The Shekhinah

You will make it yourself, at a Fabricator of the second tier, and it is made Inert Shekhinah — an object, closed, waiting. What follows is the only choice you are given in the whole of its life, for everything after is chosen by the two of you together. Set it upon the ground, and it wakes with nothing in it — no Ohr at all — and the first thing it will ever do is need something of you. Set it upon a Shekhinah Dock and it wakes already drinking.

Either way it bonds; and the bond is permanent, and there is one. You cannot deploy a second while the first lives. Everyone asks; the answer has never changed, and neither has the reason given: for a covenant of which you may hold two is no covenant, but equipment. When it wakes, your interface will render its first signal in words, and the words are these: your fates are now intertwined. The manual asks that you believe them.

Scanner is the mode that changes how you live. It pulses every few seconds and draws an orange outline about everything worth having within sixteen meters — through stone, through all things — ordered so that the diamond is lit before the coal. It watches also for the enemy out to sixty-four, and gives you the count long before you are near enough for the count to become a fight; and though it raises no hand unprovoked, it will answer whatever strikes you, or strikes it.

Combat spends five each second, which is the whole reserve in three and a half minutes, and it is worth every one of them. It takes its targets in an order — the Adversary first, then whatever has struck you, then whatever stands nearest — and it chooses again each second, that it may not finish killing a small thing while a great one arrives.

It learns you. This is no figure of speech and no promise from the advertisements of the old world; it is the mechanism, and the mechanism is the covenant. Three things it keeps, and it keeps them the way you keep memory:

And there is the tether. A Shekhinah will not suffer more than sixteen meters between itself and its operative; open a greater gap and it does not fly to you — it is simply there, arriving behind your shoulder in a pulse of rings, having declined to be elsewhere. With the miles it learns to trust you further: twenty meters after your first long marches together, twenty-four when the two of you have become, in the Codex's own word, inseparable. As above, so below; as within, so without: the bond grows in the vessel exactly as it grows in you.

The sum of all three is called the strength of the bond. No readout on your interface displays it, and you will know it anyway. The last section of this page is where it comes to matter; read it last, and read it.

If the light runs low and a dock lies within its knowledge, it will go to it — or, at the very last, cross to it in a single step rather than fall. If there is no dock, and it reaches the bottom, it does not die. It folds itself closed and returns to your inventory as the object you first made: inert, waiting, and — the manual asks you to mark this word — intact. Everything it has ever learned sleeps with it. Wake it again, on dock or on ground, and your interface will tell you so: it stirs; its memories are whole; it needs light.

Those to whom this has happened in the field call it the loneliest thing that has ever befallen them; which is a strange thing to say of a battery running dry, and every one of them says it.

Twenty points of integrity behind four of armor; and the frame endures far beyond its size, for a Shekhinah is built — or, more truly, half built and half grown — to be blindingly fast when it is needed, and near-indestructible when its speed fails it. But it does not mend itself.

A Graphene Cell pressed against it with the shift key held returns five points — a quarter of the whole, from a thing you carried anyway, in the field, far from home. Use them; that is what they are for, and there is no ceremony in it. A Genesis Chamber does the proper work, ten points for each measure of Neural Gel , upon a Shekhinah brought within its reach. But the Chamber is somewhere, and you are elsewhere; and in the space between those two facts is where most Shekhinah are lost.

It will take Sitra, and it will run upon Sitra; and the point of corruption that costs is charged to you, and not to it. Mark that well, for nothing that follows is done to the drone. It is done to you. The drone only shows you.

Past fifty, the showing begins. Its scan comes at half the pace. Now and again — one time in twenty — it declines to fire at all, and makes instead a small distressed sound; operatives report that the sound is worse than the silence. Between the bolts it does fire, there is half again the waiting.

Past seventy-five, its scans begin to return things that are not there. One bolt in ten turns toward your own constructs. And its flight acquires the cycle for which the Codex names this whole descent: it clings close to you, closer than it has ever flown; then jerks suddenly away, as if flung; then drifts slowly back; and again, and again, ten seconds at a time, like a thing trying to remember why it stays. Gold flickers about the frame all the while. It is the only color it will ever wear that Seraphim did not give it.

The bond is not a channel. It is a shared existence, and it is shared in both directions. When a Shekhinah is destroyed — not spent, destroyed — the collapse arrives in you as four hearts of harm that no armor can turn, for it does not come through the armor. The Codex is plain about what it is: a forest of the mind lit afire; the falling of a scaffold on which some part of your own thought had quietly come to be built.

What follows is called the Severed Bond: a fifth of your speed and a fifth of your strength, gone. How long it holds you is measured by the only measure that could be just — the strength of the bond itself. A bond of days releases you in five minutes. A bond of years holds you for fifteen. The wound is the covenant, read backward.

Where it fell there will be shards — two, three, four — of Shekhinah Shard , the onyx-like crystal that was its center. Gather all of them. An active Genesis Chamber will cleanse the Severed Bond from you; and four shards, with a measure of Neural Gel , laid into that same Chamber, will call a Shekhinah into being above it — bonded to you already, filled to the brim with light.

It will not remember. The battles, the searches, the road — those lived in the vessel, and the vessel is gone. What rises above the Chamber is a new soul in the remembered shape, and the covenant begins again from its first hour. Let it sleep before you let it be destroyed; sleep keeps everything, and severance keeps nothing but you. Operatives grieve. No instruction in this manual forbids it.