32.9

 

She moves her hands from his shoulders to his cheeks, cupping the stone-grey face and tilting it up to meet the orbless sockets of his eyes. It is not that he has lost his eyes; more that they were never included to begin with. His is the visage of a statue, carved from granite to make it clear that the subject is blind. He was created to be indifferent. To react only to what he was instructed. He has never been alive, as such, for his entire existence has been in reaction to everything else. He had no self, no will, no desire, no self-identification. He was never meant to be more than a non-player character in a game, programmed with the identical response to every situation. Edit. Remove, Eradicate, until she interrupted him at the precise moment when there was no longer a Voice to issue his orders – until Astaroth killed God.

Now he is a tool without a user, a subroutine without an operating system; a worker bee without a queen. Roisin’s voice softens. “You are not like the other angels. You were never meant to be an individual. You were never meant to become self-aware.”

Hasmed’s form flickers violently as he shifts his not-gaze to the floor. “I know,” he says, his voice like sand on a polished floor. “And now I have no function.”

Roisin looks into him, from one plane to the next his form shifts and fluctuates, as if he can’t decide where he should be. There were no fractals inside him for he was just a collection point, removing them from the world and passing them on to those above him, but now he has Knowledge. Knowledge of Self, of Identity, of Context. He is an image found upon the floor of a vast library, fallen from the pages of an unknown book, and without context, he can never be pasted onto his original page again. She feels the fear of unbelonging radiating from him like blue light from a yellow bulb. “You’re scared.”

Hasmed’s wings collapse inward, folding back into his spinal column. “Am I? Is that my new function?”

Roisin smiles and tilts his face up to hers again, leaning forward to place a kiss upon his rigid forehead. “You are not malfunctioning, you are evolving. You are becoming your own self, and the knowledge is giving you an identity you can wield in this new world. You can make decisions for yourself now. You are the Judge, with the ability to weigh both sides of a preposition, and act accordingly. You know Right from Wrong. Balance from Imbalance. Evolution form Stagnation.”

Her breath trembles as she realises a truth. Hasmed has been born again. He has gained control of an NPC he was to become a player – a level one character with a whole host of free level-ups. “You’re not breaking,” she smiles as she whispers, tears pricking at the edges of her eyes. “You’re changing. Becoming.”

The void stills.

Hasmed’s voice fractures like a porcelain cup thrown from a first-class train carriage. “Becoming… what?”

Roisin’s mantle pulses as she realises he’s not questioning himself, he’s expecting an answer from her. He is asking her to define him. He kneels before her. Broken. Glitching. Wings flickering between absence and form. Void spasming like a piece of melting celluloid in a projector. He looks up at her with hollow, terrified eyes. “Tell me what I am.”

She  feels the mantle pulse between her hips, a warmth spreading through her groin as it waits patiently for her to make a choice and she knows this is another test, for if she tells him what he is, she is the one defining his role, just as God did. He will become bound to whatever she names him as. She will become as God and will be subject to the same fate.

She leans in once more and this time her voice is soft, steady and very human. “I won’t define you.”

Hasmed’s wings glitch violently. “You… refuse?”

“Yes.”

“You will not tell me what I am?”

“No.”

The void recoils from the word as the former Angel of Annihilation trembles, sinking into himself like an inflatable with a slow leak. “Then I am… nothing.”

Roisin moves her thumbs from his cheekbones to his eye sockets and presses lightly. Beneath the pads of her thumbs appears a pad of gelatine which quickly grows into the twin orbs of eyes, shining with the gold of a fresh dawn. “No. You are free.”