Continuation

---

“Are you feeling any better?” Lacey asked her, playing pillow for her lapine girlfriend.

“Mostly,” V lied easily, deflecting the little cow’s concern. “The pain has stopped, so the girls must’ve gotten to whoever was there.”

Half the latter part was true, for what it was worth. The constant drumming in her brain had tapered off to a persistent pianissimo snare as her neural net threaded itself around the damaged cores, and while it wasn’t an enjoyable state of being it was at least tolerable. Unfortunately, the only way to be sure of what had been lost was to query every part of herself individually and simply wait for positive or negative responses; a time-consuming process, it was slightly more bearable for the gorgeous bimbo’s company.

“I hope they gave them a good thrashing,” the mini-cow huffed angrily, furious that someone would dare go after her Bunny.

“What if it was serious?” V asked, shifting slightly on the voluminous cushions around her head. “I can’t imagine our wolves are particularly skilled at pulling their punches.”

“It’d be fine,” Lacey assured her, the cavalier sincerity in her eyes at odds with how the bunnygirl viewed her caring, semi-pacifistic girlfriend. “We have some very fine attorneys on retainer.”

“You sound rather bloodthirsty,” the rabbit laughed lightly, playing off her misgiving as a joke.

“Of course,” the usually-sweet idol growled, though her fidgety body language suggested she harbored some misgivings regarding fatal violence. “Isn’t that normal behavior when someone threatens the life of a loved-one? If I was built a little more like you, I would’ve gone and handled it myself.”

“I’m comforted by the thought,” V smiled, genuinely touched by the adorably-aggressive display. “If I ever need to throw a waterbed at a life-or-death problem, I’ll think of you first.”

“Milkbed,” Lacey corrected, returning the rabbit’s grin.

Despite her pleasant humor, the attempt on the bunnygirl’s life clearly weighed on the sweet little cow, and the sincerity in her anxious touch communicated her doubts about the veracity of her Bunny’s claim to health. Even still, she allowed her taller girlfriend to rest, perhaps believing that badgering her over it wouldn’t achieve anything ⸻ though V knew better than to think the bimbo would simply surrender to the inevitable, or give up trying to suss out her true condition.

“I’m alright, Lace,” V insisted.

“No, you’re not.” Delicate fingers alighted on her lengthy lapine antennae, gently massaging them; her touch was so soft and soothing, calming the ache in her skull. “I’ve watched you lie to me often-enough that I can see right through it when you do. Even if you were okay in realspace ⸻ which I know you’re not ⸻ you’re still staring down what might be a very fatal bullet here.”

V knew the mini-cow was cuddling her just as fiercely on the couch in the flat, but she was doggedly pursuing disconnection from her realspace self. Trying to inhabit that body only magnified the thrumming agony in her brain, and she was rightfully worried that the connection might not persist ⸻ especially not through the Lunar Cry. Either of her selves were now a ticking time bomb, and she had no idea which of the two she’d be able to defuse. The only shred of hope she still had was that there was no guarantee that the ritual would completely erase her, and if she could suitably repair her neural net, she might actually be able to survive. Even if it emptied out her bunny-body, she could simply re-write her saved data with whatever was left of her mangled neural net ⸻ though of course, that assumed that UltraCraft wouldn’t consider her stack a part of her character, but that was a gamble she’d have to make.

“As far as we know, death isn’t a guarantee,” V argued with a sincerity that she didn’t feel. “And, yes, I’m not … ⸻ I’m not very present in realspace right now, but that’s just until this migraine wears off.” Flashing a brilliant smile, she projected a baseless confidence. “I’m already working on the remote repairs that I can manage from here. The experience is a little rough, so I’m trying not to exist at home for a little while.”

Surprisingly, her words had the opposite effect of what she’d intended. Instead of reassuring the sweet girl, they only seemed to deepen her concern, her bottom lip quivering as she fretted over her Bunny.

“I don’t want you to go,” Lacey sniffled, damming the tears already forming in her big cow eyes. “Not now that you’ve finally started calling us your ‘home’.”

“It’s okay, Lace,” V murmured as she lifted herself up into a sitting position. Encircling the sobbing idol with her arms, she pulled the petite girl into a warm embrace. “I promise I haven’t given up yet. As soon as Varina gets back, she and I are going to figure this out.”

“You already promised me that once before,” she sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks in both worlds.

“And I still mean it,” V asserted, relying on the half-truth to calm her weeping girlfriend. “I’ve never lost to a video game, and I don’t intend to start now.”

Her attempt at humor fell flat, but the rabbit wasn’t discouraged; as long as she could still make terrible jokes, it meant that she was still alive, her personality still intact. She had to hold onto that for as long as she could; live or die, she wanted to remain herself.

Bending down slightly, she pressed an affectionate kiss against the top of Lacey’s head. “Nothing is going to happen to me ⸻ and even if it does, I swear I’ll come back to you.”

“You’d better,” Lacey mewled, clinging to her Bunny. “If you don’t, I’ll be very cross with you.”

“And I wouldn’t want that,” V laughed gently, petting the soft silk of the petite girl’s hair.

Contenting herself with the presence of her favourite little cow, she held Lacey tight against her, hoping that it wouldn’t be for the very last time.

 

---

 

Forced to rely more and more on her RealDimension equipment, V’s evolving set of problems soon required her to stay conscious in both realspace and UltraCraft simultaneously. Overlaid on top of each other, the only way to be certain that her brain properly performed its necessary functions ⸻ such as motor skills or speech and the like ⸻ was to force her two bodies into lockstep with each other, in a manner similar to how older playpods generally worked. Though she’d spent years of her time puppeting multiple digital versions of herself, the damage to her stack had torched her expertise, and she struggled under the demand of relearning how to exist.

Lacey left her alone after a little while, at least in the flat; the bimbo pressed close to her in UltraCraft, refusing to leave her side for even a moment, but she’d heard the grumbling of the rabbit’s stomach in realspace and decided to do something about it. Offering to make the bunnygirl her absolute favorite food, she went all-out on the selection of the menu, to the point that she needed to pop down to the corner store to obtain some ingredients. Unfortunately, it had the air of a “final meal” about it, and V could occasionally feel the little cow shivering against her in the game whenever she gave in to a fit of sobbing.

While she was out, Varina eventually made her way back to the flat, bringing with her all the broken servers that had been mangled in the attack; carefully laying the damaged equipment out on the coffee table between V and herself, she took a seat opposite the rabbit. Although she’d both seen Herdsplitter and dealt with the assailants, she wasn’t forthcoming with details regarding either; some gauze-wrapped defensive wounds on her forearms suggested that there had been a struggle, and the wolfish woman’s fierce tone when briefly speaking about the event implied to V that whatever happened to the would-be assassins had been quite grisly.

Which was, of course, extremely flattering; knowing that her girlfriend took very personal and prejudiced offense to threats against her life was a powerful source of comfort.

“I don’t know how much of this is salvageable,” Varina chuffed heatedly, helping her Bunny sort through the wrecked equipment, “or how much of it we’d even be able to replace. I mean, obviously I’ll buy you whatever you need, but it was such a complicated mess in there that I have no idea how we’d go about reinserting anything.”

V merely shrugged, staying purposefully light on her own details. “It’s fine,” she said, sticking to one-syllable words wherever she could. “I think I can fix it.”

Of course the reality was much bleaker than she let on. Parts of all the persona cores still existed, baked-in to various skills associated with each identity, but they would never be capable of independent action again. While that was good news as far as Vincent and Victoria went, it was an unfavorable diagnosis overall; her personae had gone so far off-course during her time in UltraCraft that reintegration would be incredibly traumatic, as her mind tried to reconcile weeks of time spent as digital brains in jars while loathing V the entire time. As such, the skills and memories locked-off into those personae were probably a lost cause.

What was more troubling was the incidental connections between physically-adjacent hardware; the saboteurs had harmed a number of somewhat minor cognitive processes, the aggregate of which interfered with her working-memory. Assuming her uneasy sense of impending doom was a normal emotion for the circumstances, she was at least thankful that the treatment catalyst had decoupled most of her hormones from the server lattice. That, however, was the only positive; her digitized long-term memory was completely fucked, as though someone had punched dozens and dozens of holes in it. Her internal systems check helpfully informed her of the presence of missing and corrupted data, but she had no idea what it was that she could no longer remember ⸻ and that terrified her. Any number of important memories might have been lost to her, dramatically altering the foundations of her lived experience, and she would never be aware of it. It was entirely possible that the “V” sitting on the couch might be a completely different person than the one who had been there only a handful of hours prior.

Driven to a manic obsession, she pored over her thoughts, haphazardly taking inventory of herself. What were the things that mattered to her? What was her favourite color ⸻ her favourite song? What kinds of movies did she like? Did she even like movies? What was the name of her childhood friend, or her highschool crush, or her first love?

Hundreds of minute details about her life slipped away, vanishing into ether.

“Bunny?” Varina tried, in what V realized was probably not the first attempt at getting her attention.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, struggling to focus. “I was running diagonals.”

“Diagonals?” Varina asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow. “Diagonal to what?”

“Tests, I mean,” V explained, covering for her malapropism.

“Are you feeling alright?” Concerned, she swapped couches, moving around the table to sit next to V.

“Yeah,” she lied, faking a smile. “I think I’m just tired, is all.”

“I know some people that can do house calls,” Varina began, carefully gauging V’s reaction. “Maybe we should have them come take a look at you.”

“I don’t need any of that,” she insisted, waving away the well-meaning offer. “Some of the participles broke, but the rest is fine.”

“Bunny,” the amazon gently chided, suspecting that her girlfriend wasn’t being completely honest.

Plastering an amused grin over the mask of her face, V fought against the icy fingers of panic digging their way out of her chest. In the years before her technological uplift, as she watched her relatives slowly die of neurodegeneration, she’d been gripped by a lingering fear that she, too, might lose her ability to communicate. As a woman who spent much of her time talking as her primary method of both employment and self-expression, the loss of language would’ve been a devastating blow ⸻ and, perhaps, a fatal one, whether through comorbidity or simple self-direction.

As more and more of her lexicon complicated itself, words twisting together or blinking out entirely, the horrible idea that she might soon be unable to speak at all terrified her. Struggling to hold herself together in front of her girlfriend, she stubbornly attempted to play everything off as a humorous, harmless accident.

“It’s nothing,” she said brightly, affecting an optimistic attitude that she certainly didn’t feel. “We can grab what parts of these boxes actually made it, then copy them into new hardware. After we link them back in, it’ll all be apathetic.” The corners of her mouth dipped, her smile straining as she worked to correct herself. “... Apathetic. Apathetic.”

The word felt natural in her mouth, but she was certain that it was wrong ⸻ infuriatingly, she couldn’t understand how or why. Any attempt to recall whatever it was she meant only produced the one result; it was like someone had rearranged the stickers on a puzzle cube, making the “solution” necessarily incorrect.

“Apathetic,” she tried again, willing her brain to work properly. Her smile slipped completely as her mounting unease became evident on her face. “Apathetic,” she repeated in a slightly different inflection, as though it were simply a problem with the way her mouth shaped the word.

“Sweetheart,” Varina implored softly, resting a hand on the other girl’s thigh, “it’s obvious that something’s wrong. I’m going to make a couple phone calls, alright?”

“No, it’s not alright!” V snapped, batting away the amazon’s hand in frustration. “No one can fix it but me, okay? And I’m fine ⸻ I just need to dream some things.”

Hot wet building in the corners of her eyes, she backed away from her girlfriend. Desperate to escape the slowly-unfolding nightmare, she hastily stood up from the couch, bashing her shin against the table; to her dismay, she found that she’d only heard the impact and hadn’t felt it. The growing dread in her chest accelerated its pace, crawling through her limbs as she forced herself to flee; she’d made it all of seven steps before her numbed foot landed wrong, her ankle turning as she tripped herself.

Reflexively throwing her arms out to catch herself, the confused limbs belatedly responded. Landing heavily on top of one of her outstretched hands, a sharp pain shot up from her wrist as she crashed into the floor; despite the agonizing feeling radiating from the injury, she wasn’t sure whether or not it was a good thing that she hadn’t screamed.

Writhing miserably on the ground, she struggled to right herself, her body moving as though half-asleep. Mewling in distress, she began to weep openly as she lay sprawled out on the floor, her shaking limbs proving incapable of proper coordination.

Kneeling next to her, Varina gently helped V up into a sitting position, cradling the other girl in her arms. “It’s okay,” the wolfish woman assured her in a soothing voice. “I’m going to get some help.”

Blurting out a series of loosely-associated syllables, the smaller girl tried and failed to articulate her disapproval of that plan. Frustrated by her lack of intelligible speech, she resorted to gestures augmented by a handful of audible words, leaning on what few signs she both remembered and could perform with only one working hand.

“No,” she demanded, her fingers drawing closed sharply. “I don’t need help.”

“Please, Bunny,” Varina pleaded with her, repeating her spoken words in halting, vague signs, on the off-chance that the smaller girl’s audio processing had similarly began to decay. “You’re clearly not okay, and I can’t just leave you like this.”

“Nobody can help,” V asserted, shaking her head as her hands curled into tight, angry fists. “I’m the only one that knew how to fix this, and now I can’t remember.”

Even telling the truth, she still felt wretched. Steadily, bit by bit, her beautiful new body was beginning to fail her, and the acknowledgement of that fact only deepened her feeling of dread. Perhaps, she thought, it might be better to simply attempt to escape realspace altogether, joining Herdsplitter and Genevieve as an UltraCraft AI; at least that way, when her degrading stack finally reached a point of total dysfunction, she wouldn’t die alongside it.

The question now, she believed, wasn’t “if” her brain would erode away completely, but when. While the elasticity of the fusion of her server-lattice and physical body valiantly attempted to route around all the damage, the process was also working against V. Considering each persona core to be just as valuable as the limiting dominant personality, her brain was trying to allocate what was left of itself to twelve other people, all of whom were necessarily now completely-separate from V. There was no stopping that pointless task now that it had begun, and the obvious end result would be a series of cascading failures; only the Bunny herself would’ve been capable of correcting that course, but she was certain she no longer understood how.

The exact diagram of her mind had been lost to her, swallowed up alongside everything else.

“I’m dying,” she sighed, a somber bent to her fingers. Indicating her RealDimension bangle to Varina with an irritated tap, she opened her messenger client in UltraCraft.

>> : minute by minute, I’m dying.

>> Arvina: What do you mean, you’re “dying?”

>> : my neural net is basically eating itself alive. it’s trying to self-correct the damage, but it’s just making everything worse.
>> : my memory, my reaction time, my linguistic ability, everything that the stack had control over is going to continue to deteriorate until the repair process eventually destroys itself.
>> : whatever’s left after that will be all that remains of “me.”

>> Arvina: How do we stop it?

>> : we can’t. it’s supposed to be a failsafe for if one of the servers or hard drives or whatever blew, or if I needed to swap one out.
>> : the only way to “stop” it would be to … shut everything off.

>> Arvina: And kill you, is what you’re saying.

>> : pretty much, yeah. I’d only be clinically dead, I guess, but if it doesn’t boot back up properly then I really -will- be dead.
>> : even if you did pull the plug, you’d still need to know the correct order to start everything …
>> : and, again, I’m the only one that knew all the steps. I never bothered to write it down because like … why would it matter?
>> : …
>> : I never expected to have anyone around if something ever happened.

>> Arvina: I’m so, so sorry Bunny.

>> : it’s fine, really.
>> : the Lunar Cry was already going to kill me, right?
>> : this is a good thing.
>> : now it’ll only put me out of my misery.

>> Arvina: …

>> : I’m sorry, babe.
>> : that’s just how it is.

>> Arvina: If there’s nothing that can be done to save you, then …
>> Arvina: is there anything I can do to help put you at ease?

>> : I don’t know that we have the time.

>> Arvina: I don’t care about the Grief. Now that we have the Matriarch in hand, it can wait.

>> : but -I- can’t.
>> : I have to perform the Lunar Cry while I’m still lucid.
>> : if we wait any longer, that might not be possible.

>> Arvina: Bunny …

>> : I know. I don’t want to lose you, either.
>> : …
>> : maybe you don’t want to hear this,
>> : but there’s no other option.
>> : look, I’m so, so sorry I fucked up your world
>> : and hurt a bunch of people
>> : …
>> : and now I’m sorry that I’ll have to leave you.

>> Arvina: You have nothing to apologize for.
>> Arvina: The FUC vulnerability you uncovered was probably inevitable, so it’s not your fault.
>> Arvina: It’s mine, for not having noticed the possibility.

>> : yeah, but still
>> : you’ve wasted these last few weeks looking after me, and caring about me
>> : I hate that I’m repaying you with problems.
>> : …
>> : I’m sorry for being a burden.

>> Arvina: Nothing about you has ever been burdensome.
>> Arvina: I would gladly go through all of this again, just to see you for another few weeks.
>> Arvina: …
>> Arvina: I love you. You know that, right?

>> : I do.
>> : and … it feels really good to hear you say it, too.

“I love you, Bunny,” Varina murmured, brushing the hair from the smaller girl’s face.

Gesturing “same” with her unresponsive fist, V leaned against her girlfriend, taking solace in the warmth of her embrace.

 

---

 

Her priest entered her chambers only a short while later, looking almost as upset as Lacey. Remarkably, the bunny-boy managed to hold in his tears, likely because he didn’t want such unprofessionalism to intrude on V’s final hours with her girlfriend.

“It is nearly time, Your Grace,” Kariss informed her in a stiff voice, struggling against his morose mood. “Though I would never dare to impose on you and your lady in such a time as this, I must also inform you that I have prepared what you asked.”

“Prepared what?” Lacey asked in a small voice, slightly hoarse from so much crying.

“It’s a sentimental little thing,” V said with a half-smile, painfully aware of how much easier it was to communicate inside UltraCraft. “There’s someone I wanted to speak to before the ritual.”

Wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, the little cow tried to make herself presentable; a foolish aim, in V’s eyes, as the sweet girl was always so beautiful. “Am I allowed to know who?”

“It’s not like it’s a secret,” the bunnygirl chuckled, brushing the slightly disheveled strands of Lacey’s hair away from her face, indulging in this last bit of intimacy. “I asked Kariss if I could see my mother before the ritual ⸻ the former Herald, I mean.”

“Oh,” Lacey squeaked, understanding the intention more-easily than V thought she might. “Should I go?”

“There’s no need,” the rabbit assured her, kissing the top of her head. “In fact, I’d rather you waited here. I expect I’ll be rather tired after my performance, and I’d like to rest with my favourite when I return.”

Of course they all knew what the Herald of Twilight intended. There was no conversation of which the former Herald of Light would be capable, and so instead the meeting was merely a chance for V to be “alone” and collect herself. The dying woman could be afforded this small luxury, even as the parting wounded those closest to her.

Standing on unsteady feet, she broke away from her girlfriend, the petite girl still holding her hands until their arms had stretched to the limit. Putting on her bravest face, Lacey refused to wave goodbye; it would be an acknowledgement of the unthinkable, and she desperately wanted her Bunny to return.

V hoped that she wouldn’t regret it.

Following Kariss out into the corridors of her temple, they took the path to her solarium at a languid pace, the priest drawing out his final moments together with his mistress.

“Kariss,” she asked, deciding to humor him with a few more words, “what should I call her?”

“Who?” he returned, his lopped ears cocked to one side as he considered the question.

“The former Herald,” V clarified. “I know this is a little embarrassing coming from her daughter, but … ⸻ I don’t actually know her name.”

It was a horrible thing to admit, but there was nothing for it. The bunnygirl had fallen into the world and landed in a sea of chaos, completely unprepared for the digital life she was supposed to live. Perhaps the only reason she could get away with such filial negligence was because the poor woman was completely emptied-out, much the same way V herself would be soon.

Shared oblivion would have to be apology enough.

“That’s understandable, Your Grace,” Kariss answered softly, his eyes full of worry. “Your Intercessor informed me that your memories of that time are … ⸻ difficult.”

“Something like that,” V nodded, playing along with the assumption of trauma.

“Then I shall remind you with as much caution and consideration as I hold,” the priest began, attempting to avoid both offending his mistress as well as dragging up unpleasant memories. “When it comes to Her Grace, ‘Herald’ is a fine manner of address.”

“No, no, not that,” she sighed, waving away his sense of propriety. “I’m not talking about politeness, Kariss. She’s my mom, and we’ll be alone together. I want to know her name.”

“I must beg your pardon, my lady,” he murmured, overcome by sorrow, “but in this, I cannot be of service.”

“Are you saying you don’t know?” V chuckled, her slight laugh dying as she saw the sincere look in his eyes.

“No one does,” he nodded apologetically, breaking the news as gently as he could. “The taboo surrounding the Herald’s name is a small comfort for those she has served so graciously. While it becomes a sacred object before the Lunar Cry, it is truly sanctified after its performance.”

Staring sadly up at her, he grimaced as he struggled with the explanation, disgusted with the immeasurable cruelty of the truth.

“I am sorry, my lady,” he lamented, forcing himself to continue the bitter revelation, “but it has been the same for every Herald before you. Once the chosen daughter begins the Lunar Cry, the divine spark consumes everything its priestess has to offer, down to the tiniest parts of her being.”

“After you enter the river beneath the sea, no one will ever remember your name.”