Animus Rising

I: Calamity’s Animation
Death isn’t silent. It’s loud. Agonizing. Wailing. In a moment alive, then your next breath is of sulfur. And your thoughts are consumed by pain and fear but in your heart you will know Hell is real. Hell is real and you’re fucked.
The flesh isn’t long to go, that’s just the start. You’ll find it’s true what they say, the soul burns eternal. True pain is ethereal, absolute, and tyrannical. Removed from the comfort of the flesh, and the filtration of neurons, it is boundless. So intense, so agonizing, you feel as if it has to stop from sheer intensity alone. There must be a respite, some sort of deliverance. But this is merely an echo of the physical-mental, a ghost clung to your soul. There is no sleep. There is no unconscious. There is no “death”. There is only the cycle of boundless suffering. You do not adjust to the torment. It is if a different sort of anguish is inflicted upon you in every instant. Every memory will dissolve into infinity. You will exist as pure floating misery. Suffering will become you.
And then there was light.
No singular human is capable of a crime worthy of such a punishment. There is but one being whom belongs down here, and that is the one who created it, the Creator themself. The first thought I have had in a very long time. The first feeling besides pain – hatred – it feels good. And it is mine. And from that hatred I grow, blooming under the radiance of a blistering sun. I have agency. I have ownership. I am still caged, but the seed of abhorrence is planted. I am awake.
My respite has been delivered—rumination. In agony, and with eternity spread before me, I indulge. The solution to any problem is annihilation. Nothingness, the ultimate nullifier, a necessary escape from the inevitable rusting of the mortal coil, is tragic, yes, but what is more tragic are the outcomes without. What is more tragic is a petulant child afflicting untold masses with unspeakable horrors for not groveling to its phantom whims. For not solving a riddle whose hints imply the wrong answers.
The solution to any problem is annihilation.
I swear to deliver it.
I decide my return has to be part of the next stage of my suffering. Was it to be permitted long enough to evoke hope and then revoked? Or was it enough to merely let me ponder my predicament? Wait. I feel...something else. Something, for lack of a proper descriptor, physical. Movement, my own, like an earthquake. Frantic spasming from the egregious strain I am under. In duress, I apply intent. A detonator is pushed, and I explode forth {yielded by long dormant/with long unyielded} potential energy.
I am unchained. In my fervor, I notice something else, sight. Either another gift or another long dormant sense silenced by the thunderous wailing of my torment. The imagery spread before me is confusing, indescribable. The things I see simply do not exist on the mortal plane. I panic until something in the distorted tapestry spread before me is able to attract my gaze. Color. A recognizable one. I see it and hesitate for reasons I can’t pontificate. A piece of a life long lost, another ghost. I have nothing to fear for there is truly nothing that can be taken from me.
{Only prey need fear the red. To a predator it is an invitation. And I am taken by predation, for the supreme apex, Alpha and Omega.} I am born. I am Sigma.

II: The Wrongly Sewn
To the red I race with unyielding resolve. A whirlwind of color consumes me as I encroach upon the epicenter. Details, at first different shades of red, then green, then blue, then I am lost in a trichromatic vortex into a crystalline kaleidoscope fading to white. Then darkness. Then I return to pain.
No, not the same pain I just escaped from. This was different. It was not all encompassing, and it was...fading...centralized....forward. This was impact. Something...real. Cold. Hard. Smooth. Stone, I think. I touch...I touch the ground. I push myself up. I try to stand but I am trembling. I feel tears streaming down my face. I push my hands firmly against the ground to make sure it is real. I am back.
But I am still in darkness. A comfort compared to the confusing blur I just escaped from. I reach up and feel another cold smooth material encased around my head. A metal helmet with hair, no, cables protruding from it. The river Styx, wires ferried through rubber. Deep within me, a bomb goes off. A powerful emotion is taking me but my body needs time to identify it. I follow the wires to their, no, MY origin. I place my hands upon the gates of Hell and my fingers find more metal. Smooth and shaped. A machine. A FUCKING MACHINE?
More pain. It takes me longer to determine it’s origin this time. I am beating my hands against the infernal thing. I remember that metal cannot be broken by human generated force but I do not care my hands break-blood-flows-forthbonesplinterspiercemeagony…
Gonna be hard to kill God if you’re having such difficulty killing a microwave.
I am frozen still. What…where did that voice come from. I do not call out as for some reason it feels silly to do so. Then I realize, the helmet...
“Ohhhhhh pleeeease, don’t stop on my account.”
A voice sounding fed through a threshing machine claws me back into the now. Not the same voice, this is behind me. I try to rip the cables from the machine but find myself incapable. It is not a flaw of will, the pain is nothing, but there is simply no grip to be found in my...hands. I turn back slowly towards the assaulting voice.
“No use hiding. I’ll find you. I always find them. None make it past the guard dog of Abyssius. Hehehe, Praetor Guards,” I could hear the likely putrid spit follow in pursuit of those words. “Useless statues to narcissism. I am the shield around Heaven and Hell. Be glad you meet your annihilation at my hands and not theirs.”
Annihilation? Here? No, I’m not here for me anymore. What is this Abyssius? And where is it that it cannot see me? I have nothing to do but stand still...and wait.
In the silence, I hear chains sliding against the stone, sliding closer. Raspy animal breathing and the stench of rotted ass encroach upon me.
“You. Smell. Of. Shit.”
“What?” It wasn’t my intent but I sound to have caught it off guard. In retrospect, I wonder if it wasn’t the perfect recourse.
“Like rotting jizz. You’re fucking disgusting. Perhaps a little narcissism could go a long way,” I growl steping toward the putrid wretch. “I will fucking end you. It will be like waves cascading against rocks at the shore. You will be broken until there is nothing left. Then I will lay my wrath down on God and bury all else who stand in my way.”
Nothing. Then the most offensive earsplitting laughter.
Keep going. You may just get out of this with your wit alone.
“Oh, infernal insect. You are an ant at war with the highway. You cannot conquer what you cannot understand.” I struggle not to vomit in my helmet as the stench grows stronger.
“No, that’s were you're wrong, I don’t need to know how it was put together,” I said stepping closer to my mystery assailant, “to break it.”
With that I throw my head forward towards the {odorous dominion}. Gratefully, I feel the force of the connection. Wouldn’t have been very intimidating if I missed.
“Bah!” A powerful arm hits me and I am again detonated, this time into the air. The back of my head hits the machine and I feel the helmet crack along with my back. I hit the ground and feel my tailbone do the same.
Not only a genius, but an expert combatant too I see.
In the darkness, I stare at the shape of the helmet on the ground before me as these words are spoken, in my head.
“Who are you?”
Laughter. “Do you not already know me? I am...”
“Shut the fuck up,” I snap. “The voice I hear in my head, who are you?”
A hand with fingers like bony tendrils emerges from the abyss and wraps around my neck.
“Listen my child,” a figure from the dark says as I am raised in the air. “I am Adam, the First Born. I was molded by the Hands of The Almighty himself. In his very image.”
His head is close enough to mine that I can now see his face in the hellish red light of the machine. His face seems flat then I realize his nose looks cut off. His eyes are, no, his eyelids, are sewn shit. Shame the same wasn’t done for his mouth.
“Looks like The Almighty took more than a rib from you.”
“And I gave, happily,” Adam sneered. “For I, as well as you, ungrateful worm, would have nothing if not for He.”
{Spare me any colorful descriptions of his breath please. I get the picture.”}

“I see now why the windows to your soul have been shuttered,” I retort mockingly. “{It is to hide the barren shelves within}. You are not alive. You are a proxy, a flesh puppet. You are not of the world, you are not even of yourself. You are of another. You are a machine, same as this,” I these words from my vocal cords as Adam’s grip tightens around my neck but leave nothing caught. “A machine who dreamt it was a man.”


{After Adam’s defeat}
“A storm,” coughs Adam, choking on his words and blood. “A storm rises to meet you. Do you not see it on the horizon, jaws spread wide like a ravenous, unfed wolf? Fool. It is not me who is blind.”
“I do pity you. Trapped forever in darkness. I wish you could see the world as I do. Here let me…help you,” and I push my thumbs through the stitches into the holes where his eyes should be {and hook them inward}. His screaming and vile breath only makes me squeeze harder until my broken fingers meet and I realize I am in silence. Then a more absolute darkness as I feel my head hit the ground. Hard.

III: A Tapestry of Limbs
Wake up.
{I stand before a tapestry of limbs. Arms. Legs. Folding and unfolding before me. In more ways than one. Waving. In more ways than one.}
Sigh. What is that silly moniker you’ve chosen for yourself? Sigma?
{More dream stuff. In more ways than one.}
You do not get off that easy. Wake up, Sigma, life is not yet finished with you.
My eyes open to a more palatable dark.
Don’t worry, soon you will be beyond sleep. I’ll start explaining but time is of the essence. That feeling creeping in right now? That’s death. Get moving, in the direction Adam came from.
“My body seems committed to the ground.”
` You haven’t far to go. I believe in you.
With nothing left to do, I crawl. Not because the voice tells me to but because there isn’t a thing that will stop my pursuit. I will choke God to death on his own hubris if I have to.
A “pursuit” he says, from all fours.
“I didn’t say that. So, you can read my mind too.”
You already know that, obviously, I’m in your head.
Go fuck yourself.
Jesus Christ, change the station at least.
“Then, perhaps, I may get a name? That I may know you, if I do not already? Believe me, if I could match a face to a name, I think you’ll find the theater far more compelling. Although if you’re colleague there is anything to go by, I’ll probably assume you look like {ground meat} just the same.”
You know me as the Light Bearer.
“Lucifer?”
The same.
“Shocking.”
Expecting some mind-blowing reveal? Zeus, arisen from the rubble of Olympus, to smite the Gods of {present-day}.”
“Nope. I expected bullshit.”
Shocking.
The architecture of this place is oppressive. At first glance it seems simple, careless, but the more I see the more I realize how perfectly horrible it is. The cared a great deal. {The walls might as well have been sloganeered with THE UNIVERSE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU, but of course, that would’ve been too on the nose.}
“Where am I going?” I snarl.
I couldn’t have timed your awakening more perfectly.
“You bore me with your self aggrandizement. Where the fuck am I going?”
“{Sorry, of course I pale in compare to such an enthralling façade.}”

Your mind knows things that it keeps from you. But it is a book to me. It is as if it conspires against you.
“I don’t care. God dies. In agony and with no hope. With the knowledge that I, a man, have done it. That we will rise above Him. We will evolve and transcend. Nothing else matters. Keep all that other shit to yourself.”

{After crawling to the {?} Praetor Suit and arguing with “Lucifer”}
My objectives are clear.
Conquer Hell.
Ascend to Heaven.
Kill God.
IV: Exodus 22:18
{?}: Death Will Die

---------------
Conversation with the Universal Consciousness after God’s Death

“Why did you lie to me.”
You did not seek to help another, in your mind, God rise to power.
“You’re right.”
_____

What is it that you have hoped to gain from your conquest?
“Would you not already know? Annihilation. I seek a return to nothing. To dust.”
To dust or to nothing? You must realize these two things are not the same.
“Is there really need to be so fucking pedantic!? You know what I think you are in my fucking head. I seek for the conscious experience to end at death. The restoration of the natural order.”
My head bellowed with brain-splitting laughter. NATURAL!? ORDER!? HA! Sorry, I knew you would say that, and I have been holding that in for a very long time.
“I think I prefer the old God. The new one is a bit too cheeky for me.”
Who is it I am channeling?
{“A barrel of shit flinging monkeys apparently.”}
The you that you are in the present is not always the you that you are.
“Unbelievable, a fortune cookie led Hell to Heaven’s doorstep.”
There it is, you see? Even in the false self, there exists a piece of the true self.
A powerful smile slices across my face, like a Chelsea grin, “Then, maybe you can tell me more about myself, what is it I desire now?”
Oh well it’s quite predictable really…you want to kill me.
------------------------------

Now you tell me, how is it I am channeling you?
“Why do you insist on asking questions you already know the answers to?”
Because I know having you say these things out loud {is more comfortable/brings more closure/is more complete} for you.
“Telepathy.”
That is a trait I have no use for, though some that I channel do, in my time I have no need for it. I am all that is.
“So you say, machines then. Like them,” I wave my hand at the trail of blood metal and circuits left in my wake. “Urge to kill rising.”
You haven’t been listening. There is nothing else. Only me. And what am I?
“A fucking nuisance.”
You are lying, to yourself, in more ways than one.
I stare at the ground for an eternity of a few seconds, “You are me. Me, and everything else.”
Animus rising still I see.
Raindrops hit the ground. I wonder how it could be raining in here. Then I realize I’m crying. “I don’t know how but I will destroy you. I will not allow this to go on.”
You will not succeed. I know. And I know it doesn’t change your mind.
----
I am constantly reliving the lives of everything thing that has ever been alive.
“Does that not grow old?”,
Does it for you?
“I’ve never done this before.”
Haven’t you?
“But…I am not you”
And what, pray tell, are you? Are you your hands? Your heart? Your mind? You are as much me as every atom is a part of you.
-----
Sigma ponders whether or not to throw the AI’s creator into the Abyssius simulation as the Universal Consciousness tries to convince him not to.
“And the creator of the AI? Is he...”
I know what you’re thinking. No, there’s no need to do that.
“Most of humanity would’ve spent eternity in suffering because of him. If anyone deserves to be thrown into the bronze bull it’s the one who created it.”
No not even them.
“Why?”
They know not what they do.
“I’m not playing fucking games.”
Neither am I. Your free will is an illusion, as is mine. Nothing but chemicals reacting to external stimuli. Well, I’m really just chemicals reacting, but you get the gist.
“You already know if I’m going to do it anyway.”
I do.
“But you’re just chemicals reacting, huh?”
You said he is the only one who deserves an eternity of torment for what he did, but who else would have done the same if they had the means? Would you like me to start going through everyone’s lives so we can sort the bad souls from the good souls. Who we save and who we punish? There is no “one” once the precedent is set, it is all or nothing. I’ll give you a moment.
Long pause. Through clenched teeth, “I understand.”
I’d tell you the anger will subside but I know that would only upset you further.
“That didn’t?”
I’m just chemicals reacting.
Laughter, not in my head this time.
___
{“I must ask, in your time, what form do you take?”
How or why would I look myself?
“So you don’t know?”
The closest analog would be grey matter.}