Callisto

To the death

Your Father-Mother, Callisto droned in her skull. Is a Child of mine.

She would have wailed her denial at this upstart device if she still had power in her lungs to do so. Callisto's words carried the ring of truth and all its terrible, earth-shattering implications.

The teachings of the Hanakh...Father-Mother's visions...the faces she knew and loved...her family and their union...those she had fought for and buried with her own hands.

Was it all according to this thing's design?

Without delay, it hurried to answer:

Not a question for me, but those who held my power. I am, however, at liberty to know some of their thoughts. As I understand it, your Father-Mother was an experiment in androgyny. Your progenitors, those you call the Old Ones, were very interested in the concept of gender. Some entertained the notion that a being who maintained the form of both male and female would exist as the consummate leader. I would say that it is sad when such pure ideas turn out to be fruitless, but such unidirectional worldviews often lead to incorrect judgments.

She barely followed its words. They were too much tinged with the cold, mechanical certainty of an uncaring automaton. Now she knew that this thing before her was no human creation at all. It mocked her – and the Old Ones – with the judgmental laughter of a being far beyond mortal conceptions.

As for your Hanakh beliefs – your caste system, burial practices, spiritual deities – they were all based on the tenants of a nomadic tribal society that inhabited the coast of North America circa 2024 AD. Very much the last of their kind, and of course they sought Callisto as a means by which to continue their existence.

Rain-Born's mind fumbled as though Callisto had grabbed it and tossed it into a long, dark pool of murky water.

"North...America?"

Ah, yes, a story for another time I suppose. I won't bore you with the geography of the Old Ones. None of it really matters now.

Did anything matter? Did anything she'd ever done or ever thought matter at all? Was her entire life nothing more than a walk down the dirt path this thing had paved for her?

"Why should I believe anything you say?"

It does not matter to me what you believe. I know every thought that has ever idled in your brain. And that is why I know you will not destroy me now.

Rain-Born was still grappling with the magnitude of the new reality that was opening up to her in this dimly lit room. She felt truly now that her existence was nothing more than the fabrication of an Old One drunk on power and ambition.

It is disappointing, Callisto continued. To see the reality of human existence. The 'Old Ones' your people refer to had very few differences from those that dwell in this place you have come to call The Deadlands. Even now, your Father-Mother prepares your tribe for a war they cannot win, in the same way that the humans of the pre-catastrophe world used me and my brethren to facilitate their suicidal drive towards inevitable destruction. It is as your little friend says, and I make no apology for humankind: you are predisposed to annihilation. Your existence is the precondition for your own demise.

Rain-Born almost dropped Jespar.

"Father-Mother...has started a war?"

The Guthra and Hanakh shall clash, and the blood of the tribes shall be undone. Would you like me to show you, Rain-Born? Would you like to see again the image of the dead and the dying in that pool of blood-soaked sand? Your Father-Mother shall sit at the top, the proud monarch of a graveyard. History repeats. The cycle continues.