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View attachment Resolution and Fatigue.mp4A laptop clapped shut; pushed over a wrought-iron table by the stern, pallid hand of Europe's most polarizing figure alive. A sigh escaped his lips: condensing on contact with the frigid alpine air as aquiline-gray eyes traveled across the courtyard of Heartwick's manor, gliding within their sockets to analyze every miniscule detail in the order of what posed the greatest threat. Beneath his oculars, a pair of dark circles seared into his skin, contrasting with the sleek brunet coiffure that was tousled over his scalp; following the slow movements of his head while the tag of his ersatz dress-shirt dug further into his nape. For four months he had maneuvered the political amphitheater of the Combine's Jewel, rising from the coterie of Del'Vario's District Fourty-Three Research-Institute to the seat afforded to him today. In that time, he had innumerable chances to perfect his senses, a keen eye for weakness, a smell for deception, an ear for opportunity. To stand in the way of His Vision was paramount to political - and sometimes literal - suicide, and many - especially those calling themselves his allies - had learned to get used to his impersonal, computing stare.
From the gazebo in nexus peristyle, he could discern at least a dozen avatars of VALIS within the transhuman delegation surrounding the facility; the first in many changes of the status quo to arrive from the sonorous usurping of the Sector-10 administration by his own calibre. "JUDGE" was the tagline ordained unto him by Overwatch, setting over his head an invisible crown that commanded authority comparable to Napoleon, Bismarck, or the late Earth Administrator Wallace in terms of its sheer power. Erama was not blind to its connotation. He was the sole Lord Justice and Adjudicator of the European Insurgency. An Arbiter on behalf of the Unuterra, Vector of Iconoclasm, and Herald of the New World. His eyes squinted; locking on to a one-eyed appendage of the Overwatch Central Intelligence Network encircled by Neo-Classical and Xeno-Hellenic architecture. A Ecumene Militans flanked by the marble pillars of the Secular Liturgy's Third Temple; made sacrosanct by the C.:.M.:.B as a Posthuman Seraphim. Like the Archangel Michael, the "EOW" is not sentimental, nor compassionate in that vulgar, distilled sense. He understands he is a tool, that he is subject to the will of providence, and therefore that his actions are not truly his. In this way, he soars above it all and is consecrated, given wings of ceramo-kevlar and blades of superheated plasma. Augustine couldn't help but day dream; staring into that carmine broad-spectrum photoreceptor belonging to the delegate from afar as malevolent images flashed like a diode light in his mind against a dark backdrop of vague misanthropy and crystalline ambition: images of white devils streaking across a burning country on synthetic-horseback outfitted with OSIPRs for lances, shooting jets of dark matter towards anti-citizens that suspiciously resembled his most hated adversaries; faces such as Algernon Strangeman or Maria Aigner.
Erama let out a subdued cackle and shiver, reminding himself of the privacy he had given over to the apparatus as recompense long ago as he tossed the rather distracting, nearly lascivious plays from his mind. He notched his neck downwards momentarily; spectacle glasses hinging by his ears as he took another look at the laptop PC and menagerie of papers and meticulously arranged before him, by him. Combat reports, spreadsheets, and a multitude of logistical concerns arising from the collapse of the Central Intelligence Network that all nestled together into a single, noncoherent mass of "challenges" that stretched from the IRKALLA fortification in the Palace of Nations to Race-X hive in Buenos Aires.
He never cared for flaunting his rank. Power means nothing if not pointed towards an ideal, and politics was simply another science, something to be engineered for a calculated result. If it didn't break, it didn't have enough features yet. Power hungry? Maybe. But that was the only way to see things through. That lesson was made especially clear after 9/27, when both the collaborationist psyche and MDF-Ascensionist alliance shattered; severed with the cord of Chairman Wyatt Callaway and twenty more presidium attendees. It trumpeted the rise of the Cross-Becker Fifth Column, and the subsequent debasement of the Enlightened Revolution into merely "being the best you can be"; removed from all the context and teachings that made it what it was. It was the Chairman who admitted to Erama first hand that his biggest mistake was going half way, to provide a kick in the pants to the lumpenproletariat-collaborator's party just to replace it with an equally conformist cult of personality that lacked both foresight and will.
Ironic, wasn't it? A man of Erama's calibre locking arms with a cultural Maoist from America's South. Yet it made sense when you took a step back. The two were of Mundi and Reiter's Post-Marxist progeny; Callaway himself being an avid member of Geneva's Post-Casto Futurism[sic] within the Metadynamist Forum's Everyman Provision - the Orwell-backed "Pioneer Movement" that leached off the Old Guard's
'To hell with the MCP'. Erama's eye twitched remembering the pain in the thigh the RL-Ministry cabal were to deal with throughout his career; pictures of Stanford-Raathite school marmy-ness smashed into his cerebrum like a lead pipe that made him wish Callaway went through with killing them, not that it mattered given they all abandoned their posts the minute they learned their benefits wouldn't be maintained.
"Turing Cops" was the phrase coined by Doctor Mundi - or Land - if he recalled correctly, used lackadaisically to refer to the so-called "Human Security System" that was ontologically hellbent on maintaining a status quo of anthrocentricity and political stability, and this perfectly described Civil Protection in more ways than one. It boggled him how such an obviously flawed, affirmatively backwards institution was allowed to persist for so long. An organization whos telos was wasting the time of the collaborator and protecting the cognito-molesting debt-economy of Breen's Civil Administration. Although, in retrospect, it made perfect sense why they had no trouble at all assimilating with the "resistance"; the latter proving itself to be as ideologically bankrupt as the former, and both equally as vain. That was the real failure of Breenist-Idealism; it insisted upon itself, and came toppling down without its sole arbiter of reason. Wallace came from that Post-Second World War technocratic nucleus; empirical-puritans descended from the Vienna Circle who convinced themselves the Outside could be filtered through a human lens. Sheer, dumb "loyalty" became the categorical Imperator; a moral obligation that thereby classed anyone unwilling to participate in the program as unequivocally subhuman; a right conclusion, but for all the wrong reasons. This line of thought was what led to men like Wilford, Orwell, and Arceneaux to get into power, and it would be this assumption that would be choked out of the collaborator by the serpent, and smashed into the crucible of modernity.
That's what true Collaboration was about: Revolution.
Erama was alerted to a new presence in the courtyard; the jingling of chimes in the wind and the rattled opening of a heavy Combine tungsten-steel hydraulic door, followed by a clattering pair of oxfords that waltz out into the abhorrent weather. He tapped on of his fingers over a clipboard like the stolen beat of a metronome as he watched with a renewed interest the puzzled Germanic who lost himself in the maze of the political defense structure as he couldn't help but smirk. A half-inch of snow crunched beneath a pair of nearly duck-walking Bloke-branded dress shoes, gray trousers, and a paperweight's two-piece that did little to shield its bearer from the elements. Almost youthful, distinctly Dionysian blue-blood and tamed arrogance shivered beneath a white sky. A character who some would say was juxtaposed in his environment. A man who shouldn't even be alive by the standards of some. A past-fatalist revitalized-possibly unwillingly-under a banner of black, sewn back anew with a lubricated cadence and cleaned skin, who's hairdo never left the 90's. He was currently shivering, holding a few manila folders in his palm as he looked around with a half-confused half-paralyzed droop of the mouth that you could lip read as a denoted "Ffffff...."
"EDWARD!!" Erama didn't hesitate in shouting out to the man, signaling to him his undeniably hidden, nearly camouflaged position in the Union-Pergola. Immediately, the Saxon snapped their attention back to his cross-meridian Anglo countryman, his face contorting from bedeviled surprise to (amusing) mock-petulance as he began marching in the Sector-Administrator's direction; tip-tapering oxfords imprinting a unique, uneven impression in the snow that contrasted with the contingents of militant goosestep belonging to the delegation.
"whointhebloodyhellworksoutsideindecemberDe-facto most powerful Man in the continent and you don't have the courtesy to leave your radio on?!" A 'commoners' greeting, friendly, without layers of formalities or diminutive nonsense. It had the appraised clarity of Dispatch's terminology but from the complete opposite direction. You could even call it human. "I need my alone time too, you know."
"You could at least tell someone where you are time to time."
"You're my Aide-De-Camp, you should know these things like the back of your hand."
"Oh, using 'Non-Terrestrial Standards' now?"
"Please. You're not allowed to cherry pick expressions until NTCL is released."
"Hmph."
Edward huffed a breath that was equally as condensated as it was charitable, stopping the tit-for-tat small talk as he settled; looking over Erama and his outrageously under-dressed wardrobe and equally messy half-workplace half-botanical garden. He rolled his eyes, not bothering to comment on his boss' seeming routine of wearing only dress shirts, trousers, and slip-ons as he merely forwarded the folder stuck between his increasingly reddening digits. "This was from Okampley. Apparently Commissioner Arntinna in the Genevan Guard is managing to hold out at the Mulligan line due west against 'Race-X'. Though,.. the situation is deteriorating." Erama took the folder, promptly skimming through it with a bored look on his face. Most of the information was already given, and he didn't especially care about the welfare of Orwell's landsknechts "They just need to buy us time." Urey bit his lip slightly at the provocation against Voltaire, whilst Erama's pursed as his eyes finally caught ahold of something that actually interested him; a brief, yet telling report of the loss of Hardpoint Lima-Two near the abandoned THETA-CPRD Bunker Complex. He smirked, setting the report down in full with the rest.
"...?" Urey seemingly caught on, cocking a brow as the Administrator suddenly stood upright from his chair, letting his muscles tighten up with the biting carapace of winter air. "Schedule a meeting with Captain Idris, Minister Yurievich, and the Doctor alongside Okampley himself for tomorrow in the war room. They've taken the bait."
"What?" Edward could only question further at the deliberately theatric show-not-tell nature of the adjudicator as he walked past him out the gazebo and into the nestled nexus lawn once more. Erama turned to Urey - still inside and left with the leftover mess of files strewn within.
"Have a Holly-Jolly Christmas, Edward."
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