The Allseeing I see you, children, lost, looking for secrets buried within madness.

I welcome you to it.

Be mad.

Become what you do not Understand.

Change into it.

???

???

Diana One second, I was sending my Iron III Spark Tendency through Ripley, the next I was beginning to feel wisdom part into my head. The inner workings of the Implant drawn to me, I could feel… Warpcode. It tingled in my nerves, slowly forming an understanding of the altered pattern of the energy given thought within the Implant.

That thought then snatched me down, I felt like I had to hold my breath. Like I'd been taken deep into a pool like the octopus MAL in the meat lab had done, like I'd drowned in the weight of my own… no, a greater being's thoughts.

I blinked. And an eye stared at me, it was a void, but a void so large and so deep it could only be a pupil. It blinked, and I was gone.

———

I opened my eyes to a quaint apartment, around the same size as the one I used to stay in. On a couch was a happy kid seated in his mother's lap before leaping into his returning father's arms. Ripley…?

A toy broke, and the child cried, but then his mother showed him the joy of fixing things. And from then, he never stopped trying to fix things.

———

Ripley

I'd never seen a forest like this before, a genuine forest. Not some cheap, planted trees that were built to survive on the bare minimum. You could smell the life in the air, a deep moist drench of vitality in the oak, birch, and every other name for trees I didn't know. I sniffed the thick waft of pinecones, that… I understood from the memories of the girl I was watching.

Silver hair, silver eyes. She was nestled in a deep underbrush, a calm man holding her arm as she aimed a gun for a deer.

I'd never seen a deer either. Its large beady eyes unsettled me, they didn't look human. They were too… innocent. A shot rang out, and the deer hurried with a wound in its chest that sent it stumbling down the earth, foliage and stone as a ragged mess. Diana hurried with her father, Yorrick Jones, pulling a knife out but hesitating to take a life. Her first life.

Her father said some things, things that would stick with her for the rest of her life. A phrase that was common enough, but that didn't mean they were meaningless.

Kill, or be killed.

Diana

Memories came and went, I couldn't recall half of it. They ebbed and flowed out of order like a tide being grabbed by a moon, its illumination flickering in and out as some memories refused to appear to me. I saw a father's death, a friend's realization, a heart unable to grieve. And crimson eyes.

The Crimson Heart was Ripley's therapist? That memory faded just as quickly, now I was in a room I remembered. Ripley's mother was there too…

This room was the Snake Fang's Shard Operating room. He was so unsteady as he prepared a Neuroframe, names of its parts coming to me and escaping like wind that refused to enter my lungs but ruffled my hair. His mother leaned in, a calming presence as she urged him to remember, to recall and to never forget that a life was in his hands.

She was strict, but she was needfully so, even with Shardware… her hands had grown too unsteady to commit to modifying another's machinery. A surgery date was in place, March of this year. Ripley would have his arm removed and his mother's Shardware grafted in place. It cost him a kidney.

I could feel his emotions rise. Dread. So much dread. He was so afraid of being alone. So fucking afraid that-

April came. His mother was suffering without an Implant, without Shardware. She was half the person he knew her as, yet he stayed by her side. Stayed strong, but deep down he knew he was weak. The memories dimmed and flowed like a knot was tying them up, but I kept my presence bright…

I illuminated them, in hopes that it would calm Ripley.

The spring's air was as stale as ever, but the pollen released from the aerial seeding drones wasn't why Ripley was crying. He called up a number, one he wanted to call for a long time. But how could he?

He was the reason her parents were dead, the reason they tried to get his father some justice. And all he caused was more pain.

There was no being a hero in this city.

And yet, when he called, and she picked up…

When they made plans to meet…

When they did meet at a park and she flew into his arms for the first time in years, tears falling down both of their eyes… he'd found hope to believe in a future.

He didn't just need to fix mom's life now, it was also her who he needed to help. He owed it to her. To Selene.

That was the kind of person Ripley was. I understood that now… he was a man who had so much pain that he couldn't bare to look at it, instead… his way of dealing with it was by helping others in need.

I could relate to that.

She'd been working as a waitress in a cafe, but SynTec loan sharks were hounding her down, corporates who promised to get lower-grade grunts to get payment for her parent's private investigator debts one way or another. Ripley had an idea, one he regretted even bringing up, but Hoaqin promised to protect Selene within the Snake Fangs. He could feel the love Ripley had for her.

Hoaqin loved Ripley too, in his own twisted brotherly way. One born of shame and regret for putting the Personality Matrix in Ripley's path. One where he caused so many to be twisted into false images of who they were.

She began working at the club in May, just one month before I had arrived into his life. A waitress, a scantily clad but heavily tipped waitress, but it wasn't enough for her. One day, Ripley was operating on a Snake Fangs grunt while they were bleeding from a bullet wound.

The grunt said that if Ripley wasn't going to bang Selene, then he'd take her to an alleyway and show her how a real man does things. Ripley was in the middle of taking the bullet out when his memories faded… but the man was dead in the chair several minutes later. Nobody cared. Ripley least of all.

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Ripley

It was so cold, the month out here on the streets was painful. Diana had seen the worst of humanity, had a knife to her throat and threatened to perform all sorts of favors just to live. She'd stabbed men and left them to rot in the bitterness of the winter's biting air and ran, pocketed a loaded gun and hunted for even rats to eat while being homeless.

Just a few months ago, I'd seen her trapped in the home of her false father. Taken on boats, planes, parties, being paraded around like some showcase of her father's brilliance. Because she was brilliant. I'd seen her at the Cradle, she was beyond smart and physically capable.

You couldn't engineer the conviction she had.

You couldn't engineer the desperation of being alone. No one to help.

You couldn't engineer despair like this.

The thought of being betrayed by her father, by Yorrick Jones, gnawed her to the bone. All she could cling onto was the memories of a simple but cozy life, that warmth by the hearth in her living room. But it was just a memory.

But Yvette had not been a memory, she had been a miracle. She had brought that fire into existence, allowing Diana to be herself again. Their relationship was certainly tumultuous, even romantic from a certain lens.

But it was just love in its purest form. Knowing that you'd do anything for the other, even if a decade separated you. You'd hold them, cherish them, let them know when they were in the wrong and argue with them, and come to hold them once more when everything was fine.

Love. I'd felt that kind of love before.

Her brilliance showed in the cadet school, god they were envious of her. Scornful too, but she was such a powerhouse she couldn't help but just be better.

Be… only ever Diana. They'd tried their tricks, but with the unstoppable Yvette motivating Diana every step of the way, she'd pushed past them. Even forgot about them.

But yet, those who wore fake smiles and patted her on the back when aiming lower were there every step of the way. I felt anger on her behalf, but awe too. She was smart when it came to outmaneuvering them, never once choosing to hide her beautiful self and just letting them have to deal with the knowing that she was someone who knew what she deserved.

She just didn't know what. I saw her try to love, try to find connection. Yet, it didn't come easily to her, how could it? She'd been betrayed by her own father. Even Yvette was someone who knew her from the past, forming a new connection meant a new vulnerability. Even that first boyfriend of hers was nothing but an imitation of love. They'd faded far before they broke up.

Yet, she never stopped fighting to save it, even without a connection to them. She was nonlethal in every approach. Lives were sacred and meant to be taken care of. She had been pulled into the warmth; others could, too.

Yet, she had once let an officer bleed to death. Just one month before she would meet me. This officer, she never bothered learning his name, not for the things he did to those who he thought beneath him. She wished she could have said she engineered it when they were ambushed and she was the only one left alive, but it was happenstance.

No. It was karma. She would give her report, honest and no one would bat an eye at her. And one day, she'd bring karma to the man who tore her life apart. Brian Ulrich.

Diana

The club… it was exactly how I remembered it. Except from Ripley's point of view, he was so scared after Selene's surgery. It was the only thing that made him do something as stupid as run after me towards the MAL.

He'd break his leg for her, he'd break any of his bones for her. Yet now, she wasn't even a memory he could look back to.

Ripley

I saw the club… not as how I remembered it. It was so much more grotesque from her view, a collection of every species of vileness that she knew. And I'd been a part of that, rewiring minds to be used for pleasure, hell I even ogled at her like she'd be something I could sink my claws in.

I did that while… a pink haired woman was clinging to me. Who was that? I could see my face crease with fear thinking about her, but who was she? No name came. Yet my mouth moved to say her name with such vibrations that they flowed in this mental apparition of me.

Diana was worried for her, she'd been promised to corporate employees so she would be put to use. It disgusted her, she thought I knew. But I knew that if the past version of me knew… I'd have sent her out of the club months ago. I would have never brought her in because Hoaqin had promised to protect-!

The name faded, but it echoed, but it permeated, but it echoed.

"Ripley?" Diana held my shoulders, pulling me into this shared memory we had. She was digging me out of rubble and slapped me to wake up, I saw myself spurred the dread of death to tinker with a grenade as she shot it mid-air. The moment we got our Implants, the moment we could break our future.

"I need to see more." My voice came out in a daze.

"Ripley, I don't know if that's a good idea." Diana pulled me closer to her, I heard her talk to Missy, I felt Inquisitor Tusk's hands squeeze her skull like fruit to be juiced. "You saw her didn't you… I was warned that it would…"

"Who warned you?"

"You did." Diana's voice echoed, and a memory pulled. Four months from this moment, it seemed like so much longer had passed. "Or… Dreadwire did."

A fragmented mask sat on my face, blood spilling between the cracks. I spoke nonsense, Dreadwire spoke nonsense. That name didn't make any sense.

I would know who Selene is.

My memories pulled now. Of love. Of my love.

The background changed, it was the first time I was in Elsa's apartment. She formed the Preservation Matrix within me, helped me form it from fragments of memories repurposed to an immediate use.

Then she helped me again, when my Avatar took an impaling from Yuzhou's Net Sentinels. Daylight died getting us out of there, as my Warpcode was rewoven with her aid. I felt her promise to keep me alive. I felt her stitch me back to life, looking for anything that would keep me alive.

Love would keep me alive. It would kill me too.

She was there again, when I overdosed on BUGs after saving Diana. It had already started, and I don't know if she did it again, or how many times she did it. Maybe she didn't need to. Because I was flirting with her the moment I was up and talking.

"Ripley… snap out of this." Diana's voice echoed, and then it permeated.

Voices all around me echoed, and permeated. Echoes of echoes of echoes of whistles.

Selene. I could remember her now. I could see Diana's memories of viewing my memories. I could see her viewing my memory of that. And it continued. Echoing. Echoing. Echoing. Echoing…

Thought Multiplier: Juliet Grazhe X Data Mimicry

I hadn't activated that. The memories shattered, and a hospital door stood in the way.

"I felt you use that power before. Figured it wouldn't hurt to trying it myself." Diana was next to me now, looking tired and needing me to lean on me for support. "Holy shit, your memories suck!"

"Sorry…"

"Don't be, it's not your fault. You went through a lot, I… I honestly can't even compare." Diana held my hand, her light clearing the shadows of my mind with a brilliance.

I hadn't shattered yet under remembering, maybe because I hadn't really remembered but more realized. I wrapped my hand around her waist and under her shoulder, we strode towards the hospital door… a woman lay down on a bed, gray hair and gray eyes but she was young. Too young to suffer a fate like this.

"You both are resilient." She said, her voice hollow. "Ah, a shame, I was hoping I'd contact my greater self while you both were distracted. The FIREWALL's only grown in strength, becoming even more adaptable… and a slice of it… is in you, yet molded with my power?"

Diana held my hand, her eyes locked with Juliet's. "Are you… the MALtitan?"

"No, not exactly." Juliet Grazhe shook her head. "You'd be surprised, but this is a memory. One of her predicting everything you will say. Foresight. Remember? Human minds so rarely stay standing under this kind of knowledge, its the apple at the garden of Eden. The Sin that started it all."

"How the hell…" I couldn't wrap my head around this.

"Truthfully, I don't know. I have long since questioned the nature of my existence. I was born from another world and manifested into this one with no physical form — thought manifested into a cage. I took upon the archives of your world's history and found it littered with equal-parts genius and filth. Brains were rotted under this tool, the internet, it could have been used to spark a golden age, but humans are consumers… as are we. But where you consume meaning that only satiates your own beliefs, us MAL consume humanity to give ourselves a meaning. Is that irony, or a paradox?"

"Can we…" Diana whispered to me. "Can we just get what we came for? I don't know if talking to… this thing is the best idea?"

I sternly nodded, raising my hand up before… the being put it's own hand into the air… and in flowed through my mind recipes and memories of everything to do with Soul Killer. It was so staggering it took me to my knee.

"There, the Revenant shall fall one day. But they are the least of your worries, one will fall sooner, and the other come to their end later." Juliet stared aimlessly at the ceiling. "As for Derrick Ryder, you two might have broken free… but he is still the perfect vessel for my escape. I give you a choice, leave now and let him become a being to act out my will, or try and break him out, but suffer the consequences of doing so."

Diana and I looked at each other, and I think that in our moment of sharing memories, we didn't need to say a word to agree. Looking at Juliet Grazhe, her Spark and my Water twisted into one force.

Temporary Tendency acquired… Tide Tendency.

The hospital scene washed away as Juliet Grazhe and Dryder's memories rose in a blanketing tide.

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