He came to her as the tide came called by the moon. The sun sank betwixt the jagged tops of skyscrapers sprung up from the wreckage of Descoria like a streak of sanguine slowly dripping across the domed arc of sky. Its fading light changed from blue to lavender while the whites of the clouds dotted across that swathe morphed into evening’s golden orange. The linings of those meteorological ministrations had shone as a mercurial fire to the west, sharp and bright like a freshly born blade that had yet to cool, slicing slivers of the atmosphere along their languid march into the night as they dutifully paid mind to the whims of a darker sky. Midnight colors settled across the dome of their planetary bell jar in a splash of stars; an innumerable collection of cosmic eyes staring upon the pitiful creatures planted well below their burning, blinking brightness.
He came to her as a fog comes creeping across moorlands. That particular outpost outskirted by the heaving breaths of an asthmatic city was recalled as being a bastion of kindness, viewed through the consumed memories of a man who was once healed, but thrice wounded. Expired physically, unfortunately, but everlasting in the thoughtscapes of another.
He came to her bereft of any motive other than selfishness. Hard to decipher for the dense darkness of the isolation surrounding the site, Luut, swaddled in his own aphotic splendor, stood in watchful waiting. His sights drifted to the heavens above, gilt-glimmer chin lifting in a minor movement, to phantasmagoric hues and facets that were so mirrored below. Around his neck, to be precise, was a single stone that flickered like an unmentioned galaxy beyond the localized comprehension of ground-stalking predators.
Yet he came to her all the same, bearing the inevitability of a desire disclosed in his approach. He lifted a hand to knock but nary a sound was made. He hoped she felt the weight of his oppressive presence ere all that; the burdensome ballast of his mind disrupting her space with the quivers of an impending cataclysm, the hum of a mechanized whirling infinite caught in a broken, yet repetitious loop.
She had already infected him. Before his hand had lifted, infected his body with tiny pieces of her own, to weigh his intentions and the chaos of his multiple mind. The firefly knew him before he'd made it all the way to her door and from the inside of him, she urged him,
Come to me. You are safe.
Solid, without echo, a shockwave that, at least for a moment, silenced the pixel memories that haunted Luut's ghost.
And Toska, feeling his body in her own, could feel the ache and malfunction of him. In his hand, physically, but in his mind,
oh, his mind.
She didn't need to speak.
They could feel each other, now-- her body already inside him as she rose to meet him at her entryway, meet the darkness of his eyes as her hands came to his gilded face, like a mother greeted her war wounded child.
So many repairs she could make, but he had only come for one.
Luut was the child of a different war these days, an internalized war, whose cease fire rung in the deafening quietude rattling between side left and its equidistant right, a hollow droning that was felt rather than properly heard. So stunned by this absence was he, that recognition momentarily abandoned him; feelings faded and remembrances ceased. All that existed were the weight of two saint-spindly hands and the beatific blues of a pair of eyes in which one could fall, collapsed by the alien laws of their own gravity.
But like a soldier shocked into silence, audio pierced by the wake of a too close explosion, things slowly filtered back with time. Not to normal - normalcy was long extinct - but to something more recognizable. Hands. Eyes.
Hands.
His good hand lifted to clutch her glass-boned wrist. Delicate, gentle, cautious.
Eyes.
Hands.
His dead hand lie limp at his side.
Eyes. Oh, those eyes and the skies they held.
She could hear in him the hum, the cacophony of what she heard when the wild swarms came to eat. To everyone else, she understood they only heard the gnashing of their metal teeth, their tiny legs scraping their tiny maws in cricket time. But they destroyed Toska's will, her -- for in their hum she heard the death of everything they destroyed, the agony screams of the lives they destroyed, the bodies they evaporated,
the everything they consumed.
In him, she could hear those screams she'd cleared from him tumbling faster back in place-- so she dammed the floodgates, a weak barrier, just for the brief time that they had between them.
And in the silence, she hummed her sad song as she reached down and took that dead hand, sick and broken, festering with rust, resplendent in its mechanical infection, and placed it to her own cheek, held it there gently as she closed her eyes. The warmth of her body, the light of her hands calmed the glitched reality that was Luut's unreliable vision, and she hoped above all hope that the effects would last, at least a short while, before they faded.
Toska could heal any part of the body, but the mind, oh, the mind was a much more complicated entity.
And yet, without the perpetually propagating trap that was his haphazardly assembled collection of anamneses, what else did Luut have?
He made sense of the healer as best he could through a new vision birthed by replenished starvation of his part comfort/part confounding consciousness, but it was one lacking any foundation. It was one dislodged and disoriented, dissonant and desolate. Perhaps it was folly to so fervently fight to stave that which was fixed, however creatures prone to acquiring such imperfect fates were destined to repeat themselves. As soldiers often fought, propelled by false pretenses, until they faded, Luut recalled himself, with the meat of false memories, until he simply could not.
The cessation of his curated clarity, or lack thereof, simplified things. The poorly assembled man-machine was bereft of the tethers to realms whose existences were puzzles, to realities that didn't matter, to processes that were superfluous to a single one that brought with it a basic human understanding - touch; a caress.
Though the glove covering his left hand blocked the sensation of skin upon skin, it was understood. The fingers, resurrected, flexed and cupped the soft curve of skin upon which they fell. He saw her for the first time - or, more accurately, for the second, or third iteration of the first time.
Toska felt the connection click, felt the movement of his fingers. She was still feverish from the task, felt the heat of the mechanical failure where his hand connected to his arm, where his arm connected to his body.
But all she betrayed was an abbreviated grimace and the quaver of an exhale for her trouble, for the pain of repair, to comfort the malfunction he presented in her.
Even when he was functional, the echoes of his infection still lingered in her, just as she allowed him linger in her touch, and allowed her walls to linger in him.
All things would cease and she couldn't keep the memories he collected at bay.
As she withdrew, physically, so she relinquished his body and the voices returned, Luut's collection of happy memories, digital tragedies in their radio wave era. At first, a trickle, then a stream.
But at some point, the levy had to break and all that was left of the reality of remembrance was a tiny woman's sacrifice and the patchwork man she still allowed to touch her cheek.
“Thank you,” Luut said through the resonant hum of internal caterwauling that was not his own, sounds and speech patterns that were far from indigenous to the trap inside which they were locked. The depth of his cranial constitution was a thing easily misjudged, shone upon in glints of returned recollection like the moon slivered into shavings draped atop the ink-black expanse of vast, churning sea, but the snapping of the dam remained a well-received, ill-displayed reprieve. Long ago drowned, those lungs were more accustomed to the fluid of his thoughts than the air of emptiness, though his inanimate face had not the means to accurately express the fondness felt for the twice-ebbed tide’s return.
And with it, resurgence drug along familiarity, a voice, most important of all, left to linger in a cache whose order was temporarily immune from perennial sabotage. Key points, in order of personal preference: hand & swarm.
“The desiccated avenues of this society are reverberant with the song of the swarm,” he continued, “but the notes that fill your throat are different; more palpably somber. Is this a consequence of your duty, or is it rather that the Firefly flutters in heliographic signals that evade transcription?”
She turned from him, slight shoulders rolling as she cracked her vertebrae, relaxed her spine. The manipulation of swarm in her was the beauty of ballet position, and her pale hands, spindle fingered and delicately trembling from the weight of her unmarred power, dotted the horizon before her that, even blocked by her treehouse walls, they both could see,
one in mind’s eye, the other in stolen reverie.
"When they come," she blew into the circle of dots she'd marked out and they came alive like tiny embers from a dying flame, floating slowly to the ground after they'd reached terminal height. "The first thing we ask is that they create a trail with the Self they can access. This is the skill and the test that defines whether or not a mender resides in the shell of this life or if the shell is only a soul and that soul will have to try again in the next."
As the embers were beginning to fade, she directed them with the raising of her hands until they were fireflies,
each moving independently but controlled in pattern.
Graceful.
"The wild swarm is a beast of destruction, a creature that is hungry, fearful. When it infects a host, it leaps from the belly, terrified and unruly and lashing out to defend. An animal trapped reliant only on its instinct to survive." She turned as the fireflies she'd created set to forming the vastness of the night sky across her darkened ceiling, her constellations, her final bedtime story map.
"The swarm we possess is a swarm that we create-- not scared, not hungry, but a part of our bodies already, inherent in our blood, in our bones. The control of it isn't survival, it is just another set of limbs to utilize, another set of arms to give comfort to those who are hurt, who are dying. Another set of legs to run messages to the mountain."
The tiny woman came to him again, to clasp his hands between her own.
"So if the sound of the swarm here doesn't deafen you, if it defies the transcript of your million memories, it is because this swarm isn't screaming. This swarm is not afraid."
The man considered her words briefly.
"That there is any other leisurely use for an appendage, inherent or not, outside of the toils of survival is a difficult concept for me to understand. For me, when I look down from any of the pike-pointed precipices that stab at the sky, I see that this world is filled with little but - be it the swarm and its frenetic, animechancial sentience, or a man who takes to thieving foodstuffs when the merchants of the overmarket turn their heads, or a cyborg caught scrapping the still useful parts of a mangled compatriot, or me, drawn to you to aid the survival of my arm through the archived and ultimately bested survival-centric consciousness of another."
As Luut spoke, a stillness settled upon him. The comfort was in the weighted of her hands holding his, the contortion of aberrant scintilla swirling in patterns calculable through esoteric equations, the sound of the healer's voice and the kindness therein.
"Do you believe that there exists a way to sate the hunger and sooth the fear, to tame the rampant destruction that eternalizes the consuming cloud of naught that is the wild swarm? Do you think someone, somewhere sings the discordant notes of its song?"
"To steal to eat, to scavenge to repair, to destroy to live are survival mechanics, surely," she replied without hesitation. "But to survive without suffering, to ease the burden of fear and pain from the dying and the soon dead is to understand the consequence of survival's failure. You know better than anyone, with the myriad dead in your mausoleum of memory-- do you feel the pain of your memory or has it faded to a dull ache by the time you've come to feed? Do you become desensitized to the final moments of human feeling when they replay, fastforward and back, in the landscape of your retrospect?"
She'd often thought of whether or not she could combat the cloud, calm the swarm as it ravaged the fields-- but she was not prepared to become a martyr, not yet. There was no one, still, to take her place.
Not yet.
"Maybe someday," she continued. "Someday, a swarm will meet a swarm and comingle, heal, and make calm. But as of this day, I am not entirely sure it is possible." The healer offered him the warmth of her smile, then, as her constellation map faded to embers, falling down to the floor around them. "I will be sure to call on you in the event that I try-- so you can record the moments, final or not, in your unflinching record."
"For selfishness' sake, I hope the mirage of fortitude that stems such abrupt bravery continues to elude you. But your thoughtfulness is appreciated...,"
Luut was unsure if wishing the woman to linger in the extended misery of existence was a curse or expression of kindness; perhaps the answer lay in the intention, opposed to the haystack of interpretation. The human side of things was infinitely more complicated than the precise functioning of metal and the logical thought processes conjured through lines of code.
Her questions were taken in and left uncommented upon, squirreled away in some hovel of data that would be sorted through later. The attachment he possessed to his aggregate of experiences was a wildly varying thing, but at the same time, it could not be said that Luut wasn't a direct product of them, even if they were the lasting legacies of someones else.
"As is your assistance, perhaps to a degree I am not quite sure how to express. In this land of ratios, it is an uncomfortable thing to have one stacked against you. What can I do to repay you for your work?"
"You can come and visit me again," she said as she released him, then, leaving him with that knowing half-smile and the solemn eyes behind it. "It's so rare that visitors come when they aren't in need."
Human as she was, she'd been a product of machine logic for so long that either intent or none at all would have sufficed. She'd overcome desire to absolve herself of suffering, so there would be room in that tiny hollow of her chest for the suffering of others,
but where did that leave her human core?
"I don't keep track-- deed, repayment, ratios. I haven't the head for such things."
"Then I shall," was the easy agreement. "Goodnight."
As the words faded, his retreat into the darkness of the Firefly's canopy encampment was marked with the sound of fleeting footsteps which bled into an ascent that was swallowed down the insatiable gullet of night.