I am - Destruction, creation, shared and feared, sought after and learned from, I am to be had by peace maker and war monger alike. The birth and death of many things comes from within me, and I within their hands to build and destroy. Weakness and strength, unity and division. Blood and lust, sin and trust, confused, abused and lost. Just a word, a word that without meaning attached means nothing, a word that is merely an abstract concept impossible to define, an entity which no words can describe, that no meaning can be conveyed through means of a single beings expression.
When I am True - Im Pure and overwhelming, a gift so rare and so undeniable, conqueror of death and life, ofend and beginning, of past present and future. Share me as this, and a question will reside within - when the inevitable end comes- and it will - is the pain of the ending less than the joys of the duration. The romeos and juliets of the here and now, are blood stains draped across a world bathed in sin, there is no place for such a flower, for something as pure as this mask I can dawn, and yet ever so often does the single flower break free from the concrete floor, how delicate and soft it is, to withstand feet that trample and winds that howl, hands that pick - but my inability to wear such a mask for long, makes it the most beautiful.
When I am Unrequited - Im a treacherous beast that circles and swims within your veins, to have your soul and life to give, to have all the elements you breathe float out of you, and collide with a wall, to leap into the arms of one, to allow yourself to truly reach them - and to find they could never catch you, never keep you from falling. How sick and twisted, how cruel, how delicious. The taste of those petals are sweet, so sweet it burns, a fitting taste to match the salt water tears that accompany it.When I hide this face from the world, from the being, I am what you could never know, could never speak of, I am a secret shared with no one, nor the one whom needs hear it, how easily I twist and rot away within, you lose yourself to me, because you lose yourself to them. How easily you could die for someone who might not believe you capable of even existing, how cruel, how true, how pure.A double edged sword when the truth is exposed, as the parties all know and the pain still shows, how wide is the wound when one feels dead, and other is guilty for what's in their head. How often this game finds one player dead.
When I am False- I am ghost, you follow me into the darkness, you trust me like a spectre of your past, and believe that I can be so much more then astral, so much more then a vision, but alas, all children grow up and forget to believe in fairy tales of ghouls and ghosts. I am a poison, a weapon, I am control. I draw you closer and closer tapping from you the soul which we all keep close, and before you can react you feel it all, and when you learn the truth of this ghostly entity, you come to feel nothing.
When you've known me -My mask is halved, black and white, day and night. There are those of you who've know me, and those who simply remember. The dark side is gone from the mind, but the white is an ember. A flicker of flame, brought on by a name, and the question I've asked before. Is it better to have and to lose and move past, or better to not suffer at all? When you know me, you've had the first taste of the drug, and it's potency can be all of the above.
When you don't know me - You wonder, your mind thinks and leaps, and how truly sad you feel before you should sleep, how empty and cold and how often you know - that there aren't arms meant just for you. How dangerous it becomes to know and not know, to think and feel, to question what's real. How twisted and scarred your vision can be, when you know that nothing lasts an eternity.
A warm summer night in Sai Kung. Sieges perched on the roof of a tenement on the south side of Sai Kung Canton, lit by the dim radiance from the booster signal as she coded a Data Miner tree for a newcomer to the Familia Grigori.
The hands-free transmitter nestled inside her ear rustled and the voice of her brother Merrill, keeping watch over her in the Real, came over the device. "So your husband has well and truly passed beyond the veil..." he asked.
Sieges let her hands pause on the ethereal keyboard before her. "By all accounts, yes," she replied. "I know they say death is relative in this place, but according to what SenaDe and Tranque told me, Nucl3ar is really and truly gone from the Real. It really must have been his body that salvage crew from Styx found..." She paused, offering a silent prayer, realizing nearly a year to the day had passed since she'd found out the horrible fate of her husband.
The transmitter fell silent, except for a rustle of breath across the mouthpiece, at Merrill's end. At length, he asked, "But what then of the man you met in the Matrix, who claimed to be him? Has your nuclear warrior become quite literally a ghost in the machine?"
She rummaged among the fragments in her archive to give her mind a moment to settle from the sorrow passing through her heart. "Yes, he is, and much as a part of me still loves him, I can't hold onto a ghost. At least now I have some final closure, but it doesn't make it easier, knowing there's an echo of him still here."
"What makes him different from a program? Why not continue as before?" he asked, innocently, trying to understand the situation. "You have a deep fondness for SenaDe..."
"Sena's a complete person in his own right, but Nuc's ghost... It's just a memory and a shard of digital consciousness. Besides, I'd pretty much moved on after we found what happened to Nuc's body. I changed after that, and even before then, when he'd moved on to help his friend start a crew with IP Conflict... Then when that creepy little coroner in Styx told me they'd found Nuc, I realized I couldn't just hang onto a memory."
"Yes... I remember that sorrowful time. It seemed your heart would cave in and take you with it," he said. "But then Austrian kept you from fading."
A thought pricked at her mind, begging to be confessed. "Well... even when I was with Nuc, I had an especial place for Austrian in my heart."
"Hero worship that took on a different guise when fate unraveled your ties to Nucl3ar?" Merrill asked.
Sieges sighed. "Yeah, that's it in a nutshell..." she admitted. She let herself smile at the fond memories of her brief encounters with Austrian, his sojourns in Outpost Segur, the deep velvety nights spent in each others' arms in her tower room. He too had lost a loved one, when his betrothed, Alice, disappeared into the Real, but the two of them had found consolation in each other, in their friendship and in their passion, that would have borne fruit if the cold winds of strife had not sundered the family and affected her health, snuffing out this small life. She thought with a pang of the small stone marker in the garden beside her tower, of the tears welling up in Austrian's eyes the last time they met in the Matrix, when she told him about the loss of their daughter... These encounters with Austrian, for all their intensity, sadly never lasted more than a few days, before he left on his mysterious endeavors in the Real, that lasted weeks at a time, leaving her alone in Segur, wondering where he'd gone.
But during these absences, fate sent her someone more steadfast, a fixed star she could set her course by, a young, enthusiastic man named PeriodDouble who'd found a purpose for his skills when she announced the launch of Project Embla. He might not be the knight in shining armor she dreamt of, fighting dragons alongside her, but he made a worthy squire and companion. He'd put his life on the line to protect her and to help her in her endeavors. She only wished she had unraveled her ties to Austrian before she had given part of her abundant heart to her "PD", but the fact that she thought more of him than of Austrian, that she had let him share her rooms at Segur and inducted him into the crew of the Quinotaur as its medical officer spoke volumes.
Then SenaDe came into her life, a combat program who, thanks to coding Tranque's daughters had transmitted to him, had come to discover the heart she knew he had hidden away in his code-structure and thus grew drawn to her during his adjustment to his new life. She wished fate had allowed her to initiate him into the deeper mysteries of love, but she knew another hoped to lead him over that threshold one day...
She'd had one or two relationships before her Awakening, nothing of note, which perhaps explained why she'd readily accepted the Red Pill when a Zion captain offered it to her. Even still, she'd turned her back on her Bluepill family, but then, on leaving Zion's service for the Merovingian's -- the better to protect the more vulnerable humans and Exiles -- she'd found a family where she'd met Nucl3ar, the young man she married.
That family couldn't take the place of her Bluepill family, but she'd found among its members people -- human and program -- who more than compensated these losses: Malastus, who'd made a play for her heart and won a love more innocent and sisterly yet no less desirable; Kabell, the father-figure whom she still loved though circumstances drew them apart; The Norseman, her boon companion and brother-at-arms; LinksLife, who came under a dark cloud, but she'd cast a light upon it and made him feel more welcome; Sallo, who'd been a mother to her and to her darker companion; Noxu, who kept her laughing and became a brother to Morraeon, Marrith's wily, sensual daughter; Anubis, whom she'd once tried to flirt with, but whose concern in his own -- or Marrith's -- weird way lead her to love him as father and mentor; and that other, darker mentor who sought to claim her as his protégé, but whose techniques she dodged, hoping she could one day bring him under her own gentler dominion through means she knew he'd resist as vehemently as she had his...
Merrill's voice asked. "You grew silent: Were you meditating or were you engrossed in code-crafting?"
She snapped back to full attention. "I got lost in my own thoughts and memories about the family and days past and present..."
"Dreaming of your constant squire or your inconstant lover?"
"Yes, and so many others," she said. "So many that live only in memory..."
"And yet who seem still close, when you but think of them," he said. "Thus laying the groundwork for newer memories, new loves..."
She heard a small querulous grumble off transmitter. "Like the one the family started with the little guy who just woke up. Hello, Harry."
"He only just awakened, no doubt at the sound of your voice," Merrill said, a doting lilt in his voice.
"I'm almost done here anyway," she said, and hyperjumped down to the hardline, to send off the code subroutines she'd promised the newest Redpill of the family and to jack out and tend to her son and to her family...
I love her. I will always love her. Even though I am killing her.
She is so beautiful. She has the kind of face that brightens up the room, and my day. Her loving eyes inject warmth inside me when the world is cold. But tonight, she has the kind of eyes that make me sob in absolute misery. And it is all my fault.
My stomach is in a knot. My eyes are shut so tightly. My eyeballs feel like they are going to pop. My face crunched up in agony. I cannot breathe from my congested nose. Chest deflated. Unable to inhale because my lungs are stuck in an exhale. My throat closed from the lump. The acid in my stomach boiling over and burning my chest. All the pressure desperately trying to escape from my forehead. The feeling of cracks in my skull, the pain breaking through.
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"You don't have to make me feel this way."
"I'm sorry," I barely muster as I turn and walk away. The door shuts behind her and I can hear her pain. It echoes in my head. Echoes and echoes and echoes. And every time I hear her in my head my heart tares more and more. To kill someone you love. To cause the pain you took away so many times.
The exit cannot get here any faster. The blur of the doorway in my salty, glazed eyes. I shut the door and let it all out. The sound of a million hearts breaking at once.
They come to you when you are at your lowest. When you are desperate. I am both.
They tell me the things I want to hear. I may never forgive myself, but I can forget. And I may deserve this prison.
So I tell them what they want to know. Another sin I'll burn for. Obvious smiles from underneath their bandanas.
I hold it in my hand. The exit cannot get here any faster. The blur of the doorway in my salty, glazed eyes. I place it over my tongue, back in my throat. I swallow the water rapidly hoping it will choke me. It all hit my chest at the same time, like swallowing a brick that crashes in my stomach.
Keep a hold of yourself. Subdue the emotions. Don't throw this up. It will take effect soon.
Drowsiness. My eyelids slide over my retinas, slowly. I used to see blackness when I shut my eyes. I used to see her. Now all I see is... blue.
Standing outside on the apartment’s wooden balcony, she casually lifted her arms into the mild breeze, and then reached up to the yonder sky, seemingly taking it within her grasp. Her hands were young and unscarred. They revealed no trace of the burden she carried. It is hard to witness death firsthand and emerge unchanged, even as a child. Yet, she had not escaped the past entirely unscathed. No, the evil men had changed her from within. This in itself was an odd notion, as she lacked flesh and blood in this viridian mirage.
She was older now, regardless of if that was significant. Even programs changed with the passing of years, as they learned to operate in this environment. Time would render methods no longer applicable, or make variables no longer present. Time had seeped into her structure and revealed the design flaw of naïveté. This had been corrected naturally. Now, every so often, she would succumb to flights of melancholy restlessness. She had learned what it meant to hurt. She had seen the City, tempestuous and sin-ridden, battered and weary, under relentless assault by an unending legion of foes. That would be the first time, but not the last, where she had learned of the pain of loss. There one day… gone the next, then the jarring and unexpected transition to a life without.
She refused to say her goodbyes. She was not programmed to move on. Some days she cried, and the city mourned with her. The clouds would turn dark and echo distant thunder as her tears burst in thick packets and flooded her vision. Rain pitter-pattered on puddles and cobblestones below, and then settled into deep aquamarine reservoirs of stagnant despair.
But by her child-like resilience, that storm would pass and give forth to a new day. Through her tears, she smiled, and the world was alight. Her sun shone from the heavens, filling the air with luminance. He reached his arms around the city and stretched: under treetops, onto green fields of grass, through the apartment’s bedroom windows as steady rays in pillars of dewy fog. Down in the streets and alleyways, the dreamers gazed in wonder. This was the very essence of her tribute.
On occasion, her white robed guardian watched as she crafted. His stern disposition betrayed no emotion, but if she looked closely, she could discern a hint of awe – he too, was calmed by these beautiful sights.
Focused in the present, she poured her very soul into the sky. She was the storyteller now, entrusted with the tales of those who had came and gone before her. The firmament was no blank canvas, it lived and breathed as did she – an anthology of verse in visual form, exhaling cyclic heat and mist. The sky was a sea of chariots carrying ancient pharaohs; the sun-god Ra and his serpent sailed past the nebulous formations overhead, glowing through the prayers and adulation of millions. Mountains of rubies and rivers of gold trailed behind, following as a train of devoted subjects.
She watched the spectacle and spun her web of cloud wisps, now inspired to swim deep in memory. There in her mind he stood, clad in black... yet, that was reflective of neither his essence nor his spirit. She made up her mind. All hints of gray in this particular atmosphere were out of place. She paused and pondered the suitable replacements, then began to paint. Over one spot of shadow she laid down a base of red-orange blood spilt in muddy craters. An edifice of darkness suddenly became overgrown and completely covered by technicolor weeds. This pattern continued for some time without wavering, until the sky was a burning disco rave that thumped and pulsed to some unconscious rhythm. An ocean of pearls and swirling rainbow coral reefs, it was a separate entity in her eyes, which sparked with occasional sentience.
Today was complete, and tomorrow would be the same. With everlasting vigilance, she created and cared for the tapestry of the rising sun. He watched from above, with the occasional approving gleam or shimmer. Some days she rested, and the world produced a pale green backdrop: the intermission period for a budding rose. No, the days she lived for were when she made the sky blaze with a patchwork of hopes, dreams, and above all, memories.
This was her ever-evolving charge. Her self-imposed purpose no longer simply concerned Neo, the one who had given up everything to save even more. Sometimes, she worked for the Oracle, tirelessly memorializing the mother figure who had been so suddenly slain. Sometimes her art was for her parents, who after silent years had been reduced to mere memories. She could barely remember how her father felt, or how his eyes twinkled in the night. But sometimes, if she aligned the heavens just right, she could hear the breeze whispering words of affection as it whistled through her hair. When she believed, she could point out where her loved ones were in the sky. They watched over her, keeping her company for the lifetimes together they had been denied.
