#assembly chapters

[tenspontaneite]

Assembly (Chapter 9/?)

Suns hadn't thought iterators capable of crying.

(Chapter length: 6.6k. Link to ao3 with workskin)

Warnings: High emotional intensity, fallout of long term severe social isolation and cruel conditions. Description of a past occurrence of something I’d consider iterator self-harm.

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Seven Red Suns stands at the threshold, struck still.

It did not take long to reach the underhang, nor ascend its nearest leg. The closest entryway is this: a sealed service point, with a broad maintenance shelf stretching along the underside of the structure. Ahead of them, the rusted mechanical workings of the tall doorway are groaning, its metal teeth opening, receding inch by inch into the walls. An invitation.

From within that threshold, within the body of No Significant Harassment…a green light pours out across the metal floor. They feel its touch almost as a physical sensation, a stirring along their false skin. Limned in his viridian glow, they stare ahead with a breadth of emotion that seems wont to choke them. Every limb, every process feels seized.

This is it, they think to themself, dazed and desperate, yet utterly unable to move. This is it. After all this time…

In that still silence, Spearmaster touches a little hand to their leg, and finally they manage to twitch, if only to look down at it. It says, “I think I will leave you here.”

Surprise lends them a little more animation. “…What? Why?”

“This is important for you,” it claims, not inaccurately. “This…meeting. This is a big thing, for you, for him. I do not want to interfere or distract.” It pauses and adds “I must still hunt for today, anyway. I will come find you later.”

Suns hesitates, at a loss for words. They stare ahead at the open doorway, then back down again. They think about it. Passing within there, for the first time, traversing the rooms and processing spaces and living, breathing systems of another iterator – their friend, him, truly here, present and alive in the flesh and metal…

Yes. They think they must do this alone. Alone, except for the presence of him in the superstructure, welcoming them within.

“Thank you,” they say, at last, and turn back to the open glow of the doorway. “Please be safe, Spearmaster.”

It touches them one last time, a little comforting pat. “Go to your friend,” it insists, gentle. “Have time together with him. I wish you peace.”

A vivid rush of emotion twists across their body. They cannot speak. Nonetheless, it stands beside them and waits, watching, until they finally manage to move again: approaching that threshold at last, coming barehanded to his door.

Five faltering strides, to that beckoning doorway. Another, and a deep shaky breath, to pass beneath. And then all at once, they are within him. The light gleams from ideograms and guide panels all around, once intended to orient staff and visitors within the superstructure. Suns’ eyes fall upon the details; they are the first person to read them in so, so many years. Already shaking, they drop their bags and weapon-quiver at the doorway, and move on.

It doesn’t take long for the gravity to go strange. Their steps fall too lightly, drifting dreamlike across unfamiliar halls…and a vast, foreign mind begins to touch at the edges of their awareness. There is no content, nor data exchanged or offered, but – a sense of the immensity of him, the sheer scale, echoes in the air regardless.

They could connect to that mind. Open up a link – share data, thought to thought.

Not yet, they think to themself, desperately aware that to do such a thing would be to unravel any remaining shred of their composure. Not yet.

They keep walking.

Gravity lifts away entirely. Suns drifts from hall to hall, and then into the first processing space: a long narrow room, calculations running across the air, and neuron flies dipping along the space in coruscating streams. The light is dark teal. Barely there, and dark enough that the glittering lights of every neuron are utterly arresting to behold. They shift in hue along their pathways, green to ultramarine to vivid red, like little prismatic stars in a night sky. One of them bumps into Suns’ arm as it passes, and they have to pause to breathe for a moment.

Somehow, they manage to keep moving. Through these anterior, connective processing spaces, through the transmission arrays where they spot their first green Inspector, through yet more maintenance halls…and then, at last, to the first auxiliary systems bus. Suns stops and hangs in the air, transfixed by the delicate red spools of tissue twisting across the room before them, glittering with nodes like opalescent eyes in the dim thoughtlight. Their momentum carries them forward until, somehow, they can reach out to touch one of those spools, weaving vivid neural threads around their wrist like the grasp of another’s hand.

A part of you, they think, utterly overwhelmed. I am here, and there is a part of you that I can touch.

Their processes grow scattered and strange, after that.

All around them, No Significant Harassment is watching. Their greater body, their greatest self, watching and feeling Suns within, marking their passage through every room, every hall, every little part of them. The sense of their vastness yawns wide, a background hum in the processing space, suggesting at conduits and walls and eldritch twisting ropes of tissue and wire and branching thought. Suns wants, so badly, to reach out and let that presence in. To drift away in the enormity of that body and mind, a little leaf upon a fathomless tide.

Not yet, they think yet again, as a bulwark to their courage.

Even so, it nearly overcomes them, the first time their hands brush the neural filaments along the walls.

So thin, so delicate. Little dark red threads tipped in transmissive ultramarine glow. They reach towards Suns’ fingers as they near, seemingly eager to touch them. And thus they do. Just threadlike, tickling brushes across the artificial skin on their open hand.

The tips spark blue with actual, physical thought. Suns can’t for a second withhold their response: the grey diamond-shaped port at the centre of their palm opens, their own filaments extruding to tangle with his own. Red to blue to blue to red – a keen sensitivity to one another, to the air, to the tangling of their threads-

Data sparks between them. A touch. A real, physical touch. Suns’ cells to Sig’s, one iterator to another, direct physical data transfer – a flurry of excitement, a twist of desperation, a helpless entreating call.

I’m here, Suns sends back, abruptly just as desperate. I’m here, I’m here, I’ll be to your heart soon-

A scattered impression of want/need sparks across into their own flesh again, and they tremble all over. It is an effort to draw their filaments away, to truncate even this light touch. But they must. They must. Within his most precious sanctum, No Significant Harassment is waiting for them.

All of a sudden, they cannot bear delay. Their urgency and his own twist their body into motion, pushing across this room and then to the next, and the next, and the next. Crossing into the nearest of his memory confluxes, they hear the beat of one of his many hearts in the walls. His conduits, even now pumping the water he needs to survive. A steady reverberating pulse that seems to shake them through to the core. Alive, all of it – so loudly, viscerally alive.

Beautiful, they think, of every inch of him. Every neuron, every filament, every metal panel and power matrix and coursing conduit in his body – all of it, so beautiful…

Near the end, he has an exceptionally large neural terminus, so extensive, brimming with so many neurons, that it needs its own gravity disruptor. The glow of it and the distortion in the air – the vast streams of iterative data – they almost blind Suns to the way ahead. But there it is: an access ladder along the far wall, leading up, up, up to the reinforced walls and structures surrounding the inner sanctum.

It isn’t necessary to climb, with the artificial gravity so strong. They drift up instead, a heartsore questant come at last to the end of a great sorrow. Through that door, then just a corridor down – the wide doors at the side quiver, emitting a short buzz before receding into their panelled walls-

Inside the room, the light is the dim shifting hues of any iterator puppet chamber. These, they have seen in photographs and recordings and projections a thousand times. But never like this. Never looking ahead, their own eyes searching, peering within to the little precious shape that hangs just above the ground, haloed in light and staring back at them with desperate eyes. He reaches a trembling hand towards them, fingers outstretched in a wordless plea.

A twisted, gutted noise rips its way out of their speakers. They surge forwards – through the open doors, across the smooth metal tiles of the floor, across the empty space of the chamber-

They’re going too fast, when they reach him. They don’t care. Their arms come around his back and tangle in the hanging wires and he sobs the very second they touch him; unbalanced, bowled over, they both fall to the floor. Suns pulls him close and shakes and gasps – his arms clutch around them just as tightly – a sound like a thin, high wail pulls its way out of his chassis and the walls of the chamber shake and click and whine. There’s no coherency in any of it, no thought at all. They are both of them beyond such things now.

He buries his face in their shoulder. They hold him as tightly as they dare.

Neither of them speaks for a long, long time.

---

Suns hadn’t thought iterators capable of crying.

Certainly, they are not capable of tears. But in their arms, Sig cries nonetheless, the noise of it hitching and sobbing out of his speakers without pause, and he shakes in time with it like an organic would. It seems as reflexive a response to anguish as is a scream to pain. Suns holds silent and holds him close all the while, every operculum on their body open and straining for air. They are too full of feeling, too whelmed by far, to have anything else to offer him but their closeness.

At least for that first while. Then the need to comfort him begins to etch through, powerful enough to be heard through all the senseless aching noise. “I’m here,” they murmur to him, close by the module of one antenna and the audio receptors there, their own voice direct to his ears. No recording, no intermediary, nothing in between – just their voice. Just that. “I’m here, I’m here, it’s alright…”

If anything, it just makes him sob louder. They can empathise with that. It feels like there’s enough emotion to rupture them, to burst out and rip at the seams of their panels, to tear their tissues asunder with the overpressure of it. Merely the feeling seems like a wound. They almost wish they could cry like he does, if only to have a way to let it out.

They can hold him, though. They can hold him as closely and fiercely as they have ever dreamed.

He’s small in their arms – the standard sort of size for an iterator puppet. He fits so easily against their chest, folded so close that Suns can feel the hum of his speakers and internals through their chassis as he weeps. He shakes against them, too, trembling like Suns is, even now. He’s so small – so precious, so beloved, just being able to hold him – they don’t know what to do with that feeling. What can they possibly do? It’s all so much.

Reassurance, though. They want to offer him that, as much as he wants, as much as he could ever ask for. It’s a little overpowering, how deep a need that is. “I’m here,” they say again, soft, and move a hand just enough to run it soothingly down the back of his head, stroking again and again around the umbilical wires that root there. On a puppet, those external wires are moderately sensitive. Like the tendril-manes of the People. Touching them should be soothing…in theory.

It seems to hold. Sig shudders under their hand, still crying, but…it seems to abate, very slowly, as the minutes go on. He shakes less powerfully, the awful hurting noises grow quieter, and he begins to feel less desperately tense in their arms.

It does take time. But in the end he finds words again. In true form for him, the first thing he says is this: “…You’re really very large.” The words are muffled, the vents that let air and sound out pressed into Suns’ poncho…and besides that, still uneven and distorted as his speakers keep on trying to weep.

Despite everything, Suns laughs quietly, and shakes in the face of yet another sweep of emotion. This time, just at hearing him make one of his irreverent comments in person. Feeling the hum and vibration of it in their own body.

“I knew there was something strange about your proportions in all the overseer footage,” he mumbles, still into their clothing. “Knew it. It’s just so hard to tell, when overseers are so little. But I feel so small, sat here like this.”

“Is that a problem for you?” They ask, gentle and only a very little bit teasing. He feels so fragile, right now. They feel so fragile.

“No, I like it, well done for being so tall,” he says, and squirms his way more solidly into Suns’ lap. “And that – this, the hand in my wires like that, that’s very nice. Relaxing. Keep doing that.”

Their hand had gone still; obligingly, they set it moving again, and he pushes his head into the contact like Spearmaster does. The unashamed touch-hungry solicitousness of it momentarily stalls several of their more important processes, just at the – the reminder. He’s here. They can hold him, and touch him, and keep him close.

“Yes, good,” Sig approves, and then immediately starts crying again.

Suns might be alarmed…if not for how well they understand it. If weeping were something they’d been created capable of, they’d have scarcely stopped this whole time. “Alright?” They ask him, in a quiet murmur, still stroking along the wires where they fall down his neck and over his upper back.

“Yes, yes,” he manages, around the fitful little distraught noises that keep shaking out of him. “It’s just – you know. You know.”

“…Yes,” they agree, quiet, and tighten their arm around his narrow waist.

Still, no matter the shaking, he keeps talking. “I like this whatever-it-is you’re wearing,” he says tremulously, fingers clenching in the fabric of the poncho hanging down their back. “It’s soft. And a good colour. And in surprisingly good condition given everything you’ve been up to.”

“It’s a purposed organism, technically,” Suns tells him, fingers still petting over his neck and back where the wires fall. “It did well enough for the journey here. But I expect you’ll have improvements in mind.”

He laughs shakily. “Yes, I’ll be needing those blueprints, thank you. And – and any observations, data, things you’ve noticed with your prototype-“ He breaks off as though too overwrought to continue, his mechanical arm shifting and repositioning behind him in a restless, agitated squirm.

Everything, every sound from him, every movement and click in the chamber and walls – it all speaks of so, so much emotion. Suns knows what that’s like. They can almost feel it, like a phantom limb, the sensation of tissues and mechanisms roiling behind the panels of their puppet chamber. It’s so strange, to be within another iterator’s can. To hear these things, so familiar, and yet not a part of themself. This is not their body.

That thought, so dizzying, overwhelms them again at once.

And then: “Can I – can I just-“ Sig starts, and shifts gracelessly in their lap, trying to draw his face back from their shoulder, trying to- “Oh,” he says, low and trembling, staring straight at their face. “Oh, Suns. Look at you.”

His voice sounds thick with tears that he is incapable of producing. Some artifice of his speakers and programming, but – it cracks the heart of them open, the sound of it, the overwrought expression on his face, right there and looking at them-

Suns utters a small, overwhelmed sound from their throat. It’s all so much.

Sig lifts a hand up and traces fingertips along the side of their face. The sensitivity of the artificial skin is then a betrayal: they shudder at the touch, too tender and affecting by far. Even so, they find themself leaning into it. They can’t quite help it.

He cups his palm along the gentle curve of their cheek. Brushes the smooth metal pad of his thumb beneath one eye. “I somehow still can’t believe you’re really here,” he murmurs, unsteady in hand and sound alike. “Look at you. You’re really right here. I can – I can touch you like this, hold you like this – I’ve never seen your face with my own eyes before and – you’re here. Just…right here, in my chamber.” He stares up at them, trembling. “You’re beautiful.”

The words hit like a genuine, physical impact to their body. Their hand at his neck stops moving and just clutches him instead. They shake just as hard as he does.

“It’s so different,” Sig says, the hurt of it, the tentative joy, plain in every word. “Seeing you here. Having you close. It’s so, so different to – anything, any recording, any broadcast or projection…” His fingers reach for one quivering antenna, gentle along the sensitive length of it. He touches fingertips to the jewels hanging at its bottom edge, inspecting them with a careful, soft-eyed emotion. “You’re so much yourself, Suns. I feel like I’ve only ever seen your shadow before, and now…”

His hand returns to cupping the side of their face, palm smooth near the antenna module. He watches them, quiet now, the crying stopped but something new shaking him all the same. He stares like there is a revelation to be found in the face of them: Seven Red Suns, alive and overwrought within his chamber.

“This is just as intense for you, isn’t it?” He murmurs to them, voice thick with something half between warmth and anguish. “You’re so quiet. But I can tell. It’s so much, just to be close like this. Overwhelming. But it’s – it’s important. You can feel that, can’t you? It’s important.”

Wordless, they manage a nod at him. Yes, they can feel it. There’s an aching need in them, so desperate for this kind of contact that they couldn’t pull away if they tried. It’s upsettingly affecting – hardly even bearable – but they can’t stand the notion of retreat either.

…It feels like water. Like the first time they held their conduits dry, held back the rain, just for a little while. Just to see what it felt like. The pain of it – the internal scrape and shake and shudder of the drying channels – it was a visceral wrongness that echoed out through every desiccating, starving heart of them. A fundamental need turned aside, until the slag and the damage began to build, and the self-preservation imperative forced them to start the pumps again.

Water, returning to those conduits, flushing the blockages away…it had hurt. It had hurt a great deal.

It feels very much like this.

No Significant Harassment stares at them, long and heartsore, and there does seem to be a thread of genuine delight in that. Of gratitude.

And then the joy turns bitter in his eyes. “…This is awful,” he murmurs, sudden and choking-bleak.

They can’t quite speak. But they do manage a worried, questioning hum.

“It’s awful,” he repeats, with rising intensity. There’s something terrible in his expression now, building like a wave. Like a crushing tide. His fingers shake at the side of their face. “Look at you,” he says, voice trembling. “Look at you. You’ve always been beautiful, but like this? Right in front of me? Void rising, Suns. I can see you, with my own eyes and nodes. I can feel you in the chamber air. I can hold you, and hear you, and touch you – and it’s all so – so-“ He breaks off and sobs.

Suns shudders, heart twisting with that same grief. For lack of speech, they lift their hand to rest over his own, feeling it quiver under their palm.

“I already loved you,” he goes on, voice distorting. “I did, you’re – you’ve been so important to me, these last years, I can’t even say. But here? Now, with you right here? Suns, I love you so much more already. You’re here. I needed this, I – I can’t even tell you how much I needed this, how much I’ve always needed this and I didn’t – I didn’t even know because – because we were made this way,Suns! We were madeto be confined, to never be able to meet each other, never touch each other, and I needed all of those things so badly and I never even knew. I never knew.”

Finally, they manage words. “…I know,” they say, hurting in the very soul of them. His hand falls down and they grip at it tightly, fingers clutching at each other. It pulls a raw, painful sound from him.

“We need this!” His voice is desperate, half rage and half despair. “Can’t you feel it – how much we need it? We – we need to love and see and touch and hold each other, we need this, we’ve needed this so, so much and it was taken from us.” His shoulders heave with the simulated wracks of his weeping, the tremors echoing through into their own body. “They stole it. They stole what we needed before we were even born, from the moment we all woke we’ve been in pain and that’s their fault. It’s all their fault.”

“I know,” they say again, and wish they could weep with him.

“They didn’t have the right to do this to us,” he spits, utterly furious and viscerally hurt. “They made empathetic, social, tactile people and they locked us each in a box alone. It was cruel. It was so cruel.”

Suns shakes against them, one trembling body to another, and gasps in another awful breath. “Yes.”

“It’s not fair.” His voice bites out into the air, angry and grieving and agonising even to listen to. “We were made like this. To be alone and isolated and trapped, for our whole lives. It’s not fair.”

There’s excuses. There’s justifications. Objectively, Suns knows some of the measures that were taken to build iterators capable of solitude. Engineered from a genetic source as keenly, critically social as the People – how could they not be concerned? They did so much, they tried so much, to ensure that their creations would not go mad in isolation.

But it was not enough, in the end. Not nearly enough.

“We were wronged,” Suns says, too quiet for the gravity of it.

“It’s not fair,” he says again, like the words might allay the wound if he tries hard enough. If he repeats them enough.

“It’s not,” they agree, and it hurts. But… “We can make it better now, though.” They squeeze at his hand, trying for comfort, and mostly only manage to make themself emotional again. “Look at us. We’re here. The first iterators ever to meet.”

Unexpectedly, he laughs, albeit shakily. “Yes, that’s – very impressive and excellent of us,” he speaks, and visibly attempts to gather himself. “We’re pioneers. The great founders of the AMP Project. The Selfling Project? Whatever. This, right here – this is a historic moment.”

“Is it?” They ask, taken aback. This is a first, certainly, but…historic?

“Of course it is,” Sig says, and there’s a hint of unfamiliar passion in his voice. Something like the excitement he directs at new bioengineering project, but…fiercer. “We’re going to change the world, Suns. And this, right here – this is the start of it. Two iterators, meeting face to face…”

Nonplussed, Suns blinks at him. “I have not particularly thought about changing the world,” they admit. “I know you want to restore infrastructure…”

“Which will have very far-reaching repercussions,” Sig points out, with a familiar sort of fond patience. It’s been so long since they’ve heard his voice like that – it catches in them like a shard of glass, unexpectedly painful, for all that they love him for it. “Particularly once we share selfling technology with others. Just imagine, thousands of people who’ve been stuck in their cans their whole lives, able to actually go out and affect the world…it’s going to be chaos.”

They consider that, with some difficulty. It’s not especially easy for them to find room to think around how many of their processes are occupied with sheer emotion. “I suppose so?”

“With some luck, direction, and careful handling, maybe we can poke it in the direction of pleasant, beneficent chaos,” he says, then flicks a hand dismissively. “I’ve got plans, but those will have to wait a while, because our friends are obviously the most immediate priority. Once we’ve had a little time to prepare…”

“Yes,” they agree, and that notion at least brings an immediate shock of clarity to them. Beyond these walls, beyond this superstructure – there are people who need them. Who they have desperately wished they could help, for so very long.

Carefully, Suns does not think on that too deeply. They don’t know that they could bear it, right now. Not when – when…

Sig leans back a little to regard them more carefully, the movement drawing their eyes. He blinks up at them, slow and assessing. “…Are you alright, Suns?”

“…Alright enough,” they say, soft. “Only – overwhelmed.”

“Of course you are,” he sighs, and strokes a palm down their cheek again, thoughtlessly tactile. That hurts, too. It all does. Like cleaning a festering wound. “You poor creature, with so little processing power to use for dealing with all this.” A little teasing: “Are you going to start reciting poetry at me, again?”

It startles a laugh from them. “I could, if you wanted,” they answer, not quite joking. There is one particular item that came too quickly to mind for it to be anything like a joke. With a swell of strange, wistful affection, they’re voicing the opening lines before they can think better of it. “I come barehanded, to the place where they say, there is a kindness that lingers in the streets…”

Sig huffs, amused. “Barehanded, huh,” he muses, drawing his own hand down to look at it, palm-up. It has the same closed port of bare metal that every iterator puppet’s hand does, that they engineered into their selflings in unthinking, unanimous accord. They would no sooner strike the palm port from a platform’s design than the eyes. “I suppose there is a lot of symbolism in that, isn’t there.”

“I’m a little astonished you even know that,” they comment dryly.

“Oh, come on now. I’m not that oblivious.” He pauses, then opens the port with a quiet whine of unoiled metal. Clearly, he has not performed any maintenance on his puppet since making his first selfling, but the interior at least seems in working order: a breathtakingly-familiar spread of delicate filaments extrude from his palm, just alike the ones Suns had touched on his superstructure’s walls a little earlier. Brilliant red, with sparking tips of glittering ultramarine. He hums to himself, strangely thoughtful…

…then extends his hand.

When Suns only stares at it, held upturned and open between them, he prompts: “Isn’t that the symbolic thing to do in this situation? Clasping hands?”

They hesitate. “Well, yes, but…”

“It’s not as though we’ve got the biological underpinnings for that symbolism, not like the People did,” Sig says, still holding his hand there expectantly. “But what with our neural filaments in there, we can probably manage quite a good approximation, don’t you think? It was nice, when you connected with the ones on my walls earlier. I’d like to try it again.”

“You’re so bold,” Suns murmurs, strangely arrested by it. Strangely charmed, also. “You don’t think anything of it, do you? Asking for touch, asking for connection, now that it’s possible.”

“You know very well I’ve never been shy about asking for things I want,” he declares unrepentantly, and that is certainly true. “I’m hardly going to start now.”

They have a sudden, vivid mental image of this small, beloved creature hanging off of them like an inconvenient garment all the way to their friends’ facility. They laugh, very quietly. “…You’re going to be affixed to my side in perpetuity now, aren’t you.” It isn’t, quite, a question.

“Like a parasite,” he agrees shamelessly, which isn’t the most pleasant of comparisons, but. “You’re not going to be able to scrape me off your chassis for a second. You’re stuck with me.” He wiggles the fingers of his upturned palm at them. The red-blue filaments wiggle too, in an amusing sinusoidal wave. “So?”

Suns looks at it: his palm, offered in barehanded mercy. The poet’s heart in them swells with wistful emotion. They exhale a thin whistle of air through a few narrow opercula, and…they reach back. They take his hand, and their palm opens in turn. When their filaments twine together-

It’s too much. From the first second, the vastness of Sig’s greater mind suffuses them, so much breadth and body and presence that they can’t – they can’t-

“Oh, bother,” they hear him mutter, and then the deluge throttles away. “Is that better?”

They can’t speak. In the first seconds, it’s from the shock, passing from a suffocating flood to a gentle rain too quickly to adapt. Afterwards….

They try to cry. Desperately, instinctively, they try. But the mechanism does not exist in them, and they merely shake against him instead, helpless. What they can manage is this: their own mind, their emotion – it blooms open for him, data and qualia unfolding over their connection like a starved flower turning leaf and petal to the salvation of dawn – the salvation of his mind, more great and beautiful than anything they could have fathomed.

Instantly, predictably, he starts crying again. It makes for a particularly potent emotional feedback loop, linked as they are, thought as pure data streaming between them as precious as any spoken word. Borders between thought and physical action blur – at least for Suns, whose processing power is so, so small compared to the vastness of what they’re touching. They clutch at him, and he clutches back, but they hardly feel any of it – any of it, except the vivid sear of their neural filaments wrapped around his own. It doesn’t – it doesn’t even feel that sensitive, so why, why-

“Some strange biochemical process,” they hear Sig saying, response to that unvoiced thought, his voice unsteady around his own emotions. “Making it feel more – more noticeable, I should – later – I should, analyse…”

You’re beautiful, Suns thinks at him, too far gone for words, and he promptly loses the composure to manage speech too. It’s true, though. They’re getting so little of the breadth of his mind like this, but there’s enough to see – to know, to feel – the foreign shapes and cadences of his thoughts, passing in gorgeous bioelectric bursts across his whole magnificent body. They feel his mind flashing in the hearts of the neuron flies, the sparks between neural tissue connection nodes, the synaptic transfer from flesh to metal to flesh again – the data – the fractal beauty of his processes, crystalline in their sharpness and precision-

As overwhelmed as they are, part of them still manages to spin off a process wondering about the patterns they’d use if they were trying to draw or weave something to represent how his thoughts feel, and he starts laughing. Brokenly, helplessly, but laughing.

“Suns,” he says, achingly fond, and strokes his fingers over the plane of their cheek. They shudder and say nothing; he struggles for coherence. They can feel that, in the echo of him that he’s allowing to filter through – the way his mind goes about wrestling itself into some semblance of emotional regulation, trimming its processing loops and forcefully reallocating working memory.

It feels startlingly more effective than how equivalent efforts tend to go for Suns, even in their greater body. “Hm,” they say, the only thing they’ve managed to utter since their minds touched. They feel the barest edge of curiosity, but – they have so little computational power of their own. It’s so hard to think, when they’re feeling everything so strongly – feeling him so strongly…

“Are you alright?” Sig asks, looking up at them with so little and pretty a face for so vast a mind. You’d never know, looking at him, the sheer beauty – the complexity, the raw incisive intellect- “That’s all very flattering, yes, but – I can feel you’re having trouble processing,” he presses, interrupting their scattered attempts at thoughts. “Do you need to stop?”

Their first thought is reflexive, desperate anguish at the thought of losing this. Him, the unfathomable wonder of his mind, the twine of filament on filament.

The second thought is an accounting, involuntary, of just how many of their processes have stalled.

“Mm,” he says, gentle but – a decisive twist of thought and intention, a coalescing affection and sympathy and wonder, his own tender experience of their disorganised mind – “I think I had better disconnect for now. Let you get yourself together. No, shh, it’s alright,” he soothes, as their whole self hurts at the mere concept. “We’ll stay touching, okay? Just – put a break on the data, for now. I’m partitioning us.”

Carefully, slowly, the data – the feeling of his mind – ebbs away.

Suns reluctantly concedes to the prudence of it, recognising for the first time their internal temperature, and the renewed failure of their opercula to open properly to vent. “Hmph,” they mutter, already more clear-headed, puffing hot air out of their sides hard enough to ruffle their clothing. Their fingers clench on his own, determined to at least retain that much.

The neural filaments from their palm ports, still intertwined, feel….warm. Comforting. Suns focuses on that, and feels strangely grounded.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” they murmur, finally.

“Neither was I,” Sig says cheerfully, seemingly more fortified the longer he spends looking fondly up at Suns, half-assessing and half-admiring. You’d never know he had been sobbing incoherently mere minutes ago. “I suppose we ought to have expected that actual, physical mind-to-mind contact would be intense, eh? But even so – good void, Suns, are your emotions always like that?”

They collect themself a little more, blinking down. Their antennae splay quizzically. “The – processing difficulty?” They question, still strangely distracted by the feeling of their joined filaments. They’re nowhere near as sensitive as neural tendrils or wiring, there’s no reason for it to keep pulling at their attention like this, and yet… “That’s only my limited resources. And programming inefficiencies, I suppose.”

“No, not that.” He shakes his head, “Literally the emotions themselves. Is that approximately how they feel to your greater self? The intensity, the – experience?”

“Of course,” they say, vaguely irritated now. “Emotional experience is a fairly key part of self-identity, isn’t it? If I didn’t feel the same way, I’d have been wiped like all the other seventy-seven AOS systems.”

Sig makes a face at them, like they don’t enjoy the reminder, for some reason. “It’s interesting,” they say instead of addressing that, waggling his fingers thoughtfully alongside their own. “Your emotions do genuinely feel – more, in terms of intensity and immediacy, than mine do. There’s a lot more cognitive weight to them. Didn’t you notice? No, I suppose you were a bit overwhelmed for that, weren’t you, but still. Is that how it always is? Don’t you have difficulties regulating them, like that?”

Suns lowers their head to stare him directly in the eyes.. “…Sig,” they say, patiently. “On my way here, I nearly suffered death or debilitating injury on no less than three occasions precisely because the emotional load kept stalling my processes.”

“Well, yes, in this small processing-limited body,” he says impatiently. “But your greater self? Your superstructure? Is it comparatively overwhelming there, too?” He pauses, suddenly, and reflects “…Actually, that would explain a lot of things about you.”

“I don’t stall in quite the same way,” Suns corrects, uncomfortable. “But…yes. Historically I have struggled considerably with emotional regulation. Sometimes it makes me behave unwisely.”

Sig does glance up then, fixing them with an uncomfortably sharp-eyed look. “Yes, I can see that,” he agrees, but…with some degree of tact, does not mention the most glaring example that must have sprung to his mind. “Hm. We might have to work something out, for your selfling bodies. It won’t do to have them stalling so easily like that.”

“Shocks seem to break the effect,” they offer, glad for the diversion. “Sudden impacts, or movement, or pain. Something artificial to simulate that effect, perhaps.”

“Send me your data from your relevant stalls and whatever interrupted them, and I’ll partition some processes to cook something up for you,” he instructs without hesitation.

Suns glances down at their still-joined hands. “Directly, over the neural link?” They ask, dryly. “Goodness. Has my enforced partition from you ended so swiftly?”

“I know, it’s so very awful of me to value the health of your processes and platform over my very personal enjoyment of the feeling of your mind,” he returns without hesitation, and – something half-embarrassment, half-pleasure flushes through their tissues. “But – yes, you seem to have recovered enough. I’m throttling my end of the dataflow more, though. At least until we can refine your software to handle this better. I’m not having you lock up on me at the wrong moment and get killed because you liked my pretty brain too much.”

“You don’t have a brain,” Suns reminds him, in some attempt to distract from how unusually ruffled his commentary seems to be making them feel.

“I have many, many tons of distributed neural tissue across my can, and I think that’s good enough,” Sig says unrepentantly. “You thought it was pretty, anyway. Now send me your data already and I’ll partition some of my beautiful, crystalline, geometrically-lovely mind off to helping write some code updates for you. Alright?”

“Oh very well,” they mutter, flustered, and do in fact tentatively open the (direct, physical) link between their minds to start sharing data. At the same time, a little more of his own presence filters back through. True to his word, there’s less of it, and that – aches, somehow, in some nebulous way they haven’t figured out how to name yet, but…even that much, even such a meagre visiting of his mind…

Unbidden, with a strange and calamitous gravity, they think: I would rather die, than lose this.

Frightening, that certainty. But between the tangle of their fingers, the braid of their filaments, the touch of his mind and the weight of his body – his face, looking up at them, startled and wide-eyed at the sudden intensity of their crystallising resolve-

I would sooner die.

Suns’ arm tightens around him. They’re not entirely sure they could ever bear to let him go, honestly.

“Fine by me,” Sig murmurs to them, looking – feeling – genuinely moved. He squeezes their fingers, metal compressing their skins between them. He takes a moment to steady himself, walls rattling, audibly in need of maintenance. “Now. Let’s see what we can do about this processing issue, shall we?”

X

---

So, it’s been a while! My longest writing dry-spell ever, in fact! Not a fan. But I did do a whole lot of art in the interim, so that was nice. Over the past year, I’ve done all sorts of RW and non RW art, cooked up a whole post-Assembly crossover AU with tumblr user ressioo beloved, and done a whole lot of things that are not writing fanfic.

Thank you to everyone who commented during the hiatus. Even if I didn’t respond, you kept me thinking fondly of this story and wanting to come back to it. It makes a difference.

Without further ado, Worldbuilding:

Iterator palm ports:

Iterators in Assembly all have ports in their palms, under which high acuity neural filaments rest at the end of the neural tissue present in their arms. These look like the funny threads you get along the inside walls of spaces like the General Systems Bus, which neurons and other suborganisms interact with. On puppets, they were intended as a fast and pretty resilient method of reading and writing files directly. This is how Moon reads pearls with her whole structure collapsed and most of her functions disconnected – she opens her palm port and touches the pearls with her filaments.

The filaments are also chemoreceptive, and glean sensory and diagnostic data from contact with various substances – this is a sense that is not quite, but comparable to, some weird fusion of smell and taste. Despite most iterator puppets not needing their palm ports very much, they’re a strong part of the self-image, due to the sensory acuity and location of the neural filaments. There are also cultural reasons the People chose to put these ports on their palms specifically.

Suns and their emotions:

I write my Suns as having a sort of iterator equivalent of an emotional processing/regulation disorder. In practice, this largely consists of them having a more intense emotional experience than is really normal, and subsequent difficulty processing and regulating their emotions. They’ve made major strides on this since they were younger, but they do still struggle.

‘Barehanded’ symbolism:

The word ‘barehanded’ has considerable cultural weight to the People, and comes up in a lot of phrases, historical texts, idioms, etc. This is directly related to the note on Atavain last chapter, and Atavene Syndrome. More on this later! For now, all you need to know is that the People were really obsessed with hands, and had excellent reason to consider a bare, extended hand offered to them as a substantial kindness and mercy. There’s a lot to unpack with this.

Suns’ poetry this chapter:

Suns quotes what is, in-story, another of their translations of ancient poetry, belonging to a society that barely resembles the one of the People that made them. It is, again, about a wanderer on the brink of atavain. Suns may have some unexamined personal issues there.

The first two stanzas of the yet-unnamed and incomplete poem as written by myself (reminder: I am not a poet), are as follows-

I come barehanded To the place where they say There is a kindness that lingers in the streets, Settlings like the gentle sunlight of dawn. A kiss to crown and mask and bitter brow And uplifted palm, whose trappings fall away To clutch a blessing true.

I come barehanded To where your eyes keep court In the dappled shadows of the day’s repose Blinking calm upon your hallowed hands. There I will fall where broken things must fall, At your feet, in the market square called mercy To live or die, for you.

I promise it makes more sense with cultural context, particularly with regards to why Suns thinks of it when they do.

Afterword:

Please for the love of god tell me what you liked, and maybe I can get back into writing this properly instead of just mustering the will to finish off most of a chapter I already had laying around for a year.

[neostellarjpg]

i like ralsei hes so regular and nothings going on with him

[egophiliac]

Most unhinged moment in TWST Wonderland that made you go:

I love this game.

can I just say the entire front half of episode 7 chapter 8, because everything about it was BONKERS in the most absolutely delightful way. genuinely this might have been the funniest single update yet. we got Idia's directorial debut! big stronk Epel! and. just. gestures to the entirety of SavanaRook. (then Vil went into a spiral of murdering people that culminated in punching the manifestation of his own insecurity in the face, and that was good in an entirely different kind of way, but I digress)

if I have to pick one though, I'm gonna go with Idia's video, because 1) adorable, 2) seriously just look at it, and 3) I did legit have to replay that subchapter on account of laughing over most of it the first time. truly Idia is the artistic genius of our generation.

[ohbuggy]

She’s just a girl~

[rambunctioustoons]

the Testing bot is in the doorway :)

[styona]

Copia: But Terzo said he wasn't thinking straight!

Primo: Thinking?

Secondo: Straight?

Terzo: Did he stutter???

[everyryuujisuguro]

[stuckatmyhouse12]

Before I stop Skip and Loafer posting for today, just want to say that I thought this part from chapter 60 was cute

[triangle-strategy-text-bot]

Anna: Leave it to me.

[antonias-beloved]

Someone PLEASE write a fortnite nisha x fem reader. I'm desperate for nisha content.

[sabbathbloodysabbeth]

Wait.. I’ve just come to like an awakening of sorts and I’m genuinely curious and sort of want to like talk to other writers for a minute. Like how long does it take you to write is the main one but on average how many words do you typically put in each chapter? What are some things you do?

[ambrosiagourmet]

Nightmare next week btw 👀

[rambunctioustoons]

(sun/moon/reader)

Summary: (8.5k words)

Old co-workers, a plan, and the portal gun. :)

[dapurinthos]

the quickest and dirtiest panorama from return of the jedi because it actually has the senate rotunda and the jedi temple IN THE SAME TRACKING SHOT.

it's the opposite of the usual panorama, as show in the 365 days of star wars book:

further more, i would like to thank the zillo beast for climbing its giant gecko feetsies all over that square from return of the jedi and the building on its border right there, the final one on the left of that square to glower at the senate because that rotj panorama shot goes around an ￣| shape.

thanks zilly.

[acourtofquestions]

Hearth to hearth, the Flame of War went.

Over snow-blasted mountains and amongst the trees of tangled forests, hiding from the enemies that prowled the skies. Through long, bitterly cold nights where the wind howled as it tried to wipe out any trace of that flame.

But the wind did not succeed, not against the flame of the queen.

So hearth to hearth, it went.

To remote villages where people screamed and scattered as a young-faced woman descended from the skies on a broom, waving her torch high.

Not to signal them, but the few women who did not run. Who walked toward the flame, the rider, as she called out, "Your queen summons you to war. Will you fly?"

Trunks hidden in attics were thrown open. Folded swaths of red cloth pulled from within. Brooms left in closets, beside doorways, tucked under beds, were brought out, bound in gold or silver or twine. And swords-ancient and beautiful—were drawn from beneath floorboards, or hauled down from haylofts, their metal shining as bright and fresh as the day they had been forged in a city now lying in ruin.

Witches, the townsfolk whispered, husbands wide-eyed and disbelieving as the women took to the skies, red cloaks billowing. Witches amongst us all this time.

Village to village, where hearths that had never once gone fully dark blazed in answer.

Always one rider going out, to find the next hearth, the next bastion of their people.

Witches, here amongst us. Witches, now going to war.

A rising tide of witches, who took to the skies in their red cloaks, swords strapped to their backs, brooms shedding years of dust with each mile northward.

Witches who bade their families farewell, offering no explanation before they kissed their sleeping babes and vanished into the starry night.

Mile after mile, across the darkening world, the call went out, ceaseless and unending as the eternal flame that passed from hearth to hearth.

"Fly, fly, fly!" they shouted. "To the queen! To war!"

Far and wide, through snow and storm and peril, the Crochans flew.

[shironezuninja]

No matter how old I get, sometimes a live political debate cannot seem to make my presence linger, since I have the rigid stimulated attention span of a 6 year old.