novelraw Chapter 337: Crafty Crafts 2: Memory’s Lament
Chapter 337: Crafty Crafts 2: Memory’s Lament
Chapter 337: Crafty Crafts 2: Memory’s LamentThe little doll moved like it was submerged in molasses as it came to life, and Déjà vu crept into the edges of that moment. The sense that this had happened before echoed across me, rebounding within my skull until it escaped the confines of when I was and swept back across my life.
Everything I’d done, I’d done before. All my choices had been predetermined, their outcomes inescapable as I repeated a lifetime’s worth of memories. This wasn’t even the first time, I realized. I couldn’t decide how many repetitions there’d been. Maybe three or four, I thought.
The world blurred and my downy tentacles were suddenly holding another doll, larger and different in design. This one would crawl through broken sewers and map out a ruined underground.
That doll was replaced by an artificial arm. Part of its biceps had been removed to reveal a web of fine mana weaves I was in the process of engraving. Three more arms were on the work table beside it.
My tentacles were gone but my tools moved according to my thoughts, will alone bringing them to life. They sewed up the stomach of a dark creature. I’d already removed the poison essences it had harvested and stored in its gut.
A thousand more golems flashed by, faster and faster, a blur of magical engineering taking hundreds of forms. Despite their variety, there was a rhythm to their designs, a pattern shared between them. The fingerprints of their maker.
Then, I held something in human hands.
It was soft clay, molded into the shape of a little girl. I turned her around to study a series of runes set into a groove carved into the back of her neck. At the time, those little symbols had seemed like such artistry. Compared to the others I’d just remembered, they were crude and sloppy.
But I hadn’t made the better ones yet.
This was the beginning.I used a long needle to clean up the edges of some of the glyphs, then set the tool down and took up a small brush. I dipped it in a cup filled with slip–a mixture of water and clay–then applied it to the edges of the groove. I had another small strip of clay, cut into a line that would fit neatly into the groove, and I carefully pressed it into place. Little droplets of the slip tried to escape in places as I pushed the new clay in, but I caught them with my thumb, then used it to smooth over the visible seams.
The door to my shop opened. The gesture was gentle, but the clank and hiss of the metal portal shattered my productive isolation.
I looked up at the intrusion, ready to cut the intruder down with the shards of my broken focus, only to hesitate when I saw who it was. A familiar middle-aged woman walked into the room, squinting under the bright lights of my shop and wrapping her night shirts closer to her body against the room’s chill air. She was small, her proportions odd for a human. She was a little person, like my own little man form. The one I wore when I wasn’t an orb or a c’thon. The one I wore when I was mortal.
That thought felt odd, like it had come from outside of me.
“Sister,” I said.
She frowned at my tone and responded with a name, but the word was amorphous. Whatever it was had been lost to time. My mind inserted my new name into the empty sound’s place.
“Grotto,” she said, the name spoken like an accusation. “You’re still working? It’s almost morning again.”
“I couldn’t sleep until I was done.” I gripped a rag briefly to dry my hands, then took up a ruby chip from a nearby tray. The back of the doll had a circular indent perfectly sized for it, lined with various sigils in a different style from those in the sculpture’s neck.
My sister came closer, calloused feet padding across cold grating on the floor. A rattle signalled a loose screw. I thought I’d hunt it down tomorrow night, but I let it go for weeks. That panel eventually got loose and I would have broken a toe if I hadn’t already been getting the injections.
No. That’s too far. Go back.
My sister walked up to me and studied the clay golem. She took a sharp breath. “Is that supposed to be…” She spoke another lost name. My mind couldn’t fill in the blank.
“It looks like her, yes,” I said, before slotting the mana chip into place. I felt a tingle across my fingers, prickling my skin and muscle before going deeper than my corporeal body. I pushed back my excitement and added more slip to the edges of this compartment.
My sister looked at me with concern. “Why would you make a synthetic of her?” she asked. “Grotto, this isn’t right.”
“It isn’t a synthetic,” I said hotly. “This will be superior in every way. Durability, responsiveness, self-direction. Its decisionmaking draws directly from my own understanding of the world augmented by a generational behavioral database stored locally like a form of DNA. It has a perfect comprehension of my intentions. There can be no unintentional outcomes. It will make synthetics worthless.”
My sister weathered the small outburst, giving me a few seconds to make sure I was finished rattling off mostly irrelevant information.
“Then what is it?” she asked.
“It’s called a golem.”
“Like the superstition of those easterners? From the desert?”
I turned and looked at her, surprised. “You’ve heard of it?” I asked. “It isn’t a superstition. They had enclaves who practiced the art. They’d developed it for centuries.”
“Well,” she said, “if it’s so advanced, why didn’t they use them when the consensus came?”
“They did,” I replied. “But few can learn the art and it takes decades to master. There weren’t enough who could craft and wield them. They didn’t have the numbers to stop us.”
My sister thought for a moment. “If it takes decades to learn, when did you have time for all of that? I’ve never seen you make one of these.”
I turned to her with a wide smile. “I didn’t. We took everything they had and bottled it. I learned to do all of this in an afternoon.”
She studied my face. Something in it seemed to disturb her. “Part of this ‘System’ your group has been working on?”
I put my smile away, returning to a blank expression. “It is.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
She went silent and watched as I added more slip to the edges of the mana chip compartment, then covered it up with another bit of clay cut into shape for that purpose.
The soft clay hardened, instantly transforming from wet dirt into something that could be classified as a supermaterial. I felt the connection to the golem click to life in my heart and mind. It made them both swell.
The golem stood straight and turned to spin, letting me inspect it for flaws. There were little details, rough edges, that could be addressed with the next one. Overall, I found it a beautiful creation. Nothing so expert as a true sculptor might make, but engineered with precise symmetry. The day before I’d never made physical art.
“I don’t trust that thing,” she said.
“The System or the golem?”
My sister pulled her night shirts tighter. “Either. Why did you make it look like…”
The name was lost. I was the one who lost it.
My grip tightened on my stylus. “Three feet to the right and she wouldn’t have become a cloud of vapor,” I said. “Now, she’ll listen when I tell her to stay close.”
I gave the golem a mental command, feeling the oddness of a psychic connection form. It was alien, but comfortable. I had the golem move into a dance; the simple, made-up dance of a child. One she used to love when the busker set up on the corner outside.
My sister ended up loving that golem.
I buried it beside her. I’d moved on to other projects.
*****
I was using something like a pressure washer to spray blood off a tall, slender model. All of its blades were extended, making them easier to clean. This golem’s materials were sturdy, but bore the signs of cheap mass production–precise cuts with a rough edge, a smudge of lubricant with a dusting of metal shavings. I’d thought about cleaning and filing it down, but had put it off for later in my excitement to finish the model. Its first test run had been a disaster, leading to the belated cleaning that coincidentally removed those pollutants I’d been too busy to eradicate.
I would never get around to the polish on this one. There were other things to bring to life.
A pair of double-swing doors burst open behind me. I recognized the squeak of the group director’s callouses without turning to look. He stopped beside me to watch my work. His tumble of white hair and curled eyebrows bobbed up and down in my peripheral vision as he thought.
“What happened back there?” he demanded.
“The training subject deactivated their personal shell before entering the arena,” I answered, moving the stream of high-speed water to begin working the golem’s joints. “He fabricated his safety signals. We didn’t realize he’d done it until he was in three pieces.”
“He did it to himself?” the director asked, incredulous. “You don’t think it was sabotage?”
“We went in and rolled back to find the original logs. We have him recorded.”
The director turned and grabbed my shoulder to force me to face him. It irritated me. This was already more of a delay than I’d planned on today. There was no need for eye contact, but I adjusted my face until it was somber and concerned.
“Why?”
I sighed heavily. “There has been chatter between the kill teams. They’ve gotten it into their heads that real
life or death stakes during training grants better skill advancement.”“That’s absurd.”
“It isn’t,” I replied. “I’ve actually run a model on individuals with top-rate skill progression. There are elements of fabricated shell readings on all but one of them.”
“When did you have the time to do this?”
“This was last week.”
“So you were aware this was a potential issue?”
“I was.”
“Then why weren’t there additional protocols in place to ensure this didn’t happen in our group?!”
I was momentarily confused by the director’s outrage. I ran it through my patterns until I had a better idea of the problem.
“It is tragic to lose healthy candidates,” I said, “but the preliminary numbers suggest that overall efficiency gains will outweigh the occasional death. Our directives are focused on results, not safety.”
The man stared at me with that poorly hidden look. One I kept seeing recently. A masked horror. “You still should have intervened.”
“I believe your interpretation of our mission parameters are flawed.”
“We aren’t here to kill candidates in the journey towards improving statistical performance.”
“You are wrong,” I said, “but I will make that query during the next consensus. I am interested in the System’s thoughts.”
There was a flash of fear on the director’s face. “There’s something wrong with you,” he whispered, then turned to leave. His overly-groomed callouses squeaked as he went. I couldn’t take the man seriously.
I turned back to my golem, thinking over its lethal training match. The construct was too high-performance for combat with unshelled individuals, but relatively harmless against shelled targets. I was struck with a weave design that would exploit flaws in the shell design to grant additional penetration to threaten shelled targets. That way, the kill teams could train with shells active and still place their lives in danger.
It would be more practical, since they’d still be using shells in the field.
I began working on the redesign as I washed the last of the blood away.
*****
I was back to using clay for the moment, experimenting on the impact of traditional materials on a golem’s overall performance. It seemed to be based on a material’s mana absorbency but there was an argument that legacy design elements had a strong impact on the magical processes of shamanistic traditions like golemancy.
“Arlo!”
I blinked and was back in the sawdust room. The wooden doll was standing on my palm, grabbing onto one of my feelers and moving it about, as if to study it. Ishi was kneeling next to me, one hand on my leg, the other pressed firmly to my face. She had one of my eyes pried open with her thumb.
“Hey,” I said. The woman blew out a breath at my response and sat back on her heels.
“You stopped responding for several minutes,” she said. “What happened? Xim couldn’t find anything wrong with you.”
I looked over to see the cleric standing with her arms crossed, peering down at me with her brow furrowed.
“Well, you know how sometimes you have a series of dissociative episodes where your identity erodes completely as you hallucinate that you’re actually your bonded familiar?”
“Oh, yeah, all the time,” said Xim.
Grotto floated over and took the tiny golem from me. He tried to turn it over a few times while the doll did a series of gymnastic moves to swing back and forth on his tentacles. It ended up on his head where it crouched down and rubbed his feathers like scratching the head of a friendly dog.
“Curious. I cannot control this entity. If our theories on ‘borrowing’ one another’s souls for skill use are correct, that makes little sense.”
Ishi patted my cheek to get my attention. “What does that even mean?”
“You know, I’m still working that one out.”
“Welp!” said Etja. “Now that you’re not crazy anymore–” She raised her arms up in triumph. “Congrats! You did it!”
I nodded dumbly as the mage spun in the air until she was upside down. The golem did a handstand on Grotto’s head, looking over towards Etja to try and match her rotation.
I checked my notifications. There were several I hadn’t seen and more kept flooding in as I read through them.
Would you like to acquire the Golemancy intrinsic skill?
You have 0 of 12 intrinsic skill slots available.
You cannot acquire Golemancy.
You have acquired the Golemancy intrinsic skill!
ERROR! You have filled 13 of 12 intrinsic skill slots. You have -1 intrinsic skill slots remaining.
Attempting to resolve…
Unable to resolve.
Escalating error code…
Escalation cancelled by administrator.
Your Golemancy skill has increased from Level 1 to Level 10! Choose from one of the following evolutions!
ERROR! Level 10 evolution has already been selected.
Attempting to resolve…
Escalating error code…
Error code has bypassed sub-system resolution procedures.
Connecting to SYSTEM CORE 1…
I wasn’t feeling especially great about what was about to happen.