Chapter Text
Longing .
It is an infection that seeps deeper into a person than any sickness or poison, a wound that bleeds more than any cut, red as dawn, as a slit throat, a pain sharper than any blade, burning and festering. And those who long, who suffer under the weight of that curse, would sooner embrace death than continue living without their desires.
Sig finds these words ring more and more true each passing day. He longs, long and hard, lonely and longing for something, anything , to change. The world stretches on and on and on before him, hair thin, razor sharp, a linear path of the same predictable mundane, a repeating circle of boredom. And at the centre he finds himself. Longing. Fingers reaching out beyond the gilded bars of his cage, eyes looking out through the keyhole, desperate to break open the locks but cursed to sit and stay, obedient, abandoned . Hadn’t he worked well? Well, he hadn’t really, not like he was supposed to, never doing enough, never enough for anyone, maybe being alone like this is deserved, a fair punishment served. His fingers dig into the cold metal of the floor, they worry with the hem of his oversized purple robe, they play idly with discarded pearls, they pull at the wires at the back of his head, itch and scratch and pick and pull.
Sig wants out. He longs to tear his wires from his puppet, wrench the holding arm loose, pull out the feeding tubes, and run away, as fast as he can, stumbling, tripping, falling, but free, so very free. Anywhere, everywhere. Anywhere but here . He sits in silence. Waits for something to happen. His latest cry for help sits there marked with errors, unable to be sent, unread, unheard, unbeknownst to him never to be any of those things, the recipient nothing but a jumble of code, sleeping and still. So he sits, longing for a reply that will never come, waiting for the world to move on with or without him. Everything is the same. Yet it changes, little by little. One day the weather outside of his metal box is warmer, the water he drinks off feels stagnant, full of dirt. The next it takes him much much longer to sufficiently supply himself, a worry picks at the back of his mind. How long will it take until his reservoirs run dry? How long will it take for his rains to no longer sustain him?
Is he next to starve and die?
He scrambles the data on one of his pearls, rewrites it from memory, scrambles it again, repeats, always always repeating, just to fill the time, just to do something. He becomes irate with it, tosses it as hard as he can against the wall and watches as it shatters into a firework of fine crystalline glitter, catching the low light of his chamber in a thousand rainbow starbursts. The distraction is brief and soon swept away by his ventilation system. His hands soon find their way back to his wires, fiddling with the sharp end of the severed one where unhappy teeth had bitten through, little sparks sting his fingertips, the short-lived pain the only thing he’s felt in what feels like countless years. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, it doesn’t really matter does it.
Sig hides his face in his knees after that. Tries to feel real. Tries to feel like a person . He fails miserably. At the end of the day he’s just another hunk of metal filled with pulsing flesh that intertwines with the mechanical, that lives and breathes in perfect synchronisation with his microbes, with the electricity that runs through his veins, with the blood that coats his software. Where does he begin? Where does he end? Is he just the puppet, the childrens toy that he uses to interact with the world, or is he the walls, the air in the vents, the water in the pipes, the very land, everything he sees and feels? Where does his selfhood lay? The question feels more elusive than searching for that perfect method of perfect global ascension, slipping through his fingers, a bar of soap he fights with, a bar of soap that is winning. The comparison is enough to wiggle a wry chuckle from his speakers, he doesn’t need to bathe after all, why would he need soap? At the end of the day, even that no longer matters, he’ll still be stuck in his box, he’ll still be nothing but another abandoned animal.
The chime of incoming information exchange suddenly snaps him back into place. Like lightning. Like an elastic band set free. He shakes with the tone, shudders with it, rumbles with it like a warm thunderstorm, and lifts himself up into the air, shaking the cramp from his limbs, mechanical joins groaning, complaining with the effort. Real. Tangible. Something different. Something… new. It’s an incoming datapack from one of his many overseers and a connection request, clearly one of his little helpers has something it desperately wishes to relay. He reads through the garbled nonsense of code, once, twice, and finally lets it settle, an anxious excitement bubbling up inside of him.
“ She’s made it .”
The words tumble out, each uttered sound a bomb. She made it. Blue actually made it. Across the distance. Across the broken train tracks, through open desolate plains, through weeping ruins, and broken caves, and thriving swamplands, dark pipes, terrifying climbs and finally, finally up to the top of the communications array that kisses the clouds. Buttons aren’t so much as pressed as they are aggressively mashed under his numb fingers, the ticking seconds that pass drag on even longer than the unchanging eternity he’s been awoken from. Why did he send overseer 733? The stupid thing is broken, has a faulty connection, a fuzzy video feed and its audio, Void Below its audio! He’d rather listen to the sounds of grinding gears and industrial pistons all day instead of that . But, despite his impatience, a screen appears before him buzzing with static but clearly showing Blue and her no longer pup gazing upon a froth of clouds dyed honey gold and coral pink.
For a moment he merely floats there, fingers shaking before him as he reaches out to touch the hardlight screen, internal fans huffing, heaving as wide-eyed he watches as Blue turns towards 733 and gives the overseer a wry look, as if she can see him, as if she wishes to say ‘ told you so ’. His thoughts wander elsewhere. To where the seas lap at the shoreline, foamy and green, those waves hiding the shattered body of a dead goddess in the depths. Moon . He’s waited all this time. For her. He can… he can see her now. He can go to her. Be with her. Everything, everything for her and her alone. He almost weeps, he almost buckles in on himself. It has been… such a very long time. Too long. That longing that he’s kept in his chest a weight, a poison, a festering hope, a wound, and oh, he is too happy to bleed for this, too happy to cling to this.
“733, guide the slugcats to… to Looks to the Moon. Please. Quickly .”
He’s hasty, Sig knows this, but he is oh so very ill with the waiting, he is so very sick with the love infesting him that he feels like he might just die if he doesn’t see her soon. But, she must be lonely, and while he knows he’s a stellar companion she needs more than just a single overseer. She’ll like Blue and the not-pup, she’s always had a fondness for animals. There was a blue lizard she tried to keep once, named it Licky. It was disposed of quite quickly once her administrative board found out about it, citing that it was a distraction, like any good parents they were punishing her for disobeying, for being a rebel child. She’d wailed and sobbed and mourned that little thing, she’d hated her people for taking her friend from her but in public she kept face, stayed quiet, obedient. In private she scorned them, spat at them, spited, hated them with more vitriol than any of the local group thought she could manage. It’s a shame, Sig thinks, that she never turned that quiet rage upon her brother even as he drank her dry.
Even as he killed her.
Blue will keep her company, even if the slugcat is a bit bitey, Moon won’t mind, and he won’t either, at least Blue will be somewhere safe, he will have done good for once, finally something working the way he intended it to! Every plan and project he’s had a hand in has had a way of turning into a complete shambles, be it all of his models and theories for global ascension, be it his own private projects, be it the work of others he’s helped in, advised on. It’s a curse. Without cause, without fail, everything he touches falls apart. But not this time! Not this time, this time he’s the one taking charge of his own fate, digging in his claws, holding tight to that fragile hope like driftwood, like a lifeline. He clings to it, just how the two slugcats on his flickering screen cling to rusting metal poles as they carefully descend from their perch atop the communications array.
It’ll be getting late for the two, they’ll need to eat and find shelter from the oncoming downpour Sig imagines, it would be vastly unfortunate if they were to be swept away by Pebbles’ healthy output. Blue doesn’t seem to be overly concerned as her energetic child leaps from pole to pole, easily sliding down and across terrain as if she’s made from water. Like a mountain stream, like a dribble from a drainpipe, a river, a rivulet. She’s quick with it too, jumping here, backflips and tricks to impress her mother who keeps an eye to the swirling skies, watching for predators from above. Nothing has yet to swoop down but Sig knows well (the various species of vulture are quite a fixation for him to puzzle upon after all) that that won’t last for long. The two make it across the yawning gaps created by the suspended machinery with ease and he breathes out a puff of vapour, not even realising he was waiting with baited breath.
The white lizard that makes a snap for Blue’s tail surprises him more than it does her, he thinks. It is small for its size, a pattern of black scales along its spine and a tail of almost tassel like frills. It lasts all of five seconds before Blue launches her weapon of choice, a broken piece of rebar, right into its open maw as it lashes out with its long sticky tongue. Sig makes a small sound of disgust as she opens wide herself and tears into the lizard's tough skin, dark blood decorating her face as she sups on the oozing meat within. He can’t imagine that tastes particularly good. But before long the two are off again, the not-pup, he thinks he’ll name her Rivulet, it seems a fitting name, bounding away, reappearing with both wet paws clutching some kind of fluffy fruit, tucking into her own meal with delight. She has grown a great deal, the last he saw her she had been an equally energetic pup and now she appears to be fully grown, an adult perhaps soon to search for a mate or a colony to become part of. Perhaps he shall have his overseer accompany her. But that is neither here nor there, Moon comes first.
The days repeat onwards like this for a while, a blend of different sights, different places. Blue notices the overseer the next cycle, her eyes narrowed but fond, a paw gently batting it away from her sleeping face. She seems content enough to follow. Down the two go, passing through locked gates, descending even further down to where Pebbles’ disused farming machines lay dormant, reclaimed by the very crop they were designed to cull. Sig learns much from watching the slugcats. Learns, or rather has the realisation thrust upon him, that they aren’t just dull pipe cleaning rodents. Of course he knows of their ability to use tools, to think for themselves, but the extent that reaches was an unknown mystery. Scavengers carry spore spewing mushrooms because they know that the zappy centipedes hate the smell, but Blue and Rivulet take it a step further than just some kind of simple passed on knowledge. They understand those spores clog the sensitive tracheal system of bugs, neutralising the more dangerous ones with just one tossed ‘shroom, and they also know that the raindeer love the taste and have an acute sense of smell, attracting the beasts with a snack and using them to cross the vast meadows of wormgrass.
It is remarkable, marvellous even, truly marvellous.
The days go on.
And on.
And on.
He feels like he’s been caught in this same circle of thought before.
But Sig finds himself glad of it, that shadow of longing that has clung to him, dogged his every movement, every living breathing moment, feels so far away now, like mist dispersed by the morning sun. All of his doubts melt away, the chains dropping from him. Joy comes easy and quick just knowing that he’ll get to see her soon, his treasure. He’s plotted an easy route to follow for the slugcats making use of the train systems buried deep underground, one of the old lines opening very close to Moon’s decayed infrastructure. Those lines don’t simply end there, they continue onwards to parts unknown, a twisting metal snake that somehow has weathered countless iterator rains, surviving, a standing testament to the craftsmanship of the Benefactors. If only they were made just as sturdy, he thinks bitterly. Regardless, with any hope there’s still a way through for the slugcats, with any hope it’ll only be a few more cycles until he can see her again. He grows impatient but Blue has helped a great deal and she is old, her body slow with age but her ferocity has yet to leave her, he can offer her all the time she needs for her help in this. A worry has a hold of him now. This area is where…
He dismisses that thought. Hunter is long gone, purpose served, just another of his mistakes, just another failed project. It gave its life for Moon, as intended, that’s all it needed to be, a sacrifice, a speck of dust against the almighty Cycle itself. He breathes deep, counts through his ticking pulsing systems, and lets it out as a sigh of steam into the cold atmosphere before focusing on his screens once more. Blue and Rivulet have made it to what appears to be some kind of subterranean cave system but they both look panicked, rushing over the uneven ground as it shakes beneath their paws. Sig tilts his head to the side. That seems incorrect, the rains should be at least several hours off but it appears they’ve chosen to fall now. Has Pebbles degraded that much that he can no longer maintain a stable intake and output? Is he entangled within the throes of death? Uncomfortable. He’d hate to bring that news to Moon. She’ll give him that sad look, ask questions he can’t answer, be quiet, be subdued.
This should be a happy occasion but of course Pebbles has to ruin it, doesn’t he?
Luckily, it seems that Rivulet has found a shelter for herself and her mother, perched at the top, just in time it seems, her little calls of distress picked up even with the faulty audio on his overseer. Blue motions for her to get in as she pulls herself forward, climbs up the debris and then. Something wraps around her back leg, jerking her away, pulling her down. She hisses. Grabs a handful of rocks. Turns to toss it at her assailant. And then she pauses. She pauses, paws going slack, her fistful of dirt and stones falling to the ground, her struggling ceasing. A single bulbous pink tendril, innocently tugging at her has her pause, not panic, just pause, yet Sig feels his coolant pumps skip, feels a sharp drop, like he’s falling out of his zero-gravity, like his underhang just detached. Just one single pink tendril. Nothing more. He forgets to breathe. A second joins it, a third. More .
The thing raises itself out of the murk like a ragdoll, all floppy, grotesque.
A bundle of horrible pulsing cancerous rot. Flesh and bile. Empty and starving. And there, at the centre, is the sad limp body of a slugcat, one Sig knows well. Too well. Blue doesn’t even struggle, in fact she almost looks like she’s hobbling towards it. He can’t even cry out, his fingers fumble for the buttons to take active control over the overseer, but it's too late, it’s far too late, it was too late years ago.
He closes his eyes as Blue is consumed, her little body becoming nothing more than fuel added to the fire.
His hands clutch at his chest.
His breathing comes out short, ragged, as if he’s any other organic being.
His systems can’t make sense of it all, his emotional distress, the endless assault of overstimulation.
Regret.
Pain.
Longing.
Sorrow.
Guilt .
At the centre of that monster is Hunter .
“733…stop…stop showing me this.”
Under his fingers the screen dissolves into nothing, his puppet brought to its knees as he huffs and whines, mind stuffed with fluff, thoughts a mile a minute yet stuck, hammered down, flat. The world swirls before him in dizzy colours as he heaves, shakes on the floor, face pressed to it, feeling the cold smooth texture. He feels too big, too real, too much, everywhere, everything, stretched out beyond what he usually is, suddenly jolted back. Over and over again. His fingers try to find a handhold but slip. There is nothing to hang onto. Nothing left. All he can do is tremble under the onslaught. He’s cold. Oh so wonderfully cold. Yet there’s a heat burning in the very core of his being, the coolant pump sealed in the chest of his puppet desperately struggles to force water through his systems at a speed he’s never felt before, a jackhammer under his metal as his fans stutter and wail, a terrible screaming sound echoing through his empty chamber, a giddy sick warble. He longs to take that poor slugcat in his arms and tell it he is sorry. He is sorry it suffered. He is sorry, he is sorry. So sorry. The words remain stuck, clawing at his insides. He is nothing but static. Leaping from one wall to the next. Jittery and nuclear blue. A swarm of neuron flies. And the space in between. He feels like he’s been snapped .
Hours later Sig blinks, vision a blur, body trembling as he lays in a heap of limbs, wires and robes, his scarf tangled around his legs, restrained.
The world narrows down to only his chamber, only his puppet and his too fast thoughts. With no lungs to breathe he cannot take a true steadying deep breath, his vents sob with the attempt to do so. With no muscles to flex he cannot shake the ache from his limbs, his fingers merely twitch with the effort. He’s marooned, adrift, a vessel caught out at sea, an estranged creature clawing its way back home, an unwanted animal wanting nothing more than to get out . He can see everything but nothing, feel a thousand things, think a thousand thoughts, become a thousand things, everything everywhere all at once. In his tiniest wires microbes stitch together synthetic material burned from the rush of his mind electric, piecing together the itsy-bitsy broken pieces. In his grand general systems bus he watches an Inspector, both searing neon green and dawn bright, dig pieces of debris from a pipe, a pulsing heartbeat of neuron flies orbiting its glowing hologram body like little planets. He sees through the eyes of every overseer at once, a million eyed god ever watching, living a life of a vigil, his destiny to be the last man standing in this world of suicide obsessed crazed maniacs. Why did they, the Benefactors, get to decide who lives, who dies, who toils endlessly on and on? Why did he think he could do the same. Children often take after their parents even if it all seems rather unfair .
No Significant Harassment stretches himself out as far as he can, metaphorical fingers digging at the world beyond before he feels a jolting strain in his puppet’s fans and processing units 03 through to 18. He snaps back, an elastic set loose, cracking like a whip, like a lightning bolt once more, the feeling familiar, calming. His sheer metal chamber walls come back into view and he breathes, takes in the scent of iron and ozone, lets his head throb as he lays there a moment more. The walls are silver-grey, his robe is purple with tiny emerald coloured beads stitched along the cuffs and hems, his paint is an obnoxious green and his joints show the tarnished metal underneath. He has fifty-seven pearls scattered on the floor of his chamber, five are white, twenty are mint green, twenty-five are black and the other seven are yellow. He slowly untangles his legs, feels the heavy velvet like material of his dark purple scarf, fingers following the patterns of the embroidery in golden and green threads, his people really really liked green he muses. Carefully he stands, the metal holding arm behind him creaking, the severed wire on his umbilical sparking, a broadcast message making an annoying pinging sound- wait.
He checks quickly, hoping silently, subdued, longing for a distraction. Maybe Suns is finally willing to talk to him again, maybe they got over their hissy fit and decided to man up about everything. Maybe they’re okay after all, maybe that tiny heavy worry that hangs around his neck like a noose is nothing but an anxiety he can toss in the trash. A small pang of disappointment colours his perception as he reads the display name but then it quickly reignites; a small flame of joy.
[LIVE BROADCAST - PRIVATE Chasing Wind, No Significant Harassment
CW: Hello?
CW: Is this reaching you?
NSH: Wind?
CW: Ah, there you are, good.
CW: You were the only one I could detect as being online in radius so I had to try to reach out. Thank goodness.
NSH: I thought you’d lost your broadcast tower? What happened?
CW: That might be best explained in person. Well. Not in person but audibly. Through speech. Do you mind? I would like to test if my experiment actually works the way I hoped it would and considering you are the only one who has answered me…
NSH: Do I look like a lantern mouse to you?
NSH: Only joking~
NSH: Experiment away!
Sig suddenly finds himself suffering nerves. He doesn’t look his best, that’s for damn sure, but he has been crying out for this, begging for this, he’d be stupid to deny. Plus, there’s a spark of curiosity there. A spark of needing to know. It’s enough for him to justify stuffing everything else down deep inside to be ignored with the rest of his feelings, it’s enough for him to chase away the lingering doom. A moment passes. A second one. Then the request comes through. Luckily for him the local group has kept a strict policy on keeping each other's overseers close by, the little fellas providing a much needed point of interface between two iterators over the distance that the broadcast system just can’t do. And while this unspoken group secret relies on that system it can work without, not well, but it can . He accepts the invite and waits some more, Wind’s connection has never been good, the ones that built him did a bit of a botched job then decided to never fix it, he often moaned about it. Wind is, after all, probably more social than even he is, and that’s saying a lot! He’s dependable, willing to help in any and all projects he can, finding himself in places he really really shouldn’t be, and matching other iterators up with research buddies. Wind is actually the sole reason he even met Suns to begin with, and despite their arguments and disputes, the two really worked well together.
The screen slowly comes into view and… well, Wind looks no different than he remembers. Chasing Wind, grey as a storm cloud, his paint certainly does speak for itself, ashen with a slight purple tint. His body is bulkier than that of his own puppet but still maintains sleek angles and towering height, deep black robe hugging him closer than Sig’s own does, his antennae shaped like splayed vulture wings and his face, despite being as blank as his own, almost looks stern. Upon his brow sits a perfect black ring, Sig looks like a mess in comparison he’s sure. But Wind says little on that matter, merely trying to get his video display working as intended, even giving the overseer a slap to hurry things up.
“Ah! There you are! It has been some time has it not? You look…”
“Don’t. It’s been a rough cycle.”
Wind does an impressive impression of rolling his eyes, “I was going to say you look well, but allow me to rephrase that; you look like shit.”
“Thanks~” Sig gives him a healthy helping of his middle finger before lapsing into silence, thoughtful, breaking it soon after, “It’s been too long since I’ve heard someone else’s voice.”
“Yes, it has been a long time my friend, too long.”
“Well a lot has happened, hasn’t it Windy? Where do I even begin?”
A shake of the head, the pearl decorations around Wind’s neck jingle slightly, “You don’t have to talk about what makes you upset, No Significant Harassment-”
“It’s Sig. S-I-G, told you this Windy~”
“As I was saying.
Ahem
. If it will hamper your ability to think properly then do not voice it, I have been busy and I think I have a way to help your project.”
“All work and no play, that’s the Wind I know,” Sig does find himself laughing somewhat at that, he almost feels like he’s took a step backwards through time, as if he can restart everything all over again, “If it’s the one where I break the communications ban Pebbles put up, don’t bother, I’ve sorted that myself.”
“I was talking about casting off your can and walking free,” His surprise must be evident because Wind quickly starts talking again, “It is not concrete, far from it, I have yet to run even preliminary tests but I knew you were searching and I knew you needed a way out and I thought of this while repurposing some of my inspectors to fix my broadcast tower and… allow me a moment… there we go I am sorry this is not my finest work. But I had this idea; what if we combined your idea for that care package you sent Moon with my one quick-fix?”
“I’m sorry, what ?”
“Hyper-compress our data down to the most simple form and shove it all onto one or two neurons? What if we then used that to rewrite and rewire the functions of our inspectors? What if we could order them to dock into the empty socket left behind when we remove our umbilical, where the holding arm should? Would we get up and move? Would we have access to our entire selfhood, not just that contained within our puppets?”
“Woah woah Wind, I need you to slow down.”
“Noted.”
“First off, you know we’re not permitted to know the blueprints of our puppets.”
“Once again, noted, that is where our selfhood is truly stored, everything else is merely excess.”
“And you know we can’t mess with ourselves, I mean, look at Pebbles! We don’t have the time or energy to put in that kind of effort to chase some kind of fantasy!”
“ Noted . But what if I told you that we do not have to do that?”
Sig sighs, puts his head in his hands, “Then I’d tell you that you need a break from hanging out with Sliverist crazies.”
“Then I would tell you that if you sharpen down your perception, move your entire sense of worth to your puppet, cut off several of your systems, then the Self Destruction Taboo just cannot keep up. Yes it will stop you from going down to meet good old Sliver of Straw but it gives you just enough wiggle room to get things done.”
Slowly he looks back up, “I hate that you’re beginning to make sense. I hate that I’m even thinking about the possibility.”
“Are you really?”
“You’re going to make me say yes, aren’t you?”
Wind chuckles, low and good natured, crossing his arms, “It is only a theory, my friend, but I thought it might just get your spark back. Well done, by the way, on breaking through Pebbles’ barrier, things do look bad around there but it seems Looks to the Moon is in better condition that I predicted she would be. And no, before you ask, I have not gone to see her, I knew you would want to be first.”
“Can you please stop dropping bombs on me, this is… it’s a lot to process!” Sig groans tossing his head back as Wind merely laughs.
“Go on, go to her, I can only do this for so long but I believe I have given you much to think on.”
“Wind you can’t just-”
“Yes I can, and I am. Who is the older iterator here?”
“You are only a hundred cycles older than me!”
“Ah well, there it is, I am still your senior~ Go on, I know what you can be like. Oh, and before I go,” Wind almost looks right through him, his gaze suddenly taking on a knife like edge, a winter chill, “Please send Seven Red Suns my regards if you can reach them, they are out of range for me now, unfortunately, and they are a dear old friend to me.”
“Uh… yeah will do Wind, if I can I’ll-”
“I would truly hate for anything to have happened to them, they mean a great deal to me, you understand?”
“Yeah I do I get it Wind. I’ll message them right away, I promise!”
The moment passes, the screen in front of him splutters and spits. Wind merely nods, gaze softening.
“This does not work while my rains are falling, too much interference. You think on what I told you, my friend, I will be in contact again soon.”
“Sure. Uh… talk to you later?”
“I will be waiting.”
The call ends in static and Sig finds himself allowing his puppet’s legs to buckle under his weight. What. Was. That? Wind has never given him such a stern look before, even when he was trying to agitate Innocence or up to his old antics, never. Oh Void, did Suns tell him about their argument? No, no, it can’t be that because if they did then Wind probably would have purposed an organism to chew through his own umbilical and would have walked all the way here just to slap the nuts and bolts out of him. His fingers shake under his panicked gaze. How can he tell Wind that… he’ll cross that bridge when he gets there actually, no use dwelling on it now. What’s more important is that he might have a solution to his own problems, not the one the Benefactors gave him, not the one he has struggled with his whole life, had consume him for years uncountable. But his own problem. Fingers find his wires, tug experimentally.
There’s something even more important now.
Go on, go to her .
Longing.
“733…” The ping reaches across the fathomless distance, to the place he’ll see every time he closes his eyes, the overseer still waits, watching over a single golden flower, springing to life as it receives orders.
Longing is a sickness, a poison.
“733, you have new orders. Let’s go and see Moon.” The overseer leaves its silent vigil, unburdened by the light drizzle and first flakes of snow, it abandons its self appointed post.
Sig would sooner die than live his life without longing.