They had come to the hospital on request. It was the best the Last City could do for those with incurable conditions. Although humanity had access to some golden age technology, nothing as convenient as a cure-all medicine existed. Unless you could harvest the light, and that power was reserved for the Guardians.
But the Guardians were heroes, especially the legendary Fire Wolf. Though the City could not save the incurably sick, it could soothe their minds and provide them with comfort. Many Guardians, Shaxx and Zavala included, frequented the pediatric wards and told the children tales of adventure, ensuring them of humanity's strength within the solar system.
This was, as expected, Jabes' first time 'volunteering'. He was encircled by children, covered in bandages. They were the ultimate outcasts of society. The 'untouchable children'. The most pitiable were finally given some reprieve, an audience with the greatest Guardian of all time. Just for them.
Jabes stared at the young lepers with disdain, the Fire Wolf had something special in mind for them. A prank of sorts.
He withdrew Sunshot, aimed it at his temple and pulled the trigger. His head burst into bits of metal gore as the children screeched in horror.
It was not Jabes' first suicide, nor even his first suicide to mock the dying. The taste of sweet oblivion never lasted more than a few, salient, orgasmic seconds. But as sweet as death was, it was paired with incomprehensible visions of a past life. A man who was barely Jabes, and certainly not the legendary Wolf of Fire.
A flashback streamed through his senses.
He was alone in a dark room, surrounded by dozens of bottles filled with yellowish-brown fluid. The stench of rotting food wafted from trash littering the ground, and an unspeakable odor emanated from a trash can overflowing with tissues.
Jabes' immense, rotund form was lit by the blue radiance of a four monitor setup. His breathing was beleaguered by rolls of fat. His heart strained against nearly closed arteries.
His fingers and arm, which was covered in a black splint, were illuminated by LED's from a mechanical keyboard. A third person game stretched across two of the screens, while a fourth played a musical video. He got a brief glimpse of the words 'Highschool DXD Anime OVA'. A strange, incomprehensible language flooded through his ears, delivered by a female voice so high pitched it bordered on the edge of hearing. On the final monitor, a drawing of a busty woman was winking at him. She was the same character as the one printed on several pillows strewn across a crusty bed.
He scratched his chin. Fingers itched over the unkempt beard on his neck. He paused the game and unzipped his trousers.
Jabes flashed back to life and spawned in front of the disfigured children.
"I am eternal. You, you are but dust in the wind."
Knight Commander Snowball had cleaned up the mess perfectly. None of the children would speak of the incident to the nurses, and the doctors got lackluster responses from children, whose remaining eyes gave only haunted, thousand yard stares.
The following week, more than three children died. The nurses and doctors were baffled, they weren't at the terminal stage just yet. It was as if they had just... given up.
Unfortunately, for whatever incomprehensible reason Jabes could not shake the thought of their broken minds. The residual feeling, guilt perhaps, stayed with him for more than three days.
Jabes frowned as he pulled the trachea out of a Fallen Dreg. He aimed his sunshot at a family of four, one bolt and the tiny fallen hatchings would pop like cherry bombs. But he stopped himself, an unfamiliar and alarming sensation filled his chest. We watched them flee to safety, the consequences of his mercy. Jabes' sense of self immediately imploded. He dialed the numbers on his comm in a panic. "Langston, am I a bad man?" He spoke into the phone.
Mr. Hugs finished handing a packet of drugs off to an orphan, patted her head and sent her away for distribution. He tilted his phone and sighed. "No Jabes, you're at worst a good man who is forced to do bad things."
Jabes' frown did not disappear. "How do you mean?"
"Well as an exo you are just the ephemeral memories of a real human, and ergo, have no autonomy. Calling you a man is even a stretch! Where are your genitals Jabes?! So you surely have no free will like myself." Langston laughed, flexing his god-given powers of choice at the depressed philosophical zombie.
"So you're saying all that I do is beyond my control? And that my suffering is caused by forces unassailable?"
"Yes, forces like those dying children. There are two forms of individuals who hold responsibility in this world — according to ethicists in the field of global responsibility. First, are moral patients. Moral patients are those without enough knowledge or agency to be responsible for their actions. Patients include the insane, animals, the mentally deficient — and by extension, Exos."
"And the second form of…" Jabes rolled the word over his tongue, it was a new and fresh term. "...responsibility?"
Langston leaned back on his throne of blood-glimmer. "Moral agents. Agents are those with the capacity for reason and conscious ability to monitor their actions. Despite being crippled by debilitating disease, those young lepers have the cognitive capacity for choice. Unlike you, who is bound as an unconscious slave to the input-output system of your neural lace, these children have the spark of the divine."
"What about my light, isn't that like the spark of the divine? Isn't that like… a soul?"
The hunter chuckled. "Your notions are as adorable as they are self serving. A piece of alien hardware, no matter how complex, cannot be compared to the actions of an omniscient demiurge. What, you think that Rasputin nuked god into dormancy? Don't be silly! You have as much agency as a vegetable, comatose or otherwise."
"How does this remove my sense of this 'responsibility'?
"As a shadowy epitaph of some long dead human, you are a moral patient. Unable to choose between right and wrong. A being whose subjective experience of this world is designed to approximate true consciousness and sentience, but can never go beyond the extent of wiring and programming. Not like humans anyway." He licked his lips and flipped through an introductory philosophy textbook. "Moral agents on the other hand, have the responsibility of taking care of moral patients because agents have real consciousness. They have the burden of choosing what's best for moral patients. After all, a brain-dead man cannot pull his own life-support. A dog that chooses to walk itself ultimately chases a plastic bag headfirst into a truck. And an exo inevitably traumatizes children."
"Good point. But where does the blame fall? Who should I punish for these feelings?"
"This is the best part, you've already serendipitously smote the culprits. It was the lepers Mr. Wolf. The lepers asked for you to come to entertain them, like some sort of dancing clown. It may not have been fair to ask them to think about all the risks, but surely at least one of them thought of the possibility, however remote, that you might be malevolent. Nothing is impossible after all, and as moral agents they had the responsibility to take into account all the possibilities that may have arisen from contracting with a moral patient." He paused for effect. "They caused you this suffering, and luckily, you returned it in turn. What's truly amazing about the whole situation is that you managed to punish them even before they transgressed upon your rights as a moral patient. I'm impressed, you wiley Rokos Basilisk you, ignoring the principles of cause and effect, time itself to inflict justice upon those cruel lepers. You should be proud of your clever input-output mechanism. Although your pride would again be simply an unconscious response to your environmental stimuli. One second…."
The orphan had returned from selling drugs. Her eyes were bright expecting praise. Langston smiled at her and wrote down the sales data in his ledger. He put a golden star sticker on her forehead and she squealed with glee. "Good job Sarah. You've exceeded the quota by five kilograms this week!" He shooed her away. "Sorry, I'm back."
"So you're saying it was the children's fault for forcing me into the hospice center? UNIBEAM."
Langston moved the phone away from his ear as the crackle of ozone interfered through the electromagnetics of the phone-line as the Fire Wolf cast Chaos Reach into a crowd of Fallen refugees.
"Exactly. Those lepers forced you into an unenviable position. Just as Clovis Bray forced you into the unenviable position of believing in your own non-existent existence. I feel for you my friend." He ushered forth the next in the line of Orphan dealers, eager for their gold stars.
"I see, those damn brats!" And just like that Jabes' guilt disappeared, just like the Fallen families before him, and he gave the matter no more thought.
The two Guardians were soon after summoned to the Helm.
"Langston, Jabes, we have to discuss the looming Vex threat. The Garden—-"
Jabes cut him off. "Fire Wolf."
Zavala pinched his nose in frustration and gave a beleaguered sigh as his will to live plummeted. "Mr. Hugs, Mr. Wolf…."
Jabes/Fire Wolf leaned back in his chair, his electronic eyes rolled back in his head. Their 'whites' trembled in ecstasy, physical pleasure from receiving acclaim and ceremony he so rightfully deserved. His eyes refocused, satisfied. He tapped his fingers together, "Yes Zavala? What can the noble clan of Fuzz do for you?"
Zavala scratched his chin and leaned back in his chair, "Unfortunately I must remain here, but I can… trust you to get results, if nothing else. Please Mr. Wolf, I can only ask that you not repeat your actions in the Vault of Glass. I can't… my heart can't…."
"The Vault of Glass?" Langston asked.
Zavala closed his eyes, the memory painful, "It is a dark story, which I'd rather not remember—-"
Jabes chimed in, "The Vault of Glass? A trifle! I pillaged it dozens of times, all it takes are five other Guardians to sacrif - erm, to assist in crippling the oracle system, vanquish the templar, and kill Atheon."
He paused, smiling at the memories that most certainly did not include an infinite cycle of death for newly woken Guardians. He stroked his own mechanical collarbone.
"The most sensual thing about time manipulating Wizard machines is that their deaths exist in a superposition of true and false time, and they rewrite history so that I never killed them. So I can kill them again. The Vex just get me. But I soon grew tired of our game. So when Oryx invaded, I allowed him to infiltrate the Vault. A deliberate, brilliant move on my part. The Vex system was crippled, and that's when I led my team in. The Vex thought they could fool us by simply opening the doors and not attacking us with their frames. But I saw through their deceit. I slaughtered every frame I saw. Once we descended into the Vault, time itself was fluid. We even came into contact with Praedyth, the Warlock lost long ago in the first Vault of Glass Raid. He came to us, weeping. Thanking us for his salvation after centuries lost in the Vex construct. He was a simulation. No doubt. I threw him head first back into the Vex portal."
Zavala lowered his head, "So many lives lost… poor Praedyth." He wiped a single tear from his eye, "There is a threat in the Black Garden. Eris has provided all the information we need but I need you both to handle it."
Fire Wolf leaned his head back, "HA. Easy. We just need some conscripts and -"
"NO!" Zavala yelled, desperate to save his fellow Guardians. "Volunteers only. And they must be experienced. No more new recruits. Our numbers can't take another hit like… like what happened on the Dreadnought."
"The Dreadnought?" Langston asked, sure where this was going.
"Oh god." Zavala whispered.
Jabes blustered, "The Dreadnought? A trifle! I ravaged -"
"NO. STOP. Just… will you do it Jabes? The City needs you now more than ever."
Jabes pondered. He was disappointed to have his usual strategy for plundering so handedly rejected, and finding actually competent Guardians was rare. He knew a few, but convincing them would be difficult. But Zavala's groveling pleased him. Physically. "Very well." He said. "Langston, it is time you met the other members of Fuzz. First, we must go to the darkest place on the planet." He said, grave. "The Library…"