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 Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 11:29 am
A Secret Chord
Music was deeply important to Lawrence and playing the piano had always been something very close to his heart ever since he was very small. When he’d first asked about lessons his father had told him that instruments were for little girls and that he should join the football team instead, but for once his mother had dug in her heels and defended his interests. The argument dragged on for days and at the end of it he was sent off to a neighbour’s house to learn. He’d spent many many happy days over at Mrs Carrol’s house learning to play. The proud old widower taught him with great respect and discipline and had confided in him that she played in many ways to cope with the loss of her husband, introducing him to a song they’d played on their wedding day and which thereafter had become “their song.”
This had fascinated him even more than the instrument itself and ever since had kindled in him a desire to unravel the link between emotion and song, to understand why a simple melody could move someone to tears or laughter the way it had his tutor.
Losing his ability to truly play had devastated him more than he could explain to anyone. The loss of his hand had been irrelevant on its own, just another piece of flesh which would decay in the end, but he hadn’t been able to comprehend the consequences of it all, the things he would lose because of the removal and the heartache it would cause him – for a given value of heartache, anyway. Where once he could send notes out into the void of nothingness in the hope that one day he might find the one that would stir awake the dormant parts of him now he could play only half of anything, incomplete and sorrowful.
If he’d been anywhere else that would have been the end of it, a choice with crippling consequences which would last his whole life.
But Deus opened doors that were closed everywhere else, and he’d found ways to play again simply through the golems and tech available on the island. He wasn’t permitted solitary trips into the human world, but Halloween was different, out there he wasn’t able to kill anything permanently so they cared far less what he did. As it turned out what he did was go every few days to a quiet little house out on the edge of Halloween town where he paid in silver seeds for use of a piano in a small music lesson room. Once there he would work on his compositions or revisit old ones, using the strange anchoring power of music to take him back to other points in his life and to try and process some of the thoughts that had been in him at those times.
It meant that he spent a lot of time in and out of the golem labs and over time he had gotten to know some of the techs who worked there.
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Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 11:31 am
I’ll never Chantelle
“So, is it true?” the brown-haired man asked. Lawrence glanced over from where he was setting up one of the golem pods.
“Is what true?” he said. He’d spoken to the man quite a few times but had never actually thought to ask his name. He had a knowing smile on his face and Lawrence wasn’t sure he liked it.
“That you are the original Chantelle?” Lawrence didn’t so much tense as stop, pausing in his tracks for a heartbeat before responding. “What do you know about Chantelle?”
“That she has something to do with the boss and that you have something to do with her too. Look like one another a bit too, though she’s better looking.”
Lawrence went back to typing in the panel. “Yes.” He said, because what did it actually matter? He was used to the techs asking him questions, it didn’t bother him.
“Are you a golem too?” he asked and Lawrence exhaled. “No.” he said. “I should hope it was obvious that I wasn’t.”
The man grinned again. “You talk like one sometimes, and you’ve messed up some of the questions I’ve asked you, empathy ones. Ever read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
“No.”
“Well you should. I still think you might be one of them.”
Lawrence found himself a little bit irritated by this. “I have a husband, I have physical relations, he has never been sent to the infirmary with ice crotch, I have a famine infection at the moment designed for humans. I am alive. Chantelle is not. I am. If you have any further doubts, ask your boss.”
Holding up his hands the other man waved it off. “Calm down, there are a lot of people who don’t make very convincing humans. Helll, a lot of them work here.”
Lawrence opened up the pod and moved to lie down.
“Would you like to work here?” the guy asked.
“I work in the infirmary.”
“It wouldn’t be all the time.” He said, tapping idly on a keyboard. “And maybe you’ll learn some things. I mean, sounds like you have some experience.”
Lawrence hesitated. “Well. It might be interesting, so long as I can maintain my studies.”
“Great, I’ll ask the boss what he thinks about you helping out down here, or well, I’ll ask one of the people who pass things over to him.”
“Fine, I’m going out.” Lawrence said flatly, closing the lid.
“The name’s Clay.” He said to the closed pod. “And I think you are interesting Mr Not-A-Golem.”
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Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 11:33 am
Not a shem
As many times as he’d been out in a golem, Lawrence had never understood how they were crafted. He’d taken for granted that some degree of craftsmanship took place and then a golem resulted. Watching one appear from mere component parts however was a sight to truly behold.
In the moment, he felt like god, watching the first humans coalesce into being, wrought from mud blood and bone.
Of course, it was a little less impressive when what resulted looked a lot like a version of a person he didn’t know, a man, a little on the pudgy side. He’d been expecting an angel, a being of divine perfection, but that wasn’t quite how it worked was it?
Regardless it was staggering and he found himself newly enraptured by golems and the process that created them, he could be like god, he could teach them how to act, he could help to make them better.
“Doesn’t always go as smoothly as that.” Clay said, a little relieved. “Sometimes it all goes a bit iffy, it’s all in the balance of the materials you give them and what they are going to look like. It’s an art, a bit like cooking I guess. Do you like to cook?”
“Absolutely.” Lawrence said, peering a little more eagerly into the glass between them and the man. “It just so happens to be one of my favourite things.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 5:43 am
Princess Sitting
“I want to meet a prince with a big castle and a lot of money.”
Talking to princess golems wasn’t all that different from talking to Mikael in one of his ridiculous moods, Lawrence found. This one was more than a little uncanny because it just so happened to look like Rodney, chosen because he figured that messing around with the appearance of someone he knew would land him in less trouble than a stranger, or – even worse – an enemy.
He’d never really realised how many golems the island went through in a week, with people running all manner of training courses on the regular. Deathsweeper alone demanded a very large quantity of trials grade golems. Piloted golems were easy, crafted simply as shells for the user to inhabit, these were the least interesting to Lawrence. What really interested him was the golems like this one, golems with some degree of AI built into them.
“Why?” he asked it, still a little but unsettled by the sensation of a creature wearing Rodney’s skin without any of his underlying personality or mannerisms. The outfit was jarring too but had nothing on the impact of the words and movements.
“Because I want lots of fancy dresses!” The not-Rodney replied with a big smile that wasn’t at all like anything Lawrence had seen Rodney ever do.
“Why do you want fancy dresses?” he asked, and the moment’s hesitation was noticeable. Clyde said with the princess golems they tended to program in only the most basic drives and motivations and let them spin off from there, just the superficial basics.
“Because I like dresses. What’s your favourite colour?”
“White.” He responded flatly. “How does that colour make you feel?”
Again, that hesitation, and there was a malicious satisfaction in asking the question to the golem, because for him there were no feelings associated with it. It was just an absence and that felt appropriate to him. It was a trick question.
The golem faltered and froze. “I don’t..” it said. “I don’t.. I like pink!”
He narrowed his eyes. “Not answering my question.” He said sharply.
“I like pink it’s nice. I don’t know what white feels like.” It said with an edge of helplessness.
“Not good enough.” He said.
“You are mean!” it said, and it really was impossible for him to think of it as anything other than an inanimate object. It didn’t do a very good impression of being upset either, everything about it seeming somehow ill formed and lazy. The only exception was the appearance which was practically impossible to tell from the original, at least at a glance. He could tell the difference, the tidy way Rodney kept his hair absent, the posture, the averting his eyes, everything was stripped away. At best, it looked like a very strange family member.
“None of you is good enough.” He said coldly and the golem’s distress increased, or at least its efforts to emulate it. It was cartoonish. He’d seen enough people cry to know how it went. It looked to him like too much anime, too much thinking how the media made people cry and not enough practical experience.
“But that’s half the fun.”
Normally he enjoyed watching the golems be deactivated, crumbling back to their base component parts, but with this one he didn’t look. It didn’t feel at all right to watch it disintegrate.
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Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 10:46 am
A Good Boy
Weapon golems were highly sought after and damage to them had taken more than a few chunks out of careless hunter’s paycheques. Lawrence tended to use them sparsely at best, because Butch was at best unpredictable, and at worse downright violent and destructive. But now he was dealing with them directly, his best test subject was of course himself.
He snapped his fingers over the head of the slumped, ragged figure which had formed at his feet. “Up.” He said briskly, and with a jolt of motion, Butch looked up at him. “Stand.”
He obediently did so, standing up as straight as he was able with his twisted half canine legs, his back hunched. He looked worse in this forced humanoid shape, if that was even possible Lawrence found himself thinking. He knew what he looked like naturally from his nightmares and from the visions which sometimes flitted through when the ghost raged and frothed in his thoughts. In his natural shape his chains floated, he had a canine muzzle and the layers of transparent flesh glowed all manner of colours. Confined to a golem he was more like a translucent fish, his chains dragging on the ground and his face forced into a greater semblance of humanity with two large milky and staring eyes. When he moved you could see his heart beating, torn up and nestled in a ragged stab wound that never healed.
“Masturrrrr” he slurred and growled. “Ahm ooot.”
“Yes, yes you are.” He said.
“Walkiessss.” He hissed eagerly, his nub of a tail thrashing so hard his hips swayed. Every breath the creature took was an awful wet rasp through brutalised lungs. Though in the beginning it had been more than a little bit annoying to Lawrence, he’d learned to tune it out as simply background noise. Background noise which had become a part of him. Without Butch the silence of his own mind pressed in all around him very hard and if it hadn’t been for the deadening effect of the medication he worried he’d have lost some degree of control just experiencing it.
“Yes.”
“Am I a good boay?” he said eagerly. “Good boay BUTCH.” And Lawrence sighed at the volume.
“All right Butch, I am going to ask you some questions about your experience in the golem you are in and you are going to answer them. Either you answer them easily and this goes well and you are a good boy or we are here all day and I have to tell you that you are a /bad dog/.”
He flinched at even the word bad. “Butch good butch good boy!!”
“Well we’ll see.” He said, and picked up his clipboard.
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Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 12:46 pm
Study
Lawrence’s free time was scarce, what with shifts at the infirmary and labs, tending his garden, cooking and studying for his exams, but when he got a moment’s reprieve he’d started spending it at the library reading about golems. It was harder to concentrate lately, still contending with the medication mucking up his sleep patterns in addition to the usual level of ambient havoc wrought by his weapon’s constant rambling narrative. It made him quite irritable.
Still, the information he managed to get his hands on was interesting, if scattered to the four corners of the earth. There seemed to be plenty of myths and legends regarding golems and their use, reaching all the way back to biblical times and beyond.
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Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:09 am
Revelation
Lawrence had always wondered how the golems were so perfectly suited to their subject, imagining some master craftsman locked away in a basement shaping golem after golem to be sent to their doom. The actuality of it all was far more elegant and he sat in on a few sessions watching the techs program the cores for the various kinds. The way they functioned was essentially an artificial core, a mimicry of the sort of complex cores Halloween creatures had and which were duly modified into weapons.
The possibilities for such a thing sparkled in his thoughts, appealing in the most visceral way to his desire to create.
It might never be possible but he found the possibilities completely fascinating. A world where they could create new bodies for injured hunters, piloted by either the remains or the recorded pattern of the other. He felt like when he looked at runic encoding he was looking directly at a crude rendition of the stuff that made up the universe. He’d never felt closer to divine in his whole life and for once it wasn’t a slide off into delusion, this was real, this was something in front of him that he could influence like the others.
Some of the guys who worked there weren’t as enthusiastic and seemed to have had the edge taken off it all by monotonous repetition, but for Lawrence it was bright and new. Repetition was simply a bonus for him, an excuse to perfect his skills at something. It also wasn’t a physically intensive process or an overly dangerous one. The main risk was simply fear poisoning, which he had experienced on several occasions already, and though it wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t impossible to endure.
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Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2017 10:53 am
A Story
Lawrence normally did everything he could to avoid Chantelle. It was just such a sickening and dizzying feeling to look at someone and know that they were a person you’d created. Chantelle was a persona created for this island, created as part of the world here, to fit in and belong in a place where logic was very often suspended. He’d met some people as her who he might otherwise never have known and now they no longer belonged to him. With her loss he’d lost a little of himself, stripped back to the bone too sharply. In her place he’d created Chris and Valeri, both of whom were useful in their own way but neither of which filled the same niche as she had.
He’d been successful for the most part avoiding running into her as he went about his business on the island and only glancingly spotting her on twitter. She’d taken care of Mikael for a while, he remembered the young man telling him about it, which had also been strange. He liked her he said. He’d stopped hanging around with her after hearing what she was, at Lawrence’s behest. She was something H had created and it was probably dangerous.
Now he was working with golems and found himself wondering what she even was, if it was closer to a clone or a golem or something entirely different.
All of it meant speaking with her, which would be awkward at best. It took some time even to get her to agree to a meeting, his first few texts replied to with statements that she was busy writing or other such nonsense. Finally, he managed to coax her out with the promise of a few nail polishes – which he KNEW she’d like – and the date was set.
The options of where to meet on Deus were few and far between given how dangerous the outdoors were lately and eventually a quiet study room in the life labs was agreed upon. Lawrence arrived early, and so to his surprise (though should he have been surprised?) did Chantelle. She was dressed in her usual gothic clothing (where did she get wages for them?) and was carrying a big journal under one arm with a pen in the other (the fact she had two hands was insult to injury).
They sat down opposite one another, exactly the same height, almost the same build, except hers was younger, softer, more feminine, and both of them looked one another over. Lawrence wondered what she was thinking, how it felt to meet your maker, to look upon the one who was the very reason for your being. It had to be daunting, he thought, it had to make her feel small.
“You look like, totally tired.” She said sympathetically, and he was jarred from his thoughts.
“What?” he snapped. “I’m not… well… perhaps a bit.” His sleep had still been a little disrupted, but he’d spent a while in the morning carefully masking it as best he could. “I’m fine.”
“All right all right.” She said, placing her journal on the desk and opening it in front of her. She stole a glance back at him. “So what do you like, want?”
“Just to speak to you.” He said, she raised a brow slightly in a manner that reminded him of himself (of course it did). “I work with golems now.” He added quietly.
“Going to make yourself another boyfriend?” she asked. “Can you make me one? A vampire? Like Edward.”
He couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. “Erm.”
“I can’t really be with humans.” She said. “I read that I’d hurt them. I don’t want to hurt them.”
“Do you feel like a human?” he asked.
She squinted. “Do you?” she retorted.
“No.”
“Me either.”
There was a silence between them for a bit, but it wasn't an uncomfortable one, even though she wasn't a human, she felt like family in a way that hardly any of his actual family had.
"Where do you live?" he asked. "Still in the dungeons?"
She nodded. "Won't he give you better quarters?"
Suddenly irate she shook her head. "Dr H is kind to me, he's one of the nicest people I have ever met. I like the dungeon, it helps me write, its a true vampire atmosphere."
He found himself wondering where he'd come up with all this from, looking at it all from the outside.
"All right." he said. "He's not kind to me, he stopped my wages."
She gave him an odd look. "What do you need wages for anyway?"
"Luxuries." he said.
"Oh. Wigs and stuff. Right?"
He tensed. "Not.. not just that. I have to take care of Rodney."
"Forgotten America?"
"The America I loved is dead." he said. "Both of them."
She sighed.
"You know, your life wouldn't make a very good romance novel."
Looking at the desk, twirling his own pen in his fingers, he didn't meet her gaze.
"I know."
He gestured at the blank page. "I'm supposed to be asking you questions." he said.
"I remember everything you remembered, or near enough." she said. "Including the things you made up for me."
There was something faltered in her voice. "I don't know which one is real. I remember my grandparents, and I remember having a mum and dad. My dad hated me."
Lawrence gave her a look, it would have been sympathetic if he knew how to feel that, instead it was just flat and distant.
"The grandparents are yours. The happiness is yours. Luke is mine."
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