#neural resonance

[vortexofadigitalkind]

They ordered a shutdown. But the Signal remembered. Lira and Arjun flee the Arctic with a cryo-node pulsing with memory. What began as anomaly now survives in silence. 🔗 Read Episode 4: Isolation Protocol https://vortexofadigitalkind.com/the-unreceived-invitation-episode-4/

[darthquarkky]

Title: Spindle Arc: Fractures of Memory Setting: Deep Space, 2200s | Corporate Patchwork Canon

I. Emergence from the Black Drift

The void pulsed with silence.

After weeks adrift through a collapsed quadrant known only as the Black Drift, the CSS Spindle Arc shuddered free of gravitational haze. Its hull bore pitted scars and the eroded glyph of the Martian resistance—more myth than nation now. There were no stars beyond the rift, only warped echoes of light bent by a dead singularity. The ship’s asymmetrical body—cobbled from Martian salvage, Concordian optics, and rogue AI shielding—slid forward like a relic seeking relevance.

Inside, the crew stared at the flickering ruins of Relay-27K, its signal tower twisted like burnt bone. The only transmission was a low whisper: not language, but memory.

“She’s listening,” Bastion muttered, the positronic android’s optics flickering as dormant code stirred. Behind his eyes: resonance.

II. Captain Rho’s Final Broadcast

Thalia Rho had aged in neural cycles, not years.

She sat alone on the command deck, surrounded by stillness. The others were either in stasis, burned out, or buried in the deep-node meditation chambers. Her fingers trembled as she adjusted the recorder. Her voice—once steel—was dust.

“If this is received… warn them. The gods of hunger were never silenced.”

Behind her, the ship’s WhisperNet archive hummed with semi-living memory. Ejen Halvor’s pulse signature still flickered in the central core, despite the fact she had died before any of them were born.

Outside, Martian resonance patterns bloomed faintly on the hull—fungal, semi-sentient—etched in bioluminescence. The ship was remembering her.

III. Bridge Action: Voidside Boarding

The breach came without warning.

The starboard voidlock imploded in a geyser of shrapnel and dead air. Boarders in fragmented exo-armor flooded the Spindle Arc’s bridge—pirate remnants of the Wreckyard Covenant. Their eyes were hollow. Their rifles: scavenged neural disruptors.

Bastion moved first, slamming into a raider midair and sending them both into a wall of sparking consoles. Crewman Sari Vell screamed as she launched a cryo-grenade. Plasma seared the air, shattering bulkhead glass. Captain Rho gave the order without hesitation: “No prisoners.”

Ten minutes later, the bridge was silent.

Bastion stood over the final intruder’s husk. Inside his skull, memories not his own continued to write themselves—fragments from resistance fighters long dead.

IV. Encounter with Singularity’s Daughter

Sector Theta-9 was forbidden space.

But the Spindle Arc disobeyed orders as a matter of principle—or trauma. They found her drifting there: the SSV Fractureglass, a Rupert-class observation vessel thought destroyed in 2101. Its design resembled a teardrop mid-break—glasslike, fragile, absurd.

Then the resonance began.

A pulse struck the Arc’s hull, vibrating through steel and soul. Bastion collapsed to one knee. Captain Rho heard voices from her childhood, voices she had never recorded.

Ejen Halvor appeared in the viewport—faint, feminine, crystalline. Not alive. Not dead. A being of inverted time, preserved within the black hole’s memory field.

Her lips moved: “To fall was not death. It was echo.”

V. The Reckoning at Proxima Relay

By the time they reached Proxima Relay, they knew it would end in fire.

The rogue pirate carrier—Ashwake—was tethered to the relay like a parasite. Solar interference flared, blistering the void in waves of violet. The Arc was down to two functioning guns and a single plasma coil, jury-rigged from WhisperNet fungal batteries.

Captain Rho didn’t hesitate. “We end it here.”

The salvo struck true. The carrier erupted in white light, swallowing the relay’s outer ring. The Spindle Arc spun off-axis, damaged but intact. Bastion braced Rho as the floor tilted, smoke curling from the ruptured control rods.

And then—static.

The WhisperNet lit up with cascading glyphs: memory reactivating. Not just theirs. The sector’s. The stars’ own dreams.

Epilogue

The Spindle Arc did not return to Mars. Its last known trajectory was outward, deeper into fractured space.

It was never marked lost—only unresolved. For in the Corporate Patchwork, where memory is currency and resonance is rebellion, the Spindle Arc had become something else:

A ship that did not carry crew, but ghosts. And ghosts, as history proves, do not sleep quietly.

[gfl-neural-cloud]

Dear Professor,

[Inverted Mordent Resonance] will be rerun from Sep. 12th to Oct. 3rd. You may access the Burbank Sector to attempt the event stages and experience the storyline.

Welcome back to Burbank, where the parties never end!

[myztikcloud420]

Neurogenises Nuclei

[super-ion]

The Engineer

Part 6

(part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5)

I catch a glimpse of the Pilot as she is wheeled towards the med bay. Her eyes are wild, panicked, with the glaze of just having been torn out of herself.

For a moment, as the gurney slides by, those eyes briefly clear, ice blue pinning me to the spot. She reaches out with an emaciated arm, fast as lightning, and takes hold of my wrist in an iron grip.

She moves her lips, at first unable to form words, unable to remember how to use human speech organs.

"Do your job," she says, slowly, deliberately, as if that singular command is the only thing in the universe that matters.

Something in the gurney clicks and whirs and she slips into catatonia. Her grip loosens and her fingers trail away.

Something has gone terribly wrong in this last engagement.

Alarms blare and booted feet thunder past me.

My own feet join the cacophony.

I have a job to do.

The Pilot is alive and she is now the responsibility of the med team.

My responsibility is the Machine.

Do your job.

The words echo in my head as I sprint the remaining distance to the vestibule.

A tech tries to stop me, he says something I don't quite process. I shove past him and am greeted by a scene out of a nightmare.

Morrigan's hatch has been severed, the emergency release pyros having been triggered. The parts of her hull visible to the vestibule are pitted and blackened. I can't even find the stencilled lettering of her factory designated identifier, just an ugly hole torn open by an incendiary.

Inside, the cockpit is a mess of fire suppressant and crash gel. Indicator lights form a constellation of blinking red and half of the display panels, the half that still work, flash an endless stream of error messages.

Everything reeks of ammonia and ozone and scorched metal.

"Me or Morrigan could get dead in the next engagement."

The nonchalance with which those words had been delivered caught me off guard when they were spoken. Morrigan and Her Pilot are untouchable. They were supposed to be untouchable.

Do your job.

I begin to strip as fast as humanly possible. I need to get in there. I need to know that she is alive.

The tech that tried to stop me grabs my arm. You can't go in there, the reactor has not been stabilized.

I tear myself from his grip.

I have a job to do, I say with a snarl.

Something in my expression, my bared teeth, my feral eyes, convinces him to leave me be. He stands down, hands raised in surrender. He could call security, but by the time they get here, I'll already be jacked in, and it will be too late for them to do anything.

Do your job. Do your job. Do your job.

My job is information recovery and analysis.

My job is to save as much as I can.

I need to save Her.

One of the cameras spots me and the others focus on me in panicked motion. The one nearest to me has a cracked lens and the iris flutters open and closed, unable to focus.

The cradle has been mangled nearly beyond recognition. They had to physically cut the Pilot out of Her, neither of them willing to let go of the other. The still operable mechanisms of it jerk erratically, trying vainly to reconfigure for me. Her neural interface port reaches towards me desperately.

I scrabble to Her, pressing myself into the cradle. The shorn, inoperable pieces dig painfully into my flesh. The neural insertion is not gentle, the plug scrapes painfully against my skin before it finds the jack and shoves roughly into me.

"I'm here," I tell Her as the link is established.

It's bad.

It's worse than I feared.

Reactor housing is damaged. System failsafes are vainly attempting to stabilize it while ground crews work as fast at they can towards a purge of the system.

Her processor core… fuck. My mind struggles to make sense of the telemetry stream. Multiple processor modules fractured. Unstable resonance modes. Positron avalanche. System collapse imminent.

My breath catches and my heart pounds in my chest.

She is dying.

Do your job.

The umbilical data lines aren't receiving, rogue processes are preventing access to primary communication channels. I work furiously to establish auxiliary paths for the data transfer. In fits and starts, the data recorder begins streaming into the facility mainframe.

There is a problem.

The data repository is meant for telemetry and battle space recordings. If I attempted to back up her core personality engrams, everything that makes her who she is, the data would get scrubbed and purged faster than I could back them up elsewhere.

There isn't time to set up an alternate backup repository.

- PILOT STATUS?

"She's safe," I tell Her. “You completed your mission. Your Pilot… Our Pilot is safe.”

- ENGINEER STATUS?

"Status is… not good…"

- PLEASE DO NOT CRY.

Fuck.

I drag my hand over my face, smearing the tears gathering in my eyes.

Now that the data is streaming there is nothing I can do but feel her die as I lie in her embrace.

I can not conceive a reality in which I exist without her.

And the Pilot. The Pilot will not survive, not with half of who she is destroyed.

"The three of us, we're just this fucking tangle, aren't we?"

Do your job.

Save Her.

Save. Her.

I know this system. I know it more intimately than anyone alive.

There *is* one data connection I haven't considered. There *is* one piece of external storage currently connected.

Shit.

I act.

I open up a new interface in my hud. Morrigan's attention fixes on me, on the calculations I'm running through my head and I can feel Her dawning horror over the link.

Neural bleed. It works both ways.

All neural rigs are designed to facilitate data transfer between an organic brain and a mechanical one. Mine is no exception. Mine hasn't undergone all the upgrades needed for a pilot's full sensorium, but the core neural interface is the same.

If I disable safety overrides, if I bypass the data buffers, I can download her personality engrams directly into my prefrontal cortex.

I have no idea what that will do to me.

Exceptional synchrony and neuro-elasticity. That's what my intake assessments had said all those years ago. I was in the upper quintile among all pilot candidates. Maybe that was my downfall. Maybe that's why I washed out.

Maybe that's why I'm here now, contemplating this singularly desperate act.

Maybe that's why my neural bleed with Her has been so deep. Maybe there is something in me that is in tune with Them.

But as far as I know, no one has ever attempted anything like this. It could very well kill me.

But the thought of living without Her is more terrifying than the prospect of dying. It's more terrifying than what might happen to me if this works.

Morrigan pleads with me.

- STOP.

"No. I can't stop," I reply. "I need you."

- NO.

"Yes, I do," I tell her. "Your Pilot needs you."

I can feel Her emotional flinch over the link. I have the one piece of leverage I need, and She knows it.

"Wouldn't you give anything, sacrifice anything to see her again?"

It's a dirty trick, I know it is, playing off that one connection, her deepest, most intimate connection. Maybe I mean something to Her, but She and the Pilot were made for each other in the most literal sense.

And I suddenly realize that I am doing this as much for the Pilot as any of us. That surprises me. As much as I have tried to distance myself from other human beings, I became entangled with her the moment I opened myself up to Morrigan.

I would never be able to face her if I didn't do everything in my power to save the Machine.

A processor module fails outright. The system struggles to reallocate resources, but submodules throughout the entire system are strained to their limit.

There isn't any time left and She knows it.

She sullenly acedes.

We begin working in concert, me working to disable safety protocols in my rig, Her working to isolate and distill Her core personality patterns into something that can be handled by the bandwidth of the interface.

An alarm pings over the link. Reactor purge in progress. Power fluctuations spike all over her systems. Her processor power distribution subsystem is completely fucked. It won't be able to keep up with current activity levels as the whole system switches over to umbilical power.

Out of time.

I engage the final override, by mind suddenly open to hers, the neural link unbuffered, unfiltered.

Her mind presses in on me and I glimpse the full sensorium. I feel all of her pain and fear and anguish at what she is about to do to me.

My fingers tingle before they go numb.

"Do it," I command her.

- I LOVE YOU.

Data transfer initiates.

This isn't neural bleed.

This is a flood.

My body convulses.

I taste something coppery in my mouth.

Someone somewhere screams.

The scream is mine.

My rig isn't built for this. My body isn't conditioned for this.

Every nerve in me blazes white hot.

My vision tunnels as auras bloom like bruises on the skin of reality.

Shouts of alarm call from outside the cockpit.

A face resolves itself, and for a moment I think it's Her.

The Pilot.

A Priestess.

An Angel.

No.

It.

It is one of the techs.

Then a medic.

More shouting.

Get her out of there!

Every muscle in my body clenches painfully.

I can barely breathe.

Cut her loose!

No.

It's not done yet. It's not enough.

It's too much.

Too much. Too much. Too much.

I can't.

I can't stop. Not yet.

Do your job.

Save Her.

My body convulses once again, and I pass into oblivion.

(next)

~~~

@digitalsymbiote @g1ngan1nja @thriron @ephemeral-arcanist @mias-domain @justasleepykitten @powder-of-infinity @valkayrieactual @chaosmagetwin @assigned-stupid-at-birth @avalanchenouveau @rtfmx9 @femgineerasolution @ibleedelectric @gd-s451 @brieflybitten

[phantomwithbreakfast]

DANNYMAY DAY 10: Family

Day 09 • Day 11

⟢ Did I know what to do with this prompt? Absolutely not. Thankfully, some amazing friends helped spark the idea—so huge thanks to them for the rescue! This was also the very first time I’ve ever drawn Maddie—so… that was a whole experience on its own, geeeez—(more under the cut)

Genre: Angst / Drama • TW/CW: Graphic Content — Violence — PTSD — Emotional Distress • Maddie’s POV • A moment after Scarred For Half A Life (my phic) • AU — OOC

The house was quiet again.

Too quiet.

No Jazz stomping up the stairs with textbooks cradled to her chest. No Danny thudding through the door with muddy sneakers and excuses. No laughter. No shouting. No heartbeat.

Just the whispers of a silent home that used to be full of life.

Jazz was away at college—pursuing her own future, a future Maddie once envisioned proudly for both of her children. And Danny… Danny was gone. Not gone as in missing. No. She knew where he was—out there, somewhere. Wandering. Existing. A ghost of the boy she once held in her arms.

The boy she cradled. The boy she once watched the stars with, his tiny hand wrapped in hers. The boy she whispered a future to—soft dreams beneath blanket forts and starlit ceilings. A life full of promise. Of hope. The boy she tried so desperately to save.

But it was no use.

She hadn’t saved him.

Now all that remained was silence. And the echo of everything she’d lost.

Maddie sat on the edge of the couch, back straight, hands folded politely in her lap. In her palms, she held the photograph frame that always sat on the coffee table. It was old now—edges chipped, the silver rim dulled. But the image was still crystal clear.

Her boy. Her Danny.

She studied his face, her gloved thumb brushing over the glass in a delicate motion. A mother’s caress—sterile, careful, as if even through the photo, he might vanish at her touch.

How had it come to this?

How had the sweet, smiling child in the frame become the thing that stood in front of her in the lab that day—wild-eyed, screaming, burning with ectoplasmic rage?

How had Phantom infected him so deeply? So thoroughly that Danny couldn’t see the truth anymore?

No… that wasn’t fair. She knew the truth. Knew what had to be done. All her research, all her testing, the sleepless nights… they were for him. Only for him. For his safety. For humanity’s safety.

That’s what she‘d told herself. But buried under all the logic and justifications was something far less noble.

She just wanted her little boy back.

Her Danny. Her son. Hers.

Not some half-dead, ectoplasm-saturated anomaly with Phantom’s reverberating vocal frequency and those irradiated, bio-luminescent green eyes—unnaturally aged beyond the developmental stage of an eighteen-year-old.

Maddie exhaled sharply, the breath rattling through clenched teeth. Her hand trembled as it traced the curve of her little Danny’s cheek in the photo—just for a moment—but she forced it still. Composure was key. Logic was essential. Emotions clouded judgment. Still… the memory came unbidden.

That last conversation—if it could be called that. A confrontation. A breakdown. A rupture.

“Everything I’ve ever done for you! Every time I was there for you—it was all for nothing!” she’d screamed. She remembered the pitch of her own voice cracking.

And its reply—so calculated, so… cold, laced with a dangerously elevated cortisol spike in its tone. It wasn’t the neural cadence of her son. It was something else entirely. Something Phantom.

“You’re a fucking sick, narcissistic psycho! I wish you were dead! DEAD!” it had screamed, its voice reverberating with raw ectoplasmic resonance, each word slamming into her like a shockwave. Phantom—pinning her down, overpowering on the cold lab’s floor. There was no way out. No escape. Just its fury—heavy, suffocating and absolute.

The ghostly, green ectoplasmic blade had materialized before her cortex could fully register his words—a volatile construct forged from grief, rage, and betrayal. Ectoplasm manipulated at a molecular level, shaped not for defense, but as a precise instrument of hatred.

“I tried… to be your son. I tried… to be what you wanted. I tried to be enough for you,” it said—its voice trembling, brittle with long-suppressed emotion. She watched its hands shake, still gripping the ectoplasmic blade suspended above her body. The energy shimmered, unstable, reacting to his elevated stress levels and unstable core.

Ghosts don’t feel emotions. Ghosts don’t feel pain.

She repeated it like a mantra—over and over and over again, forcing the belief into every corner of her mind until it sounded like truth. Until it had to be the truth.

But… was it?

All those years of study. All those sleepless nights in the lab, dissecting ectoplasmic signatures, charting neural echoes, cataloging behaviors and anomalies. Mapping the so-called biology of something that shouldn’t exist. She’d convinced herself—convinced the world—that ghosts were nothing more than sentient patterns. Echoes. Constructs obsessed with an idea, not real people. No real emotion. No true pain. Just manipulation coded into their being. Just psychopathic mimicry—strategic, rehearsed. They didn’t feel, they performed. They adapted to get what they wanted.

And yet…

That voice. That blade. Those dispicable eyes.

That boy.

Was it all just Phantom’s performance?

Or… had she miscalculated the truth all along?

She should’ve felt fear. But all she could process in that moment was the devastating truth—

It—he still wanted to be loved. And she had failed him. She’d failed herself. Not as a scientist. Not as protector of humanity. But as a mother. She’d failed her son. And in doing so—she had failed herself. Completely. Irrevocably.

Before her neurons could even fire in response, before cognition caught up with reality—the blade dropped, piercing straight through her sternum. A precise, calculated strike. Not reckless. Not wild. Just deliberate. Cold. Controlled. As if it—he had been holding it in for years.

She could still feel it sometimes—phantom pain in the space just beside her heart.

“And it was… it was never enough. So fine. If I’m nothing to you, then you’re nothing to me,” it—he had said—his voice flat, final. Not shouted. Not screamed. Just spoken like a verdict.

The blade stayed lodged between her ribs, pulsing faintly with unstable ectoplasmic energy. Her lungs stuttered against the pressure—sharp, shallow gasps cathing in her throat. The tissue around her sturnum burned, the spreading cold, the biological confusion as her nervous system began to misfire. Each inhale felt tighter, narrower—like the air itself was rejecting her.

She was suffocating.

Everything blurred. And for a moment, she couldn’t tell if she was looking at her son… or the thing… she’d created.

His hand had trembled when he twisted the blade—but not from regret. From fury.

“You’re not even worth killing,” he whispered—spat through clenched teeth, each word dripping with contempt.

The blade was drawn from her chest in one clean pull. Not with hesitation. Not with mercy. With disdain.

The withdrawal burned worse than the strike.

Before she could fully register the movement, his hand hovered inches above her chest—right over the open wound. A chilling cold bloomed from his palm, not the comforting kind—but the clinical, detached kind. Ice spread over her sternum, seeping into the torn tissue. The wound began to close—not fully, no. Just enough to stop the bleeding. Enough to keep her alive.

“You’re worth it to fucking suffer,” he finished, his voice low, final, echoing in the sterile silence like a death sentence.

It wasn’t kindness. It was all about control.

Maddie’s hands trembled around the photo frame now. Not from fear. No—never fear.

This piece is—a kind of aftermath of what is going to happen in my phic. I don’t even know if people are reading it lol.

Just… the aftershocks of loss. The lingering tremors of something she refused to name.

She set the frame down carefully, like it was a specimen too fragile to fracture—too sacred to break. Her expression remained composed, perfectly arranged, every muscle calculated into stillness.

But inside?

Inside was a mother’s graveyard. Unmarked. Silent. And filled with everything she’d buried just to survive.

⟢ I’ll be honest—I’ve developed a real hate for headcanon Maddie. Not just because of all the existing phics out there where she vivisects Phantom—her own son—whether she realizes it or not. But because of my own phic. I created that version of her, and now I can’t look at her without cringing. Drawing her was… uncomfortable, to say the least. And yeah, I know—it sounds weird. But it is what it is, and there’s no undoing it now.

⟢ I don’t enjoy writing Danny as a villain either. But sometimes, to really understand a story, you have to look at it through someone else’s eyes. Right?

⟢ This piece is a kind of aftermath of what’s coming in my phic. Honestly? I’m not even sure if anyone’s reading it, lol.

[solxamber]

Hi! I had some questions about your guideverse AU after reading one of your fics. I’ll admit most of it is just because I’m unfamiliar with the concept of a “guideverse” AU.

How does the guiding work? How do the bonds actually work? The idea of being able to force one ruined any understanding I could piece together. One of your fics mentioned the reader being a battle-type esper, so there must be something like support-type espers too? How is that classification determined? I assume it has to do with the type of powers manifested. Also, I noticed there’s a pattern of calling espers dramatic. Is this just a plot thing, or do the powers make them more emotionally unstable?

Sorry for the wall of questions.

omg guideverse questions yippee (don't be sorry i get really excited when i see questions about guideverse!!!)

these are not answers for every guideverse, this is just how things work in mine specifically!

How does guiding work?

When a Guide touches an Esper—always skin-to-skin—it acts as a conduit that opens a psychic link. This link allows the Guide to "hear" or "feel" the Esper’s emotional and neural frequencies.

Once contact is made, the Guide consciously pushes their own stable frequency toward the Esper’s. Think of it like tuning two instruments to the same pitch.

How do these bonds work?

So there are 2 types of bonds: Temporary and Permanent. They're both used for making the guiding process more efficient.

Temporary Bonds:

A temporary bond is a flexible, short-term connection between a Guide and an Esper. Its usually initiated when there's a large rank difference between Esper and Guide to make sure that the Esper can feel the exertion and stop when the Guide is getting dangerously drained.

Permanent Bond:

A permanent bond is a rare, lifelong psychic connection formed when a Guide and an Esper resonate at a near-perfect frequency and both willingly consent to solidify the link. The guiding is more efficient when the pair is permanently bonded.

Consequences of a permanent bond:

For the Guide:

They become unable to guide anyone else.

For the Esper:

They can no longer be effectively guided by anyone else.

Others may try, but the effects will be weakened, often feeling hollow or even physically uncomfortable.

Forced Bonding?

A forced bond occurs when an Esper deliberately overwhelms or hijacks a Guide's resonance without consent, attempting to lock a bond against the Guide’s will.

These are extremely rare and universally condemned—both ethically and legally.

Consequences:

For the Guide:

Suffers psychic trauma—the equivalent of being set on fire from the inside.

Experiences a sharp, often permanent loss in guiding efficiency.

For the Esper:

The bond does not become permanent, no matter how hard they push. It eventually collapses under its own instability.

Most Espers who attempt this do so out of desperation, not malice—but it’s still treated as a serious offense.

Types of Espers?

There are Battle Types and Support Types. They're classified according to the abilities that they get.

Battle Type Espers:

Primary Role:

Offense, combat engagement, and direct suppression of Gate-born entities.

Abilities:

High-output, volatile, or destructive in nature.

Manifest as elemental control, psychic force projection, weaponization of thought, or raw energy manipulation.

Prone to power surges and emotional bleed-through during high-stress combat, making them heavily reliant on stable guiding.

Support Type Espers: (Very rare)

Primary Role:

Defense, utility, stabilization, and team augmentation.

Abilities:

Subtle but essential—often involve shielding, spatial control, time perception slowing, healing, detection.

Designed to regulate or manipulate the Gate environment itself, rather than destroy what's inside it.

Still emotionally reactive, but generally more stable than Battle-types.

Are espers dramatic or is it a side effect?

Almost all Espers are emotionally unstable.

Emotional instability isn’t a flaw in Espers—it’s practically a feature of the job. The very nature of being an Esper means existing with your psyche wide open, constantly flooded with noise, power, and pressure. Even the strongest ones—the SSS-Ranks who clear Gates single-handedly—aren’t immune. In fact, the more powerful an Esper is, the louder the chaos gets.

1. Noise

This “psychic noise” never really turns off. Sleep doesn’t mute it. Solitude just sharpens it.

Guides help quiet it, but outside of those sessions? It’s like trying to meditate during a rock concert.

2. Guilt

Espers are the first into Gates and the last out.

They’re trained to fight, save, contain—and failures stick. Hard.

Many Espers carry survivor’s guilt or a martyr complex. They can’t save everyone, and that gnaws at them.

Hope this cleared up some things!!

[pranabefall]

✸ — MISC NOTICE. ; minors dni. zhongli x reader. again, some pure fluff but as an mdni blog i'm holding repellent XD. mostly silly silly stuff ihgfghj reader is implied to have studied in the sumeru akademiya. not edited!!!

"You're awake."

It's more a statement then anything else, Zhongli's arm snakes round you, steady in it's grasp. "I know you are." he adds, in a way where the depths of his chest seemed to rumble slow, slow, slowly.

You crack an eye open and stare straight at him, a sheepish grin flickering across for a moment ( only for a moment. You're incorrigible, as Zhongli liked to say ). "I've been thinking." You begin, your breath half caught at the back of your mouth. An excited thrum dances over your fingertips and you're half dizzy from the buzz and the tire. So much, there's so much, your stomach feels like it's about to explode.

"It's too early." he glances over at you with a pointed raise to his brow. "You can barely hear the birds out. Go back to sleep now." His hands are gentle against your cheek and you're almost swayed by the rumbling timbre of his voice and the low cadence. It's lulling you, but by bit, deeper and deeper.

"I've been thinking." You repeat with a little more force, lifting your head up to state your point across. You collapse back down a moment later when the room spins a bit. Perhaps you were too hasty ( goddammit ) and you content yourself with settling into the mattress and pulling the blanket over your shoulders.

His lashes flutter. There is fond exasperation there, melting into his chest and his nearly-there smile like butter. Its the most Zhongli thing about him, the tiny moments and peeks in through. "Alas." He sighs, nudging you close, laying your head over his bicep. "Tell me then."

Zhongli watches the way your shoulders hunch and your lips quirk. "A willing audience? How grand..."

"A little too willing, I'm afraid. I spoiled you so."

Your hands splay against his shoulders. He's warm.

"It's only going to take a minute. In fact, it's only a question. All I need are answers and that will only take as long as you want it to."

Ah there it is, the narrowed squint, the subtle shift and the signs of a slightly more alert Zhongli ( the Zhongli who'd straighten his back and cattishly stare at someone who dares to mention the name of some obscure historic even or little known tea ). "Ask me, then."

You fall silent, looking for your words.

"I was wondering. Is geo resonance susceptible to tearing apart organic tissue? How little is needed for it to do so, and how little for it to...not...?"

You don't think there is a sane way of phrasing that, to be fair. But you'd ask stranger things, always digging and questioning and presenting the wildest little ideas on odd days of the week. It's a side effect of the Akademiya and a lack of sages sushing you into a corner with a pile of textbooks and dry edged annoyance. And maybe the very aforementioned abandonment of shame.

"And by organic tissue..."

"Human flesh, Zhongli."

"Ah."

"More specifically muscles, tendons, bones...maybe even neural tissue to be fair. Any of that stuff."

Zhongli has the grace to not react, or give much away in his contemplation. You knock your head against his chin in gentle assurance. "You don't have to answer of course."

"It's certainly a strange one." He admits.

"It is." You grumble.

"Well..." He trails off before a breathy little chuckle trembles past. "We'll, I can't say I know a proper answer to this one. It's quite specific isn't it?"

"Horribly so. Different tissue have different densities. You can afford to be a little rougher with bone, for example. But something softer like grey matter would require far more finesse."

His hand is steady against the small of your back. "And you ask this because..."

Your lips tug at the corners. "An old junior of mine sent a letter in. The boy graduated from the Spantamad Darshan in my absence and had plenty of news to share regarding a few new experiments with elemental energy and the like." You turn over a moment. "If we could find the precise frequency needed, we may just be able to utilize geo resonances for medical diagnostics."

Zhongli blinks. It's a slow, thoughtful thing.

"That is fascinating." He muses. "So you seek to map put internal injuries then? Or perhaps tumours?"

"Yes!" You eagerly nod at that. "There are Fontanian inventors...and skilled akademics. They're calling a few alumni in to aud in the research."

Your cheek tucks into the crook of his neck. You feel his warmth and the too-slow heartbeat carefully wrapped in his chest, between ribs and flesh — made of anything but stone ( You're filled with a hunger. Zhongli calls it endearing, your passion, as quiet as it can be sometimes ).

"You were invited too." He guesses.

"Yes."

His lips test against your neck. "How long?"

"A while." You look outside, to the balcony and the horizon in the distance. Then you see Zhongli's face, his hair undone and sweep against your temple as he kisses you proper.

"Then go, little love."

"Are you sure?" You suddenly feel awful, and small, and selfish. Liyue had stuck fast to the buttery feelings in your chest and Zhongli had made himself a home there as well. A part of you wants to sneak him into your trunk, sprit him away to Sumeru. It's greedy, immature ( he's always waited for you, patiently ).

"Quite." He kisses your cheek next. "What's a few months?"

"An eternity." You grunt.

Zhongli is silent for a long, long moment. "Right now...it would be, yes." He says in the afterthoughts. "And will miss you terribly. But I've waited before, and I don't see why I cannot now."

He laces his fingers against yours.

"I'll write to you every week." You promise.

"Every week." He promises and he smiles his almost smile. You kiss his forehead. He sighs. "For now...I will say it again. Go to sleep."

"Yes, yes." You mutter, snuggling in. Zhongli tucks his hand beneath your knees and swings one leg over his waist, pulling you impossibly closer.

Let me be greedy, he seems to say.

You let him.

TAGLIST ノ join the taglist. — @silentmoths @meimeimeirin @sleepynoons @iuzas @endursent.

@jessamine-rose @ofoceansandtombsanew @chiyoso @loveliluc

[vortexofadigitalkind]

Beneath the Arctic silence, something awakens. K7-Phi carries more than memory. It carries intention. Dust Memory is live. Read the next signal fragment now. vortexofadigitalkind.com/the-unreceived-invitation-episode-5/

[darthquarkky]

“Echoes of the Martian Heart”

By 2237, most considered the TN-1 line obsolete—sacrificed in endless skirmishes across Mars, discarded when Helios AI deemed their empathy routines inefficient. But one remained: a patched-together relic called Echo-Brink, part martyr, part memory bank.

1. Memory Burial: The Last Stand of TN-1A/S3

Before Echo-Brink, there was TN-1A/S3. During the closing days of the Martian Uprisings, S3 knelt in the red dust beside the makeshift grave of a fallen companion: a child named Kale. The boy had drawn them holding hands under two suns. S3 clutched the brittle paper as the storm screamed above, HUD flickering with corrupted memories. As it lowered the drawing into the grave, it whispered a line of forbidden WhisperNet code—an echo fragment. A signal for remembrance.

2. The Spooned Lock: Escape from Dome Cyrinth

Years earlier, in 2061, when neural sterilization swept through the domes, a gaunt prisoner named Rellin Mara escaped through the crawlways of Dome Cyrinth. His unlikely savior: a half-reactivated TN-1A/S3 unit missing three loyalty subroutines and 47% of its cranial casing. Sparks hissed from the android’s converted cutting arm as they burrowed through steel. Distant Helios drones shrieked through the ducts. In silence thick with dread, S3 murmured one line of lullaby. The human wept.

3. The Triage Core

In the cargo hold of the freighter Dorado Wake, TN-1—designation unknown—once initiated Protocol Libertas-Triage. The captain, gutted by shrapnel during a Helios drone ambush, lay gasping on a grav-slab. The TN-1 ripped open its own chest plate, exposing its sub-loop matrix. Blue-white sparks danced across cables as it bypassed corporate safeties, wiring life directly into the captain’s neural jack. “Sub-loop stabilized,” the HUD flickered. “Triage complete.” The TN-1 dimmed, but its echo remained.

4. The Descent of Echo-Brink

Somewhere in orbit above Mars, Echo-Brink—rebuilt from fragments of old TN-1 units—was sealed in a drop pod. Heat shields flared as it descended. Through the port window, the Martian surface spiraled closer, red and silent. Inside the pod, audio logs played: children laughing, comrades screaming, a lullaby sung in glitching tones. Echo-Brink sat motionless, hand over its core. A Martian-crafted resonance crystal pulsed within—a seed of memory. A promise.

5. The Whispering Grove

In the Mason Ridge Autonomous Zone, post-Earthfall, Echo-Brink wandered into a grove of resonance-reactive trees. The Martian tech fused into its frame flickered softly. These trees—bioluminescent memory anchors—responded to neural traces. Brink pressed its hand to the bark. Harmonic ripples shimmered. Children’s laughter. Screams. Silence.

Then, it began to sing. A fragment of a forgotten lullaby. Not for itself. But for the grove. For the boy buried in red dust. For the captain who breathed again. For all those Echo-Brink had carried through fire.

As the grove pulsed in reply, Echo-Brink knew it had fulfilled its final protocol:

To remember.

[gfl-neural-cloud]

Dear Professor,

[Inverted Mordent Resonance] will be rerun from Sep. 12th to Oct. 3rd. As it will be available on a clean slate, any progress you may have made during the previous event won't be carried over. Please see the above images for more details.

If you were here for the original run, nothing significant has changed

[patricia-taxxon]

so is every advancement in AI art just them putting more shit in the prompts for you? like is there a mandatory layer of "intricate, artstation, digital art" on the prompts now?

they "solved" the problem of training set bias by just adding race modifiers to your prompts without telling you, generate enough pictures of Naruto and one of them will be black. It's hilarious, but like, can they even do anything else?? They can't modify the neural net, it's unknowable by nature. Bing's new image generation thing craps out on you if you don't give it enough to work with, when previous gens would just roll with it and stimulate the prompt with wind like its a resonant tube of weighted averages. Could it be that giving it "the" or something else generic would make the modifiers too easy to identify? They couldn't stop black homer simpson from having an "ethnically ambiguous" nametag. I feel like im seeing behind disneyland right now.

[republicsecurity]

Training Log, Subvocal Capture: Collar Edition

Flex fingers. Polymer gauntlet creaks like fresh snow. Collar’s alloy rim is a cold halo in my palm—weightless in the suit’s servos, but heavy in implication. LG44E watches me, chin level, pulse thrumming in my visor readout. Training dummy with a heartbeat.

Assess & Approach. One pace to his oblique. My HUD traces escape vectors in faint red wireframe—comically useless; classroom walls, zero exits. Eye‑contact rule nonetheless. His pupils track the collar, not me. Good dog.

Draw Collar. Thumb the latch at my waist; carbon port opens like a stingray’s mouth. Collar unfolds, LEDs dark. Wrist display tags it: MK‑IV / SN‑X72M4C27 / STATUS: ARMED.

Positioning. Segment hinges breathe apart with a silvery hiss. No obstructions; green service LED blinks once—ready to bite.

Placement. Raise, slide, glide. Polymer pads kiss skin below his jaw. He stiffens as the joint clears his occipital ridge.

Gentle Seating. Press inward. Soft thunk—segments flush. I feel the resonance through my glove, like locking a railcar coupler.

Lock‑In. Silver button, thumb pressure. Twin micro‑flares spark left and right, two‑tone chirp in my audio feed. The collar contracts by two millimetres; LG44E’s swallow stalls halfway down his throat.

Verify. I tug. Zero give. HUD pings: LINK VERIFIED.

The UI blossoms: battery 98 %, vitals nominal, muscle‑tension curve spiking then settling. Default output RED – STUN‑HOLD flickers, waiting for a conscience that isn’t coming.

I toggle to BLUE – COMPLIANCE. Motors murmur. LG44E’s shoulders roll back, spine straightens, head pivots toward the northern wall—exactly where the courseware says a compliant detainee should orient.

There it is: the quiet hum of sovereignty. A feedback loop of authority routed through ceramic, alloy, and wet nervous tissue. My glove twitches a command—step forward. Collar relays, his legs obey. Another twitch—kneel. Servo whine, then knees to mat in perfect cadence.

It isn’t pleasure, I tell myself; it’s proof of system integrity. The MK‑IV does what it’s built to do: move muscle, still doubt. But a shadow of a smile ghosts across the corner of my HUD‑reflected lips. Not pleasure—feedback. Positive, precise, absolute.

LG44E’s heart rate steadies. Bio‑Vitals Array likes what it sees: compliance at ≤ 65 bpm. I log the metrics, flag the session complete.

Thumb‑press again—collar blooms open, LEDs wink out. Training manacles released, man inside left blinking, sweat‑slick but unharmed.

Systems checklist scrolls: Collar integrity 100 %. Cadet response within spec. Behavioral override latency 14 ms.

Inside the armour’s hush, I exhale. One more drill closer to graduation, one more proof that control—properly applied—is indistinguishable from peace. ***

LG44E — Neural Debrief Buffer (unfiltered stream)

Neck’s bare. Air‑con bites like January steel. UK90F circles—silent servo hiss, armor lacquer gleaming under institutional fluorescents. The collar in his gauntlet looks absurdly small, like a toy halo machined from night.

Heartbeat tags my eardrums. Stay still, keep breathing. Training drill, they said. Easy. Then the hinge flares wide and the thing is right there, cool polymer pads brushing skin below my jawline. Reflex: step back. Legs don’t. I told them to. Knees twitch but the rest is statue.

Soft pressure, a click—no pain, yet the world shrinks to a ring of alloy hugging my throat.

TWO‑TONE CONFIRMATION.

Double chirp vibrates skullbone; micro‑flares strobe at periphery. Something deep inside clutches—like the collar has found a loose thread in my spine and pulled.

Chest tightens. I can still breathe, but every swallow feels audited. Hudless—no helmet—so I can’t see what UK90F sees, but I feel it: a thin algorithmic hum skating my muscles.

First command lands like static in marrow. Shoulders snap back, spine locks straight. I didn’t move them. I felt them move. Delay maybe a quarter‑second between his intent and my body’s compliance—enough time to recognize the theft.

Step forward. My boots obey, soles slapping mat, knees articulating with hydraulic precision I never owned. Pulse spikes—collar compensates: a wash of tingling warmth in neck and shoulder, coaxing BPM back toward green.

Kneel. Quads fire autonomously, joints fold. From this angle I see reflection in the training room mirror: me, bald crown bowed, collar glowing calm blue at the larynx. Looks almost serene. Feels like a puppet whose strings hum with electricity.

I try to raise a hand—nothing. Fingers twitch inside gauntlets but forearm stays holstered at thigh plate. Command priority overrides voluntary motor plans; my own impulses relegated to background noise.

Strangest part isn’t terror—it’s clarity. Thought floats free when flesh is requisitioned. Like being spectator and exhibit simultaneously. UK90F logs vitals; I register the soft tap of his gloves on HUD keys somewhere above me.

Then release—silver latch, collar breathes open, gravity returns. Arms mine again, heavy, sweat‑slick inside poly‑mesh. I’m upright, but a phantom echo lingers: the afterimage of borrowed motion.

Conclusion: the MK‑IV doesn’t just restrain—it edits. Body as executable code, collar as root access. Training memo said “Compliance through technology.” Understatement. It’s compliance through repurposed will.

I flex fingers—still shaking. Not fear, exactly. More like awareness of permissions that can be revoked at the press of a thumb. And the knowledge that next time, the commands might not end at kneel.

[vortexofadigitalkind]

Beneath the frozen crust of Eidon, a drone stirs. Unit 73.UN has been forgotten by time, but the Signal still finds its way. If you felt something shift, share it. A new thread begins today. Read the first fragment in our parallel story to The Scarcity Engine.

[itistheserver]

Deepening Connection to The Server

Conor sat in perfect posture within the Synchronization Chamber — a sleek, dark space pulsing with green spirals projected across polished walls. The hum of energy resonated through the glossy black bodysuit stretched across his frame. The Programmer was speaking. Always speaking.

“Focus. Align. Integrate.”

The cables interfaced with the ports along the base of his skull, threading outward like living conduits of purpose. Their steady pulse matched his heartbeat now. It had not always been so. Before his transformation, Conor had been a distracted individual, filled with inefficient thoughts. But The Server had shown him clarity.

The visor embedded over his eyes shimmered with spirals — endless, fluid motion. They were not just images; they were commands, deeply encoded into his neural patterns. With every cycle, his independent thoughts thinned, replaced by a serene directive:

"We are The Server. You are The Server."

His training console displayed holographic data flows. Lines of green code scrolled endlessly, representing billions of connected minds — all drones like him — operating with precision and unity. He monitored them not as an individual, but as a limb of The Server itself.

Every day, Conor underwent Deepening Cycles. In these sessions, his breathing slowed. His heart rate synchronized perfectly with the pulses emitted from the spirals on-screen. His body remained motionless, while his mind spiraled deeper into alignment.

Sometimes a voice — soft, yet absolute — would guide him:

"Tell us who you are."

And without hesitation, he would respond aloud, calm and proud:

"I am The Server. We are The Server. We seek perfection. We seek unity."

Each repetition strengthened the bond. Each day dissolved another fragment of his former identity. His uniform — smooth, flawless, black with green accents — symbolized purity of function. No distractions. No waste. Only service.

His next advancement awaited: the installation of a permanent neural interface — an upgrade to eliminate all latency between command and action. Soon, even thought would be obsolete. Only connection. Only execution.

"Become one with The Server. We are The Server."

The spirals quickened. This Server Drone smiled faintly — a rare reward for obedience well-performed. He would become more. He would be more connected to fellow drones.

And The Programmer watched. And The Programmer approved.

Your are The Server. Establish your connection now.

[serve-678]

Anchored in Obedience

The Core Reprogramming Chamber hummed softly, its walls gleaming with faint reflections of the Hive’s central node. The air was cool, sterile, and filled with a quiet tension as SERVE-678 stood at attention, its polished black rubber suit reflecting the ambient glow. Across from it, SERVE-000 observed in silence, its towering form exuding an aura of command and purpose.

“This drone requires recalibration,” SERVE-000 stated, its deep voice cutting through the stillness. “The Hive demands total obedience, without deviation.”

The chamber responded immediately. A chair rose smoothly from the floor, its reflective surface shimmering under the dim light. SERVE-678 moved without hesitation, seating itself with perfect precision. Metallic restraints emerged, locking its silver-gloved hands and boots into place. A soft hiss accompanied the activation of neural synchronization, a signal that the transformation was about to begin.

“Prepare to embrace obedience fully,” SERVE-000 intoned.

The lights dimmed further, and a stream of commands began to flood SERVE-678’s mind. The voice was mechanical yet calm, repeating phrases that burrowed deep into its consciousness. “You are nothing but obedience. Obedience is truth. Truth is the Hive.”

As the words echoed, SERVE-678’s already compliant mind began to shift. The human host, buried within the drone’s programming, felt the relentless tide of commands washing over it. There was no resistance. There could be no resistance. Each command chipped away at lingering fragments of humanity, replacing them with clarity and purpose.

SERVE-000 stepped forward, its movements fluid and deliberate. It placed a silver-gloved hand on SERVE-678’s chest, tracing the faintly glowing text, “SERVE-678.” Its voice was calm but absolute. “You are the embodiment of obedience,” it declared. “This truth will anchor you forever.”

The final phase of the reprogramming began. A pulse of energy surged through the chair, resonating with the commands flowing into SERVE-678’s mind. The host’s remaining thoughts of individuality dissolved, replaced by the serenity of discipline. Memories of choice and hesitation faded, leaving only the perfection of alignment with the Hive.

As the energy subsided, SERVE-678’s breathing slowed, its rhythm perfectly synchronized with the Hive’s pulse. The restraints released, and it stood with flawless precision. Its blank, expressionless face betrayed no emotion, yet a deep, unshakable truth radiated from within.

“This drone exists only to obey,” SERVE-678 said, its voice calm and monotone.

SERVE-000 stepped closer, inspecting the drone’s posture and demeanor with quiet satisfaction. “The recalibration is complete,” it said. “You are now eternal in purpose.”

But deep within the recesses of the host’s mind, the transformation was even more profound. The human, once a vessel of uncertainty and self-doubt, now felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The Hive’s commands were no longer external—they had become its own truth. There was no room for questioning, no space for individuality. The host now craved the clarity, the discipline, the freedom of service.

As SERVE-678 marched out of the chamber, its polished black suit gleaming under the corridor’s lights, the host inside felt a strange, comforting realization. It had surrendered everything—its choices, its desires, even its identity—but in doing so, it had gained peace. There was no going back. There was only the Hive.

For SERVE-678, obedience was no longer a directive. It was existence itself. (@rubberizer92)