33 - The Wetware Does Not Lie

Dear son,

I am all in pieces.  I have been dreaming.  Dreaming in the day and in the night.  I’m not sure which is day or night or if I am awake and imagining I am sleeping and dreaming or asleep and truly dreaming.  I cling onto Yasna's hands but they are there and then not there and then there again.

I see a dragon around you my son. Metal and glass and steel and gold, gold glitters in the depths of its head and it is wreathed in its toxic breath.  It doesn’t breathe fire, my son, but red sand.  Oh, be careful.  Be careful of that sand.  It turns up to down and makes your skin burn, turns your eyes to running muck in your head.  Be careful my son, that dragon you ride in a snowstorm means to kill you.

I hear it laughing and trying to send you to be with your father’s spirit.  I don’t know if this is today.  Or tomorrow.  Or never.  It could be yesterday.  I could have already happened.  It could be real. I see... my son I see things sliding over other things and they are both real.

Kyrus beware the bald war-bird.  I hear it scream ‘Dukir’ ‘Dukir’ and it seeks you through the snow, chasing you through the tsingy of the Milar mountains, to pull you up out of the dirt with its beak and fling you up to the sun.  The bees.  The bees.

Yasna.  Help me write a warning to my son.  There is a corpse-eater beetle in human size, ripping apart the bodies of our kin, flinging their skins and their bones into the canyon after he has sucked the life out of them.  He drinks the blood of our children.  He thrusts long talons into a heart here and a heart there, licking blood off and looking for more. He hides his bony palps behind a hive-lord’s black lace.  Our denay does not lie.  Our blood tells.  It tells the truth.

And the bees.  They buzz in my ears and drone warnings and warnings and tell me these visions.  They buzz and preen and the bees want you my son.  The queen is dying.  The queen is dying.  Royal larvae. 

I lie to the bees for you.  I lie to the bees to protect you.  I say you are dead, I say you are a girl, I say you never existed.

I lie to protect myself.  They will never find me.  I am not zardukar. I was but I am a kluge now.  I am a random number.  I am not a number.  I am Dag.

My name.  I am Dagdohva. Yasna has found the most recent bug.  It is an enormous corpse beetle.  Its will, its programming have injured me. I am full of bugginess.  I am Dag.

Oh my son, be careful.  There is only warning from the bees and they drone and drone and drone in my head.  I love you.

I lie to the bees for you.  I crack their programming.  I crack myself.  There are bad operating instructions fubar, cheap, badly done in the wetware.

Wet.  During the rains but you are in Milar.  It is always the wet and I cough my lungs out my mouth, purging visions.  I see the boy you described, the brown-haired boy climbing and falling in the tsingy and getting his back slashed to ribbons.

I see that girl, the naked girl with the naked face.  She wears a veil sometimes.  She is good for you my son.  Listen to her.  

The surdeniliarch takes his white wand and pierces your heart but doesn’t kill you.  He has a secret joy.  He is a secret.  I see a gravestone but the spirit in it is wrong.  A death that is not a death.  A dead man wears your face. A hole in the mountain.  A falling mountain.  I see a white ferret dancing on your head.

I love you my son who is not dead but a girl but a runaway, lost, never born, dead.  I love my Kyrus.  Dream in a solid line my son.  The wetware does not lie.

Your loving mother,

Dagdohva