Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  He used his power, and the area at the far end of the alley was frozen. A ten foot high wall of looped air. Tecton slammed into it, struck the air as if it were a solid wall.

  He punched the wall, and it shook. Gray Boy proceeded to freeze the walls on either side.

  A dead end.

  “Shooting in the dark,” Gray Boy said. “Let’s see. There!”

  One section of bugs were caught, trapped in a loop.

  “A miss. Phooey. There!”

  Another section of bugs frozen.

  And Foil shrieked.

  Shrieked again.

  Shrieked again.

  A loop.

  Parian’s own scream joined Foil’s, but there was no loop there.

  “Gotcha,” Gray Boy said.

  Weaver hung her head.

  “We’re going to walk out of here,” Jack said. “In… about five minutes. We’ll freeze everyone we see. Tell them to run if you want. It won’t matter.”

  Foil’s screams continued. Each the same length, with variations on the tail end, as she managed to reassert control over the bodily impulse that was being performed anew each time.

  Jack and Siberian advanced, passing Gray Boy as they closed the distance on Tecton.

  “How much more damage can we do? Is it a question of doing as much damage to as many people as possible? Can we get a second trigger event out of one of you? Bring about the end of the world?”

  Jack seemed so pleased with himself.

  Jack has a thinker ability.

  What? Not precognition.

  “Or is it about doing something significant? Does killing Scion count?”

  The heroes outside the perimeter were aware Gray Boy was inside. Had to be, by Foil’s voice. They were caught between watching for outside threats, of which there were bound to be few, and guarding against an approach from within.

  What does Jack do?

  He grasped for a thought and failed.

  No. He needed to think about it from a different angle.

  What does Weaver do?

  “Dinah.”

  “Three questions left.“

  “What’s the chance? For what I’m thinking right now?”

  “Allowing for the fuzz I’m getting from Scion’s presence above you? Seventy.“

  Seventy.

  “The numbers are better,” she said. “You’re on the right path.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Jack had raised his sword to Tecton’s throat. The Siberian stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder. Gray Boy looked up and Golem leaned out of sight.

  “Weaver, you have anything up your sleeve?”

  “Yes and no. A way to stop Siberian, maybe. Or Gray Boy, maybe. But… I need an opening to do either. A distraction. And whichever one we don’t stop is going to destroy us.”

  “Okay,” Golem said. “I’ll get you that distraction.”

  “Was going to use my bugs, get Clockblocker. With him, maybe we can take out both at once.”

  “Don’t,” Golem replied, tensing up despite himself. He’d nearly raised his voice to the point that Jack could hear. Foil’s continued screaming drowned him out.

  “I… won’t. What are you thinking?”

  “That there’s an answer. A stupid, silly answer.”

  He stood, resisting the urge to groan, and he approached the end of the rooftop closest to the heroes who were defending the areas outside of the alleyway.

  He gestured, signaling to one. When they didn’t move, bewildered, he created a hand, pushing them.

  Others, he stopped. A shake of his head. Clockblocker was out. So was Imp. Grue, Vista, Kid Win, Cuff and Grace wouldn’t do.

  Only this person would serve.

  “Two more questions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Left or right?”

  “Right.“

  The long way around. Not the way he would have expected.

  “Now, or wait?”

  No response.

  He gestured, and he created hands pointing the way.

  “Now,” she said.

  He shut his eyes. This was it. Last question asked.

  “Be ready,” he said.

  This would be the moment everything fell into place.

  The man made his way down to the end of the alley, and Golem created more hands; six hands in a matter of seconds, sticking out of the wall. Each pointing in the direction they needed. He created a platform and started raising it. Raising their potential savior up towards the top of the wall of looped time.

  “You’re- he’s walking into a trap,” Weaver said. “They’ll see him. They’re looking right at him.”

  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. W
e 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-“

  26.x (Interlude, …)

  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. T
hey 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.