Aesthetically he was both alluring and repulsive, the obvious penchant for violence pointing to an underdeveloped social hierarchy. The weapons that protruded from his arms had slid back into his hollowed wrists. It had been thousands of years since I had seen blood of any form.
“Quite a mess,” commented Lelain, tapping into my thoughts.
“Have Section Five clean it up,” I said, deactivating the cloak around our observation pane. The crossbreed was no longer awake to see us. “Analyze his resonance and find the hereditary chain.”
“His vitals are weak. He is dying of blood loss,” said Lelain.
Such an underdeveloped shell. “The auditors will recharge him as soon as you analyze his resonance.”
There was a momentary pause as Lelain tracked his stellar heredity. For the first time in our companionship, his slender brows furrowed in confusion. “Sarine, he traces back to Philo, Avadara.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, analyzing him myself. It was as Lelain relayed. “Philo, impossible.”
“Vel’Haru,” said Lelain. “We exterminated those Rhazekan hybrids a thousand years ago.”
“We missed a few, it appears.”
“We never miss a few.”
Again, Lelain was right. But he also couldn’t be right this time. “We missed a few, and I will run a diagnostics on our stream to find out how. Have the auditors recharge him for now.”
XII
EMPATHIC BONDING
Pariah Andosyni—;
I’D BE LYING IF I SAID I WASN’T awestruck for at least the first hour of our arrival to Niaphali-X. We materialized on a series of jagged cliffs of an old eroded crater housing an ancient spacecraft graveyard as far as our eyes could see. The sky was a wash of red and brown; the thick, gaseous atmosphere trapped the heat close to the planet’s surface, rendering the air barely breathable by any lesser standards. Even for us it was a bit uncomfortable, like traversing through a sauna.
Sapphire and Zira showed a significantly less amount of astonishment, choosing instead to survey the landscape with sullen disappointment, knowing now that our objective would prove even more difficult than we had originally thought. Attica detected zero fauna in our immediate surroundings. For now we treated this place like a dead world. The silver lining was that there wouldn’t be any threats to keep us from our first objective: finding a way to Niaphali’s moon.
“There used to be a city here,” said Zira, morose. “More than two thousand of their years ago.”
A violent gust of wind took me by surprise, and I pulled the hood over my head. “The weather seems nice.”
“These ships are different in composition than the metalloid imprint left by Altrians,” said Sapphire. “Another civilization must have colonized here later on.”
Zira shot her a sidelong glance. “Or they just, you know, progressed technologically. Civilizations tend to do that sometimes.”
Sapphire met his eyes, hers relaying nothing. “Perhaps.” Without another word she leapt down the cliffs toward the canyon. Zira lingered, logging the graveyard into attica.
ALTRIAN CENTRAL CITY, DEMOLISHED.
POSSIBLE NEW COLONIZATION. ALSO DEMOLISHED.
He took a sensory capture of the scenery, and then started after Sapphire. Ziranel Throm had never seemed the sentimental type, but the lament behind his gaze as he’d witnessed the ruin of a once prominent world was apparent. Even the older and more progressive civilizations eventually came to an end, and that was a sobering thought. More sobering was the idea that many of the civilizations we had contracted recently would be long gone by the time we visited them again.
As we walked through the graveyard, I brushed up on some Niaphali-X socioeconomic history. After last night I knew practically everything about the planet, but nothing of the people who had once lived here.
At their height, the Altrians had used 97.5% of their planet’s resources and begun spacefaring voyages in search of new worlds to colonize. Unfortunately they were dealt a bad hand in terms of cosmic coordinates—there weren’t any habitable-zone planets within a reasonable distance from them. The colony ships were never heard from again. Many died of famine, the rest of atmospheric alterations as Niaphali’s sun expanded. What had once been lush valleys and rivers was now a hazy, muddy-brown wasteland of pink clouds and a murderous sun.
The Multiverse was a cruel place. I, too, lamented their fate.
There was an irresistible urge to study the massive ships, to feel their surface, to determine its composition. Who was right, Zira or Sapphire? Had the Altrians progressed, or were they replaced? This was important to know.
“Shouldn’t we analyze the ships?” I asked.
Zira kept walking. “What for?”
“To find out who owned the world before it ended.”
He smirked. “We can find that out with far less effort once we get to a city.”
“This is a crash site,” said Sapphire. “Obviously the Altrians weren’t the last ones here.”
“They either died or thrived in this environment,” added Zira, conceding her theory was probably correct.
Sapphire took the victory humbly. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
As we reached the other side of the canyon, I slowed to watch the monolithic ships pass over us, their size rendering us insects in comparison. They rose higher than the canyon border, saluting the horizon in memorial of an old machine world.
*
We walked until the fierce, blue sun moved to the other side of the horizon. We were bored of the barren scenery, tired from the half-day trek across an unideal climate. The heat and thin air drained our energy reserves. Sapphire and Zira picked up the pace as dusk approached, apprehensive of what nightfall might bring.
I struggled to keep pace, my lack of physical training evident. Clearly I was a hindrance to my seasoned companions (or chaperones, as Adrial had hinted), but neither complained, only slowed whenever they saw me straggling too far behind. Clouds condensed above as the sun gave its farewell, fading beneath the skyline. The wind picked up, intermittent gusts ravaged the land and sent me stumbling. We climbed a cleft of sharp, petrified ground. Another gust hit us and Sapphire nearly fell. Zira grabbed her right before she was blown off the cleft.
“I think we should call it a day!” I yelled over the wind.
“You want to set up camp here?” Zira called back. “Your body will be crushed by the weather and there’s nothing to replenish with!”
He had a point. Instead of replying I bit back my exhaustion and continued to climb.
Once we were across the cleft (which spanned miles), an orchard of serrated trees welcomed us to a strangely different stretch of environment. They were less like trees and more like pikes sticking from the long grass, purple, gnarled and twisted, armored with blood-red thorns. Some kind of monument rested at the center of the orchard. There was little shelter this place could provide, but none of us were able to resist the temptation of investigating the dying world’s hardiest fauna. More so the relic. At least for me.
We approached the orchard without discussion, synching our data streams in preparation for a collective thread update. Like drones answering the charge, we marched toward uncertainty under a threatening night sky. Drones were a good way to describe us. Most of our actions were carried out of free will, but some were instinctive, reflexive. Protecting our nobles, exploring the unknown, learning the unfathomable.
We had no time to investigate the relic. As we reached the middle of the orchard, it began to storm. The masochistic world showered us with yellow hail that was definitely not composed of water, burning our skin. We drew our hoods and sat around a tree with our backs against the trunk, knees to our chests, wondering what to do next. We couldn’t stay here for long.
—There.
It was Zira. We communicated through telepathy now, unable to speak over the storm. He was looking north, and I followed his gaze. Beyond the orchard the ground sloped. There was some kind of hovel
carved into a hill.
The hail began to scorch the tree we were under, but oddly the grass was unaffected. We darted for the hovel, our bodies whirring across the unkempt field, using the last of our energy reserves to keep the acid hail from singeing our flesh.
Hopefully the storm didn’t last long, or else Qaira’s rescue team would need a rescue team.
*
“This isn’t letting up,” I said, several hours later.
Zira raked his fingers through a clump of dead tallgrass, blown into the hovel by the storm. Some of the blades were left ragged, used for his replenishment. “It can’t last more than the night.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“This area is flush with fauna,” said Sapphire, kneeling a few feet from the hovel’s entrance. “If this was a regular event, there would be none.”
“And if by sheer luck we just so happened to come here the day of a cataclysmic event, then what?”
“Then we have terrible luck,” said Zira.
Sapphire looked at me, her hazel eyes reflecting streaks of lightning beyond our shelter. There was an inexplicable question behind her gaze. “There is only a twenty percent chance that a cataclysm is occurring.”
“Twenty-point-six,” corrected Zira.
She side-eyed him. “I truncated.”
Zira gave her a pretentious smirk that always meant he was teasing. “Our circumstance calls for rounding. Numbers mean nothing if you can’t convey their importance.”
“Importance of what? Panic?” snapped Sapphire, taking the bait. It was the first time that I’d seen her so emotionally-charged. Until now she was unflappable; robotic, even.
“Since we’re going to be here for at least a little while,” I intervened, “why don’t we make this time useful?”
“Doing what?” asked Zira.
I shrugged. “Getting to know each other better.”
They looked toward me in unison, bewildered.
“Share our stories,” I elaborated.
“Our stories,” repeated Zira, amused. “Should we hold hands in a circle, too?”
“Any story we have is available in the attica stream,” said Sapphire.
“Not the stories of who we were,” I said.
Sapphire was confused. “I don’t understand why you think sharing our origin stories would be useful.”
“Team-building,” I said, matter-of-factly, “forms stronger bonds, and maybe after sharing your tragic pasts with each other you’ll be less inclined to bicker.”
“We’ll be less inclined to bicker when Sapphi stops flaunting her expertise,” said Zira.
“My past isn’t tragic,” said Sapphire, ignoring Zira.
“Let us be the judges of that,” I said. “Let’s all swear that this will stay between us and practice some empathic bonding.”
Zira frowned. “You sound too much like your psychologist noble.”
“Our psychologist king,” I corrected him. “And thank you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Almost all of the scholars looked down on soft sciences, only placing any merit in the harder disciplines. But our king offered them something no king had previously—a voice.
Soft sciences couldn’t protect anyone from threatening technology or an imminent cataclysm, but it made for a more considerate, conscientious leader. He relied on our advisory in areas where his knowledge was lacking. It made us feel like a well-oiled machine, working together as a multidisciplinary collective. It was also the reason why we were trapped in an acid-hail storm, but that was neither here nor there.
Sapphire’s confusion turned into apprehension. “The only way empathy can happen is if we affix our subconscious stream. That would give us access to more than just our memories.”
“If we go looking,” said Zira. “Which we won’t.”
“You’re onboard with this?” she asked.
Zira cast me a sideways glance. “I’ve always wondered what he was.”
I grinned. “Like I said, this stays between us.”
“I’m not going first,” said Sapphire.
“I’ll go first,” I said. “It was my idea, after all.”
Zira and Sapphire sat cross-legged on the ground in silent concession. I joined them, and we closed our eyes together. Empathic bonding meant we linked our subconscious data streams. Attica was our device integration system. Our brains were the devices. Through this mechanism we could experience each other’s thoughts, even memories as we replayed them.
I felt a thrum within my mind and knew the integration was complete. As promised, I went first.
*
SONG OF EXTINCTION
Pariah Andosyni
WE WERE THE CHORUS, cast into the vacuum of Eversae Major, serenading nothing.
At one time we were corporeal; we learned, lived, loved under an ancient blue sky with warm wind and the scent of moist grass across sprawling fields. Palpability was fleeting.
In common with other sentient, ambitious races, we progressed with greed and sucked our world dry in a matter of a thousand years. By then we were starved and riddled with disease as war after war for the last drop of resources raged. Overpopulation suddenly turned to underpopulation while EXTINCTION carved our epitaph.
As everything crumbled asunder, we receded into the digital world, virtual reality, knowing our end was near and unable to cope. The pain of hunger gnashing at your insides, the fear of being robbed on the street, the smell of waste and abandon, the knowledge that your existence would soon end and it all meant nothing…
We couldn’t cope.
Only a seventh of our world had the luxury of digital access. VR was only for the ever-dwindling commonwealth. When it all finally ended we’d receded so far into the digital world, our bodies having wasted away long before then. We felt nothing.
And we felt nothing thereafter.
At first our digital—now conscious—world was a utopia. But soon it became a prison, crowded with our thoughts, our wills, our desires. We could progress no more and the scenery was boring. We missed physical reality, even though the only difference between PR and VR was that we knew the latter was synthetic. Wondrous and warm thoughts turned dark, adulterated by stunted growth. We lamented our past and the decisions made. We wanted to explore a reality that we couldn’t control.
Millennia passed; playing gods stripped us of our ethics and turned us into caged animals. We sought to break free, and we did, dispersed upon spectral waves of light and sound, crossing Eversae Major in search of vessels—bodies—that could allow us to reclaim all that we had lost.
We were the Chorus.
Again, millennia passed. Dozens of developed worlds were left altered in our wake, their indigenous invaded by our consciousness and used to exact our directive. We took their minds, their bodies, their technology and their futures. We lived their lives and made them our own, neutralizing the remaining population once all of us had claimed hosts. Interstellar observers or others within the system would notice a sudden shift in law, organization, culture, even. Then the wars would start, the outliers neutralized. In the aftermath we were freed to continue our corporeal existence.
It wasn’t long before we caught the attention of the Court of Enigmus. After all, we had taken over the bodies of their clientele and lived on a world that no longer called for scholar services. Once an active world went dark, they came to investigate, at first only confused by us not knowing who they were.
But it didn’t take them long to recognize the patterns across other worlds.
We fled before they returned. Since stumbling into one of their galactic neighborhoods, we all came to know what kind of a threat they were to beings like us. And, slowly we came to know what kind of a threat we were to them.
The Chorus put as much distance from Vel’Haru stomping grounds as they could. We were a higher-order form of sentient life. Our invasion tactics were reflexive at this point, and went as followed:
PHASE 1 – SCOUTING
&
nbsp; Our targets were selected by wave frequencies. If they had communications in any form, we traced them to their source and invaded their transmissions.
PHASE 2 – SYNAPTIC TAKE-OVER
Sound to neural wave alterations made large portions of the population break out in manic violence. The targeted world suffered intervals of inexplicable violence and anarchy until the state of their societal structure weakened.
PHASE 3 – HOST TRANSFERENCE
As the civilization’s structure collapsed even further through war and eventually famine, we claimed the affluent members of their world—leaders, judiciary, theistic (if applicable, some worlds never had religion). Our incursion transmissions stopped and a reformation period began. Slowly we kept taking more and more hosts. Once transference was complete, we began our lives anew.
You weren’t typically given a name in the Chorus. And if you were, it was either a really good thing, or a really bad thing. In my case it was the latter.
The Chorus, while not completely of unified mind, marched toward their directive, never deviating from that directive. Too long had passed since we had bodies and a world that was truly ours, and we had since shed any and all components of a flesh and blood race. We were immoral opportunists, mechanized instruments of subjugation.
Galactic parasites.
The others didn’t like the name I’d given us, so they gave me a name.
Pariah. Outcast. I sang out of tune with our directive.
It was true I found this endless cycle of world ruination tedious. We didn’t need hosts to progress as a civilization, in fact hosts only hindered us. We could let loose across the universe, screaming into the vacuum and find a higher purpose—somewhere waves were more abundant.
Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6) Page 9