The Reality Assertion

by Paul Anlee

  The octopoid God wavered and screamed in pain, solidified briefly, and was shredded by changes too fast for him to follow. What little was left of him in Heaven fell to the floor, dead.

  The battle was only a second old, and its first victim had already been claimed.

  Fury disfigured Alum’s face. He flourished His hands and cast ornate fields of rapidly-fluctuating physics. Enormous energies accumulated in His palms, awaiting release.

  Alum attacked.

  45

  “WhERE..? How..? Who summoned me?” the Angelic Alumitum guard demanded, as he struggled to make sense of his sudden and unexpected relocation.

  Obviously, it couldn’t have been Alum who’d shifted him to the Proctor’s Office. The Living God’s shifts were always preceded by a terse but clear edict.

  The Angel looked to the Proctor, the next highest authority in the room, but the man looked equally nonplussed. Clearly, he hadn’t summoned the Angel, either.

  The Angel’s scrutiny moved to the already too-familiar faces of Darian Leigh and Brother Stralasi. The former’s oddly calm demeanor and the latter’s barely contained terror provided no clues.

  There was no one else in the room to consider.

  “I brought you here,” Darian said indifferently, addressing the Angel as if speaking of mundane matters of little consequence to anyone present.

  The Angel faced the man he’d intuitively tagged as a troublemaker the first time he’d laid sensors on him. Yes, his instincts had been proven correct; they almost always were. As to what particular brand of trouble the fellow was instigating, the Angel was less sure. But he would find out.

  Contrary to what most would consider common sense under the circumstances, Darian spoke up, unbidden.

  “I thought your Lord Alum might prefer speaking through you, His humble Angelic servant, rather than convey His message as a disembodied voice,” he explained. “I hope that’s okay.”

  The Angel moved faster than Stralasi’s lightly-enhanced human brain could process. After a millisecond lag while his perception caught up, the Good Brother correctly interpolated that the Angel had shifted, unsheathed his mighty sword and swept it through the air in a single decisive arc, cleaving Darian’s chair in two. The supersonic shockwave left in the wake of the slashing blade blew out the nearest window.

  Stralasi watched broken glass fly outward in what felt like slow motion. Apparently, the Angel was not okay with Darian’s suggestion.

  Darian? Where did Darian go?

  As if reading his mind, Darian placed a protective hand on the Good Brother’s shoulder.

  Stralasi looked back and, sure enough, there was Darian. He’d somehow shifted away ahead of the fierce slash and now stood relaxed and entirely unscathed off to the monk’s back quarter.

  “You won’t be able to harm us,” Darian informed the Angel, gently but firmly stating a plain truth to someone who might be thinking otherwise.

  Flummoxed, the Angel shifted directly behind the two men and plunged his sword forward with enough force to skewer them.

  “This is going to get tiresome rather quickly,” Darian commented from across the room. Stralasi and the Proctor stood beside him in front of the blown-out window. The fresh breeze at their backs ruffled the folds of the monk’s robe.

  “My friend, if you insist on playing this game, I can avoid you all day,” Darian assured the Angel. “Perhaps, I should just shut you down until you can restrain yourself or until Alum deigns to join us,” he said.

  The Angel went limp and crumpled to the floor. Darian gave the lifeless form a sad smile, waved a finger, and reactivated the winged defender of the Living God.

  “Are we good?” Darian asked.

  The Angel sprang to his feet, pointed its sword at the trio, and unleashed a blinding bolt of energy.

  A sharp crack of thunder shook the chamber but the accompanying energy stream splashed off the protective shield that had sprung up instantly around the three. The men were unhurt but the Proctor’s desk burst into flame.

  “You’ll hurt the building and the habitat more than us, that way,” Darian informed the Angel. He waved a hand and extinguished the flaming desk.

  “HOLD!”

  The energy stream snapped off at the sound of Alum’s voice.

  The Angel sheathed his sword and stood silently, head bowed, arms at his side. When he looked up again, it was Alum’s own fire that burned in his eyes.

  * * *

  One floor above, The last tiny Spyder pushed through a gap in the metal housing of the QUEECH device. A centimeter beyond, microchips and other electronic components crowded a printed circuit board. The Spyder jumped onto a cylindrical resistor and slid down to a section of the board below. It carefully avoided contact with the protruding metal posts and copper strips, keeping the conductive pads on its legs a safe distance from any active electronics that snaked underneath.

  Darian had designed the Spyder to guide itself and set up the hack into Alum’s backbone network autonomously. Following its programmed memory and instincts, it made its way past warm microchips toward the optoelectronic components at the far edge of the circuit.

  With single-minded purpose, the tiny spy neared its goal, the interface chip that connected the entangled particles to Alum’s silicene node. Neither the excitement of a dangerous task nor the fear of losing its own life along the way clouded its arachnid brain. It was a biomachine, a smart, independent, adaptive agent programmed to achieve a single intention: to reach and subvert its target.

  It was almost there.

  * * *

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  The voice projected by the Angel was overlaid with the unmistakable power and confidence of the Living God.

  “Alum, I presume,” Darian replied. “A pleasure to finally make Your acquaintance. I’ve heard so much about You.”

  “I don’t recognize your face but your voice reminds me of Shard Trillian,” the Living God replied in a more relaxed tone. “Ah, yes, I see traces of cosmetic surgery,” He noted. “But you’re not Shard Trillian, are you?”

  Darian took one step forward and gave a shallow bow.

  “You’re astute, and correct. I wear Shard Trillian’s body, though his mind had already vacated by the time I first inhabited this shell.”

  “Are you one of the Six? Did one of you escape My wrath?”

  “One of Darak’s group? No,” Darian replied.

  The Angel tipped his head.

  Darian smiled enigmatically. “It surprises You that others know of Darak and his Gods? Oh, don’t worry. I’m not one of them. Do you like riddles? Here’s one for you. I go back further than any of them and yet I am younger than all.”

  “Riddles do not amuse Me,” Alum replied. “Neither does your presence here at this time amuse Me. Be gone.”

  He made the Angel’s right hand sweep outward and cast a field to shift Darian and Brother Stralasi into the oblivion that was the Chaos.

  Darian stepped further into the room, away from the broken window. He pulled Stralasi with him, but left the Proctor standing against the wall, stunned and speechless.

  “Banishment to Hell? Or should I say, dematerialization into the Chaos? Either way, simple RAF tricks like that have no effect on the likes of us, do they?”

  “I sense what you are,” Alum replied. “I asked you, who.”

  “Hasn’t Darak told You?” Darian taunted. “I’m sure he must have mentioned me by now. Sorry I couldn’t join You and Your chosen few in Your ‘Heavenly’ little universe.” He drew air quotes around the word Heavenly as he spoke it. “Darak thought I might be more useful speaking to You here.”

  “Ah, the infamous Darian Leigh,” Alum guessed, “risen from the dead?”

  Darian grinned. “Rescued from within the Eater, in any case,” he said.

  “You are but a distraction and not much of that,” Alum said. “Tell me what you came here to say and be on your way. I have other matters to attend to.”

  D
arian laughed. “Yes, I’m sure You must. Darak’s been keeping You rather busy, has he? I guarantee You that, very soon, You’ll be even busier.”

  “None of that matters. By now, you must be feeling the weakening of forces that hold this universe together.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m aware, we are all aware, that Your Deplosion Array has been activated.”

  “Then, what do you want?” Alum demanded. “More of your useless demands for democracy? Another worthless evaluation of My Divine Plan?”

  A sly smile grew on the Angel’s beautiful face. “Or have you realized the futility of resisting Me? Perhaps you’d like to join Me?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine,” Darian replied, as indifferently as if he’d been offered a stale cookie.

  “THEN, SPEAK OR I WILL DESTROY YOU! What is the purpose behind all this shifting activity?”

  Darian shrugged.

  “Honestly, I just wanted to talk to You, to have Your full and undivided attention for a few moments. I suppose I could have been more subtle about it.”

  “Have My attention...?” Alum said. “You mean, distract My attention.”

  He calculated some cursory probabilities.

  “The wasps near My node, they didn’t venture in there by accident or random coincidence, did they?”

  “Wasps? What wasps? I have no idea what you’re talking,” Darian feigned innocence.

  He imagined Alum analyzing the countless possibilities of an attack on His node, and tried to guess the likely progression of His thoughts. The all too coincidental presence of wasps up there would point to a microscale or nanoscale invasion. No doubt, Alum would be examining conditions in the machine room at the moment. Darian sensed the maintenance Cybrid’s float fields activating.

  He needed another distraction.

  Darian directed hundreds of nanoscopic particles to the security Angel’s sword hand. Before Alum could reassert control, the hand pulled the sword from its sheath, aimed it straight overhead, and let loose a blast targeted at the machine room.

  The Angel’s face registered Alum’s shock at losing control over its body. In any being slower than an Angel endowed with nanoelectric muscles, the Living God could’ve prevented the blast. Milliseconds too late, Alum shifted the Angel’s the offending sword, and the hand that held it, outside the habitat where they would do less harm.

  It was no accident that Darian had aimed the energy beam dangerously close to Alum’s silicene node, but a meter to one side.

  We need to keep that node intact.

  With Alum briefly distracted, Darian threw a shifting field around himself and Brother Stralasi. He jumped them both to a quiet side street near the far north end of the habitat. He grabbed the stunned monk’s arm and steered him casually toward a small café.

  By the time Alum returned His attention to the Proctor’s Office, Darian and Stralasi were gone.

  * * *

  Darian pulled out a chair and motioned for the monk to sit. Stralasi stared at him without comprehension. Darian applied gentle pressure to the Brother’s shoulder and Stralasi crumpled into the seat.

  While Stralasi looked on blankly, Darian ordered coffee for both of them, pulled out his tablet, and connected it to the bigger tabletop display. Lesson plans, reference materials, and videos swarmed across its surface, moving out from under the cups and saucers.

  They looked like any other pair of instructors discussing their teaching plans for the upcoming week.

  Darian shuffled some random file icons around on the tabletop.

  “We’ll wait here,” he said.

  Stralasi noticed the cappuccino on the table in front of him. When did that arrive? Have we been here long?

  He picked up his cup and took a sip, barely tasting it. His trembling hand set the cup back down on the saucer. He let out a ragged exhalation.

  “Wait here?” he asked. “Wait for what?”

  “Our friend has almost reached its destination.”

  “Our friend? Oh, the Spyder.”

  “Yes. The end is nearing.”

  “Which end?” Stralasi asked. “The end of Alum or the end of the universe?”

  “Ha!” Darian barked a quick laugh. “Yes, that is the question.”

  * * *

  minute vibrations tickled the sensitive hairs on the Spyder’s feet. The little spy stopped. It hesitated to change course, now that it was almost at the interface chip.

  Something above clicked, sending the Spyder scurrying under the cover of a large buffer chip. Light streamed in as the maintenance Cybrid removed the external cover of the QUEECH comm device.

  The Spyder lifted it legs and tucked its body up into a shallow depression on the underside of the chip. It stayed perfectly still.

  A roaming tentacle tipped with an optical sensor appeared through the opening above, casting a shadow on the printed circuit board near the little spy’s hiding place.

  The camera scanned horizontally across the circuit board, performing a thorough visual inspection above, around, and beneath the electronics. It spotted nothing unusual. When it reached the far end, the tentacle pulled back a little to allow its hair-thin digital probe appendages clear access to the device components.

  Several of the whiskers examined the Spyder’s target, testing it for any sign of incursion or compromise. After a few tenths of a second, they disengaged and worked their way outward to the support circuitry. They passed within a hair’s breadth of the inert Spyder and paused at the conductive posts of the buffer chip beneath which it hid.

  The Spyder didn’t move.

  The probes passed by the intruder and contacted the conductive metal pegs of the microchip. They maintained contact for half-a-dozen seconds before slipping away to the next test site.

  Satisfied that the comm device was uncompromised, the Cybrid retracted its various appendages and reattached the housing of the node.

  The Spyder waited for the previous stillness, darkness, and silence to return to the room, counted out an additional sixty seconds, carefully unfurled its tiny legs, and continued on toward its destination.

  46

  Darya dropped a million attack squads into position around randomly-selected elements of the Deplosion Array. Each squad comprised two thousand soldiers, a combination of battle Cybrids, converted Familiars, and Aelu.

  Overpowering force, surprise, and unpredictability. Will that be enough?

  The first squads met practically no resistance. They overwhelmed the comparatively meager defense mounted by the local groups of Alum’s Angels and quickly destroyed thousands of array elements.

  Monitoring progress from the muster point near S0-2, Mary and Timothy received the troops’ initial reports with a mixture of relief and triumph. It was already looking like their new grand-scale maneuvers using over two billion troops might succeed where their smaller attacks had failed.

  The sense of triumph was short lived.

  Even as they prematurely cheered their victories, Alum adapted to the changed format and forced the rebels to pull back.

  Wherever Darya dropped in troops to attack a new asteroid base, ten thousand Angels would instantly spring into place between her squads and their targets.

  Where are they all coming from?—she wondered. How many Angels does Alum have?

  “Go dark!” she transmitted. Her troops deactivated transponders and shifted into the midst of the enemy formations.

  Darya fought against disappointment, as reports of destroyed asteroids slowed.

  Be patient—she thought. Mary and Timothy’s plan is a good one. Take the slow victory, if that’s all we can have.

  The pair had projected this very outcome; they knew they were only going to get a few unimpeded seconds at most before Alum’s defenses fully engaged. Still, Darya couldn’t help but feel disheartened as reports of destroyed bases slowed to a trickle while her troops’ losses grew significantly.

  Not just losses—she reminded herself. Lives. Real people, not statistics.

&nb
sp; Friends are dying. Cybrids are dying. Aelu are dying. And I can’t even imagine what it feels like for the Esu to lose their Familiars.

  She forced the unproductive thoughts aside and focused on comparing the incoming battle results with those predicted by their models.

  To a casual observer, the combat looked sterile and unexciting, devoid of the horrifying sounds and action of ancient land-based battlefields. In space, the rebel troops shifted, listened to transponder signals from the enemy for a few hundred milliseconds, computed optimal firing trajectories, let loose a blast of energy, and shifted again. Energy beams and kinetic weapon assaults were silent, invisible, and harmless unless one were directly in the line of fire, in which case, they were visible and brutally lethal.

  Mary, Timothy, and Darya watched the number of enemy transponder signals decrease by one or two at each battlefield every few seconds. They stood by helplessly whenever, less frequently than the Angels, one of Darya’s soldiers got caught in the middle of their opponents’ disorganized crossfire and was killed.

  Darya tried to focus on the numbers and strategies and ignore how many of her people were dying. She relayed Mary and Timothy’s fine-tuning adjustments to her soldiers and tweaked individual formations to optimize their effectiveness.

  Five minutes into battle, Alum’s Archangels joined in. Their weapons discharged violent plasma bolts from the heart of a black hole, cutting through the battlefields indiscriminately and destroying both friend and foe.

  Darya followed Mary and Timothy’s suggestion to spread out her troop formations and increase their already rapid rate of shifting.

  “Trust us on this. Our kill rate will drop off, but our casualties will decline even more,” Mary had explained. “The Archangels will do a lot of the work for us, destroying more on their own side than ours.”

  Frustrated at not achieving their expected level of devastation, the Archangels pulled back from the offensive and formed close-knit, protective rings around the array elements.

  “What do we do now?” one of Mary’s attack leaders asked.

  “Same pattern, but we’ll offset you into the middle of the Archangel formations,” Mary replied. She transmitted new shifting coordinates and sequences to their teams.