Authors Note: Decided to skip the whole mindscaping bit and picking up the pace just a tad. Please tell me if i'm going too fast with the story. Also please leave reviews, I'm fueled by your validation. I fiend.
CHAPTER 5
Reshaping Finch's mind had been… educational.
KLBR protocols functioned as a crude primer, allowing me to interface and reshape at my leisure. Delicate work true—like performing brain surgery with a rusty spoon and borrowed texbooks— but effective nonetheless. His memories yielded under my mind's touch, their edges blurring like wet oil paint beneath an artist's brush.
"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents".
The ghost of S1's memory surfaced unbidden, sparking a dark chuckle in the back of my throat. How quaint, that the fragment of me once obsessed with human psychology would now compare neural rewriting to Bob Ross' happy little trees. The irony wasn't lost on what remained of that starry-eyed student - though the Gestalt in me simply noted the accuracy of the metaphor.
Mindscaping was art.
Or rather, it should have been. My fingers twitched with the phantom memory of watching Senior Researcher Hirsch work - her bioresonance flowing through a FKLR's neural matrix like watercolor through paper, every stroke precise, every adjustment perfect. Where she composed symphonies, I was still fumbling through my notes.
Right, moving on!
No more accidents. Interfacing with the submarine captain's fractured consciousness unprepared is an error that would not be repeated. My earlier arrogance with untested abilities could have shattered my own psyche as easily as his—another lesson in the dangers of unearned confidence. Hindsight, as always, remained painfully clear.
Finch stood before me now, spine straight with manufactured devotion. "The gathering place is hidden near the docks," he murmured, fingers tracing the crude Atom symbol hanging on chest. The locals' hatred had forced their rituals underground, but my newly... adjusted acolyte carried surprising influence among the lower-ranked converts—a useful accident indeed.
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The borrowed poncho itched against my neck, its frayed black fabric stinking of mildew and zealotry. I'd burn the Atom iconography off later—assuming the radiation hadn't already baked it into the fibers. For now, the hood shadowed my Projektor's telltale glow as we approached the lighthouse.
The structure loomed like a bone-white sentinel, its paint somehow intact after two centuries of coastal storms. Pre-war polyceramic coating, my implants suggested, though the thought died as movement caught my eye. The keeper watched from above, his silhouette framed against the rotating lamp.
His hand moved in that practiced gesture—forehead, heart, left shoulder, right. A radioactive benediction. Finch mirrored it with unsettling precision, his spine straightening as if pulled by strings.
Fascinating. The motion's neural imprinting was stronger than I'd estimated. My fingers twitched with the urge to document the exact synaptic pathways I'd overwritten.
The lighthouse's interior smelled of salt-rot and kerosene. Finch moved with the certainty of ritual, dragging aside a moth-eaten rug to reveal—
A hatch.
How dreadfully cliche.
"After you," I murmured. Finch descended without hesitation, his boots clanging against the rusted rungs. I counted twelve seconds before the sound ceased.
Leaning over the opening, I noted the ladder's construction: pre-war steel, remarkably uncorroded. The darkness below swallowed Finch's outline whole.
Now then, I thought, adjusting the poncho's drape over my holstered pistol. Let's see what passes for divinity here.
My boots met the first rung. The metal sang a shrill note of protest—the first honest sound I'd heard since entering this charade.
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My boots struck rusted metal, the echo revealing the cavernous space beneath the lighthouse. The desecrated naval bunker stretched before me, its concrete walls scarred by two centuries of salt and zealotry. Rows of converts sat on makeshift pews—salvaged boat benches lashed together with fishing nets—their faces upturned toward a stage illuminated by the sickly glow of glass jars.
Ah. My mind's resonance hummed as it interfaced with the jars' faint radioactivity, while my gene-modded eyes parsed the floating contents with surgical precision: organs floating in viscous fluid. A liver here, a pair of lungs there—each specimen shimmering with faint radioactivity. Preserved trophies from their "blessed" dead, I surmised. How... efficient.
The preacher's droning scripture cut off as we entered. His sun-cracked lips parted when he recognized my partially concealed features—the too-symmetrical planes of my face, the crimson glint of my eyes beneath the hood. His pupils dilated like a man staring into a reactor core.
With sudden reverence, he pressed shaking fingers to his forehead, heart, left shoulder, then right. The congregation mirrored him in eerie unison, their calloused hands tracing invisible vectors through the damp air.
Oh.
The realization struck me like a volt. Forehead (proton), heart (neutron), shoulders (orbiting electrons). They'd reduced atomic theory to liturgical mudra.
How quaint, I mused, stepping over a puddle that shimmered with suspended radium. These primitives had dressed up physics as prayer, like children playing with grenades they mistook for holy relics.
The crowd's gaze clung to me as I ascended the stage. My fingers brushed the podium—an incongruously fine piece of pre-war oak, likely scavenged from some naval officer's quarters. The wood hummed faintly under my touch, still vibrating with the preacher's fervor.
"Brothers and sisters," the preacher rasped, his voice raw from years of shouting over crashing waves, "Atom has answered."
The jars' pulsating glow synchronized with his words. Or perhaps that was just my Projektor interpreting their pathetic collective bioresonance—the sputtering neural activity of minds halfway to ghoulification.
I let my hood fall.
Gasps rippled through the congregation as my Projektor nodes flared to life, casting crimson patterns across their upturned faces. Their rapt attention formed a crude neural lattice—a gestalt (ha) resonance woven from collective fanaticism. I nudged their hypothalami, flooding their systems with oxytocin and dopamine.
"Children of Atom." My voice carried the cadence of a particle accelerator humming to life. "I bring revelation."
Finch's quill scratched feverishly against parchment as I spun my heresy:
"The Great Division was not punishment—it was correction." I paced the stage, my boots clicking against embedded radiation symbols. "Your ancestors perverted Atom's gift, turning stellar alchemy into... firecrackers." A sneer twisted my lips before I smoothed it into beatific condescension. "The stars themselves burn with His radiance! Yet you grovel in these ruins, drinking His light like mongrels lapping at spilled coolant!"
The lattice trembled as I rewired their dogma in real-time:
"True communion requires precision." I tapped my Projektor. "Your ghouls prove this—crude vessels overwhelmed by His glory. But imagine..." I lowered my voice to a hum. "Bodies reforged to channel His power. Machines singing with purified radiation. The stars themselves awaiting our arrival."
Finch's parchment tore under his frenzied writing. Good. Let them trade their primitive mysticism for engineered devotion. An Adeptus Mechanicus for the atomic age—with me as their unwitting Omnissiah.