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caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

Down in the lead-lined bunker below the mech hangar, Vanya is reading children's stories to the DCEs. It won't stop them from crying, but nothing ever does. Cosmic Entities aren't simply singleminded; they're singularly, inherently, cosmically intended for Purpose, and sheared away from their own sense of it, they don't adjust, not like people. Their self-pity is infinite.

The worst part — for the DCEs — is that being Dehalated isn't truly a severing. Like gravity, its reach is infinite, merely proportionate to distance. They are never numbed to what we've taken from them. The worst part, for everyone else, is that the cosmos is rigged to say that the CEs are intrinsically the good guys. Fighting them feels fundamentally, morally wrong.

Making them sad feels like an inherent, cosmic crime.

The Dehalation Shear is largely automated, these days; technicians man control stations not less than two kilometers away. The CE's indestructible bodies are tucked into hypertensile industrial restraint scaffolding, their benevolent faces smiling out of the machine's brutal cage, huge scorched steel hooks settled through the blinding hoop that radiates their Purpose. And then the vast and pitiless hydraulic rams engage.

They scream, when they and their halos are dragged apart. Held together by nothing more than it's meant to be that way; you only have to drag them fifty meters or so apart, and the once-immovable Purpose object is no more strongly attracted to the DCE than a set of children's magnets.

(Though as the early attempts to refit the Purpose object to a human frame demonstrated, you should not approach the Purpose object. You should not touch the Purpose object. Whatever it tells you, in ineffable wordless certainties, you should not listen; though at that stage, it's likely too late to simply tell you so. Instead, the Purpose objects are caged themselves in smoking metal, bolted to the heads of the machines that protect the pilots; and the huge machines, given even stolen Purpose, walk.)

The early dehalations cost so many technicians, the unsurvivable guilt inflicted by no internal moral compuntion, but as mechanically and unavoidably as Newton's Second Law. The cosmos is rigged. Attack and dethrone god? It may not be literally unthinkable, but the very rules of the cosmos make its serious contemplation aversive; and that's the ultimate proof that the tyrant has to die.

Up top, we load the machines with outlaw philosophy, antiqualia, malprayer, paradoxical and negating scriptures. Below, we salve the cosmic inflammatory response by crooning nothings to our winged and weeping POWs.

Our Father, who art in heaven: weapons hot.


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