The Reality Assertion

by Paul Anlee

  Now that they were closer to the asteroids, the continuous radar pulses from the array elements illuminated the rebel soldiers, stripping them of the protective cloak of deep-space darkness and leaving them exposed and vulnerable. As expected, the odds shifted quickly in favor of the Archangels.

  Darya watched her teams being picked off. She doubled the rate of pattern shifting. It slowed the decimation, but it wouldn’t be long until the enemy gutted them.

  I have to get in there and help—she thought. The Archangels are too powerful. They’re destroying us. We need to change the attack parameters. Quickly. There had to be something she could use from her recent elevation to godhood.

  She hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with her toolbox of godhood tricks. The ability to control the laws of physics brought all sorts of possibilities to her vastly expanded mind. Too many. It was overwhelming to think about.

  She focused on what she knew from her own experience. Most of the Deplosion Array elements housed limited, specialized nodes of Alum. The deplosion fields were so complex that the individual CPPUs were dedicated to the required math. That left little processing power to house any of the Living God’s consciousness. Once activated, the field generators were set to run on automatic. Alum had never seriously considered the possibility of attack by someone with RAF capabilities. He never thought He’d need to be personally present to defend His Deplosion Array.

  Okay, that gives me something to work with—she thought.

  “Mary,” she sent via QUEECH comms, “which element has resisted attack the longest?” Best start with our most difficult target—she thought.

  “Easy. That would be SagA* 129.564.992. We’re twenty minutes in and the asteroid’s practically unscathed. Both sides are taking heavy losses and nobody’s been able to gain a consistent advantage. I suggest we move that team to a different target.”

  “Hold off on that,” Darya replied. She jumped to the well-defended asteroid and examined the battle.

  Her fighters were following the modified attack plan. They were executing blind shifts reliably and accurately. Alum was losing a lot of Angels but kept bolstering their ranks with a small number of Archangels—not enough to win the battle but they were holding their own.

  What’s it going to take to tip the scales?—Darya wondered.

  She watched through several shifting cycles. Each time her attack group got within range of the asteroid, they met with heavy resistance from the Archangels, and were repelled before inflicting much damage.

  Repelled? Why are they leaving without completing their firing sequence?

  “Mary, Timothy, this team’s energy blasts are being cut short by about a hundred milliseconds. Only half the projected energy is released on each volley. What’s going on?”

  They watched as another group fired a few shots and left prematurely.

  “I have no idea,” Mary replied.

  Darya shifted five of her attackers a few light minutes away from the battle.

  “Why did you leave without completing your full attack sequence?” she demanded.

  Confused, the battle-Cybrids hesitated. They compared their data among themselves.

  “We didn’t,” they answered together and sent their recordings of the half-second they’d spent near the asteroid before shifting. All five showed a synchronized jump into their pre-assigned positions, followed by 300 milliseconds of target acquisition, and a 200 millisecond burst of fire.

  “Except you only fired for a quarter of that time,” Darya said, “which did nothing to the asteroid, and then you left early.”

  Her assertion was met with stunned silence.

  “What time do you have?” she asked.

  They compared chronometers. All five were 225 milliseconds slow.

  “I know what’s going on,” Darya said. “Alum’s messing with local time.”

  It’s my own fault for not anticipating this. I have to start thinking like a God—she realized. Her fighters were attacking the asteroids from within a thin shell outside of its jump-blocking fields, as close as they could possibly get without conventional rockets.

  Alum must have used the Deplosion generators to produce a localized time dilation effect, a tweak so small we didn’t notice it.

  She sent a message to Mary and Timothy.

  “We need to mix it up a little. Vary the distances from which we shoot at the array elements. It’s too predictable and Alum’s taking advantage of that.”

  “But it’ll weaken the blasts,” Mary protested. “It’ll add fifty percent to the number of hits needed to kill one asteroid.”

  “I know,” Darya replied. “But I need the time it’ll buy us.”

  She returned the five Cybrids to their next assigned positions.

  One God’s direct intervention deserves another—she thought, and shifted herself directly inside the asteroid.

  As she passed through the asteroid’s RAF field, she felt a wave of nausea but nothing she couldn’t handle. She materialized next to the main CPPU.

  Let’s see, what do we have here? Standard asteroid layout, power and computational support near the core, massive arrays of RAF generating antennae spread just under the surface.

  “WELCOME!” a booming voice greeted her. “DARYA, I PRESUME?”

  Alum?

  The shock of hearing that voice, His voice, here inside this particular asteroid sent her mind reeling. Was it a trap? Why would the Living God house any portion of His consciousness inside this array element?

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find You here,” she answered, feigning more calm than she felt.

  “Nor I, you,” Alum replied.

  And just how much of You is here?—she wondered as she bobbed politely.

  “Sometimes, direct involvement is required in an engagement,” she said aloud. “As I’m sure you know.”

  “Do you really think your direct involvement here will make any difference?” the Living God challenged.

  Darya heard the arrogance and disdain, born of millions of years of unchallenged supremacy. She yearned to rip that haughtiness from His throat, to teach Him that even Gods have responsibilities—to Their own people, at least, but also to the universes.

  He has no right to eliminate this and all other universes. Whether natural or created, a universe has the right to an existence that doesn’t depend on the capriciousness of a single Being, however supreme.

  But can I convince Him of that? If not, am I prepared to enforce my belief?

  Here, deep inside Alum’s lair, surrounded by RAF generators that can cast fields across the whole universe and into the Chaos, what hope do I have? Is there anything at all that I, a newbie to godhood, can do against a Living God with eons of experience?

  Now that she was beginning to understand the kind of power that came with the ability to shape the laws of nature, she was also beginning to see the limitations of that power and the responsibilities.

  I’ve fought against Alum for millions of years. Ever since I learned what the Deplosion Array was for, what His Divine Plan meant for the universe, I’ve plotted and resisted. And I’ve made no headway. I am never going to win like this. We are going to die, every last one of us, and Alum is going to live on.

  She caught herself wanting to give up, and laughed. She refused to lose this battle over her own uncertainties and fears. If she was going to lose, she was not going to make it easy for Him. She conjured up the image of herself as rebellious warrior princess and held it firmly in her mind.

  Am I going to quit now?—she asked herself.

  Hell, no!—came her instant reply. I’ve fought Him for ages as a Cybrid. Now, I’m here as a God, an equal. And I am a force to be reckoned with.

  She threw out fields to shift Alum’s CPPU into space, disrupted His power supply, and transferred bits of the entangled interior of the M87 supermassive black hole into His local RAF processor.

  Alum brushed away the troublesome fields.

  “I’m
happy to see your new capabilities,” He said. “It will make destroying you all the more pleasing.”

  He launched a massive, rapid-fire assault that directly altered the physics of her CPPU substrate in twenty different ways across several different parts of her brain, and shifted three Archangels into the chamber with her.

  The Archangels fired beams of unrestrained black-hole energy.

  Had she still been a mere Cybrid, such an attack would have finished her. Thankfully, she was no longer that person. She hadn’t been able to explore her whole god-level toolbox yet but, when Darak had shown her how he isolated other manifestations of himself in hidden dimensions, she’d immediately supplemented her lattice with four Familiar CPPUs from the Esu, all modified to her special substrate, and hidden them in different dimensional extensions.

  While part of her screamed in agony at the changes Alum had imposed on her physical presence, three other parts quickly analyzed His projections and cast their own fields to neutralize the effect.

  Her fourth hidden mind added yet another field, diverting the Archangel blasts harmlessly into the Chaos, and reached out with its own fields to shut down the Archangels.

  “Interesting,” Alum said as His fighting constructs toppled. “And impressive. You have resources beyond what I expected. But are your abilities up to this challenge?”

  She could hear the sneer in Alum’s voice. He did not like to be surprised and, most certainly, never bested. At anything.

  The Archangels disappeared.

  Four more CPPU nodes, adorned with complex electronic antennae and exotic matter transmitters appeared alongside His existing node. Altogether, they took up half the empty floor space. Their combined processing power provided Alum with the capability to generate more RAF fields and fields of greater complexity than Darya could hope to keep up with.

  Time to abort—Darya decided.

  She tried to shift back to her team but was unable to leave.

  She extended her range to various locations light years across the universe. Again, no luck.

  Desperate, she tried to escape to entirely different universes of her own conception. Alum brought her back each time.

  She attacked. She threw dozens of different realities at Him. She altered the matter around the chamber to explode in a fiery fusion reaction. As soon as the unleashed energies settled, the room appeared again as it had been. Nothing had changed. There was no damage to the chamber, and the five “Alum” nodes chugged away as if it were any other ordinary day.

  Darya felt the deplosion field from the asteroid temporarily shut down as more copies of Alum poured into the local processors.

  Before she could take advantage of the minor blip, she felt Alum shifting her nearby soldiers into the oblivion of the Chaos.

  “Noooooo!” she cried.

  Despite eons of training and conditioning, panic seeped in. Then, anger. The anger became fury.

  She threw everything she could at Him to stop what He was doing but it was too late. Her soldiers were gone.

  In Heaven, the biological Alum smiled and shifted more processing nodes to the asteroid.

  Darya found herself encased in a world under Alum’s control. His pervasive consciousness instantly analyzed her projected fields, no matter how complex, and used the asteroid’s massive RAF antenna to neutralize whatever she tried to do.

  She clenched her virtual jaw. Her resolve was indestructible. She didn’t get to such an advanced age without learning a few tricks, and she’d had plenty of time to hone her perseverance along the way. No matter how unlikely survival appeared, she was not going to give up.

  She waited for the next lull in Alum’s onslaught and disabled one of His nodes. A tiny victory! Renewed confidence surged through her lattice.

  “HOW DARE YOU!” Alum roared.

  He shifted out the disabled CPPU and brought in two replacements.

  The brutality of His attack was surging with His ire, and Darya felt the desperation of imminent defeat.

  She screamed in rage and defiance.

  47

  In the core of heaven, The battle between the Gods intensified.

  From their vantage point only a few meters away, it didn’t look like much of a battle at all to Brother Stralasi and Mirly. The pair looked on with little understanding as the manifestations of Darak and Alum materialized in the Core of Heaven and joined in combat.

  The human incarnations of the two Gods appeared to do little more than stand and glare at each other in intense concentration. At a level far above what the two observers could sense or understand, the two Gods fought ferociously, projecting enormous energies and complex, reality-altering fields.

  To external observers, their cast fields had limited effect. One of the Gods projected some alteration to the basic laws of physics. The air around their opponent shimmered a little and returned to normal as the field was neutralized. The opponent launched a counter-offensive field with equally little apparent effect.

  Internally, the battle was more like a combination of deep math, 3-D chess, and mental martial arts as the two probed each other for weakness.

  To supplement His human form, Alum shifted in a dozen refrigerator-sized nodes from the outside universe.

  Darak’s manifestation of the Angel Gabriel, his most fierce persona, took up position alongside the man-God. His wings spread high, and his face settled into a fixed, fierce mask. His sword answered Alum’s energy blasts but it was his RAF fields that held the most potential to hurt the Living God.

  Stralasi could read no emotions from the gesticulating upper appendages and smooth elliptical body of Darak’s Aelu persona, Fal sek Troal, standing to the man-God’s left. The creature’s three arms waved rapidly overhead, throwing out reality-altering fields. Aside from that, the Aelo didn’t move at all.

  The hovering matte-gray sphere of DAR-G that floated behind Darak’s three other manifestations was entirely inscrutable to the monk, as were Alum’s machine CPPUs.

  Alum’s human personification, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man with a tidy goatee, stood before a neatly-grouted brick wall. He looked critically outnumbered facing off alone against Darak’s several manifestations.

  “But appearances,” Stralasi told Mirly, “are often deceptive. That brick wall, for instance, hides the most powerful of foes, the enormous RAF machinery that comprises Alum’s central node in Heaven.”

  Stralasi eyed the wall with reverence and fear.

  What might one expect of a fighting wall?—he wondered. No fierce anger. No panicked evasion of flying bullets or beams. No deflection of slashing swords. Such weapons were for lesser beings.

  “The Gods fight with the substance and basis of reality itself,” Stralasi explained. “They pull exotic matter from other universes and weave complex mathematical mysteries to hurl at each other. They seek to overwhelm their opponents’ essence in both obvious and subtle ways.”

  Intense beams crisscrossed the space between the opposing sides only to be silently dissipated, diverted, or harmlessly absorbed by unseen shields. Most of the beams were in energy ranges invisible to Stralasi and Mirly, though they caught flashes of visible light from the ionized atmosphere.

  A gaping hole into another universe opened up next to Darak and his manifestations, threatening to swallow them whole or spill strange and deadly matter onto them. DAR-G closed the hole and cast a field of his own.

  The air around Alum shimmered as the light of Heaven tried to make sense of physical laws that didn’t include it, that didn’t permit the photons of visible light. The Living God waved and the flickering ceased.

  Mirly and Stralasi huddled together near the entrance gate to the Core, lost in their own thoughts. Shaking uncontrollably, Mirly leaned against the folds of the Good Brother’s robe for support and comfort.

  “Don’t worry, Mirly,” the monk reassured her. The young centaur-doe’s quaking muscles and rapid breathing concerned him. “Stay close to me until they’re done. I’m scared,
too, but I’ve been in several similarly terrifying situations during my travels with Darak. I’ve learned to accept that this is beyond us mere mortals; let the Gods sort it out. It won’t take long. We’ll be okay.”

  He didn’t worry her needlessly with the information that this battle, though it looked only slightly more fierce than a chess tournament fought under strobe lights, was probably deadlier than any other ever fought throughout the long history of humanity.

  If Darak or Alum felt any pain from one another’s attacks, let alone from sheer exertion of battle, neither showed it. The Gods bore their injuries, if any, in grim silence.

  “No matter the outcome,” Stralasi added, “you’ll be free to stay here in Heaven if Alum wins, or to leave with us if Darak prevails.”

  Leave?—Mirly wondered. Why would I leave? Leave Heaven? Leave my home? Leave Alum’s Perfection?

  She felt both drawn to the idea of further travels and adventure, and repulsed. Overall, she supposed the notion appealed to her, now that she no longer suffered the worrisome starvation of energy that had plagued her journey these past few days.

  On the other hand, having had a taste of adventure and the wider world, how could she ignore her fear of a vast unknown universe, one that was more foreign to her than the Edge of Heaven? Would the strange God, Darak, protect her in that other universe? Would he guide her or abandon her even more horribly than Alum had abandoned her here?

  She didn’t know what she wished for, or who she wanted to emerge victorious from the battle. It was both confusing and distressing.

  Stralasi was far less conflicted. Though he’d spent the majority of his life, hundreds of years, in service to Alum and the Alumita, he’d come to agree with most of Darak’s views. The siren call of security was hard to resist for one who’d grown up immersed in certainty, but it was a universe of limitless possibility that had led him to Gargus 718.5, to meeting Darak, to Eso-La, and to Crissea. It was hard to ignore that.

  His attention flicked rapidly back and forth between his Familiar’s consciousness that was bearing witness in the Core of Heaven, and his human consciousness that was sitting with Darian Leigh outside a café on the Alumitum.