Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

Darkness. She found it comforting, the darkness of her apartment.

She inhaled deeply, sucking in enough air that the walls of her lungs pressed up against her ribcage. Holding her breath, Marja rose from the sofa and went over to the window sill, bringing her face up to the cool glass; she exhaled, emptying her lungs and feeling her stress slough off to fog up that smooth surface.

She raised her arm to find she was still holding on to the tablet, its screen-light making a ghostly reflection in the window-panes. The article she had been reading had something to do with the ethicality of importing 'genetic-dead-end' breeds of dogs for commercial sale in Desertian cities. Hardly riveting stuff.

Marja flicked back to the main page. The top-most item was tackily titled Woman, Women and Fighting; it was accompanied by an attention-grabbing picture of a dark-skinned, bulbous-nosed woman with a face that was bloodied and beaten blue-black. Her large nose was streaming blood down her philtrum and her left eye had been forced closed by a severe swelling; her mouth was gaping mid-scream, revealing teeth and gums that had been stained with crimson coagulate. A broad-faced, tan-skinned man—dressed in the green uniform of the PDF—could be seen in the background, towering over the hunched woman and raising a baton over her shock of blood-matted hair, frozen in the midst of delivering unto the open-mouthed woman a savage beating.

PDF brutality at the junction of the Agave S-2 and S-3, the caption read.

Marja winced. It was powerful imagery and obviously chosen for its inflammatory potential. She tapped on the link and was taken to a short article written by an Amiraha, the article spanning three or four pages.

Woman, Women and Fighting

And she began reading in silence, the city of Saltilla sleeping in the background, the boundaries of her perception wavering and slowly becoming absorbed into a world of Amiraha's making…

I have always been an audacious woman.

From the moment I was brought into the world as a big-boned child—obstreperous to a fault—I knew my destiny was to fight. To fight is to resist, even though it hurts to be beaten for it. Governments in general can break one or a hundred bones, but they find it rather difficult to break spirits or to keep in absolute control of narratives.

It is this weakness that gives me the hope that my efforts and the efforts of every Sul woman will be worthwhile; but I wouldn't sleep on it, because I much rather fight in the streets, I much rather bring the fight, on behalf of Woman herself, to the corrupt system that has arrogated to itself the power to control Woman.

I was taught to be quiet, to respect my elders, to be soft, cute, and loving. I was taught to give way to men because they were the ones who fought and because they were worthy of fighting whilst I, born a woman, was only fit for child-rearing, for the kitchen and the factory line. Whatever a woman was worth, it surely wasn't fighting.

This isn't going where you think it is. I am no shill for conscription, and even less am I a saleswoman for that weirdo brand of 'equality' that Democratic fadsters love to preach (NOTE: such virtue-signaling usually accompanied by an untrammeled patriarchal entitlement. Hardly a coincidence.). If that's what you were looking for—do me a favor and click away right now. This is not the article for creatures of inferior intelligence.

Offended? Good.

For those of you still listening, the truth of Woman is quite simple. We fight for what is in our interest, and what is in our interest is also in society's interest. They are one and the same; women are the keepers of what is right and good in a society, and a society that does not treat its women with the importance they should be accorded cannot long survive in any political, economic, or social way worth talking about.

The Saltillan Bureaucracy doesn't speak for society, and neither does the government. Woman does.

In recent decades, the concept Woman has increasingly come under fire. Any man can pay a brain-tekkie for a womb-prosthesis, they say, or, if they have 250k Chit to spend, seed a mechanical surrogate. A man can become a woman, they say, simply by changing their genitalia and outfitting themselves with a womb. A man can become a woman, they say, by believing he is a woman.

None of these deserve to be called woman, simply because Ahman has not made them Woman. Genetically, socially, morally—they are not worthy of the title, Woman. Any man can pretend to be so, any liar can. And a woman who destroys their body in order to be called a man? It is an insult to think that such a creature can be considered any more than a traitor.

Radical? Get with the times.

To recap, a woman is born a woman, and a woman is made to fight.

It is our good fortune, as women, to exist in a time where the great women that have already trodden the path of Woman have also taught us to look beyond superficial political chicanery. The modern feminist declaims from the shoulders of such giants as Paglia, Hess and Cottomb—Great But Misunderstood—perhaps it is the cross that the great must bear, to be misinterpreted by virtue of their genius and to have their messages lost in translation.

For example: many people consider Cottomb's call for 'equal rights' to include the obligation to be conscripted. Hypocrite, they say, when the modern feminist argues against the conscription and womb-prostheses. Do I hear them call out the fact that a woman is still, in this thirty-first century, expected to keep the house in order? Do I hear them call out the hypocrisy of conscripting women (or the farce of 'exempting' them from conscription should they bear children) but still putting upon them the burden of Womanhood—that is, the burden of being controlled?

There a general attitude—common even amongst some Sul women—that a woman is somehow incapable of deciding matters in her own interest. Patriarchal institutions routinely and systematically assume that women are incompetent in matters relating to their careers, their bodies, their opinions, the things they assert, the things they refrain from asserting (out of some misplaced attempt at not seeming too opinionated), and subject them to systems of governance that disadvantage them relative to men.

Women die in childbirth because medical professionals assume away complaints that 'the pain is in my ass'—routinely assume such a complaint has nothing to do with being in labor, because Sul women are too big—too fat, they say—in comparison to the light-skins and Jegorichians. Women lose their jobs when they go on childcare leave because employers assume their promise of returning to work will not be honored. Young women who assert medical issues fail to be exempted from the frontline at the same rate as men who assert medical issues because the War Department assumes their excuses are attempts at avoiding responsibility. These are systematic biases that are borne out by studies conducted by Paglia and Hess, biases that remain unresolved and undiscussed because it just isn't that important.

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Try to point this out and all you come up against are walls and petty obfuscations. Calls to have proper dialogue are met with bad faith responses; attempts at leveraging official channels for public discourse are shut down without explanation. I said that too nicely. All you get are the same age-old excuses thought up by whiny fucking man-children.

It's high time the script was flipped. Women control; women are not to be controlled. I say again: women are the controllers.

Anyway, the truth is that physical violence is passé. A lot has been made about the superior ability of men to be violent, but anyone who spends half a brain-cell thinking about it properly will see that that's not such a good thing as people make it out to be. Sure, we may be at war with some Alien-Fucking-Creatures; sure, there are times you may need to shank some smug cholera-defecate as he saunters out from the Shotokan Hotel; but really, all things—war included—require the Woman's superior finesse and skill to prosecute. Automated bipedals, drones, logistical planning—these are all things that women do well and far better than any male-gendered or bi-gendered or half-gendered monstrosity that modern industry occasionally sponsors.

Fighting, it should also be said, is not limited to war. There are more ways to fight than one, and more causes to fight for than what is promulgated or indeed tolerated by the government. We fight by making enough noise that society cannot deny the fact that Woman's interests are coterminous with society's interests. It boils down to this: women must be free to choose. That's all there is to it.

Such freedom is the truth upon which our tradition is built, and it dates back to the days of the Sul and even before. It is a properly indigenous tradition. I'll not rehash old narratives, but suffice to say life has a way of teaching us things that people do not say.

My mother was the perfect woman society wanted her to be: meek and little. Unheard and unassuming. Being a perfect woman, she was perfectly vulnerable.

The day it happened happened to be in the last week of the last month of '66. She would meet the man who would become her husband, grabbing his attention because she embodied all the great virtues a woman was supposed to have. So went the fantasy, that he would sweep her off her feet and take her away to be married and to live happily ever after, in a harmonious home filled with warmth and love, where they would raise their love-children to be perfect, well-adjusted men and women, patriotic, meritorious people who would embody the virtues taught to us as virtues by the powers that be.

Alas, this man with which I share my colossal nose was indeed as perfect a man as society could make him: a violent, intrusive, and insensitive man. My mother was bound to him and so her demise was foretold.

It was a happy marriage at first and perhaps all marriages start out that way, but anyone can guess how such patriarchal institutions turn out for the victims. The man beat my mother and liked it. He had no greater pleasure than seeing her bleed out her ears and eyes and mouth. He throttled her, from—

A sound, stabbing out and then dispersing into the gloom.

What was that?

A phantom shape flitted about in the darkness, its reflection caught in the windowpanes and backlit by the purple night. The suddenness of the movement caught Marja's attention, jolting her from her deep immersion in Amiraha's world. Another sound, like the thump of a padded footstep, drifted over from somewhere behind her; she held her breath and forced herself to keep still, tracing with her eyes vague shadows distending across the transparent surface before her.

Her lungs began to protest. Her ears pricked. Her blood turned to ice in her veins. She thought she could feel her wrist-transceiver buzz, but she couldn't be sure.

A smell, sickly sweet, filled her nostrils.

She caught the glimmer of something sharp reflecting in the glass and sidestepped out of reflex, her hip flexors tensing sharply at the same time so that she bent steeply at the waist. She felt the tablet leave her hand as she threw it impulsively into the air, felt the rush of something fly past her and heard the window shatter before she saw it, a thousand glistering shards tumbling jagged end over jagged end, blinking in and out of existence as they caught the piercing rays of the tablet screen-light at different angles.

Her heels raised themselves instinctively so that she was balanced by the balls of her soles. She wheeled and twisted her body, coming face to face with several figures that were hooded and masked and stalking carefully toward her from behind the couch. The figures were covered from head to toe in strange, black clothing that billowed like static and which broke up their forms so that they seemed to overlap with the shadows.

Old training kicked in; her body knew to relax itself; anxiety and fear were blasted from her mind by the frigid rush of alertness. Just her and the enemy.

Take your stance, power leg behind, left leg ahead; arms to the front of your face.

She blinked and knew there were four of them, because she had been trained to spot their eyes. Her Incunabulum—she saw it lying on the low-table, right in front of the couch. Her first priority would be to secure it. She reached into herself and found their blazing intentionalities pressed up against her and perceived that they had nothing but murder in their mind.

Perceive their intentionalities. Trace them to their root—the rhizomatic hub of their will, where their Incunabula sit—and mold it, compel it…

Flaring her own intentionality, she intertwined her tendrils with theirs and followed the threads further into their forms—but suddenly, the thread was lost and she found nothing but inchoate shards where she expected to find their Rhizomes—the hub of their wills, supposed to be concentrated within their Incunabula.

'They are immune to the compulsion matrix!' she realized, her eyes widening in disbelief, parting her arms slightly so that she could squint at the slithering forms and absentmindedly unclenching her fists as she did so.

That sickly sweet smell again. She recognized it for what it was: death and mortality, a hair's breadth away.

The thought had scarce left her mind when her right palm exploded with piercing pain. She had reacted at the nick of time, bringing her hand back to shield her face; a blade erupted—sharp and glinting—between her knuckles, pushing out toward her and stopping mere inches from her eyeball. Blood shot out from the tear in her flesh, spattering her face and eyeballs; she felt the sting and blinked reflexively, grunting as she felt warm blood stream down her forearms.

She bucked and lunged to her left, attempting simultaneously to sharpen her intentionality into usability, to activate her power. Her shoulder impacted the faux-wood flooring and she could feel the blade in her right hand judder within the tear.

Reality was peeled back. The threads of spacetime were revealed.

The time to act was—

Before she could call upon her power, her mind was sent reeling in surprise and consternation. She felt their intentionalities worm their way into her, and realized the four intruders had coordinated themselves to overbear her will.

What!? They are turning the compulsion against me?

She tamped down their attempt with a violent flare of her own intentionality, but the cost was a moment's hesitation. Her right calf was gored through with another blade, the pain lancing up through her body in waves.

By the time her sensibility returned to her, the closest figure had leapt over the back of the couch and was reaching its hands toward Hobbes—

There's no time for a setup! You need to act, NOW!

The words inflamed her consciousness, dredged from old memories of the Acropole Gymnasium and the painful imprint weapon-master Asani's stick had made upon her mind. Locking her teeth together in a tense grit, she twisted onto her left foot and pushed up into the air, lunging toward the figure and raising her right hand, the blade still embedded in it; her body hit the figure, eliciting from within that mysterious shroud a muffled yelp, and she pressed her hand onto it, dredging up all the intentionality she could muster.

She pushed and felt the blade penetrate further through her flesh, felt the keen edge grind against her delicate carpal bone until a hilt arrested its forward advance. She touched the tips of her finger to that staticky wavering material and found it smooth to the touch.

Proximity has been established.