Nameless

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 {{#ifeq: {{#ifeq:  |User| Joysweeper | Joysweeper}} | | 
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   {{#ifeq: {{#ifeq:  |User| Joysweeper | Joysweeper}} | | Authors: ' | 
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Author's Comments

I'm trying something a little different. When I was thinking about a game, it dawned on me, and then I kept thinking about it, and now it's getting typed. I couldn't manage total inhumanity, though, so SL-2128, also from Femtroopers, was pulled in to help translate. The idea, and I'm still not sure if it's going anywhere, is that someone made it known that they would be interested in interviewing a Femtrooper, and one showed up. I'm not sure who the interviewer is, though - this flowed more easily when I just went with what the Fem is saying, but I'm not sure I want to leave it as a page of one-sided dialogue. Two-sided would work better, and I sort of favor Dr. Sands being the interviewer. Thing is, I don't "get" Sands. When I try to type him, it's just bad. What are some of his character traits, anyway?

The first thing you should know is that I do not communicate verbally. Ever. There has never been need before. My thoughts are not packaged into the primitive sound-symbols that you call words. I naturally have no desire to communicate with anything. It is not something I need to do.

Yes, me. Singular. If your paltry pair of ocular organs – so sorry, eyes – have any functionality at all, you will have noticed that I am not like you. You are one unit, I am many.

Consider this, however. In your little body, and in each of my units, there are multiple individual organ systems serving multiple individual functions. Some are redundant, others are specialized. Each organ system is composed of organs, each organ of tissues, and each tissue of hundreds of thousands of tiny little individual cells. See? And yet you, too, call yourself by a singular pronoun.

Name? A name is nothing more than a sound-symbol that you rabble use to identify each other and group into factions. Understandable, I suppose, since a single unit is almost always ineffective. I have no need for such a thing. Other factions in the rabble, I am told, label me “Femtroopers”. Fine. It makes no difference whether or not you follow suit.

Oh, you mean the name of this single unit? That makes even less difference. Why would it matter? If I label anything, it is only "fastest" or "almost best", when I am assembling parties. Only the Individual still has its own label, and this is not the Individual.

Ah, yes. There are moments where I regret taking the Individual. It did not defend itself when my units found it. It found a way to communicate with me effectively, and when I took it, it did not fully become one of my units. I am not always aware of it and what it is doing, sometimes it carries out my plans in different ways, sometimes it subverts what I want to accomplish. And yet it is probably my most effective unit. It brought me the unit you’re looking at now, one which I gather was important to some part of the rabble. Puzzling.

Original occupants? Please. I don’t care for minds. They interfere with movements. No, I do not absorb personalities and memories and skills. If I could, I might, but the units are all I need. Why would I care about what happens to the minds? They wriggle when I first take them, and then they still, except for the Individual. What of it?

Tell me. You eat meat, right? Meat which does not want to be eaten? Meat which has all of these same things you worry about? It feels pain and pleasure, it has some dim concept of a past and a future, it forms attachments, it is conscious and aware, it does not understand what you want of it but it knows to struggle. You breed it and raise it up for the sole purpose of killing and consuming it. You trade for it, already neatly packaged, so you don’t have to know what it was. Some of us don’t have that luxury.

Yes, it is the same. It is exactly the same. This resource is less than I am, just as your resource is less than you, and so you take it. "Rights" are rules you set up to justify this. Nothing is inalienable. You need meat to sustain yourself, and I need units to continue my campaign.

This is starting to bore me. There are resources I could be acquiring. I am getting annoyed. Stop wasting my time.

No. You misunderstand me. There is nothing to keep me here, because I am not here. I am not this unit. Kill this body or disable it, and I will not be able to see and hear what is happening here. I will be only slightly inconvenienced. If you seize it and hold it, I can withdraw from it and you will have no hold over it. I am not here. I sent this unit to you of my own will. The Individual seemed to think it was a good idea.

What about me? I don't see that there is much to tell. Fine. Ask, and I will respond.

I have never been just one. At campaign start I was just two. I knew it was impossible to advance with only two units, but I had to be very cautious. Right from the start of this I realized that most of the rabble is entirely unsuitable for my purposes. Most everything is either too weak and soft to be useful, or too difficult to subdue. Only a relative few are right, and the easiest way to tell is visual - if a unit is armored, I will take it and alter it to suit. So far almost every one of my units is humanoid and fleshly, but I have ambitions.

Female form is the theme. My first two units were female, with the peculiar arrangement of armor that looked so impractical. I was displeased until I discovered that this campaign meant it was actually an advantage. Sadly, I remain unable to modify an unsuitable unit into a more useful one, but this does make it easier to tell which units are mine when conditions are crowded.

Other matters require my attention. This was the Individual's idea. It can talk to you instead.

-What? Argh. I didn't know he or she or it could do that. That is very annoying, I hope my good friend can't - no, can't. That's good, I guess.

Huh. Looks like I've already managed to forget how short regular troopers are. Normally I would be towering over you. Hello. I still haven't decided on a pronoun for my good friend, who you were just talking to, but he or she or it is busy with other matters.

Of course we sound the same. My good friend didn't bother changing this trooper's voice. Besides, I was coaching and prompting my good friend - I'll say 'he' for now - this whole time. He really doesn't think in Basic - I mean English. Maybe not in words at all. A number of those turns of phrase were mine. He happens to have no sense for sarcasm, I must say. Not much of a conversationalist.

So you know who I am! Good for you. Contacts in the Five-Oh-First, I take it? You probably know everything about me but my mother's maiden name. It's Crispin, by the way.

If you aren't completely pathetic you've probably realized by now that I'm not the leader. There is no real leader; it's just my good friend with several dozen brainwashed servants. I used to hear the word "hive-mind" bandied about now and again, but I'm hesitant to label him as that, either. In the normal run of things there's a limited autonomy to each unit. Very limited, mind. He picks a place and a pace, they all go there and assemble. If they are attacked, they will cluster around the attacker and fight back, then resume traveling. They attack what they're told to attack, hold position when ordered to, target what they are told to target. There is some automatic behavior - if they're threatened by a stronger force they retreat, more of what I just told you, and when they aren't given other commands they take care of their bodily needs, for instance. Sometimes he forgets to let them sleep or have them find something edible. That generally ends badly.

They are very boring, I'll tell you that now. I can usually provoke a reaction, but so far I've never seen more than a bit of surprise and some backing away. I knew who some of them were, before. They look surprised when I say their names, but that's it. I can tell them, "Nod your head when I talk", and if I enforce my will they'll do it, but I can't so much as get a yes or no answer.

The reason I don't think of him as a hive mind is this. Hives are set apart from other cults because of a mental link shared by all members. In some cases this is a fairly minor link between individuals, in others it is part of a collective consciousness, and there are numerous stages between the two extremes. At any rate, even when it's jut the most tenuous of links, corner one and they'll all know where you are and come after you.

How did you know? Contacts in the Rampant Catgirls, too? Good. Feelers in every group; that's really the only way to be effective here. No, that's just what the 501st calls them - they usually prefer neko-something. They're more dangerous than they look, you know. It's a lot worse than ears, a tail, and an annoying tendency to misuse Japanese words. They're all cute enough that any and all altercations they get into get blamed on the other party. But have you even seen how often they get into fights? And how many recruits they've picked up since everything changed? Sure, they're relatively harmless, but let them spread unchecked for maybe ten years and every human on the continent will be buying fur shampoo, squealing "Kawaii!", and putting bells around their necks.

Back to the topic at hand. My good friend doesn't really fit the definition. As you saw, he thinks of himself as a singular entity. Hurt one Femtrooper and he won't necessarily notice. He is aware of individual "units" being in pain or hungry or tired, but only if he actually directs his attention on them. He also doesn't seem to see things in the normal way - I can't be entirely certain, but it's like... it's like he sees things from above.

Absolutely certain. Force-Sensitive, remember? The Chosen One? Turning into a woman doesn't mean losing my power. If not for three quarters of my body being mechanical I would be running this thing. Occasionally being able to read the mind that I've been linked to is nothing. He does seem to see things from above. The concept of "ceiling" isn't one I've been able to get him to understand - separate floors are a damned hassle. It reminds me of a computer game I played... I think it was more than one, actually...

Well. Most impressive. You really did do your homework. That's right; before I joined the 501st I spent a few hundred on different RTS games. You probably know who I was better than I do - it all feels like a dream, sometimes. Only the past couple of weeks are real.

Heh. I knew you'd ask sooner or later. Fine. I'll be candid.

If the 501st is still what I remember it being like, they'll have told you what I did that time. The result of that little fit of temper. It wasn't entirely my fault, but I could have stopped it, and I knew that I was very lucky nobody died. Afterwards, I was ashamed and afraid of myself. Well, wouldn't you be? It's no fun, I can tell you that. Even so, I didn't exactly seek him out. I was out alone, he showed up, I realized just what would happen if I cut loose and fought back - massive carnage, but in the end he would be able to direct quite a lot of my ability. So here I am. I don't know if it's because of who I am or because I didn't fight it, but I'm not like those poor sods.

It's... different. Some of the baggage has been let off, and I don't have to take myself seriously all the time. There's also the whole female thing, but it's not as big a thing when half of my internal organs are cybernetic anyway. Yet it's all still the same, and I know that makes no sense. Seems like I'm always under someone more powerful than me. I don't care for my good friend - having served under someone with vastly more intricate goals, who actually had something to teach me, it chafes. I'm not even sure how to start plotting the inevitable.

...Hey. Joysweeper. Yeah, you. I'm breaking the fourth wall because this is going nowhere fast. Do you even have a plot in mind for this?

Stop dodging the issue and answer me. Do you actually have a plan for this, or were you hoping to just find a place to end?

Ugh. Fine. Okay, this works as buildup, but you need to find somewhere to go from here. No, don't go to another tab, stay here and keep typing me. Seriously, what did you want out of this?

You really need to stop trying to write a story based on whatever gimmick has just caught your fancy. What were all those English classes supposed to teach you? Don't give me that shit about subject-verb agreement - you took Creative Writing and we both knew it. A class devoted to the writing of stories. Poems too, but for the love of the Force don't write any poetry.

What does it matter? I'm part of your stable of characters, I know what you know when you go on weird escapades like this one. Need I remind you? Setup, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. You have an ending or a high point in mind?

Since you're only writing dialogue I feel I must say that I'm rubbing my forehead with my hands right now. Ugh. Do I have to do everything?

A standard way to resolve "This is going nowhere!" is bringing in something completely unexpected. Like an alien invasion. Are you up to that?

That was just an example, Joysweeper. Of course we can't have that kind of alien invasion, not in this storyverse.

I told you to stop tabbing out. Very clearly. Will you stay with me, or do I have to choke you again? This is what happens when you write assertive, forceful, confident characters when you yourself are not remotely assertive, forceful, or confident. Pah.

Find somewhere for this to go. Go find a plot, Joysweeper. Ugh. I'm surrounded by incompetents.

You're back. Found something yet? Show me. Hmm. Well, that's something, I guess. Get to it.

I mean, I could just kill every trooper, bounty hunter, super soldier, and miscellaneous other unit controlled by my good friend. He can't even conceive of betrayal. I'm more dangerous than any of them. That's not a boast. When one individual is focused on, some of that skill and accuracy and agility comes back, but I can take any of them. Problem is, that's not a solution. I wouldn't gain anything by doing that, and I would be branded as a mass murderer. Not only that, but I'm not even sure that would kill my good friend. And... yes. It wouldn't be right. I'm not going to lie. I don't think that these people are "dead". If they were just automatons, I'd find it a lot easier.

The world, and the Force, aren't just black and white, Dark and Light. Most adults know this. A lot of people here at Xanadu whose minds have been changed see it in simple terms. I don't. If you'll forgive my going philosophical,