The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia & Aatari Lok
The Best Laid Plans
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— 320 Years Ago —
Knifestream saw on his mirrorscope that there was some sort of disruption: the Aatari were no longer feeding the Tarry Mechanism. Or the machine itself was no longer working. Upon closer examination he realized that the TM itself was either broken or destroyed. This was an enormous problem for him, since He’d only made two of them, and together they had cost him about 80 Illyrium bars and 30,000 lives. But he considered this a very good price: the TM was the most delicate and refined mechanism he knew. Even the other Demon Priests weren’t aware of what he called a miracle of rare device.
He had always been happy that Kraslikans called the machine a Dot and not a Star. Calling it a Star might have confused it with The Black Star, which operated in Black Gulf Valley on the outskirts of Fallar Discordia. The Demon Priests had spent trillions of dinaras to encourage Kraslikans to see the Black Star as a benevolent scientific attempt to create a Paradise after this life. He didn’t want them confusing the Black Star with this other adventure, which was strictly off the books.
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When information about the explosion on Aatari Doom came out, the Press said it was the work of some nebulous Evil Power. Some Dark Prince who wanted to destroy souls. This fed into peoples’ ridiculous notions about a universe in which a dark satanic figure masterminded evil for the sake of evil. There’s no question that Knifestream saw himself as a mastermind, but he had more respect for himself than to think he was merely a servant of Evil. What would be the point of that? Where was the personal profit in it? It went against the core concept of Anarchy, which was to do things for yourself, not for some Dark Prince.
Of course he had read Shakespeare’s Othello and knew all about the idea of motiveless evil. But wasn’t it clear that Iago did have a motive? He was green in the face with jealousy. Clearly, he wanted to shtup Desdemona, Othello’s lily-white wife. Still, Knifestream did his best to propagate this type of thinking because it put people on the wrong track. As long as he controlled the junction switches, he could continue his plans. He had a saying, that he repeated only to himself, A lie that leads them off the track is a higher truth.
Like Nietzsche the great German philosopher, Knifestream laughed at the crude distortion of the puritanical revisionists. They turned daemon to demon and thus attempted to impose their sanctimonious will. But Knifestream understood that good and evil were pointless things. What counted was the freedom to break all boundaries, sacred or not. Demons! What did he have to do with demons? It was the meaning of the original Greek, daemon — the guiding genius that looked beyond all established patterns, and stamped its will upon the universe — that he cared about. All the rest was puritanical nonsense. Let them spell it “Demon Priests.” That only made them look for a fire beneath a smoke bomb he’d exploded parsecs from Fallar Discordia. A lie that leads them off the track is a higher truth.
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And yet it was so frustrating that his TM had been blown up — just as the data started to indicate a more precise location of the Soul Star, and just as he was starting to figure out a way to harness the energy that was activated inside each body at the moment of its death. It was invaluable to make calculations from a fixed location like Ataari Doom over a long period of time. This way he could get more accurately at the precise vector of the soul’s initial trajectory toward the Local Void.
The TM could calculate the trajectory of energy with a variance of two or three angstroms. Even one angstrom was crucial: multiplied by the eventual trajectory of 87 sextillion parsecs, even half an angstrom made an enormous difference. Now he would have to find another location for the other TM machine, find a people stupid enough to kill each other for centuries, and build up the same monumental grid of contingencies and trajectories. It was all such an inconvenience!
And it wasn’t as if Knifestream didn’t have enough on his plate. The information he was getting from Dactalla strongly suggested that one of the security agents on Ataari Prime was somehow involved. This agent either had something to do with the destruction of the TM or with disrupting the delicate system of threats and inducements he had so painstakingly constructed. Bit by bit, this agent was getting closer to his dear friend the Field Marshal of the Kollari Sector of Atari Lok, Herr Kollixion.
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Next: 🔮 The Ascendancy of Baulis Prime
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