#moralideals

Rem Saverem: Steady Heart ANIMATION

The Guilt-Eaters of Lament

Silence wasn’t the absence of sound in Lament; it was a substance. It poured into the gaps between broken buildings, a thick, dusty syrup that swallowed Rem Saverem’s footsteps as soon as she made them. Her survey mission had been simple: confirm the abandonment of this SEEDS colony outpost. But her escape pod’s crash-landing three kilometers back had turned a routine check into a fight for survival.

The buildings, all white adobe and curved arches, were pristine, untouched by the planet’s rust-colored dust. Yet every window was a dark, hollow eye. Her Geiger-counter clicked a benign, monotonous rhythm. The only anomaly was the silence.

And the mirrors.

They hung at every intersection, polished discs of what looked like salvaged ship hull, dangling from frayed ropes. In the first one, Rem saw her own reflection—pale, ash-blonde hair tied back, blue eyes sharp with fatigue, the utilitarian lines of her SEEDS uniform. In the second, a block down, her reflection was slower to appear, as if the glass had to remember her face. By the third, the reflection smiled a fraction of a second after she did.

A dry wind sighed through the empty streets, carrying a whisper. It sounded like her name.

“Rem…”

She spun, hand on her ion-pistol. The street was empty. The whisper came again, not from the air, but from her own mind, a memory given voice. Tesla. The name was a fresh wound.

“This is a psychological manifestation,” she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the waiting silence. “Isolation stress. Auditory hallucination.”

“Is that what we are, Rem Saverem?” The new voice was liquid, mellifluous, and came from directly behind her.

She drew her weapon in a smooth arc, settling into a combat stance. The man standing there was impossibly tall and slender, dressed in a coattail jacket stitched together from a thousand silvery, reflective scraps. His face was long, handsome, and eerily familiar—it was the face from the mirrors, but alive. His eyes were pools of polished mercury.

“We prefer the term ‘symbionts’,” he said, his mouth not quite syncing with the words. “Or ‘cathartians’. Guilt-eaters is so… visceral.”

“What are you?” Rem demanded, sighting down her pistol’s barrel. “A rogue AI? A neural projection?”

The man—the creature—laughed, a sound like tinkling glass. “We are the consequence that lingered. This colony didn’t die of famine or plague, Rem. They died of regret. We simply… facilitated the feast.” He took a step closer, ignoring the weapon. “And you, my dear, are a banquet waiting to be served. The guilt you carry… it’s exquisite. It has layers, like a fine wine. The sharp top notes of professional failure. The deeper, richer tones of a sister’s betrayal. And the foundational palate… the love for something you believe is a monster.”

Her breath hitched. Nai. How could it know?

“We know because you show us,” it said, answering her unspoken thought. It gestured to a nearby mirror. In its surface, Rem didn’t see herself. She saw the cold, sterile lab on the SEEDS ship, saw her sister Tesla’s defiant face before the lockdown, heard her own desperate, unanswered pleas.

“Stop it.”

“We are not doing it,” the creature crooned, circling her like a predator. “We are merely the mirror. You are the one who cannot look away. Do you regret following orders, Rem? Do you regret not fighting harder for her? Or do you, in the darkest hours, regret that she made you doubt your precious Project?”

“I have no doubts about the Plants,” Rem snapped, but her voice wavered.

“Liar,” the mirror-man whispered, now suddenly beside her ear, his breath cold and odorless. “You love the independent ones. Like the child, Nai. You love its potential. You fear its power. You lie awake wondering if you are nurturing a god or a weapon. That cognitive dissonance… it is our ambrosia.”

A second figure emerged from a nearby doorway. A woman, composed of the same shifting, mirror-like fragments, her form reflecting a younger, more anxious Rem. “The weight is crushing you,” the female echo said. “Let us taste it. Let us have the moment you first called Nai ‘it’ instead of ‘him’. The moment you chose protocol over kinship.”

Terror, cold and sharp, spliced with a strange, hypnotic seduction. The offer to be free of the gnawing, constant shame was profoundly alluring. She saw it in their silver eyes—a promise of oblivion.