PsychoCIDE

Chapter 33: Memento Mori

While it is possible to live multiple lives there are distinct disadvantages to copies of the same consciousness existing in reality at the same time. The first and most relevant is the loss of the ability to draw quants from subspace, the relationship between number of copies and loss of Kantor rating is logarithmic making it a poor trade off for most people. The other issue is that each new copy offers a new ingress point for attack on the soul itself. An attacker can damage the soul directly and thus all copies of a person simultaneously if they have access to a single terminal of awareness. The Phylactery provides two benefits, first it contains the subspace metadata required for reincarnation and second it blocks any attempt to incarnate another copy of a mind thus guards the soul against all backdoor access.

Talwe Khan, A Resurrectionists Manual

The fire of the word raced through my veins to my heart and from my heart came change. I could feel something far away and heavy that was tied to me. It was like an anchor and when I tried to adapt to this new reality that was rushing in on me it bound me to an unchanging death. I needed to be different if I was going to survive the fire that was blooming inside of me. Tatsuki couldn't survive the way she was. I had been killed three times and each time I had been brought back. Each time the corpse had shambled on, missing pieces of itself. Each time it had been patched up by artifice and stubborn will. This new thing that I was trying to become was an ugly thing, incomplete, foolish and uneven. A disgusting kludge assembled from the pieces of butchered meat that had been once a whole person.

The boiling black sludge raced along that tether and I knew that I had to break the chain or I would be burned alive. Could I live on as a puppet of another demigod? Could I choose a life with the scourge of divine compulsion baked into my soul? Had I made an error more fatal than oblivion by accepting this compact? I found that as the fire consumed my flesh that I didn't care. I didn't care that I would be slave to another. I didn't care that I was serving some greater design. All I cared about was not being burned. The chain snapped and the beautiful statue riddled with holes shattered. Fire consumed the broken doll and I could feel the scorching heat as it ate through my skin. I vomited lava. My bones broke and my nerves fell to pieces.

Then as quickly as it had started it was over.

Sight returned and I found that I was still standing in that clinic recovery room. I felt the same as I had before. Nothing seemed to have changed. I was still the same broken, battered creature that I had been before. My breathing still came hard and my heart still felt rage, hate and betrayal. My mind was still a place of self loathing and arrogance, earned and unearned. I blinked tears out of my eyes, spat bitterness from my mouth and saw the black god standing there. Ezra was still standing there as well, holding his stomach like he had been punched.

"Tatsuki McLaughlin is dead." Ruan intoned the words and I looked down to a sickly something that lay on the floor before me. It was small and moved feebly. It looked partially human, covered in blood and black tar. The Blacksun closed his extended hand and the tiny mewling thing flashed into ash in an instant.

"What... what have you done?" Ezra gasped the words out between pants.

"I suppose that you both will have a long time to figure out exactly what I have made this day but you have more immediate concerns." The Blacksun waved a hand in front of his face and gone were the narrow mahogany features and widows peak of black hair. Instead staring back at me were my own grey eyes, my own face, my own shorn black hair. My doppleganger gave me a smile filled with too much knowledge and too much compassion and then dragged its finger across its throat, leaving a bloody rent that spilled its blood, my blood in a ghastly river down her chest. I watched my own smiling face as the flush of life drained out of it, replaced by the horrific pallor of death.