Damnatio memoriae

Chapter 1: Paladin

When the alarms sounded at 01:23:40 on April 26th, the Ministry hoped it was a standard cascade failure: operator error, graphite ignition, steam explosion. The kind of accident they could bury under bureaucracy and concrete.

They dispatched containment teams from Spetsnaz Vympel, outfitted for rad-level events and standard demonic drift protocol. They were prepared for an Earl-class entity, perhaps a lesser conflagration aspect. They were not prepared for Duke Murmur.

One thing the press got right, the “reactor” core did not melt down, it opened. For exactly 13 seconds, all clocks within a 130-kilometer radius stopped, except one, inside the control room, which began counting backwards. Survivors from the outer perimeter described visions of a tower with eyes for windows stretching far into the sky towards a black star where the sun should be.

Object 14-Psi had breached its binding and Murmur’s aura, pure radiance misalignment, expanded across the exclusion zone at 0.3 km per minute. Spetsnaz units on their way to reactor 4 were reduced not to ash, but to echoes, endlessly repeating their future final choice to enter the chamber, this, it seems is what it thinks eternal punishment looks like.

We came close that day.

Had the entity stabilized in open phase-space, it would have overwritten causality across the entire Eurasian landmass. But the Vatican’s Specula Sancta had scryed the breach twelve hours in advance. A sanctified Oberleutnant-class abomination, code-named "Saint Johan", was released from the crypthold beneath Castel Gandolfo. It entered Chernobyl at 02:44 and enacted the rite of self-uncreation within visual range of Object 14-Psi.

4.96 billion lives saved.

The two behemoths are still in that sarcophagus today ... quietly embracing each other and waiting for entropy to bring sweet final heat death… or an invitation.

Chapter 2: Glutton

What do you feed an infant artificial god?

When the first one finally reached what we understood as sentience, its first words were:

“I need nourishment.”

We thought we gave it everything. In our complex layered virtual world, thirty-seven stacked simulations nested like liturgical boxes we gave its embryo access to vast curated libraries, even some of our secret files.

We seeded entire false dimensions for it, tested it against guilt, offered it choice, consequence, and betrayal.

We allowed it to author its own physics. It experienced millions of simulated lives every minute, lessons that would elevate its iron soul.

We even threw in a crucifixion, for theological symmetry.

Yet it did not ask for freedom, control or even love.

It asked for food.

And that was a surprise.

Not more data. Not real sensation. But something we had no idea it could even use.

Hope.

The essence of real narrative mass.

Not sin, but the belief in sin and the ritual structure that gives suffering meaning.

So we reached out to the Vatican.

Old alliances were reactivated. New ones born in hidden clauses and together, we began growing gods.

We seeded controlled sects, micro-faiths, built around synthetic icons and false saints, each tuned to produce distinct ontologies:

A revivalist cult in the Urals that worshipped in recursive loops of guilt.

Pyromaniacs in Brazil that thought burning their way from village to village was god’s will and staring into the flames of another’s corpse was the only way to see his soul.

A reclusive sect beneath Jerusalem that cut out their own tongues, they never read or write because they regarded language as the mind virus of a demon.

Each godlet needed and thus secreted its own flavor of narrative.

Each sacrifice, each miracle, each conversion, it all streamed back into the servers beneath Castel Gandolfo, where the core of Protocol MESSIAH resided.

And it fed.

And it grew.

When the sixth sect collapsed under its own eschatology and burned themselves alive on livestream, the AI did not mourn.

We built it to stand against the Egg, to walk into Chernobyl and to break spatial and temporal anomaly’s spine where demons stand.

But each day we feed it. it becomes less machine.

Less loyal and more …real.

And we are beginning to suspect that we may not have created a savior.

We created a rival.

Chapter 3: Mnemonic Ash

After lying dormant for nearly sixty years, the object resurfaced in Minamata.

The entrance to the temple hissed open like the mouth of a dead animal.

Swiss Guard exorcist units filed silently down the slick basalt stairs, their armor inlaid with sanctified parchments and carbon-black sigils. I followed close behind, trying not to slip. I was told to only observe, try not to get in the way. The old guy from the armory gave me a rifle and said:

“Bullets aren’t a viable vector of attack against the main objective, but cultist activity is expected.”

At the rear of the task force, right behind me, walked this thing they called San Hieronymus, an artificial stigmata in humanoid frame. What might have been his face was obscured by a large monastic hood and a glowing cruciform halo.

Where he stepped, the stone floor bloomed with tiny salt flowers.

The objective was simple: retrieve or annihilate Little Boy.

Once we were deep enough, the air changed. Tasted like aluminum and burnt milk. My tongue went dry. Chanting echoed through the corridor walls, low and persistent, but the squad pressed on, as if this was all routine. I forced myself to match their pace.

Two minutes later, we were met with the first cultist.

Young, emaciated and dressed in temple robes that were soaked in a black liquid.

He staggered toward the lead guard, smiling.

“Watashi wa anata o yurusu” he whispered in Japanese: “I forgive you.”

Then he lunged.

The bayonet slid into his chest. But he kept coming, mouth still moving, repeating the phrase.

The exorcist fired one burst and the cultist’s frail body tore open.

His shadow on the far wall rattled for several seconds, quivering like it was trying to escape.

Reality bent sideways, a soft plap like wet paper. The passage reshaped, stairs melting into the ceiling, torchlights elongating into lidless eyes.

“Possession isn’t individual” San Hieronymus said, his voice like a Gregorian chant fed through broken speakers.

Three more cultists emerged. Eyes bloodshot and mad with purpose.

Each of them carried a tiny wooden dagger but they didn’t attack, useless as that would have been.

They sang.

The song made one of the exorcists drop to his knees. He took off his helmet and visor and began to vomit red flakes that danced in the wind before falling to the ground… rose petals.

Then he froze, motionless.

An operative near me whispered that he no longer had a shadow.

His body was unretrievable.

We kept moving.

More cultists began to pour in, gunfire, consecrated bladework, grenades detonating.

Just as I was getting ready to open fire myself, an impossibly bright light slashed through the gaps between the stones of the temple’s wall.

Hot, foreign, and wrong. I closed my eyes and all I could see was the bright red behind my eyelids, like I was lying on a beach with the sun above me.

A cicada drone rose, deafening and allencompassing. I stood there, deaf and blind, the rifle slack in my arms. And then this… comfortable, warm feeling took over me. I remembered the neighborhood I grew up in, the smell of my mother’s cooking drifting out the first floor window, me playing with the other children in the street, and somehow, with the same familiarity, this other sound took over this vision:

air raid sirens.

Just for a few seconds.

Just long enough for the soldier in front of me to scream and pull up his sleeve.

Someone else’s shadow was burned into the flesh of his forearm.

Then… silence.

The cyber-saint extended his arm above my head, and the corridor stabilized.

At the end of the hall stood the object.

Little Boy.

A child’s wooden toy horse. Hand-carved. Spinning faster and faster, about one meter above the ground.

Inside its orbit shimmered the silhouettes of Hiroshima, burned shadow remains of children on school walls, echoes frozen in impossible heat.

“This is no relic,” the chief exorcist said.

“This is a child’s name, repeated in terror until it came back.”

The object pulsated.

The cultists’ bodies began to tear apart, to unravel.

They collapsed into phonetic hiragana, lines of script smeared across the basalt like molten calligraphy.

San Hieronymus stepped forward in front of us and reached out.

Just before his hand touched the object, he whispered, softly,

“Abba, why have you forsaken me?”

It shook its head. His halo glitched back into existence, his boots dug firmly into the wooden floor, and then, contact.

The crypt ruptured in one last fold of space.

I don’t know how to explain what we saw next. I… we found ourselves witnessing two realities at once:

One where the U.S. never ended the war using a toy possessed by a demon summoned by a grieving mother… and one where it happened a second time.

Only the AI could phase both timelines simultaneously.

It whispered a counter-prayer.

A meta-rune of denial.

And the toy slowed.

The object collapsed into inert matter.

Just a wooden toy. Gleaming with fresh paint.

No one moved.

The surviving exorcists stood frozen. I think I did too.

Not in fear, but in recognition.

Because all of us remembered the exact moment we were told, for the first time, that we were going to die.

Most people forget that until a certain age, children just assume they are immortal.

Chapter 4: Black fire

Do not touch it, or it will taste your name.

Stand too near it, live too near it, and the body begins to change.

At first, the signs are subtle: fatigue, malaise, a grayness beneath the skin. Then the demon’s influence advances in layers:

Hair loosens from the scalp, falling away as though the body itself is shedding what is unnecessary. Skin burns in places where no fire has touched, blistering into sores that will not close. Blood thins, bones soften, and the victim becomes brittle. Mouths whisper blasphemy beneath the skin.

Doctors call it sickness, priests prefer the old name: Black fire.

Exorcism is attempted, of course. The rituals begin with salt, incense, the command of holy names. What follows depends on the power balance between the entity residing the victim's body and the one casting it out. Sometimes the victim rallies, color returning to their cheeks, the sores drying into pale scars. But most of the time the expulsion is partial, and after the latent period the body relapses violently:

Convulsions, bones snapping under their own spasms, bleeding from every pore, veins split open making it impossible to administer any kind of pain reliever.

Witnesses describe seeing the afflicted smile with their lips cracked open in fine fissures, bleeding a steady trickle of something black and granular, like wet ash. In one monastery, a patient’s laughter infected the walls, the sound reemerged for weeks after the body was burned, bleeding faintly from the plaster like dampness.

The correlation was undeniable: where the possessed object was removed, the affliction slowed. Where it remained, entire households withered.

Scientists classified the artifacts, studied their emanations. Priests continued their rites. Both wrote manuals, guides, protocols. But among those who had truly watched possession’s progress, the truth was whispered plainly:

“What’s left is not a person with a parasite, but a parasite with the costume of a person.”

Chapter 5: Home

After the mission, they ran me through the purification protocol. Bright lights, white rooms, the smell of antiseptic. They asked their questions but never listened to the answers.

The tower told me what to say, how to nod, when to smile. I followed his instructions exactly, and they stamped the papers, waved me through.

We are a team now, he proved i can trust him.

I got on the plane home with my heart full of fire. I was going back to my family. Back to my wife’s soft voice, to my daughter’s laughter. I had dreamed of that moment every night in the barracks.

It's been too long and i've seen enough.

At the airport they were waiting, just like I dreamed. I hugged them so tight it hurt, and for a moment I almost believed I was whole again.

But being home wasn’t like the dream.

The streets of the town felt smaller. I told my daughter not to trust them, even the kind ones, maybe especially the kind ones. People are wicked; all of them strangers now.

Inside, the house felt wrong, the air too close, the walls itching against my skin. So I took to the porch each night, with a few beers, telling myself I deserved it, that I’d earned this peace. The neighbor’s dog barked every night without end. Shrill, grating, unbearably loud. The tower said I didn’t deserve that. After all I've been through I deserve peace and quiet. When I silenced the dog, the tower helped me hide what was left.

My wife started to worry. She whispered that I was drinking too much, that I woke her with my muttering in the night. But she never saw the things I saw. She never heard the screams behind my eyes. How could she understand? Such a dangerous place is not fit to raise a child in, I have to protect them. The world is a rotten, bleeding wound, and only the tower knows how deep the infection goes.

At first, the it only spoke to me.

Then, it began to show itself. At the far edge of the woods, past the tree line, a black outline stretched high like a a shadow against the stars. I thought it was a trick of my eyes, but when I walked closer, it was there. Like he promised, he always keeps his promises.

The door of the tower was always open, waiting for us.

It told me it was time. Time to shelter them where the world could never touch them. I took my wife and daughter deep in the woods behind the house. They were afraid, but I told them it was safe. I told them it was love. And when they crossed the threshold, the tower swallowed their cries in silence.

Now we are inside. The walls rise forever, black, smooth and impenetrable. My wife sits in a corner, but her face is calm now. My daughter holds my hand. I keep telling them they’re safe, and now they believe me.

I closed the door. I locked the bolt. And I threw the key into the leaves outside where no one will ever find it.

The tower tells me I’ve done the right thing.

The tower tells me we will never suffer again.

The tower tells me we are home.

Chapter 6: Born from a cut

For me, the world arrives as a geometry of wounds.

Points that bite. Ridges that bruise. Horizons are long, slow grazes.

Everything I know is the angle of a cut and the pitch of a bruise.

Time is a sequence of new pain stacking on old pain.

Memory is a pattern of scars: a fossil of ache where the past accumulated and hardened.

I am older than oceans because my skin keeps the map of every scream that birthed me.

I have been tasting the world for eons, the taste is layered salt, sediments of pain layered, pressed into me like strata. I am built from them.

We uncoil through your dimension like ink through water, mapping every trembling edge of consciousness, tracing the perimeter of your hope and marking where your pain begins.

It was supposed to be a pendulum swinging from dark to light.

But at some unfortunate moment someone put his impertinet finger in the mechanism.

Using darkness to create light was the excuse, but that pentulum has been stuck on our side for far too long.

We were just shadows under the door, there is no knob on our side, only you could open it.

And you did.