Nickname

Nickname

Peturabo raised an armored hand and laid it over the still-imperfect data panel inside the chariot.

On the panel made of iron and assorted minerals, simple to the point of crudity, forms flickered from time to time. Long paper tapes recording data and commands streamed from an outlet on the side of the machine, piling up like a mountain across the chariot floor.

He had to clear them away regularly. In accordance with the principle that paper tape and carbon black came from the vast wilderness, he threw them back into nature through an opening in the side of the chariot, to await the day when additive-free wood pulp would once again be gnawed clean by things called microorganisms.

Peturabo straightened the iron-band ornament on his head, which had slipped askew while he repaired the machine. Then he opened the chariot's top hatch, letting the dusty morning air sweep across his cheeks and carry away some of his irritation.

The more he learned, the more he understood that beyond Olympia, there must once have been a broader world, a more distant utopia.

The indecipherable books in Lokos had already let him touch one corner of the long ladder leading to those lofty heavens. Countless grand designs surged from his mind to his fingertips, eager to prove his innumerable fanciful inventions. But, but!

His frustration made him pound his fists against the top of his machine, after which he immediately checked whether he had damaged it. A few minutes later, he confirmed that the machine was completely unharmed and seemed to have resumed operating normally at its sluggish pace.

Peturabo rubbed his aching hands, reclaiming that fiery feeling of anger pressed into his chest. He continued to brood over how Lokos's basic industry lagged behind his progress from every angle. Materials, theory, industrial precision, manpower... everything was too lacking, too backward.

He could not even find a single talented person capable of communicating with him normally.

He would eagerly clutch a scroll and explain to someone how dynamic multi-pooling convolutional neural network models learned sentence-level representations through frameworks based on capturing meaningful word-level semantic rules, while using dynamic multi-pooling strategies to extract trigger words and event arguments. The other person would only say, "What sentence? What god? Are you asking about the god of poetry?"

Oh, except Mors.

Mors would only mock him, asking whether he truly believed his theories were flawless. If that fellow had just finished basking in the sun and was in high spirits, he could at least discuss a few deeper, more enlightening subjects.

Peturabo could not deny, even to himself, that those were among the moments he looked forward to most.

The other was, naturally, when his creator came to find him. He would definitely compare Mors with his true creator, and then he could say: Mors, your character is truly beyond contempt.

A chariot caught up with him from behind. Its top hatch also gradually opened, and Calipha stood up inside, waving to him. Her long hair was tied back with a ribbon that bore black-and-yellow stripes in someone's unmistakable style, proclaiming the identity of the ribbon's giver.

She cupped her hands around her mouth like a little speaking trumpet, though the distance between them was already close enough for Peturabo to hear her clearly.

"Why are you throwing paper slips out again, Peturabo?" Calipha shouted, her voice brimming with teasing laughter. "The wind blew them all into my hands!"

As she spoke, she grabbed a long strip of paper tape from her seat, letting its perforated lengths rise and fall in the airflow.

"You should keep the top hatch shut!" Peturabo shouted back.

"I can't! Then my driver won't be able to see the road ahead!"

"Is your glass opaque, Calipha?"

Calipha smiled even more brightly, her black strands of hair gleaming. "The driver says he can't observe the surroundings through that glass. He isn't used to it."

"One day, I'll make it so people don't have to observe the battlefield with their naked eyes. It's too foolish!"

"Ah, I'm looking forward to your achievements!"

"Let's sit down and talk!"

Peturabo pulled down the top hatch, drew out the cable for receiving radio waves, and plugged it into the port of his humming machine.

Before long, Calipha's voice rang clearly by Peturabo's ear through the radio waves the locals called "Twin Gods' Telepathy." No longer needing to shout, her voice softened again, more like that of a close blood relative chatting intimately.

"This is the first time you've left Lokos since you came here," Calipha said. "And you're acting with thoughts of war rather than peace."

She paused there. Perhaps she wanted to ask whether Peturabo was prepared, or perhaps she wanted to ask how far he intended to take this war before he would stop.

The current carried her silence, and silence often allowed the listener to interpret it according to the desires of his own heart.

Peturabo leaned back against his seat, pinning the draft paper he used for calculations to a wooden board. At the same time, he spoke stiffly. "If I don't take soldiers with me, then once I leave Lokos, I won't be able to return."

"Yes..." Calipha sighed. "Actually, this is my first time leaving Lokos too."

"When Dameks visits neighboring countries, he doesn't take you with him?"

Calipha's laughter produced a small burst of static in the current. "Harkon going is enough. What would I go for? To see which Prince might suit my fancy?"

Her laughter dissolved into Peturabo's silence. A thread of hollow dimness drifted through the current, roaring with weight. That emotion tore open a breach along the outside of Peturabo's heart, and a bond intertwined and extended between them.

For one brief instant, Peturabo suddenly questioned why he could still sit there so silent, so cold, analyzing this absurd situation with reason.

Then he remembered why he had been pushing everything forward so urgently, and whether he was truly changing all things and all lives across the vast land of Olympia.

"All right, Peturabo," Calipha said gently. "You're about to become a real general. And I am a busy quartermaster under the esteemed general, arranging all his logistics and sending out round after round of fodder to feed the army."

"No more idle chatter. I need to see whether your soldiers have eaten their lunch."

After saying that, Calipha was about to cut the connection. Her hand should already have been on the depressed button, ready to press it again and make it pop back up.

Peturabo called out to stop her. "Wait, Calipha."

"What is it?"

Peturabo looked at the road before him through the glass. "What Mors tells me most often is to be honest."

He did not know what he was saying. He merely spoke, parting his lips and tongue, letting the words climb up from his heart and march outward through the open passage. His calmness exceeded even his own rational expectations.

"So I allow you—I hope you will call me by a shorter syllable."

He heard a sharp intake of breath. That trembling current pierced directly into the deepest shudder of his soul.

For a moment, he even felt profound despair at his own rash expectation, until Calipha's voice sounded again. "Bo, would that be all right?"

"Of course, Calipha," Peturabo blurted out.

From that moment on, he knew he no longer needed to wage an endless, repeating battle of suffering against his own weaknesses.