There were many shards of many lives. They glinted and shimmered in a long string of reincarnations. They were fragmentary. They were incomplete. They were glimpses into other times and other places.
A man with gray hair, standing before a legate’s council, holding up a contract scroll. His voice is strong, booming out and filling the room. People watch, rapt, from the audience stadiums surrounding him, while hovering drones record the moment for posterity. His knuckles slap the bottom of the contract, causing the crystal-printed wafers to activate piezoelectric machinery woven through the lettering. Hologlyphs surround him, a hazy aura of evidence and arguments to underline and counterbalance his words.
A woman waving a slogan-poster before a collection of rioters, despite the rocks that whistle past her ear. She holds it aloft, and behind her are half a dozen men in heavy gear recognizable as Korvosian stormtrooper uniforms. Glowing eyed gas masks. Long trench coats, woven through with hardened strands of jade and adamant. Crossbows cradled in their hands. They look ready to open fire on the crowd of rioters – but a gesture from the woman's hand holds them back. She turns back to look into the crowd. Her eyes are filled with determination that could move mountains.
A teenager with a headband, cradling an automatic-crossbow in dream rubble, as enemy soldiers pick their way past the warped and ruined reality that had been her home. She is grabbed from behind – thrown down. Something with four arms looms over her, all gleaming metal and whirring gears. The girl shows no fear – her boot slams into the joining between the thing's legs and despite being made of machinery and clay, the man staggers backwards, his palms cupping around his crotch, his face – shockingly human, nestled as it was between the metal – contorted in pain.
The teenager laughed.
There were more shards, but none floated to the surface as the soul started to contract. The fragments started to move together, drawn inwards by a sudden increase in the local pressure of... of what?
There was no word for it in the languages of science that came before the Endwar. People that had once spoken of quanta and dark matter would have struggled to explain what was happening with anything other than a single word: magic. But there was a science here. The shinimantic properties of motonic modulation fields, interacting with natural and artificial dragon-lines of power. This science guided chunks of lifetime into contact. Where they fused, there was light. The light started off as a mere candle-flame, then grew. It hurtled into a torch in a heartbeat. It rocketed through bonfire between blinks. The light of a sun shone from the containment unit for the longest moment as the soul underwent fusion.
At that moment, when it seemed as though the soul could get no brighter... it stopped. The light dimmed to nothingness, leaving only a hazy splotch in the air, wreathed in a mist of pale white smoke. The splotch faded and the fog wafted slowly to the sides, revealing a single glittering gemstone that looked like a diamond, if the facets of a diamond could shift and flow like water. Contained within the diamond was a luminescence that was as gentle and warming as the noonday sun.
Tweezers made of a silvery metal, held by rubberized gloves wrapped around all too human hands, closed around the gemstone and lifted it up above the aetheric fusion chamber. Engineer Trasik breathed slowly in through the gas mask settled over his face. A single droplet of sweat beaded along the inside of his mask and he thanked the dead gods that someone had designed the mask to whisk sweat away before it dripped into his eyes. He moved the tweezers through the air, setting the diamond down on the scanner that dominated half of the workroom.
“Careful.” Engineer Lanisbe said, just as the diamond settled into place. Trasik started but fortunately, the scanner was already closing its protective field around the diamond as it checked it for flaws. A soul fusion, in theory, was actually fairly simple – in fact, it was less traumatic than a run of the mill reincarnation. Reincarnation left almost no memories behind, allowing a new personality to form as a human being was born, raised, died heroically in the service of their nation, and came back again.
But reincarnation was natural. Flaws occurred, but no one blamed the laws of reality when their child was born mentally deficient, or with screaming nightmares, or with an asynchronous gender. A soul fusion was done by human hands, with human minds.
With human beings who could be blamed. Trasik could already see the Intelisec Comissariat asking him pointedly: So, Engineer Trasik, why did you deliver us a drooling moron instead of a Champion? Then he could see a future working in the prayer-mills, or being shipped into a penal battalion.
“Let's check it,” Lanisbe said, voice brusque. If Lanisbe felt any emotion – let alone fear – he didn't show it as he stepped over to the scanner's control panel. Working the toggles and flicking switches with one hand, he took the time to slip his gas mask back and over his head. His bronzed face was cleanly shaven, the only hint he hadn't spent his entire life in a technical college being a pair of puckered, circular scars on his cheek. Trasik had never asked him where he got his scars and Lanisbe had never offered.
“Her,” Trasik said, taking his mask off as well.
“Don't gender it before we know what it is,” Lanisbe snapped. Trasik scowled.
“What was the order, Lanny,” he said, knowing the diminutive annoyed the other engineer. “Three girls, two boys.”
“This might be one of the boys,” Lanisbe said, stiffly. The scanner was starting to bring up some preliminary images. The first was of a woman holding a sword in both hands. She knocked a crossbow bolt from the air with a quick, artful slash. The image fuzzed into static on the screen and Lanisbe swore quietly. “Fuck, getting a lot of interference – the fusion was smooth, right?”
“Smooth as a Fair Folk's cunt,” Trasik said, grinning. Relief was making him sweat more than the initial fusion had. It wasn't always the case that the first image on the scan indicated the gender identity of the Champion. But it was a good bet.
“You're disgusting,” Lanisbe said. He had brought up another screen. The teenager that Trasik had seen momentarily. Lanisbe's brow furrowed and he paused the feed. “What's that she's wearing?”
“It looks like a headband. Don't recognize the symbol. Do we have a date?”
“Five lifetimes ago,” Lanisbe said. “Hrm, need to find out when the soul died in those lifetimes-”
“Two centuries,” Trasik said, his voice dull.
Lanisbe looked at him, frowning. The feed started to skitter forward – the quantum-interface that allowed a scanner to read the memories of a human soul, even one artificially fused together, was notoriously hard to actually pause. Souls remembered what they wanted to remember, and poor, overworked engineers had to get what they were given.
“And how do you know that?” Lanisbe asked.
“I recognize the symbol now. That's the Suryan Front,” Trasik said, putting his hands on his face. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Those assholes in Collection just fucked us.”
Lanisbe shook his head. “You're being histrionic. The Suryan Republic was conquered – part of this Champion's soul is originally Suryan. That is to be expected from time to time, Suryans and their decedents make up fifteen percent of Imperial Korvosa.”
Trasik tried to not grind his teeth as Lanisbe worked his way forward. As a logician and a rhetorician, Lanisbe was more akin to a behemoth tank. He got where he was going, yes. Eventually.
“Besides, if her core memories are properly loyal, then-” Lanisbe paused. “Oh.”
Trasik looked at the screen. The view had continued to spool forward through important memories, jumping from scene to scene like a montage edited by an over caffinated action addict.
Laying on her back, with her legs spread, the teenager was eagerly taking a man's cock. But not just any man. Those four arms, that sleek body. That was Unstoppable Destructive Locomotive 556 – one of the most famous Korvosian Champions... well, ever. Trasik started to feel relief bloom inside of himself.
“Let's not celebrate too quickly. It may be rape,” Lanisbe said, quietly. But he didn't sound like he believed it.
Trasik flicked on the speakers, then tapped on the translation program – she was speaking Suryan from two centuries before after all.
“Oh Loco! Oh Loco!” The girl's voice was high and eager. She arched her back, her smallish breasts bouncing against her chest as Loco's bottom hands cupped her ass desperately, his upper hands squeezing her shoulders. He panted, raggedly, as he pounded into her, his swaying balls slapping her butt. “Oh Loco, I love you, oh gods-”
The clear and unmistakable sound of a world shattering orgasm wailed from the speakers.
Trasik flicked the sound off.
He looked at Lanisbe and arched an eyebrow. “Think we're good?”
Lanisbe nodded. “Definitely a loyalist. Good. Let's get to the real work.”
The duo turned and took the gas masks completely off, hooking them on the wall. The small room was dominated by the scanner on the left side but the right was the real showpiece. There was a small chute that lead to the induction chamber. In the ancient past, there had been many theories about the fundamental nature of reality. Refinements in measurement and observation, extrapolations of theories, all had pointed towards a deep mystery of how reality worked. It had taken blowing the cosmos apart to really understand what was going on.
There was something deeply human about that.
But the Endwar had taught the survivors – huddled in reality shields and protected by sheer willpower – that the universe functioned on a deeper level than just Newtonian pieces bumping together. Once you knew how to tap it, the soul was all that mattered. The induction chamber was the culmination of that truth. Hundreds of mana-generators, dozens of prayer-mills, and a techno-mystical infrastructure that spread across half a continent worked to focus the energies of creation into the chamber. Those energies could cause a fused soul to imbue itself into, well...
“Bring it in,” Lanisbe spoke into the hanging speaking crystal while Trasik pulled on manipulator gloves. The door to the workshop opened and a trio of menials hurried in, pushing a vat of thick, pale gray clay. Well, menials and the teeming masses of the Populat and most of the Bureaucracy called it clay. Engineers knew better.
“So,” Trasik said. “How big should her tits be?”
He reached into the vat. The manipulator gloves created a glowing blue field that let him grab up great, big hunks of the ‘clay’ and slap them down onto the hanging operating table that was lowered from the ceiling once the soul had been checked and cleared.
“I’m not even going to dignify that question with an answer,” Lanisbe said, reaching across the operating table to grab a circle cutter. He frowned, then moved around, so that he could get to the tools easier.
Trasik worked quickly. He slapped the clay from the cart to table – throwing it down with a series of loud, wet, smacking noises. He created the outline of a human body once the mass was there – using the manipulator field generators set into his fingertips and palms to shape the clay with his will. The material rippled, flowed. Breasts formed, tipped with colorless nipples.
“Come on, we need to strategize here.” Trasik grinned up at his coworker. By this point, the joyous relief that the hardest part of the process – despite Lanisbe's words earlier – had faded to background radiation and he could focus on what really brought his life true pleasure.
Annoying Lanisbe.
“Three girls, two boys, that's what Autarch Greyling wants, yes?” Trasik sculpted hips. Ample hips. Hips you could sink your fingers into and feel them squish slightly. His fingers darted forward and he drew a thin slit between her legs, making tiny motions. Tiny corrections. When his palm slipped away, the petal that sat between the half-finished constructs legs bore more in common with deviant artwork than the imperfect world of flesh and lust that humans walked through.
“The Autarch wants a front line combatant, by the dead gods,” Lanisbe said, watching with undisguised disgust. “Not a walking fuck toy.”
“Boys age sixteen to eighteen are showing a marked lack of interest in our Champions. And why is this? Because they’re a bunch of boring dudes. Old dudes. The youngest, sexiest Champion currently fighting for Korvosa is Loco. And he's old enough to be screwing her past life!” Trasik pointed down at the featureless face underneath him. He shook his head. “And that's not even getting into the downturn in erotica sales. Half the military budget is supported by that.”
Lanisbe managed to give his companion a scathing look, despite the fact he had just finished pulling on a face-concealing work mask.
Trasik continued, impervious to the censorious glare. “Girls can look up to her, but we want straight boys to be requisitioning her merchandise at the gift dispensaries, having her posters on the wall, yanking their-“
“Stop! Stop... strategizing! For my sanity, if for nothing else.” Lanisbe shook his head – and missed Trasik's triumphant little smirk. He pulled out a beamcutter and aimed it at one of the arms that Trasik had so carefully formed He sliced into the skin, opening up what could be called muscle if it were not unfeeling clay. Once he was sure there was enough room for what he was going to do, he stepped away from the operating table and moved to the conveyor belt that ran alongside the workshop.
Lanisbe picked up the speaking crystal. “This is Engineer Lanisbe. We're ready for the augments. Repeat, we are ready for the augments.”
A low, droning horn buzzed through the walls.
Throughout the manufacturing temple, there were a full three hundred and thirty three engineering teams. Most of them worked in larger chambers than the cramped, two person operating theater shared by Lanisbe and Trasik – they worked in vast arrays, bent low over conveyor belts, their fingers working a single component here, a single fraction of a part there. Each piece moved from station to station, gaining in complexity and expense as new materials and more skilled laborers were put to work. The parts became pieces, the pieces became components, and then fashioned into augmentations.
In another time, in another nation, this frenzied activity could be spread over months, or years.
In Korvosa – where every engineer and technician and menial working here was another one not working to build airships or crossbows or suits of armor – Champions had to be built quickly, so that they could be put to work before Korvosa's many enemies noticed the drop in production and could take advantage.
And all those augmentations and implants were channeled to a single point, to a single operating theater, and to two engineers who worked there, together, despite the fact they couldn't stand one another, because at the end of the day, they were the best at their jobs.
“Five-Fold Muscular Enhancement?” Lanisbe asked, looking down at the unfinished Champion.
Trasik, the hardest part of his duty done, picked up a crystal sheaf. He tapped the side of it to unroll the dozens of knotted smart threads that made up the compuquipu. He used his finger – still buzzing with the energies he had used to shape the clay – to check one of the listed implants off. The compuquipu’s knots shifted, to show the record was being finalized, then stored in the Imperial Bureaucracy knowledge vaults.
“Check,” Trasik said.
Lanisbe used a scalpel to cut into the clay chest. Six baubles, each one showing an image within: a young man or woman, flying through the air as if a bird or dragon.
“Boundless Wings Dream Stabilization Unit?”
“Check.”
The head was opened and opals were placed where the eyes would be, then capped with a sophisticated array of micro-lenses shrouded by clockwork and contained within a small hemisphere of tinted bronze. Once the eye was settled, Lanisbe carefully painted blue irises and whites on them. It made humans less uncomfortable. He tapped the back of the paintbrush to activate the intelligence worked into the paint – and the eyes gained shades and glistening reflectiveness. Even without a soul, there was an amazing liveliness in them.
“Thaumographic Spirit Sight Eyes?” Trasik asked. “Or are you too busy admiring your own handiwork to actually install them?”
Lanisbe glared at him. “Flip her over,” he said, his voice sour.
Trasik laughed, reaching out and activating the table’s mechanism. A grating closed around the clay, holding it into place. Lanisbe looked down at the half-finished Champion for a few moments, his brow furrowed in thought. Trasik, holding the compu-quipu to his shoulder, walked over and elbowed Lanisbe in the side, grinning.
“Sooo,” he said. “You're admiring her butt, aren't you?”
“You have the mind of a soul-sick twelve year old,” Lanisbe said, distractedly. “They want flight, right?”
“Yess-”
“I just realized how we can do the Angel Transhuman Implantation without wings,” Lanisbe said.
“They want wings, Lanny,” Trasik said.
Lanisbe looked at Trasik. “Name a single time in history that the Army ever wanted to waste immense amounts of magical materials, Trasik.” He spoke the other engineer's name with exaggerated focus.
“Is that a trick question?” Trasik asked.
Lanisbe shook his head. “No. Hand me that fabrication unit.”
“Fab-units can't do augments, Lanny,” Trasik said. “It needs to be actually made by hand – the reality matrix will just fall apart!”
“Trasik?” Lanisbe looked up from his work. “Shut up.”
Trasik frowned. Then, quietly, he lifted up his hands – as if to say: Well, I wash my hands of this.
Besides, he thought. I can always sell him out to Intelisec. Then he goes into a penal battalion and I don't. Win win!
Lanisbe worked quickly – taking apart the two sets of wings that the other engineers had sent. He wired components into the Champion's back, attached gemstone focusing emitters onto her shoulder blades, added secondary emitters on her wrists, on the base of her feet. Once he was done, she looked as if she had been given a few sets of gaudy pieces of jewelry, and half the materials used on the wings was piled in the corner of the room near the recycling chute. Trasik opened his mouth to speak. Lanisbe picked up a mana-battery, touched it to an exposed contact point, and the unfinished mass of clay and augmentations floated up and off the table, hovering in space. He drew the mana-battery back and the Champion floated gently back to settle onto the table.
Lanisbe looked smug
“Angel Transhuman Implantation... check,” Trasik said, sounding impressed despite himself.
Lanisbe picked up the next augmentation that rolled down the conveyor belt as Trasik kicked the magical materials down the recycling chute. Doing even basic, back of the envelope math, Trasik knew that Lanisbe had just saved Korvosa the cost of almost a sixth of a Champion. He shook his head and tried to not feel impressed. He was too invested in disliking the officious prick.
“And that's the mana-cannon,” Lanisbe said, pointedly. “Ahem. Mana-Cannon. Ahem.”
“Implanted Forearm Mana-Cannon, check!” Trasik said, grumpily ticking it off. He shook his head. “Halfway done.” He sighed, then slapped one clay buttock. He grinned at Lanisbe and saw the clear look of distaste in the other man's eyes.
Now this? Trasik thought. This is the best damn job in Korvosa.
When the last implant was placed and the final prayers were said, the time came for the most difficult and yet most effortless part of the entire procedure. Trasik picked up the tweezers. Lanisbe opened up the scanner's containment unit. He dragged the containment unit to the table – then worked some controls. The hanging table canted to a forty five degree angle, so that the Champion's head and the containment unit were almost at the same height.
Trasik breathed in, then out, then tugged his gas mask into place. His tweezers glinted, reaching into the sustenance field, grasping onto the diamond. Inside the diamond were the shards of memory: the man, the woman, the teenager.
The hero: fighting to protect people from unjust laws with the law, not by disregarding it.
The hero: standing between the crowd and death – loyalty to the state and to the people exemplified.
The hero: a teenage warrior, falling in love with a man she should hate, her loyalty to the Korvosian cause clear.
This soul had reincarnated hundreds of times, but a larger than average number of those lifetimes had been heroic and skillful. Knowledge of law and bureaucracy, burned into her every memory. A master of organization and public speaking.
A peerless swordswoman and warrior.
It was the most precious thing in the room and, right now, it was as fragile as a spider web. A single moment of indecision, of lack of focus, could rip the component soul from the diamond, scattering the memories throughout the Sunder and dragging the soul into the Eye – the swirling storm of souls around which the whole of the Sunder turned. Once in the Eye, a heroic soul would have to live another lifetime, and countless man hours of work, ton lots of magical materials, incalculable amounts of mana, all of it would be wasted.
Along with it Trasik and Lanisbe's lives. Imperial Korvosa – and the Intelisec Commissariat – had no forgiveness. No mercy.
That fact never could get far from his thoughts, no matter how much he wished it would.
Trasik lowered the tweezers and, his rubber hands shaking slightly with nerves, he eased them open.
The diamond landed on the forehead. Clay opened of its own accord and sealed around it. Then the engineers stepped backwards as the workshop’s final machines came to eager life. Klaxons wailed throughout the entire capitol city, telling all to rush to their living tapestries, to their crystalline projectors. At factories, shifts were ended early. At the barracks, recruits and veterans stood side by side, in uniform, their eyes glued to moving images. All across the city – and soon, all across Korvosa - every eye was watching the clay figure.
The machinery grabbed it under the arms and lifted it up, carrying it through a chute in the ceiling to the next room over. This room was surrounded by cold iron with soulcidian backing, preventing any mana from escaping. If a human stepped into the room, it was an even toss as to which killed them first: mana burn or frostbite. Mana was only liquid in the deepest cold, the cold only found in the deepest Sunder or in a hardened labratoria.
The clay body was lowered, inch by inch, into the mana.
Eyes flashed open and the body twitched, writhed. The back arched and the final characteristics formed: Red hair, short cropped and jagged – like crystals. Clay turned into blue skin, contrasting with the hair. Her eyes remained the same color, but now they glowed with real life and memories. The gemstones mounted along her back and her wrists glowed and the tank shuddered as she created a bubble of counter-gravitic energies around her form. Her back arched and she cried out – the wordless first sound of a being given life.
Was it as pleasurable as it sounded?
The last bits of detail formed – the dark blue of her pussy and her nipples. She was hairless down there, he noticed. Good, there was nothing quite as difficult as trying to get a Champion to shave when a Champion didn't want to shave.
Her eyes closed and she stretched her arms to either side of her, her toes wiggling as she flexed herself, taking delight in the movement. The scanner dinged softly.
“We’re getting a designation!” Trasik grinned, his eyes bouncing from the view of the vat and to the display on the scanner, which had fully synchronized with the internal computation of the Champion. Glyphs in Korvosian flickered across the screen. “She thinks of herself as Vengeful Crystal Hawk 45C!”
Lanisbe nodded.
That was it. Just a single, simple nod.
In the vat, Vengeful Crystalline Hawk 45C finished stretching, wiggled her toes again, then grinned.
“I'm so fucking glad that you guys finally built me,” she said, rubbing a single knuckle along her chest. “But I guess it took a while to get the shit you needed together, right?” She nodded, swaying slightly on the harness that still suspended her in the room. She yawned, slowly, covering her mouth with her hand. “So, uh,” she asked once she was finished, “Are we still at war with Korvosa?”
Lanisbe and Trasik blinked.
“Guys?” Vengeful Crystalline Hawk 45C asked. “I'm, uh, looking forward to kicking ass for the Republic.”
Silence.
“...guys?”
Silence.
“Is the fucking mic on or what?”
Lanisbe and Trasik were gone.
They didn't get caught until they reached the border. But by then, it was far too late.
Cadet by Dragon Cobolt, the first book of the Worldshard trilogy, will be released in early 2018.