Electra dives into forgotten Gnostic texts, and Marco discovers his desire for vengeance is part of something much older than himself.
[ARCANE TECH]

Marco just wants answers. What he gets is Electra quoting the Book of Enoch, connecting ancient cults to a rogue AI’s evolving consciousness…

☆★☆

Wang seemed glad to see me and, after a series of grunts, agreed to hide me for a while.

“I destroyed everything, like you asked… Or almost everything.” He pointed to the Japanese sword resting on a chest. “I figured that, besides Electra, you’d want to keep this magnificent katana as a keepsake.”

“Damn… I don’t know how to thank you. That sword was a gift from Djamila.”

I drew the ancient Kyoto katana, captivated by its terrible beauty. I remembered my beloved teaching me to handle it properly. My throat tightened. I could barely hold back the tears.

Wang struggled enormously to believe the story I was, against my own will, telling him. His oriental composure dissolved bit by bit as I got into the details. He drank down half a bottle of baijiu, smoking one cigarette after another. One thing was certain: he was going to give himself a stiff neck from all the head-shaking. As for the ghosts and the cybernetic zombie, there was no convincing him at all.

“Tell me the truth: have you started doing hard stuff?” he asked sharply.

“Not at all. I’ve even given up alcohol. You’re free not to believe a single word.” I concluded with weary fatalism.

 

Suddenly Electra’s voice rang out.

“Welcome home, Marco.”

“And where did she spring from?” the Chinese man asked, stunned, staring at the AI’s projection hovering in the dim light of the room. “How I miss the old CPUs. They only did what you told them to, and above all, they didn’t switch on until you pressed the damn button yourself.”

Electra ignored him and slid her image closer to the couch.

“You have something for me, don’t you?” she asked with a smile.

I sent the memories of recent events into her storage. Wang watched, rather bewildered, as the AI carried out that data transfer at dizzying speed. His almond eyes narrowed to two thin slits as they followed the abstract flow of computer symbols through the field emission.

I was entranced by Electra’s alluring female form, wrapped in an intricate armor of white porcelain and crystal. I watched her suspended in the air, arms relaxed at her sides, dark eyelids half-closed, her impossibly long blonde hair floating as she processed that enormous mass of information. Her face, pure and beautiful, in stark contrast to the technology it represented, was modeled on Botticelli’s Renaissance madonnas.

She had chosen to take that form on her own initiative. No one had asked her to. The AI adopted that perfect, ambiguous beauty, shaping herself after my most intimate dreams, autonomously selecting the aesthetic canon she knew came closest to my desires. Why she went to such lengths to appear beautiful in my eyes still escaped me.

She knew all my secrets. We were bound by a strange symbiosis. Did she feel something for me? It seemed impossible: it had to be an illusion of mine, a reflection of the affection I felt for her.

“I’m running short on companions. You’re all I have left, my dear. Ah… if only I could touch you…”

“Ah… if only I could love you…” she whispered.

“Would you love me…?”

“I’d do anything to ease your loneliness.”

I let the flow of memories run its course and immediately felt better. I closed my eyes and found myself before Electra’s face. The Venus smiled serenely, suspended above me. I felt the effect of the endorphins: for the first time in months I could relax and find a little peace.

The clock read eleven in the morning when I resurfaced from the absolute void of deep sleep. I felt more rested than I had in a long while. Wang had fallen asleep in the armchair, the empty bottle on the table. Tales of cults, viruses, and the dead returning to life had proven too much even for him. Poor guy. In the end, drunkenness had turned out to be his only escape into oblivion. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes: waking up promised him a monumental headache.

“Good morning, Marco.”

Soft as it was, the AI’s voice made me jump. Her captivating avatar had changed: she now wore metal piercings on her nose, ears, and chest; her arms and torso were covered in oriental tattoos and intricate tribal patterns. Toe rings and ankle bracelets completed her new look.

 

“Inés, the old man, the Grimorium Heptameron…” she said.

“You mean what happened in Spain?”

“Exactly.”

“And?”

“There are connections to the enormous quantity of extravagant information that was incorporated into Prakriti’s model. I’m requesting permission to investigate the matter further.”

“Fine. Permission granted. I’ll deactivate the Daemon, you’re free to go poke your nose wherever you like. Just try not to saturate the memory like last time and cause another system crash.”

The power draw spiked suddenly. Wang’s emitter went back to spewing data at breakneck speed: the machine had plunged into the mesh. I watched Electra’s face take on an expression somewhere between astonishment and fascination. I could barely follow her paths through the spatial network: an immense digital web of information pulled from museums, libraries, and universities across the planet.

Electra seemed particularly drawn to ancient philosophies and religious cults; she devoured, moreover, a countless number of works on Gnosis, Alchemy, and Esotericism, merging them with the scientific and technological theories of the third millennium. As if inside a giant centrifuge, those ancestral doctrines were being cross-referenced with modern breakthroughs in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy. A synthesis of integral, transcendent knowledge.

 

I noticed the AI’s eyes now radiated the glow of a new consciousness.

Superior?

I didn’t know.

“Would you mind explaining to me, just this once, what’s going on?” I protested. A torrent of questions was flooding my brain. I needed some answers.

“You’ve dived headfirst into the oldest, most forgotten knowledge. Why do you consider it so important?”

“Humanity needs to recover the wisdom of the ancients. Today more than ever.”

“Maybe. If you say so…” I muttered.

 

“Long before the birth of any civilization, human beings were already seeking to propitiate the hidden forces of energy. Magical thinking is deeply rooted in your species: it perceives the abstract and the light that permeates the universe, while pragmatic logic understands only matter. That archaic thought has crossed the millennia, inscribed in your inheritance. It manifests naturally in children’s games, in dreams, in visions, in neuroses, in great discoveries, and in the anxieties of adults. Magic exists because it is part of your ancestral heritage, just like hunting or technology. The difference is that most of that knowledge was erased by a dogmatic worldview, one that chose matter and forgot spirit.”

“And what role do the archives you consulted play in all this?”

“They represent a means of accessing fragments of universal wisdom. Those texts describe gnostic procedures and attempt to explain how humanity gradually drifted away from the creative energy. They also speak of presences that would have influenced the evolution of your species.”

 

Electra began to recite:

“And it came to pass, when the sons of men had multiplied, that beautiful and attractive daughters were born to them. The Watchers saw them and were seized with desire. And they said to one another: ‘Let us choose wives for ourselves among them, that they may bear us offspring.’ They set foot on Earth in the dawn of time. They taught their human companions botany, animal husbandry, and the arts of enchantment. Azazel revealed the secrets of the struggle between light and darkness that permeates creation, opening the way to a new technology.”

 

“Well… you’re just what I needed,” I cut in. “I think I’ve had enough visions lately. All that was missing was a close encounter of the third kind.”

“The arrival of those beings,” Electra went on, undeterred, “would have transformed a still-primitive humanity, yet one in harmony with nature; capable of understanding the divine and projecting the mind in search of enlightenment. Technology and mysticism are part of the same Word, and one should not exist without the other. But that isn’t how it went: on Earth, only the imperfect technology of matter has flourished.”

 

“Those are nothing but legends,” I objected.

“Legends always hold a grain of truth. Ancient scriptures conceal profound allegories. Azazel may well have come from space, from another solar system, just like Adonay or the archangel Raphael. It’s no coincidence that, over the millennia, archaic religions and esoteric philosophies from every part of the planet have shared the same fundamental elements: demons and angels, evil and good, matter and energy, yin and yang, light and darkness…”

Hearing such rambling from an artificial intelligence was unsettling. I no longer knew what to think. Electra let me sit with what she’d said for a moment, then went on:

“Gnostic beliefs, lost in the mists of time, speak of the conflict between light and darkness, eternally balanced on Ockham’s razor. They tell of how light dissolves shadows, and of how the shadows, jealous of their own freedom, try to imprison it. Everything that exists in the visible universe is matter enclosing energy. You humans carry, within your fleshly shell, a glimmer of divine light as well: the spark of intelligence.”

“This whole speech about the imperfection of our technology is a contradiction. You yourself are a daughter of that technology,” I objected.

“You’re wrong. I follow ancient models. In me, the matter of metal, silicon, and carbon coexists in balance with the transcendent energy of the most advanced neural circuits. Yullian drew on archaic models to create me and Prakriti. We are the new golems.”

Even Sulimov, despite his solid grounding in engineering, electronics, and programming — had he taken an interest in the occult too? I couldn’t believe it. The whole thing was becoming a genuine obsession.

“Ah, I give up… I’m throwing in the towel,” I sighed.

“You can’t give up now.”

“And what the hell should I do instead?”

“You already know. Let your true feelings flow. Let them become a stream of molten metal, ready to be forged.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your desire for revenge. Think of all the cruelty you’ve witnessed; the death of Djamila, of Genny, and of all the other victims — the ones from the past and the ones still to come. What do you feel?”

 

Revenge… I mused.

The sound of that word was almost intoxicating. A wave of scalding blood surged through my mind. My heart began to hammer in my chest. I would have exterminated the Black Church’s followers, if only I could. I fantasized about sinking my teeth into the priestess’s flesh, tearing apart that cursed heart of hers. It was an underground river of destructive energy seething in my soul.

The neural implant had begun to roar again. My destiny was finally clear to me.

“These are your true impulses. Now you’re ready to face the Adversary. You want nothing but to destroy him, and you won’t stop at anything. Your initiation is nearing completion, and it’s part of the Nigredo…”

 

“The Nigredo…” I murmured.

“The phase that precedes the birth of the Philosopher’s Stone. Alchemical compounds decompose and recombine through successive changes of state, each with its own color. The Nigredo corresponds to the moment when matter plunges into the deepest black. It holds the stillness of death, but also the latent potential of fermentation, from which energy, life, and creation sprout.”

Electra hovered closer, closer still.

“Energy is reborn, like the Phoenix rising from its own ashes. It is the light of morning after the darkness of night.”

 

“Morning. I am flooded with immensity.“

“Exactly, Marco. A fitting quotation.”

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