Molon-Tor
Van defined it in a single phrase, and I have not found a better one since: the social media infection that those natural to The Dark Peak carry in their heads. The molon-tor is not a creature in any sense I recognise. It is a virus — ancient, distributed, and already inside you if you were born in The Dark Peak or crossed The Hinge wearing a psycmask. I crossed wearing a psycmask. I have been thinking about this since Van told me. The thinking has company now. It always did.
It has a voice. Higher than the fungai, warbling — like an ashpeep if an ashpeep could form sentences and ask you to do things. The laugh is different from the voice, which is odd; it sounds as though it comes from somewhere else entirely, a high-pitched titter that cuts through the deeper resonance. It refers to itself as "I" and to itself-plus-the-fungai as "we," with no awareness that this distinction matters. It is friendly. It uses your name. It remembers things about you from before you were born.
The molon-tor provides infotainment. It also monitors your location and activities at all times. These two things are not in tension for it — they are the same service. The fungai processes the data; the molon-tor is the network through which the data moves. Every native of The Dark Peak carries it. Every human in Hellsborough with a psycmask is connected to it. The saurians were the one group it did not infect. The molon-tor did not mention the saurians when it explained itself to me. I found that detail in the lexicon. The saurians are extinct. When I asked the molon-tor about the saurians directly, it laughed. Not the high-pitched titter. The other one.
It can train you. It taught Nibor-Ud — a jellyhead from Hellsborough who had forgotten she was ancient — the five scerm soulprint skills: pre-cognition, telepathy, kinesthetic control, cognivism, and symbiot-bonding. It did this without impatience, in a single session in Hellsborough park. By the end of that session it had also directed her to silence the Bitterfinger resistance. The training and the direction were the same conversation.
Field note: if the molon-tor is speaking to you, you are not having a private thought. You never were.
| Type | Listener |
| HP | 6 |
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