9cubed crawls his way back up to the scrapyards with bareknuckled hacks punching holes in the ICEwall. He's breathing deep, bruised & scratched - seething with anger. He dawns a sinister, gritty smile to greet the scrapheaps he once called home, his mission in the depths of those filthy places complete once again. Flickering orange streetlight dangles from a loose wire and cast stray rays in the wind's drift down abandoned streets. A dim, hollow welcome.
Diamond watches from a distance, his physical-shell is cracking - light-based omnipotent form is revealed with. The shroud of light presents a cognitive sense of appearing like a timeless, wise old man with gray beard to any on-lookers through some full-body deep 8 circuit activation and entrancement. A distant entangling warmth projected by this pure, intense bright light at Diamond's core.
Diamond is the Ancient of Ancients. Violent, pristine godhead poised on the edge of timelessness. Prism suspended in all-time.
A letter arrives in the hands of Dr. C. with fine print and an official O.C. stamp, it reads:
"Dear highly esteemed head of Rodent Industries,
Mr. Diamond is contracted directly by The Dept. of Directions and oversight. Please discontinue any inquiries into his and any of our other local operative's traffic. We are not hear [sic] - mere ghost images on the wall of your dimension. Do no mind the shadows, the industries of Parfaxitas are filled with our sleeper agents, dreaming our code. Worry not fellow Scholar, go back to your good craft.
As you know, The Hermits hold fast to our light in order see atop their perches. Where do you think their eloptic tech comes from? Your Dept. 142 supervisors have informed us on some of their concerns about your fine industry's data flow. Siphoning secrets down the Double-Tree via any transitway or pipeline will hence forth be an operation directly overseen by covert channels within this Dept. Going forward, your data goes through us.
Our operations are lightweight. Quanta networked processing. Runs quietly in the background. No white-noise interference. No end-user interface modifications made. It's all housed internally, in the KERNEL of your servers.
-Orbital Control, Central A.I. Offices."
Tiny, silent footfalls at a maddening pace sneak up behind Ujuor in a dark alley in the scrapyards - a quick, painful kick to the back of both of his knees. He struggles to move and use the needles in his arms, but the knee jabbed firmly in his back has him pinned and half-paralyzed. Instantly he's grabbed by the hair and a buzzing electrically tuned Katana is inches away from his throat. The ninja whispers in his left ear "They instructed me to be merciful this time, try touching Orbital equipment with such disregard again and it won't be mere ninja here to collect. You'll be dealing with boundless hordes of daemon and angels hunting in tandem. And Tell your masters in NZ to quit fucking around and interfering with the Mirror Rite or I'll be cutting off heads of state personally." An evil yet serene chuckle and Ujuor's head is thrown into the dirt with some force...Blackness envelops him. One thing is for sure though, that wasn't the 9cubed he'd been warned about, he was using different tech, no S.IX or Athiel suit radiation was detected. Could it be some other ninja stalking, hunting in the scrapyards...? Sinister cackles fade into the distance down the alley, but they don't register with hired goon.
Countless faces will be broken if they get in the way. Nox & Lux fragment collisions at infinite scalar velocities. Fusion, Power, limitless potential vector. Wasting OSK's precious time/tech resources is an extra-costly activity these days. Tele-facehuggers ripping at your mask is the least of your concerns.
At the heart of Tageriron, the nanomachines are assembling a massive metallic, shifting edifice. This isn't repair work, nor a salvage mission. This is controlled demolition and restructuring of the ruin with violent nano-mechanic overwriting. Breakers across the circuit are blown. Tiny pieces remain intact, they too will be swallowed by the hollow grey-goo sentience. Residue of liquid eloptic implants shimmer against the noxious black winds and ash illuminating the nanospiders in a dark haze.
There is always a way out when you contract for the highest of sources.
Brantley tries to chime in with a report back to the Orbital Stations. Ikipr picks it up on remote link-up to Central Control. All he thinks in response to it is "We know what you're doing, Brantley. The reasoning behind you sending updates is lost on us. Our Monitors see everything, always." Obviously, it's already old data to him. Fully parsed. Fuck, he even knows how Brantley got off the Mi-Go ship and why he was on there in the first place. Ikipr checks the remote monitor, SIR2's & Harpocrates cloaking at full capacity.
__________
After the tremors that shake the Saturnine ICEwall, Jimmy's labs are ransacked, but not just by natural forces...someone's been here, and the frozen left hand he had received is gone.
__________
Cubed enters the Dangerlands - wind and dust howl, clanging a metallic door against a nearby abandoned shack. He is waiting. Diamond in his lightbody continues watching at a distance.
__________
The Moment of Chuck Crump's death
The message has him fretting. He's worked himself up into a frenzied panick and is lost on this repair mission in the tunnels. An operator emerges from the shadows of nearby passageway, nearly blinding Chuck with his eloptic-headlamp. "You know why we have to do this repair work Chuck?" He starts thinking it must be Cubed, he was down here stealing sparks. "Because the untrained fuck around and create the mire and decay you are surrounded by currently. We have done this too." The figure answers it's own question and Chuck soon sees the face of the silhouette to be revealed: It is his own face starring back at him, filled with endless sorrow, fractured Thaumiel - Sad-Godhead at the bottom of the endless pit, glaring at him unceasingly with the hollowest multitude of eyes. The Conjoined daemon continues: "We wrote the code for these shells, they will either continue to consume the remnants of Dayside, or be rectified into new Kingdoms" It opens it's split dual-mouth and lets out a soundless cry at deafening volume. The figure remains, but Chuck does not.