by J. N. Chaney
Another alarm sounded. It was the oxygen critical alert.
The tunnel went on, and he had a few minutes of exploration left, so he might as well use it. He continued, pushing along and drifting.
Then a final alert sounded. Oxygen depleted. So all he had now was whatever was left inside the suit.
“It’ll get me to the scene of my death,” he said, then giggled, because he’d thought the same thing about the Halfwing’s drive just a few hours ago.
He giggled again, but it trailed off into a soft groan. Everything was slowing down. His head hurt. Carbon dioxide poisoning. Dash was proud that he recognized that.
The tunnel was gone. Darkness was around, above, and below. Well, this must be the dying part. Except, what was that enormous face?
Indeed, Dash found himself hanging in front of a face—angular, stylized, metallic, and dull grey metal rimmed with something that gleamed like gold. It seemed to be lit from all around by a soft blue glow that now seemed to come from all around him, but very far away. He had a vague sense of being in a vast cavern
So he was going to share his tomb with some enormous, metallic guy.
Weird.
The face loomed closer as he drifted toward it. Now it filled his faceplate. A blue circle suddenly illuminated, looking like a large button. He pushed it, and there was movement—metallic things sliding and rotating around. Now he saw…a chair?
Dash shrugged again. The movement made grey stars blossom behind his eyes. More soft, wooly greyness pushed in from all around, consuming the world. Now, it was just a narrow tunnel of grey.
Then there were more tunnels, so many tunnels.
Dash settled in the chair, making himself comfortable for the afterlife. That went on forever, right? Might as well be sitting down comfortably for it, then.
“Power Core initializing. Establishing connection.”
Wait, did I say that?
That was Dash’s next-to-last experience. The last was an explosion of pain that blew everything away—
—and then it all came thundering back in, a rush as the world slammed back into focus. A tidal wave of agony came with it. It seemed to emanate in waves from his back, and almost washed away words spoken by a gentle, female voice.
“Link established. Welcome, Messenger. I have been waiting for you.”
14
Pain.
There was a tsunami of sensation, experience, and information.
Dash’s consciousness was expanding, snaking along shimmering pathways, splintering into new awareness, then continuing along new strands of glimmering light.
He felt a sense of growing. Of expanding, both physically and mentally. Of becoming…more.
This went on and on, for what felt like an eternity, and then it began to subside, the rush of change and growth slowing. More and more of…Dash, that was his name, of Dash began to reemerge. Eventually, it was mostly Dash, and he could begin to think about just what was going on.
He found himself slung in a cradle that had seemed to shape and conform itself to him. It was, well, comfortable failed to describe it. More to the point, the Oxygen Depleted alert in his heads-up seemed suddenly redundant. He had no problem breathing. Mind you, what he was breathing in and out was stale and sluggish and spent, probably more carbon dioxide and sweat than anything else, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dash finally unlatched his helmet and pulled it free with a hiss that made his ears pop. Fresh, cool air washed over his face and he took a moment just to feel and taste it.
Where am I?
“You are safe, Messenger.”
Dash blinked. He hadn’t said anything but got an answer anyway. “I…” he started but had to stop and dig his voice out of wherever it had gone deep in his throat. He coughed, then said, “I’m safe? Okay. That’s good. Safe is good.”
“Your physiology and biochemistry were unexpected. Primitive. The connection took longer than anticipated to establish and stabilize, but it is now within acceptable parameters,” the voice said. It had a quality that was inhuman, crisp, yet warm.
“The connection?” He looked around. He seemed to be in roughly spherical chamber, featureless except for the cradle holding him, which was itself suspended from a pair of metallic columns to his left and right. “Wait.”
Dash shook his head. Between near death from anoxia, and whatever the hell had happened since, his head rang, while intelligent thought swam in and out of reach.
Dash took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go, right back to basics. Where am I?”
“You are currently co-located with object 2763548263, approximately 1.5 kilometers below the closest point of its surface.”
“I…okay, hang on.”
Somehow, it seemed to Dash that the voice he was hearing, and understanding perfectly well, wasn’t really a comprehensible language—at least, not to him. It also seemed that the distance in kilometers to the comet’s surface hadn’t been measured in those units at all. Some sort of sophisticated, real-time translation was taking place, allowing him to both hear the language as it really was, but understand it anyway.
“Alright,” Dash finally said. “Let’s try this again. Where am I right now? As in, what is this room, or compartment, or whatever it is?”
“You are in the interface. Given your physiology, it is the only way you can properly interact with the Archetype.”
“Wait wait wait. What’s a…”
But Dash trailed off. The question wasn’t really necessary. As soon as the word Archetype entered his conscious thoughts, a flood of memories surged through him. Trouble was, they weren’t his memories. Or, rather, they were, but they were memories of things he hadn’t really experienced.
“Let me see,” he said. “Let me see this Archetype.”
“As you wish, Messenger,” said the AI.
The sphere around him vanished and was replaced by a kind of cavern. The transition wrenched at Dash, making him momentarily dizzy. Strangely, it did not feel like he was inside a giant metallic face, which is what his still wobbly memories seemed to recall, but rather looking through his own eyes.
That was when he saw himself. Or, rather, that was when he saw the Archetype.
A massive, metallic construct, shaped like a humanoid. It was vastly imposing, but also supremely elegant. Its huge torso was a complex arrangement of triangular facets, its limbs a series of long, enmeshed prisms, fully articulated at shoulders, elbows, and wrists, as well as at hips, knees, and ankles. Its head—upon which was the face he had seen when he entered this vast chamber—was sleek, tapering to a pointed chin. Titanic, wing-like devices were folded upon its back.
It was stunning. Terrifying. And utterly beautiful.
And it was Dash. Or Dash was it. Or would be. Or partly was.
“The connection is currently muted, Messenger. Now that you have fully interfaced and there is no risk of self-damage, do you wish for it to be fully implemented?”
Dash almost asked, What does that mean? But he knew what it meant, somehow. Right now, his connection with the Archetype was passive, feeding experience into his brain but allowing nothing but thoughts to travel from him to it.
“Uh…” he started, but had to shake his head, like he was trying to clear away the last fog of a hangover. This felt like a dream. Or being dead, maybe? Maybe he’d died, and this is what came afterward—an afterlife of living inside a giant, humanoid robot.
Dash smirked. As far as he knew, no religion had ever suggested that.
He finally nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do it. Go ahead, turn the connection up to full.”
Between one heartbeat and the next, Dash ceased to be merely part of the Archetype, and became the Archetype.
He lifted a hand, but his own, fleshy hand didn’t move. Instead, a colossal hand with segmented, metallic fingers rose into view. And yet, it was still his hand. He moved it, rotated it at the wrist, and flexed the fingers, the way he always had. But it was the Archetype’s hand that did those things. It was ent
irely seamless. From Dash’s point of view, nothing had changed; he was still Dash.
Except Dash was now an enormous alien construct.
“There are no anomalies in the connection, Messenger. All is normal.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good I guess.” He frowned. “Why do you keep calling me Messenger?”
“That is your identity,” she explained.
“Um, no, it’s not. I’m Dash.”
“Do you wish for that to be your new identity?” asked the AI.
“I…I do, yeah.”
“Very well, Dash."
Dash took a deep breath and…and then took another one. The Archetype’s chest didn’t rise and fall. But when he moved his leg, a titanic leg moved beneath him.
Yeah, this was going to take some getting used to.
“Okay, Archetype? Is that what I call you?”
“If you wish, but it is unnecessary. My only connection is with you, though this specific unit has a designation of its own. That name is Sentinel.”
“Ah. Okay, Sentinel, what exactly are you? Like, I guess you’re a machine? A computer? A really, really powerful computer?”
“My nature is problematic to render in a way that you would comprehend. For your purposes, though, computer is sufficient.”
“Well, that sounds just a little condescending, but okay. And how long have you been here?”
“I was placed here, awaiting the arrival of the Messenger, approximately two hundred thousand solar years ago,” Sentinel said.
“Two hundred?” He asked. “Holy damn.”
So, when this Archetype had been placed here, humans were primordial ooze, or apes, or something primitive anyway, back on Old Earth.
“Hang on,” Dash continued. “You’re not saying you’ve been waiting here for two hundred thousand years for me, are you?”
“Based on the best information available, you are the Messenger, so yes, I have been waiting here for you.”
“Oh. Well, sorry I took so long to get here.” He considered all the things he somehow knew about this. The Sentinel was not only a massive, walking avatar resembling a colossal person, it was also capable of flight through space—both subluminal, and through unSpace. The details of the technology involved in all this were both intimately familiar and utterly alien to him, but Viktor or Conover might be able to make better sense of it all.
Viktor. Conover. Leira. Right. They were out there, likely wondering if he’d died.
What would they make of this?
“They would wet themselves,” he said, then considered the Archetype further. It was fundamentally powered by what seemed to be a microscopic singularity—a tiny black hole. The physics of it were such that the smaller a black hole, the more energy it radiated; it was an elusive concept Dash had heard called a kugelblitz. Essentially a limitless source of energy, a kugelblitz would render concepts like fuel obsolete. Trouble was, creating a kugelblitz entailed harnessing incomprehensible amounts of energy, far beyond anything the galaxy could even muster. So, it remained an idea only, a fanciful dream that might work in stories, but never in reality.
But there was one right here, and it was powering the thing that Dash had become.
“Okay,” he said. “We…er, I can leave here, right? This is as much a ship as a…”
He struggled to find a word to describe the archetype. The one that finally came to him was from an ancient vid he’d watched, something from the days of Old Earth. The word was mech.
“As much a ship as a mech, right?” he asked Sentinel.
“It would serve little purpose to prevent the Messenger from leaving this place.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“It is intended to move to the places it is needed, no matter where those may be,” she said.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Dash took a long, slow breath. He’d gone from a desperate plan to thwart Nathis and Clan Shirna, to being plunged into a hopeless ordeal that would inevitably end in his death, to being merged with a vast alien mech representing technologies undreamed of.
What a day.
“I have a recommendation, Dash.”
Dash blinked. “Oh. Okay, shoot.”
“You should proceed to the Eye,” Sentinel said.
“The Eye? What’s that?” he asked.
As soon as he asked the question, he knew the answer. The Eye was yet another piece of ancient alien tech located on yet another of the multitude of comets making up the Pasture.
“Ah, okay. I know what the Eye is. So why would I want to go there?”
Dash expected to suddenly know why, but this time, he received a reply instead.
“It is the first step on the path of the Legacy. As the Messenger, you must come to understand the Legacy of the Creators, who decided that such understanding must be a deliberate act, undertaken over a period of time.”
“Not sure I really understand that, but I guess that’s the point of this Legacy thing.” Dash braced himself. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Nothing happened.
“Uh, anytime you’re ready, Sentinel.”
“The Archetype is functioning normally.”
“Okay, so…” But Dash trailed off. The way this thing worked, essentially substituting for his body, did that also apply to traveling through space?
As an experiment, Dash tried to fly.
Dash felt a smooth, powerful surge that somehow both was and was not movement. Or, rather, he felt the sensation of movement, but there was no acceleration. The Archetype simply began moving, sweeping majestically across the vast chamber holding it, and it headed straight toward a sheer wall of ice and rock.
“Crap.”
Dash’s brain did its reflexive thing, flinging his hands up to protect his face. But his hands were titanic, vast metal constructs that slammed into the wall. The impact spalled off chunks of icy debris that whirled around the Archetype. To Dash, they swept past him—that is, him personally, and not the giant mech he was inside. He gasped and winced, then yelped as a hunk of rock and ice hurled directly toward his face. He tried to bat it away, but he missed and the frozen boulder slammed into his nose and shattered, the broken pieces flying off in new directions. He felt the impact, but didn’t, just as he felt himself moving, but didn’t.
He relaxed a touch. This was weird.
Taking a couple of deep breaths, he said, “Right. Is there a way out of this comet?”
“The substance is hardly an obstacle to the Archetype.”
The sentence had been delivered in the same dispassionate tone as all the rest, but Dash couldn’t help feeling the words you dummy silently hung off the end of it.
“Okay. Well, so let’s try this, then.”
Dash reached for the wall, hesitated, then dug his fingers into it.
Whatever propelled the Archetype kept him firmly in place, not rebounding in a Newtonian way as he pushed his hand into the wall. He felt (and, again, didn’t feel) his fingers sink into the ice. He pulled his hand back, scooped out a huge chunk of the chamber wall, and flung it aside.
Dash couldn’t help grinning. This is amazing.
He shoved his other hand into the wall and dug out a chunk. Then he went to it in earnest, tearing the wall open, digging his way out of the comet.
Dash’s hand crashed through the ice and encountered nothing. Through the resulting gap, he could see the blackness of space. He’d reached the surface.
It had only taken minutes.
Again, Dash decided to go that way. The Archetype responded by accelerating into the remains of the ice, easily smashing through in a shower of debris and soaring into space, away from the comet.
And just like that, Dash was a spaceship. He was flying.
It was one of the most marvelous, and yet most terrifying things he had ever experienced.
Space was dangerous. It was an airless, radiation-charged void that alternated between stellar heat and vast cold. A human would survive only moments exposed to
its brutally harsh reality. That was why, of course, humans travelled through it in complex ships, and wore cumbersome, hermetic vac suits. What they didn’t do was fly through space the way they might swim through water, essentially naked.
But that was exactly what Dash was doing now.
Okay, not exactly. His frail, fleshy self was safely cocooned in a vast construct of alien tech. But the experience of it was just that. Dash felt as though he flew through space, that there was no alien construct, just him, soaring through space as though he’d been born to do it. Once more, he could both feel and, yet, not feel, the emptiness of a vacuum, the heat and radiation pouring from the stars in the Globe of Suns beating on one side of him, a cold nearing absolute zero on the other.
“Okay,” he said, zooming away from the comet, “this is really something.”
Whatever drove the Archetype—his Sentinel at the helm—was smooth, powerful, and silent. If he decided to go faster, he did. If he decided to slow down, or turn, or spin himself around, he did. It was like moving his hand or his foot; he did it, and it happened.
In what seemed like no time at all, he closed on another comet. This one wasn’t rotating. Something was keeping it locked into one position and orientation. And it was, indeed, his destination. This was the Eye.
Dash flipped a somersault, so he approached the Eye feet-first. His experience in zero-G was eminently helpful here; all he had to do was what he’d do in an environment free of gravity and the Archetype would respond, instead of his actual body, which simply remained comfortably ensconced in the cradle. As he approached the comet, he slowed himself down and finally landed on his feet, flexing his knees. He stumbled a bit—because he wasn’t that experienced with zero-G—but remained upright. Now, standing on the Eye, he looked around.
A short distance away was another alien construct. This one was a smooth, polished dome, with a variety of protrusions—some tubular, some square, some just elongated prisms.
“So that’s the Eye?”