17 Aevum Oblivio That Was Your Life

“Welcome to our experiment,” said Edward Tsien, his teeth moving despite being stripped of muscle and flesh and lips. “As you can no doubt appreciate, I represent the first attempt to complete the metamorphosis.”

Zhe clutched his head, kneeling as dark, bloody tentacles bound him to the floor. The rack stopped its spinning, and the flayed visage of Tsien floated closer, his empty eyesockets brimming with foul light. The technician could feel the two realities grinding against each other, threatening to crush his mind between them.

“If anything, the results should be more interesting this time around.”

Then the skin rolled back over Tsien’s half-featured grin as the background faded, blackened…

About Zhe's comatose corporeal body, the residue of Everdark's Golems was literally boiling, melting together into an inky dome. He couldn't see it coming.

Technician Zhe never felt the myriad tiny claws of the Slavesystem enfolding him. They covered him like a rising tide, plugging into his biological systems and surrounding his brain. He was too far under now to care, or to feel the absolute enslavement of his body. The visions were a lucid nightmare, behind which the face of Tsien pulled the fiberoptic strings. And behind him?

“I’m so sorry, Zhe,” said another voice, not as loud, but all-enfolding, a voice which spoke liquid words as huge as mountains. “But as a Technician of the Multiplicity, I'm sure you know about the necessity of investigation.”

Zhe couldn’t see the speaker through a haze of random memories. But he knew the codespeak twelve of the Multiplicity when he heard it.

“It is possible that I have found, here in this abysmal backwater, a means to end the war.” Zhe knew the voice - an echo from his newspawned days, back under the triple-sun of the Technic Academy. He could picture the serried energy bands of Nyl's magnetic field. He could smell his aura.

“With luck,” said the renegade technician “you may even survive to witness peace.”