by wildbow
Something was wrong. Something missing.
“Attack. Sound the attack. Distractions!” The words were wheezes.
Weaver signaled, her bugs drawing words.
Chevalier shot his cannonblade into the far end of the alley, furthest from the villains.
Golem created a hand.
Just what they needed.
The man leaped down from the top of the wall. His light armored suit absorbed his fall, made it quiet.
The D.T. uniform.
He sprayed containment foam at both Jack and Siberian.
Nothing. It wouldn’t achieve a thing.
But Tecton took the moment of Jack’s blindness to duck, to strike the ground.
The Siberian wasn’t immune to gravity. She fell, and just for a moment, she broke contact with Jack.
Tecton slammed his fist into Jack’s stomach.
The D.T. officer had turned the containment foam onto Gray Boy.
Except Gray Boy reappeared, out of the way of the stream.
The containment foam froze in mid-air.
No.
The Siberian leaped out of the fissure, then paced towards Jack.
Her hand stopped an inch away from him. She lowered it.
Jack had turned gray. Trapped, looped.
“Pathetic,” Gray Boy said. “Stupid, useless. I thought you’d do something interesting, but you made yourself prey, instead of the predator. If you’re going to be prey, I want you to be my prey.”
It dawned on Golem. Gray Boy froze him.
Foil’s screams continued, and were soon joined by Jack’s, as Gray Boy started using his knife, reaching within the field.
Up until the moment Foil, still screaming, using her augmented sense of timing to measure the length of each scream, stepped around the monochrome field he’d cast just in front of her. She threw a handful of darts through the Siberian and Gray Boy’s head as his back was turned.
The Siberian flickered out of existence as Gray Boy collapsed.
Neither reappeared, healthy or otherwise.
“Get back from Jack!” Weaver called out. “Quarantine him!”
Tecton used his piledriver, erecting a shelf of earth. Golem stepped back, then did the same, folding large hands around Jack. Jack’s voice was mellow, inaudible, with a funny cadence.
The D.T. officer, for his part, tore the containment foam hose free. He got gunk on himself, but he managed to direct the resulting stream at the gaps. Sealing Jack, burying him.
They stood in silence, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“We got him,” Weaver said. She raised a hand to her ear. “We got Jack. He’s down. Everyone report in.”
“Houston is safe,” Defiant reported. “Battered, but safe.”
“What are the numbers?” Golem asked. “Dinah, if you give me one more answer today…”
No response.
“Reporting from New York. We told Bonesaw Jack was down, and she just surrendered. No idea what to do.”
Chevalier answered, giving instructions for containment. Bonesaw was loaded with viral charges and worse. Quarantine was best. Nilbog could be taken to a secure facility.
“That’s… are we safe?” Golem asked.
“Unless the catalyst event just happened,” Weaver replied. “Get sorted, get organized. First aid, asap. We need to check all info, then we quarantine ourselves for the time being. Stay calm, stay focused, be alert.”
There were nods all around.
They made their way to the ground. Waiting as the others joined them.
Weaver looked at Bitch. “Guess we can hang out for a bit, while we wait to see if there’s any lingering effects or traps.”
“Hanging out sounds good.”
She looked at Golem. “Yeah?”
He shook his head. “I don’t—”
“I don’t either,” she said. What they didn’t was unclear, but the message still served. “You beat Jack in the end.”
“I wish I was so sure,” he said.
“So do I.”
A long pause reigned as Tecton and Foil caught up with them. Parian wrapped her arms around Foil, openly sobbing.
“Anything? Any clue what might have happened?” Weaver asked.
“No,” Bitch said.
“No,” Golem answered.
“Jack said something,” Tecton said. “I don’t… I don’t think I should say it.”
Just like that, the peace was gone.
“Was it—” Golem started. “No. Stay quiet.”
Weaver hung her head for a moment.
“I don’t think it was the catalyst,” Tecton said.
“Pick someone you trust,” Weaver said. “Someone you know to be sane and safe and non-dangerous. Then whisper it. They’ll give a second verdict.”
Tecton’s eyes fell on Golem.
Golem nodded.
Tecton leaned close. “Doesn’t make any sense. Nonsensical. He said—”
Interlude 26
The entity swims through the void and it remembers. Everything is stored, dating back to the very beginning.
In the beginning, a species chokes their gray planet. Here and there, landmasses appear, created by inhabitants to trap or uncover the scarce food that exists, but the landscape is largely liquid, water thick with silt and other particles. The creatures worm in and around one another, and the planet has as much space taken up by the creatures as there is space left for other things.
Each has evolved the same capacity to shift between layers, to explore the alternate versions of this same world, and each of these other worlds are choked by more of the same creatures. Still, they continue to reproduce, and in their spread, they have eradicated virtually every source of food from every world they can access. The species is so numerous that it is nearly impossible to find space to surface at the uppermost areas of the water, where they might absorb starlight and radiation. What little energy they do manage to acquire in the process is lost in struggles to stay at the top and the continued efforts to avoid being pushed and pulled down by the coils of their neighbors.
Tangle.
The ancestor is aware of this, fully cognizant that the fight over resources will soon reach a climax, and there will be a war where every creature fights for itself. These wars are not graceful or sensible. The strongest can be torn apart as easily as the weakest. Once it starts, it will only end when a meager few remain.
Then, as they retreat to individual worlds to mend and restore themselves, the prey will multiply, and there will be a span of feasting for those lucky enough to survive.
With that, the process will begin anew. The same things will occur. This has happened no less than one hundred and seventy times, with little variation. Each time it occurs, realities are left dead, the grace period before resources run out once again is shorter. That the number of worlds exceed the number of particles that might exist in one world’s universe is inconsequential; the creatures multiply exponentially.
They are running out of time.
The ancestor knows this, and it isn’t satisfied. It knows its kin aren’t satisfied either. They are quiet, because there is nothing to say. They are trapped by their nature, by the need to subsist. They are rendered feral, made to be sly and petty and cruel by circumstance. They are made base, lowly.
With all of this in mind, the ancestor broadcasts a message. Each member of the species is made up of cells, of shards, and a typical broadcast is a simple concept, a single message nuanced by a million individual influences brought to bear by the shards that made up the speaker.
Proposal.
The message is voiced with violence, across innumerable wavelengths and means, through heat and motion and electromagnetics and light. Each shard cluster retains different abilities, minor tools for self-defense and offense, for finding prey and helping the ancestor make its way in the cold gray mud. In communicating, it turns the vast majority of these resources outward, to transmit the signal, and each form of communication
has different ideas, different subtleties. In this, a greater, complex communication is achieved.
The act of speaking nearly kills it, it is so starved for energy.
It continues, and because this message is so different from the screams and cries over food and territory and everything else, the others listen. They expend their own energy to transmit it further. The idea spreads across every possible world like a ripple.
A species needs to continue evolving. It needs conflict and variation.
Failure to meet these objectives leads to self-destruction.
By the time the ancestor is finished communicating, it is depleted, unable to even move as it is shoved by the bodies of others that swim past.
Then, in bits and pieces, it is devoured.
Devoured not for energy, but for material.
The shards are absorbed, made a part of the eater, and the ones who eat swell in size. Unsustainable sizes, but they grow nevertheless.
All across the possible worlds, the creatures turn on one another. It is a war, but it takes a different shape, a different form. This time they are not eating for energy, but to stay afloat and stay large enough that they are not subsumed by a greater whole.
The gray planet makes several revolutions around its star before things reach a climax. Many of the creatures are so large they cannot subsist in one world alone. They weave into one world and worm out into another. Every flank is vulnerable to another of its kind lunging out into a world and attacking, consuming whole chunks at a time. Heat, cold, electricity and mental manipulations are leveraged in these struggles, slowing their targets down enough for them to wrap themselves around, shear off a section to take into themselves.
More revolutions, and only a handful remain. Energy is scarce, even with the individual bodies taking up whole oceans of the thin gray mud, absorbing all of the light and radiation they can. Countless worlds have grown dim, absorbed of all possible life and nutrients in the course of struggles and fighting.
The smallest ones recognize the fact that they don’t have energy, that it would cost them all too much if they continued fighting this uphill battle. They submit, and are consumed.
Two remain.
They spend time reorganizing themselves, shifting the sheer masses of shards they have acquired into forms useful for another task.
Once they are reformed, they leech all of the heat and energy from countless worlds and concentrate it in a single reality. The energy boils the oceans of silt-choked waters, disintegrates the landmasses.
Their bodies form into a large, complex shape, with only small fragments in this one world. The extensions of those same fragments extend into other realms, in concentrated, specific shapes, made for a purpose: to survive the next step.
The energy is released, and the planet shatters.
The shattering is so extreme that it extends into other worlds, through the same channels that the fragments used to extend into other realities. Every single one of the remaining habitable worlds is destroyed in the ensuing blast.
And the fragments radiate outwards, shedding and dropping their protective shells as they sail into the black, empty void.
Gestation.
Still flying through the void, the entity forms the word in the midst of its recollections.
They are children. Offspring. They travel the void, hoping to encounter another habitable world.
This is the beginning.
Countless perished, no doubt, in contact with lifeless moons, expending the last of their energy to search the possible iterations of that moon for life. More die within moments of the detonation, their outer casing too damaged, vital processes separated from one another.
But others made contact with other worlds.
A world with life rooted in landmasses, weathering brutal storms of caustic acid. The one who arrives on that world struggles to find a means of survival.
It finds refuge in one of the dying plant structures, provides ambient heat to nourish it, so that the openings might close up and the shelter be made more secure.
The planet revolves around its star many times.
Many, many times.
The one that occupies the structure has bred, now, fragmented into clusters of shards that could occupy others.
Some shards have different focuses. This is the experiment, the test.
Of these plants, some thrive. Others die.
The creature tests different capacities, different clusters of shards. It watches, observes and records events into memory.
It borrows of the conflict and stress of this new, alien species. It borrows of the evolution, of the learning, of the crisis. In some ways, it is a symbiote. In others…
Parasite.
The fragments continue to divide, feasting on abundant resources, on light and radiation and the alien food sources it has started to learn how to consume. It spreads quickly now, across every possible variation of this world that sustains life.
It encounters another. A later arrival to the same planet, a member of its own species, another that is multiplying and consuming and growing. This new arrival chose a different means of survival, but it too chose a kind of parasitism.
They exchange shards where they meet. In these shards are codified memories, as well as the most effective techniques they have observed.
The planetoid is small, the range of options limited. A message is broadcast. Mutual agreement. They will move on.
Migration.
The process is similar. Drawing themselves together. There is cooperation, this time, as each shard returns to the source. The hosts die in droves, and are absorbed for energy.
They gather into the same vast forms that span multiple realities, and they leech energy from other worlds to fuel their exit from a single one. It takes time.
But something else occurs. A broadcast from the other, followed by an attack.
A carefully measured attack. The two creatures ruin one another with friction and pressure, burning hot, and shards are destroyed. Many are partially destroyed.
The other creature joins shards together into combinations, discards and destroys. Repeats the process.
New shards are created. Different functions. Forced mutation.
The end results parallel the studies the creatures have made of the plant life on this planet with its acid rain.
More blatant than intended in the beginning, but nothing lost. New strengths, regarding growth and durability.
They concentrate the energy as they form themselves into an encasement around the small planetoid.
Shell.
The detonation of the small planet scatters the individual clusters of shards, and this time, they are better inured to the harsher elements of space.
So the cycle continues.
The next world encountered has sentient life, civilization. A complicated, rich world.
It is a symbiosis, this time, more than parasitism. The two species learn from one another. The shards code the ‘technology’ of this new species into their memories. They learn of warping space and gravity.
Until the species turns against them. Those lucky enough to bind with the entity’s offspring war against those who do not. Some seek to rule.
Monarchs. The entity forms the thought, defining the memory.
The cycle is cut short by a forced exit, as the shards are rooted out and destroyed by the natives of this civilized world. They meet, they bind and again they share ideas. Richer perceptions, complex technologies and more are fashioned in the unity of three larger creatures. It is through differences in the greater entities that a richness is created, new derivations, new connections that none would be capable of on their own.
The planet is expended, the offspring are cast off in every direction once again.
This time, they are capable of moving, of controlling their course. Gravity, warping space.
The entity recalls all of this as it swims through the void and makes its way to the next target. It can
reach back into the depths of its memory to recall all of what came before.
Each time the cycle started anew, lessons had been learned, methods refined. Each time, the spawn that are spewed out from the destroyed planet are more robust, larger, hosting innumerable memories. Where memories fall in parallel, they are shared out, offered to others.
After more than three thousand cycles, there are safeguards, there are protections. The arsenal of abilities, powers and protections the creature possesses have been built up. The entity remembers past failures and has adapted so they will not happen again.
The entities travel with partners now, moving in spirals while maintaining a measured distance from one another. Each is slightly different from the other, taking on a different role. Attacker and defender, warrior and thinker, builder and destroyer.
This divide is so they are able to take a different stance, shape their shards in subtle ways and clarify the results when their shards are compared and joined once again—some shall be kept, others discarded. Some will turn up interesting possibilities that can be explored when new shards are invented at the cycle’s end.
These individual focuses drive the pair, shape their tasks as they approach their destination.
The entity reaches out with clairvoyance, with precognition, and it views its destination. It communicates, covering vast expanses of space, transmitting signals across channels formed of the very foundation of this universe. These signals are broadcast only across specific realities, so that no aftereffects or lingering transmissions will contact a version of that world that hosts no life at all.
Destination.
Agreement.
Trajectory.
Agreement.
Each signal is nuanced, shaped with subtle details and clues by the trillions upon trillions upon trillions of individual shards that make up the entity. Through these nuances, it conveys more information than an entire planet of sentient beings might in a hundred revolutions.
They have settled on a target. Old lessons are remembered. It is a planet of sentient lifeforms, more primitive than some the entities have run into, more advanced than others. Social creatures, forming communities. These societies teeter on fine balances, but they persevere nonetheless. A world rife with conflicts, big and small.