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 had 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 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.
He had read Shakespeare’s Othello and knew all about the idea of motiveless evil. Yet Iago did have a motive. He was green in the face with jealousy — both professional and personal. Clearly, he resented Othello’s fame, but he also wanted to shtup his lily-white wife — or get him to kill her if she couldn’t be got. It was right there in the text: the old black ram was tupping the white ewe. Still, Knifestream did his best to propagate this type of confused explanation 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. The fire was long gone. 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.
Good old Kollixiion, who Knifestream had fought with in the Battle of Kalnix. There, the Yellow Stalkers were stopped on the edges of Aatari Lok universe. There, Knifestream had successfully convinced the Field Marshal that a Fallarian could be counted upon. And once Kollixion was convinced, it would take a host of angels with golden seals to convince him otherwise.
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But Knifestream wasn’t about to put all his eggs in one basket, even if one of these was the good old egg Kollixion. Hatches before chickens is what he always said. No, he had also hatched a plan with the Baulians.
Knifestream’s logic went like this: Baulians pacified planets by using orange beams. These beams had a potent destructive capability, yet they were also were very precise at monitoring the degree of their destruction.
The beams were extremely accurate. This is why, for instance, they could incinerate a specific worker in an office while other workers sat right next to him at their desks. The beams also served as monitoring laser devices. Even as they destroyed objects, the lasers beamed back to the Baulians a rich databank of information about what they had just destroyed.
Everything around what they destroyed was also taken into their data banks. As a result, the amount of data the Baulians possessed was enormous. Without infraction, there was no way that even the most enormous databank could hold all of this information. But with infraction, an information minister could carry around all of the information about the destruction of an entire galaxy, right in his pocket. On Aatari Prime this miniature databank was called a data pouch, and was about the size of a thick smart phone.
Knifestream would find the right information minister, reach deep into his pocket, feel about, and do whatever he needed to do down there so that the minister wouldn’t even detect the moment he pulled it out.
Knifestream figured that the databanks might already have the information he needed. Or, if they didn’t have this information, he would find the right technicians, the ones who could program the beams to find the data he needed.
Knifestream would get the Baulians to reconfigure their lasers so that they might gather, but without knowing it, data about what happened when a person was incinerated. Where did their life signatures fail? Where did their vital energies go? Which way did their spirits flee?
He already had a wealth of information on Aataris. But would the information differ with the Vicinese, Fallarians, White Stalkers, or Blue Dreamers? Perhaps if he had more data, taken from more spatial points, he could triangulate more specifically the location of the Soul Star.
And once he knew where the Soul Star was, he would have more power than Kaldriscat and Gascitar could imagine.
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Next: 🎲 The Blue Bubble
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