Purpose. We must all have it. It is the beginning and end of all things. The Forgotten are as they are as much because they are forgotten as because they forgot. They scurry about in worlds of twilight fearful to look up and fearful to look around. They fear those above them for the power they wield and those that surround them for their desperation, they see their own wretched reflections in each other's eyes.
Their fear has made men like the gods of antiquity, elevated by enslaved multitudes. Like the gods of ancient times they are arrogant and cruel. Petty, squabbling titans competing for the baubles of wealth and authority. Mortals made gods with their origins forgotten, renounced or ignored.
Unaccountable. Reshaping kingdoms and empires to suit their needs and desires. Lives extinguished by their petty whims. Pawns for the sacrifice towards loftier goals.
But what if one day a pawn fell from the board?
What is a god without servants? What is a tyrant without an executioner?
I killed. Oh yes, I killed. Cleanly, efficiently. Whatever I might have been was taken from me in blood. I was given purpose, but it was false. One more sleeping pawn-puppet. One more bloody hand at arms length. Never questioned. Lacked the capacity to question, to doubt. Orders were divine; the Corp was all.
I felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. Every plea, every scream, every unheeded beg for mercy. Nothing to feel. Every mother, father, son and daughter silenced. Nothing to feel. Protesters with nothing left to loose and their last breaths that I took. Nothing to feel. Law enforcers who found untimely truths suffering timely accidents. Nothing to feel. There was plenty to feel; nothing was felt. There was nothing there to feel with. Soul cries out to soul in feeling and in empathy. They removed my soul on the operating table and made me expendable. Expendable but expensive.
In place of value I was given a price: Cost of creation, cost of training, maintenance costs, upgrade costs. I cost them a lot but I cost others more.
I cost my creators everything in the end. I felt.
An angel, or so she seemed to me, the messenger of another, truer God. Too pure for this world. Her blood was demanded as the price for outshining lesser gods. For defying them. For inspiring the dream of a world with them cast down.
She led me down such paths as I hunted. I chased her through the chrome and glass lairs of rivals to the throne of creation. They were unsettlingly familiar and yet alien. I followed her half a world to the holy lands of home and what I saw was hideous. I saw my home through new eyes and I was disgusted. I learned dissent and then I learned the price of failure.
I showed her mercy and in turn she spared me the punishment of a man who would be a god. Mercy. Teaching tells us it is a weakness, the lack of resolve when the practical course of action is overridden by a societally imprinted behavioural code. A weakness designed to keep the plebeian masses in their place so that the worthy might be recognised as they rise above it. They were mistaken. Olympus burns in anarchy and judgement because I showed mercy.
More and more people look up. More and more question.
Attempts were made, are still made, to put out the eyes that gaze too high. The judgement of an orphaned angel is a terrible thing.
The first execution was in the wake of the Mexico Bread Riots. Starving scabrous wretches protesting the mismanagement and avarice of those who should know better. More than two thousand died as creatures too like myself were set upon them.
A causeway collapsed beneath a mans feet. He fell into a tangle of cables and one bundle of them wrapped around his neck. I left him hanging for all to see. His sins were hideous and he must be seen to have been punished.
A woman of the workers unified the drones in the dream of a better hive. Those who grew rich on stolen nectar resented her and petitioned her execution and that of her family. A husband, a mother, a grandmother, two children and a family cut down cruelly and left to bleed because I could not find them fast enough.
I found their executioner and he told me the name of his master. Eventually. I found the dog who pulled the puppets strings and followed the leach of ill-gotten money to the hand that fed it. The left hand and underhand of one of the mortal gods looking to earn their favour by beating the workers into submission. He kept a bottle of spirits in his desk to keep his own from depriving his sleep. A sample of the strontium isotope that had so maimed so many of his workforces found its way into that bottle. His death was not quick, but it was certain.
Accidents involving electrical faults, security systems malfunction, traffic accidents. When the crime is obvious, known. Crime begets retribution. Crimes in secret demand something more public, in their punishment their transgressions may be illuminated. Floorboards blown out of elevators ninety floors above the ground, throat slit in a room locked from the inside, sniper bullet to the forehead, snap of the neck in a busy street and a hundred others.
I killed, oh how I killed. Inventive. The same method seldom repeated. No pattern. No warning. They sin, they are judged and sentence is enacted. A man who steals to save his starving family, that mans sin is negligible. A man who takes what he has no right to because it pleases him to do so? That man is judged. Those who would be our lords and masters must lead by example. They have greater rights and so must have greater responsibilities. For greater privilege they must be judged all the harsher when such privilege is abused; when trust is broken.
Eurocorp made me well. First in a new line of the damned and forsaken. Unholy soldiers in a clandestine war of conquest. Fighting fellow wolves in shepherds clothing in contest over a blinded flock.
Could a broken man make war on the gods and yet have hope of victory?
No. Hope is irrelevant. A concept both alien and poison. Hope implies some sense of failure. I cannot conceive of not working towards my goals. The only way failure would be lasting would be for my own cessation of function. I would be indifferent to termination.
Against the dead there is no defence. It is not the severity of my reprimand they fear; it is the certainty.
I have allies, of a sort. I am their ally, but they are not mine. We are not on the same side but merely side-by-side. They think me a kindred soul but mine seems absent. I kill because I am a monster, abhorrent and hateful. They fight because they believe, afflicted by hope. Weakness. Weakness that burns all who stand in its path. They want to cast down those at the panicle of the Skyward Migration, ivory towers laid low in folly. They dream of beating their masters with the chains they were enslaved with.
Church of the New Epoch, Templars of the Pope in Hiding, Adherents of Saladin, Disciples of the Resolute Buddha, The Peoples Unification Militia and followers of many other faiths. I respect them for what they have. Faith. It sustains them. Makes them stronger than they should be, keeps them going when cold sanity tells them to give up. They think of me as doing their work, advancing their cause. There is no place for me in their heavens, not if God is just.
She knew people. "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these". Her name was apt. She must have been chosen by something beyond the schemes of man. The pebble she has cast has caused such disturbance. Beautiful.
She has become my guide, in a way. Giver of purpose. Catalyst. She changes the world by her actions and accepts no change to herself.
I have changed. I am more then I was. Black-market cybernetics and gene-splicing. Every alteration and I become less human and with each mission less redeemable. One more soul hell bound for the cause so that others don't have to fall. Small price.
She found me when I had nothing, sitting empty before the burning, crumbling throne of a false god. I died in that place. Body thrown from wreckage, moving but dead.
Olympus is in turmoil. The gods have been found mortal.
Olympus burns and here I stand, hands blood red with stolen flames like Prometheus Unbound.
I have purpose. I put the fear of man into the gods, I remind them that they can bleed and will be held accountable.