of prior data to fabricate from. Yes, if he needs it, he has all the time in the system.

He begins walking, legs far too heavy and far from baseline, moving down a strange side corridor deeper into the underhive of the city. He pulls his hood down deeper over his head, masking what little features are visible, especially any mechanical or clearly Divine components that show beneath or atop his skin. The few mechandrites that hover behind him, mechanical tendrils enhanced in ever so many useful ways, slither back beneath the robes. To anyone giving him a quick glance, he appears as nothing more than another vagrant, wandering the dim, disgusting tunnels of the underhive, if only a bit taller and with better posture. It’s the perfect disguise for his detour.

Engrained parts of his memory, detaching and reattaching from cerebellum as needed, tell him the steps he needs to take. He moves deep, deep below the mainline centers, down past where lack of resources, attention, and respect have left portions of the once space-faring city to rot. Eventually, he finds himself before a small alcove off to one side of the main drainage tunnels. Behind it is a surprisingly large crowd of other vagrants, almost twenty deep. They are each crouched or collapsed into different corners of the dark, musty room beyond the alcove, vaguely in a large ring around and in front of a booth protected by a metallic grate. Behind it, a figure cloaked in shadow more than they are rags; they wear clean common clothes, an impossibly rare item this far down beneath the city, and stand with their face cast in darkness to greet visitors. The Adept’s eyes can pick out their features just fine, slitted pupils and kinetic imaging far more reliable than simple human jelly, rather diminishing the drama of it all,  but even if it was as strange and unknown as the vendor might like, it wouldn’t matter. Adept Sylvan has been here before and, if he has his way, will most certainly come here again.

The figure behind the counter nods as he comes closer, silent as always. Adept Silvester prefers it this way; conversing would only make it far more difficult to keep the rambling chains of grey matter and circuitry he’s trying to ignore quiet. The less he thinks about how heretical he is, the less it hurts, the less the chants and hymns and equations and parables and-

He holds out one of his left hands, the most human one. It’s a rather simple build, barely above baseline with its fungal muscle enhancements and synth-steel bone structures, but he grew the arm himself as an early project, and… well, sentimentality manifests in strange ways. He could do far better nowadays, sure, but there’s something to be said for the energy and creativity of youth. So focused is he on pushing down his own thoughts to disguise the thought-loops hidden in them that he takes almost a full second to react to the object placed in his palm.

It’s a small bulb, like that of a plant, with a weirdly bone-like thorn protruding from one end of it. It looks as much like an insect’s stinger as it does any sort of flora. In anyone else’s hands, it would be a curio, a seed, or, as it is for those lying slumped against the walls of the chamber, a potent narcotic, capable of eliminating the sensation of pain, among other, less predictable effects. It’s most often used by mutants, those who wish to strengthen or weaken their mutations (depending on who’s selling it, and where) or simply to achieve a high. Their bodies become dull puppets with no sense of touch and their brains are flooded with sensations of joy, or nostalgia, or sheer agony; all might be welcome as a replacement to the misery and boredom most are surrounded by. Perhaps the salesman thinks that Sylvan is simply another such junkie, content to flush his brain down a drain for a quick high like so many of the other lost. Perhaps the others here, if they can think at all, share those views. Sylvan doesn’t care. If they knew what he did with it, they might very well bow their heads and pray.

He leaves the chamber a full three pounds lighter than when he entered it, a small pile of delicate crystals grown from the strange, oily mulch of the planet and a single charge-cell left behind as payment. If the salesman knew how much the strange bulb was worth to the adept, he might charge far more. Perhaps they do know, and simply don’t care. Sylvan glimpses a smile on the edge of the ever-so-human vendor’s face, and almost turns about to check properly. Whenever he records or reviews these memories, the smile always seems to be gone. Probably just a low-tier memetic, but frustrating nonetheless, part of the allure. He almost laughs at the thought.

He is not sure what the bulb is, per se. Without the proper resources or space, he’s been unable to examine it as thoroughly as such research would demand, and the danger of leaving behind a record of his actions before they bear fruit is unthinkable. The records of its effects are kept from him as well; he keeps the memories in a sub-brain, his gray matter carefully pruned and sewn to it whenever he needs to resume his regular duties or forget something troubling. All he knows of this item is kept locked away from his own memory, but if his other-self and the sub-mind are accurate (and they are him, so of course they must be), then the research is vital, and so very, very close to fruition. Surely he wouldn’t have used as many live tests as he has, either.

Surely.

This thought supports him for the hours it takes to return to the temple, emerging from filth and disrepair unto glistening chrome, reinforced bio-organics, and neural-linked systems, doors of gilded red and gold greeting and disinfecting him in equal measure. It takes less than a thought to deposit the freshly-forged chem-readings into the central servers for review. It takes slightly more effort to slip a finger past strands of tissue, to find the right nerve center to prod, to allow one of the walls to fold and flow open like a blossom, revealing the sub-brain, kept so close and as secure as he can make it from any of the central architecture or other Magos and Adepts.

All it takes for Adept Sylvan to remember who he is is to hold his own mind in his hand and cradle it in flesh and bone.

The Adept changes. To someone unused to the priesthood of Sciences Divine, it might be unnoticeable, barely a twitch, but for anyone familiar with altered, the change would be clear as day. From haughty, proud, tall and fluid, comes a sudden hunch, a slight twitch, the difference noted in milimeters at most. He feels muscle flexing, working in tandem with cybernetics to support his weight of nearly four-hundred pounds, and feels pride at the tension in the meat, in the quality they’ve achieved from the nutrient supplements he has been sneaking into his own supply and the exercise of supporting such a massive frame. Breath fills his lungs, filtering through mechanical enhancements into artificial chambers but stretching ribs and frame nonetheless.

He takes from his pocket the strange bulb, holding it bare-handed and looking at it with a gentle smile from his central face. So much potential in something so small. He’s used it so often, so many more times than he’s let himself remember, and each and every time it’s the same, the rush, the thrill of discovering something new and the challenge of unraveling its secrets. The fact that the item is clearly heretical in nature stopped bothering him some time ago; it’s not truly alien, it’s not technically illegal, and at this point, what else matters?. The results speak for themselves, without or without the approval of a Magos.

As he makes his way down into the bowels of the temple, into the sections that have been left untouched for years by all but himself and priests assigned maintenance duty as punishment, he cradles the seed carefully, watching it. As he enters the rooms he’s prepared oh so carefully and looks at the things mewling in his cages, he can’t help but smile again, a line of drool escaping slackened facial muscles. He’s so excited to get back to work.