Mask of Humanity

‘A fire? Really? It’s not particularly cold,’ Nicolai said, watching as Harold finished dragging a clump of dry and ancient wood he’d found who-knew-where into the cell.

‘It’s a celebration,’ Harold puffed, tensing his body as he lifted the mass of rickety wood then dumping it in the middle of the cell. He grinned at Nicolai. ‘You’re finally joining me in here. Now, let’s see about this…’ His tongue poked out from between his lips as he settled beside the pile of wood, taking out a small length of broken metal and a stone, then knocking the two together, generating a few measly sparks which fell more on the stone than on the wood.

‘A fire could be noticed,’ muttered Nicolai, moving to the exit and peering out down the length of the tunnel outside. The torches were dull red and would be turning off soon. The cells across the way and those surrounding were packed, as they were every night, by the masses of skeletons who did nothing but mine Oma crystals all day. Harold said that they stayed out of this one ever since he’d started sleeping in it.

‘Noticed by what? The undead won’t care. You can trust me on that. Heh,’ came Harold’s voice from behind him.

‘What about that big centipede?’

There was no response, and after a moment Nicolai realised even the knocking of the stone on metal had stopped. His Soul Sense was immediately feeling around Harold’s position, but Harold was still and unmoving.

He turned to look on him, and found Harold hunched over in the same spot, staring blankly at the wood.

Nicolai circled around him, staring down. ‘What is it?’ His Seed’s tendrils wormed out the exit and spread around outside, to warn him of anything approaching.

Harold just shook his head and raised a hand. He wasn’t meeting Nicolai’s gaze. He sat back on the ground, and let out a sniffle then wiped at his nose, eyes blinking.

Nicolai realised that Harold was, for some reason, upset. ‘You’re upset,’ he said dumbly, confused.

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Harold, turning away. He let out a little scoff. ‘Yeah. You’re right. It could come for us. It could come for us any time.’ He stilled, hands clasped to his knees, staring at nothing.

Now Harold was afraid. Recognising that fact, Nicolai realised this was an opportunity to practise being human. He settled into a squat across from the man, and Harold’s eyes flicked up to meet his. Nicolai gestured for the stone and metal and Harold passed it over.

Nicolai drew a knife he’d taken from a skeleton and which he carried hidden beneath his clothes. He busied himself carving strips from a piece of wood, making a pile of tinder; rearranging things.

‘No,’ he said after some time. ‘It won’t come for us. Not here. That’s why you chose this place, right? You said so. It’s close to the undead’s centre of operations. We’re surrounded by them on all sides. The centipede won’t come here, and if it does, it won’t be because of the fire. I was being overcautious.’

Harold nodded, swallowed, briefly re-surfacing from his funk.

Nicolai kept his silence, focused on his work, giving Harold some time. It was clear something had happened between Harold and the centipede. An encounter which had left a significant impression. He wanted to pry and find out exactly what it was, in case there were important details. But his simulated humanity begged him to be kinder, because he had decided, somehow—perhaps simply because Harold was the first human he had interacted so much with since his rebirth—that he liked Harold.

With the wood and tinder arranged to his liking he began to scrape the back of his knife on the flattest part of the stone. Long, rough strokes that sent bright showers of sparks onto the smallest pieces of tinder.

After a time he saw a twist of smoke rising from it and bent to put his face by it. He held the tinder in place with a stick while blowing steadily at it until there was a puff of orange and the fire crackled; quick spread through dry tinder. He performed each action with steady, calm speed, his mind quiet, half his focus on his tendrils of Soul Sense.

He tucked the tinder beneath the next level and the fire grew, rising to lick at the larger pieces arranged above.

Nicolai sat back, his eyes absorbed in the process of the fire as it unfurled, moving through the structure he’d prepared for it. With his Soul Sense he could feel a kind of joy from the fire, almost a primitive emotion, which drew his interest.

He occasionally felt a little of the “flavour,” as he’d come to think to think of it, of the world around him via his Soul Sense. Mostly, it was very faint. The stone was old, and cold. The undead were old, and empty, and faintly bitter. He felt little more. But in the case of the fire, it was something bright and vibrant and hungry that seemed to cry out to his Soul Sense. A newborn babe eager to devour the world.

‘You look like you’ve done that before,’ said Harold, breaking Nicolai from his observation of the fire.

‘I have,’ said Nicolai.

‘You from the wastes? The broken lands?’ There was nothing but genuine curiosity in Harold’s face and voice.

‘Sort of. I’ve been many places.’ Nicolai considered how much to tell. What story will I spin? ‘I travelled. For work.’

‘What kind of work?’

Considering how to answer that, Nicolai's thoughts drifted to the centuries before his time as a part of Zero-Twelve.

I killed people for money.

‘I solved problems.’

‘Like a consultant? A consultant who sleeps out in the rough?’ Harold smiled.

‘It was quite hands-on.’ Enough. He found himself unwilling to invent any more. Lying to Harold upset his simulated humanity, and lies were more risky than simple silence. ‘How about you? What did you do before this?’

Harold let out an embarrassed little chuckle, looking away and scratching the back of his head. ‘Well, right before this, I was in prison,’ he said.

Nicolai raised his eyebrows.

‘Nothing crazy, don’t worry,’ Harold assured him. ‘I got caught up in this insurance scam. No one got hurt, it was just a bit of infrastructure damage. Only, turned out we had bad directions. Slagged the wrong ship. Belonged to some corporate bigwig. The tribune came down hard on us.’ He shook his head, bitter. ‘Twenty years I got, just for a bit of damage to the wrong vehicle. Forty if I hadn’t agreed to being a BI. Lucky I was only in there for five before… well, before all this happened.’ He waved vaguely around them.

‘How’s the head?’ asked Nicolai. BI stood for Biological Interface, meaning Harold had spent five years with his brain plugged into a collective bioware CPU. It typically wasn’t easy on one’s grey matter.

‘Pretty good, all in all. Get a bit shaky now and then. Have some weird echoes. Mostly fine.’ Harold didn’t look fine. He looked angry. His eyes were dark and lidded as he gazed sullenly into the fire. He took a breath and regained his smile, glancing up to meet Nicolai’s gaze. ‘Before that I worked for just about every mining firm there is, at least on the Western Coast. Mostly scrap recovery ops; a few big projects.’

The fire grew, spitting out crackles of sparks, its heat and light beginning to press across the cell. From outside, there came a flicker and the torches all went dark.

For a time they sat in silence, one that began to stretch. Nicolai was hoping to learn more of Harold, but the man seemed content to stare silently into the fire. Nicolai’s eyes fell on the red water bottle laying beside the man and he identified a new topic of conversation.

‘Your water bottle do anything special?’ he asked.

‘Eh?’ Harold looked up at him.

‘Your red water bottle.’ Nicolai pointed.

‘This? A bit, yeah. It cleans things. Here, have a look,’ Harold passed it over.

Nicolai Examined the bottle.

Red Water Bottle

A friend to any exploring Cultivator, this bottle gradually restores its stock of water which is unusually hydrating. This water is also well suited to cleaning, capable of easily removing dirt and grime before rapidly evaporating, and possesses anti-bacterial properties.

‘Not bad,’ said Nicolai. All the bottles seemed to have some minor extra function, each basic but quite useful. The blue slightly aided healing. The green boosted wakefulness. This one would help the user stay clean. He wanted it, but he passed it back. For now, it didn’t matter which of them held it. And, he reminded himself, I like Harold.

‘Helps me stay fresh,’ Harold grinned at him, then his smile faded, and he stared into the fire again.

Nicolai tried his best to work out a way to link their words naturally into what he truly wanted to talk about, the centipede, but he drew a blank. For a moment, impatience warred with the perfectionistic drive within him alongside his desire to be kind, to be human. The three-way battle twisted and turned and impatience won out.

‘Anything you can tell me about the centipede?’ Nicolai asked, the words spilling out of him.

Harold looked away, making a little face, tongue moving around in his mouth. He looked like he wasn’t going to reply. Looked to be thinking on a matter he wasn’t sure he wanted to be thinking on. Then, his expression firmed, some kind of internal battle won, and he spoke.

‘I came here with another. A woman. Her name was Unity.’

Some random urge within Nicolai wanted to make a snide comment about the naming conventions of modern-day Earth, but he managed to restrain himself, waiting for Harold to continue.

‘We were partners, I guess. Only person I’ve met in this place other than you. We saw that centipede on the first day. Saw it watching us a few times since then, from the ceiling over the pit. Stalking us.’ Harold shook his head. ‘Should’ve guessed. One day, she was near the walls. Looking for a way out, as always. It got her, dragged her into a tunnel. I…’ He paused, swallowed. ‘She was crying out for me to help her.’ Harold paused for a time, shaking his head, not looking at Nicolai. He wiped his nose.

‘Next time I saw her she was dead and it was carrying her head around,’ Harold resumed. ‘It laughed at me, and it said things. It wants me. It wants to complete the set. That’s what it said. To complete the set.’ Harold stared into the fire, face tight, hunching his body. ‘I avoid the walls around the pit.’

Nicolai nodded. ‘Sorry about your friend,’ he said, because that was the thing that one was supposed to say. After a moments thought, he added: ‘I saw the centipede but only once, when I first arrived. It got in a little tangle with the undead and I haven’t seen it since. Have you seen it?’

Harold frowned, thoughtful. ‘Me neither, now you mention it. Huh. That’s weird. I had been seeing it quite often. Maybe its dead.’ He sounded hopeful.

Nicolai shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

They didn’t talk much more that night, and soon Harold fell asleep. Nicolai watched him and considered whether he trusted Harold. Obviously not. He didn’t trust anyone. But he thought it very unlikely Harold would try to do anything to him while he slept, and either way, he was a very light sleeper.

But even so, Nicolai rose, and took a lit chunk of wood, and left the prison cell. He’d learned that the prison was spared the creatures in the night, and so long as he kept to the edges, the Wardens didn’t mind prisoners moving about in the night.

He returned to his cell where he curled up, alone in the cold dark, and there at last he was able to relax and drift to sleep.

###

The next day they split up as usual, Harold to search for the heart, Nicolai outwardly for the same purpose, but in reality he was more interested in completing his Seed.

The group of skeletons he’d been trailing had chosen a spot to start mining and the guards had taken up their positions, and Nicolai took up his own position in preparation for killing them all. But, just as he was lifting his pickaxe, taking aim at the first skeleton, there was an ominous rustling in the darkness of the tunnel beyond them.

The light glinted off insectile chitin. Nicolai rapidly backed away, his mind conjuring up a vision of the centipede. But the centipede did not emerge. Instead a small crowd of bugs the size of dogs armed with vicious, scissor-like mandibles, moving on sharp legs that rattled over the stone, boiled out of the dark and set upon the guarding skeletons.

The skeletons didn’t last long, though to their credit they managed to stab at least two of the bugs to death. Nicolai didn’t wait around to see what happened next, sprinting away down the tunnel, hearing rustling and clicking and clacking from all around. He saw more undead fighting bugs down other tunnels, and began to feel a sense of threat. But he made it out in time to burst into the light of the pit.

The undead in the pit were rushing about, while above ranks of them marched down the slope. From the dark of some of the tunnels, bugs emerged.

Nicolai headed up the slope, ducking to the side of it as a few orderly formations of knights, spearmen, mages, and archers stomped toward him. He found a crevice in the rock and buried himself inside until they’d passed by, worried that if one of the more intelligent types spotted him they might force him to take part in the fight.

After they’d passed by, he reemerged, and he found himself searching around, a frown of… worry? on his face. It took him a moment to work out why. He was worried about Harold, or at least his simulation was. It was a novel enough sensation that for a time he just stood there and marvelled at it, before the movements down below recaptured his gaze.

He paused, standing on the edge, looking down. This day had started like any other. But now, out of nowhere, there was a battle underway. He hunkered down, sinking to one knee as he stared into the pit.

What is going on?