137 – Cognitive Pressure
Zefaris thought of everything she’d experienced as a soldier, even the early parts - she thought of why she chose the path of a professional soldier, years before the war had started. She’d wanted to see all the new wonders of technology, wanted to wield the newest, most advanced weapons for the sake of her homeland. In a manner of speaking, she got her wish - it was just all too late, now. She was just another dead war-criminal, as far as the records knew.
Funnily enough, she didn’t think at all of losing her eye. It wasn’t important. No, she moved onto all that came after. The recon specialization, the transfer, the death of the Captain. After that, the war went bad, and they were relegated to a supply convoy. All that time after their supposed desertion, the months of living in the E.Z., that was a gap - a long stretch of nothing.
It was the end of that nothing that she truly began pouring everything she remembered into the machine, minus a few unnecessary details. Anything and everything she had learned about the state of her country since that mysterious foreigner stared her down in the middle of the E.Z.
Unknowingly, the cyclopean markswoman also poured all her emotions, hopes, sorrows and trauma into Sigma, having lost control of herself after cautiously selecting relevant information. When she came back to her senses, Sigma still sat there unmoving, its eye still that cyan color, blinking as it had before.
“You done?” it asked, the machine-voice tinged by a sense of sympathy that she knew shouldn’t be there. Zefaris nodded, only now noticing that a tear had rolled down her cheek. Wiping it off with her sleeve she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her chest, even if she hadn’t gotten any answers yet.
“I… Lost it there. Sorry,” she apologized.
Sigma rumbled an understanding chuckle, though there was something… Off, about it. A stuttering distortion to the tone of its voice that hadn’t been present before.
“This-is-is no-ot unex-ex-expected, I can co-o-ope,” it said, shaking its head and even hitting itself the way one would hit a malfunctioning machine. It seemed to work, as its speech returned to clarity, “You’ve uh… You’ve really got some major cognitive pressure going on there. My current shell was not meant to handle this type of mental strain, so don’t be surprised if it seems like my mental state is degrading. Understood?”
Sigma seemed to take this matter with deathly seriousness, and so Zefaris just nodded along and waited for it to say its piece. Then it started. Its eye-color flashed to green. The stiffness vanished from its form as it took on a naturalistic sitting position, even mimicking the subtle movements of a living human, as if it were breathing.
“If you walk the path you are on now, you will both witness and partake in carnage that will make your War of Fog look like a petty squabble. You will not know peace until a nation falls - whether that nation will be yours, that I cannot say,” it said, with a voice sounding simultaneously as smooth as velvet and as rugged as the engine of an armored transport. It was a steady, resolute cadence, like one of the officers giving a speech. Already, Sigma’s tone of voice had changed.
“You will not know peace even if you seek it out, for those who hate this nation will find you and make a villain of you, for the shade of your skin, for your past allegiances, for the crime of being born into a nation that defied the Old Powers. Perhaps most relevant to you, you will not know peace for as long as the one you call Zelsys remains the subject of your affection.”
Everything it said up until that last sentence was nothing more than confirmations of what she already thought might be the case, but that last one… That last one felt like it could be either the worst of the best thing she had ever been told.
“Why? Why Zelsys?” Zefaris asked, trepidation in her heart.
Sigma chuckled, as if it had expected exactly this question. At least Zefaris thought it was a chuckle, though it sounded more like a collection of jammed cogs grinding against one another to approximate a human chuckle.
“She is an engine of conquest given human flesh, human vices, human desires,” it said. “A walking, loaded gun.”
“So am I,” Zefaris replied.
“So you are,” the subcore conceded, a grin audible in its voice. “A professional soldier with no notable civilian skills, and a repressed adrenaline junkie to boot. You two are perfect for each other.”
“Still…” Zef trailed off, “that does not answer my question. Is there any point to all this? Is there any point to still holding on since Ikesia has lost the war?”
“Has it lost?” Sigma prodded with a question that it clearly expected no answer to. “The last time a war wiped out most of the cultivator sects on the continent, history deemed the group that did it the winner.”
“...What do you mean?”
“Oh, I do suppose it must’ve been centuries ago to you,” Sigma laughed. “I can’t say much, but… I’ll just say that the story of the so-called Dead Gods didn’t exactly go the way you’ve been taught. There wasn’t a single slayer, for one. It was an entire slayers guild that became a revolutionary group.”
“So the Dead Gods didn’t…” Zefaris began, only to be cut off as the machine continued its ramblings. It sounded like it was using this opportunity to spill its guts as much as she had done, just in words rather than an uncontrolled thought-stream poured into arcane machinery.
“Oh no, they were very real,” it said. “They just weren’t gods at all, or even called that. They were three very powerful cultivators that had each founded their own country and at some point or another decided to unify into a single country with three rulers."