by J. N. Chaney
Dash couldn’t react fast enough. He flew through the explosion immediately after it had happened. Charged plasma, stellar-hot, washed over him, and then he was through.
He looked around. The two missiles he’d dodged earlier had regained their lock and now burned straight at him. The final raider, meanwhile, had pulled back, and now fired two more missiles. It turned out he was smart; he maneuvered to ensure Dash had to face three threats—himself, and two pairs of missiles—coming at him from three entirely different directions. He might be able to deal with any two of them, but probably not all three.
That was clearly the raider’s thinking, and it would be sound in the case of nearly any other opponent. But Dash was starting to get the hang of the Archetype, even starting to feel comfortable wearing it, for lack of a better term. The missiles were actually the more dire of the threats, because their warheads could pack a far larger punch than a particle beam. He sent seekers after three of them, which was all the Archetype could launch. That left one missile and the raider himself.
He focused on the remaining missile. The dark-lance projector was still recycling, so he flung himself toward it, dodging it at the last second. As he did, the seekers found the other missiles. Dash saw them destroyed—perfect. As for this one…
He swung an open palm, as though swatting at a Penumbran blood-fly. It caught the missile in a glancing hit and sent it spinning off, thrusters firing crazily as it tried to reorient itself. Eventually, though, it simply gave up and self-destructed.
The raider flashed by, particle beam ripping in the Archetype.
With a frustrated yell, Dash swung his other hand in a fist. It slammed into the raider, punching its drive section away from the remainder of the hull in a spray of debris. The rest of the raider continued to coast, sparks and more debris trailing behind it. A few seconds later, the drive section exploded in yet another searing fusion blast.
Dash looked around. Wreckage and clouds of rapidly cooling plasma surrounded him. But that was it. There were no more threats.
He took a shuddering breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. That was fucking intense.”
Dash made his way to the black comet. As he did, he took stock of the Archetype. The dark-lance had finally recharged, and repairs, or healing, or whatever it was, were well underway, layering new material into the wounds of the particle beam hits. But a lingering question remained.
“Why,” he asked, “is this thing not running at full power? Like that dark-lance thing. How come it’s using its lowest-power setting?”
“Because there are components that must be obtained and installed in the Archetype.”
“Wait, this thing isn’t complete?”
“It is complete, but not optimal,” Sentinel said.
“So is that what this quest, or whatever you want to call this scavenger hunt, is all about? Travelling around to assemble all the pieces of this Archetype? That sounds, well, not to be rude, but pretty silly. Like a game or something, where you have to collect a bunch of things and then face a final, powerful enemy.” Dash even had a few games like that in the Slipwing’s computer. They weren’t a half-bad way of passing the time.
“There is a reason such things are enduring, regardless of the culture in question. Seeking and laboring to obtain things, in order to advance one’s knowledge and understanding, would be familiar to all of them.”
“Really?” Dash asked.
“Some truths are universal.”
“If you say so.”
Who am I to argue with a two hundred-thousand-year-old artificial intelligence?
They reached the black comet. Dash made to put the Archetype down on the surface the way he had on the Eye, but he suddenly realized—in that same, strange way of just realizing things—that it wasn’t necessary. What he sought was buried beneath the surface, meaning he would have to dig to get at it. In fact, that would be the only way to get at it.
He plunged his fist into the surface of the comet. It punched through a crust of organic compounds and pulverized rock, into the ice beneath. In a few moments, he had dug deep into the comet, flinging a trail of spinning, frozen debris that drifted into space behind him. As he dug, he got closer to his target.
It was a rock.
Dash frowned. “Uh…”
“This object required protection against the passage of time. It was encased in rock for that reason.”
“Okay. How do I get it out?” Dash asked.
“That is a problem you must solve.”
“Oh, so I’m being tested now?”
“Every sentient thing is being tested, all of the time.”
“How philosophical.”
Dash considered the rock. He could easily hold it between his massive thumb and forefinger. Simply crushing it, which he could easily do, seemed risky. If whatever was inside the rock needed to be protected from the long passage of time, then it may not be as indestructible as most of the other Unseen tech he’d encountered. But why? And how was this a test?
Dash peered more closely at the rock, but other than the wearing and pitting of age, he saw nothing that gave a clue.
Wait.
As gently as he could, Dash squeezed the rock. It immediately cracked, fragments spalling off. He took his time, turning it, applying a small bit of pressure, then turning and squeezing it again. Eventually, the broken rock crumbled into fragments, revealing a cylindrical rod about a meter long.
“I guess the point is, when using this Archetype thing, it’s easy to be all big and powerful. But, sometimes, it takes a gentle touch.” He smirked. “Same way I deal with women.”
“Whatever methods you use to promote reproduction, as long as they work, they are adequate,” Sentinel said.
Wow. Not only had this ancient artificial intelligence managed to make romance and sex sound about as fun as changing out a defective power coupling, but Dash couldn’t help feel it had also managed to work in a snide remark about how he approached it.
“You’re just jealous.”
There was no answer.
Dash stared at the rod a moment, wondering what to do with it, or if removing it from its rocky casing had been the whole point of this.
No. Wait.
He lowered the rod to a point on the Archetype’s thigh. There was a receptacle for it there. He knew that.
Gently, he worked the rod into the receptacle. It took a couple of tries, mainly because he kept getting distracted by the reality he was trying to do this with a hand the size of a small ship. Only when he pushed that aside and just focused on himself doing it, did it slip into place. The metal around it began to flow, the opening into which he’d placed it shrinking, until it was gone and the rod was fully implanted.
A surge of power rolled through the Archetype. The rod had not only allowed for a more efficient distribution of power from the mech’s kugelblitz source, but it also generated power on its own. So, a rod a meter long that put out as much power as a fusion plant was now in his command, and he had to plan accordingly. It wasn’t every day you had the power of a city in the palm of your giant, metallic hand.
Dash gave up trying to think of these things in terms of wealth. It was pointless. There simply wasn’t enough wealth for any of this tech, much less all of it.
An instant later, the image of the Pasture that had been Dash’s perspective pretty much ever since he’d dug the Archetype out of its icy storage changed to something new.
It was the galaxy, seen from afar. But it wasn’t some conceptual image which, since no known race had ever left the galaxy for such an external view, was all that anyone had ever seen. Dash knew this was the actual Milky Way Galaxy, seen from very far away.
As he watched, the history of the galaxy began to unfold before him, and it was nothing like anything anyone had ever even imagined.
“This is the galaxy as it is, but in truth, Messenger—this is only the beginning.”
The image of the galaxy suddenly expanded. Dash
realized it wasn’t just zooming in; he was experiencing some sort of travel, apparently through real space, but travel that somehow ignored or bypassed the restrictions imposed on normal travel like, say, the speed of light. It had something to do with…
“The Dark Between? What’s that?”
On the boundary between what you call real space and unSpace is a realm of existence that incorporates the fundamental nature of both. The Creators, the Unseen, to you, occupy and travel through this realm. They are therefore freed of the constraints imposed by both of the adjacent realities.
“So they can stay in real space—kind of, anyway—but also be in unSpace? So they can travel as fast as they want? They don’t have to, like…accelerate? Worry about inertia?”
“Essentially correct, at least in a very cursory way,” Sentinel said.
“Holy shit.”
The Archetype didn’t respond to that, but it didn’t have to. Dash could only marvel. Marvel was the only word for the whole concept and what it implied. Even then, he could only fit a small amount of that inside his brain. It was all too big. Too much. The only thing that really stood out was the Fade on the Slipwing. In some way, he realized, it must be riding this Dark Between, but in an extraordinarily crude way, wobbling and ploughing through it, rather than actually entering what was, apparently, an entirely different reality. Compared to this, the Fade was like some ancient hot air balloon would have been compared to the Slipwing herself—practically not even in the same universe.
He gave up and turned his attention back to the image of the galaxy. He plunged into the heart of it, skimming the edge of the event horizon of the super-massive black hole in the galaxy’s core, then zooming into one of the spiral arms. Just that brief experience would probably keep scientists who studied that sort of thing going for an entire lifetime.
The rate of passage slowed. Individual stars resolved from blurs of light whipping past. The image finally stopped.
The image, that is, Dash, came to a stop. Around him, colossal bursts of energy erupted, as though stars suddenly flared and faded. A few stars actually exploded, titanic blasts that left glowing nebulae in their aftermath. For a while, Dash could only stare at it all, wondering what it meant.
“Oh, hang on, Sentinel. This is a war, isn’t it?”
“It is. The Unseen do battle against the Golden, seeking to preserve the vestiges of life that occur on many planets.”
“The Golden? Okay, who the hell are they?”
In answer, the image shifted, showing an inset—a bipedal humanoid probably about five feet tall, whose skin—which was, indeed, golden—rippled and flowed as it moved, like some fluid polymer. It took Dash only a moment to realize it was artificial, a constructed life-form.
“That’s a Golden? Who made them?”
“That is unknown. All that is clear is that they were created, then they destroyed their creators to assert their own existence.”
Dash couldn’t help but notice a glimmer of distaste. The idea of destroying one’s creator seemed to not sit well with the Archetype, in any case.
“Their loyalty programming obviously didn’t get enough quality control testing. So what, exactly, are they trying to do, that the Unseen are trying to stop?” Dash asked.
“The Golden seek to destroy any life, or even potential life, throughout the galaxy. This is because they believe all life is inferior to their own.”
“Oh.” Dash narrowed his eyes. “Kinda sounds like Clan Shirna, which your Creators, I’m pretty sure, also created. They made them like guard dogs of the Pasture, except now they seem to be determined to wipe out everyone else.” He curled his lip. “A little hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“To be effective guardians, the bioengineered lifeforms that you now know as Clan Shirna had to be given a degree of free will. Over time, that has developed into an unintended intent.”
“No shit. They’re xenophobic assholes.”
“Hence the need for the Messenger,” Sentinel said.
“The need…wait. What? What do you mean?”
“The war you are witnessing happened two hundred thousand years ago. Every two hundred thousand years, the Unseen return to exert their influence and ensure that the Golden do not succeed in exterminating all life from the galaxy. The Messenger is a harbinger of that return.”
Dash stared at the flashing, exploding stars. Just stared, while he tried to wrap his mind around this new bit of information about the war he was watching.
“This is going to happen again? Like soon?”
“Potentially. Nothing is certain, Dash. But that is the logical extrapolation.”
Dash tried to imagine the galaxy caught up in a war between these two hyper-advanced races, the Unseen and the Golden—a war in which the stars themselves had been weaponized. How could anything that wasn’t itself a hyper-advanced race even begin to think about surviving that?
“Well. Fuck.”
The flashes of searing energy, of gamma-ray bursts turned into colossal beams, destroying whole star systems, of stars erupting into unimaginably powerful blasts of x-rays and plasma, began to slow and diminish. Eventually, it stopped altogether. Apparently, the war was over.
Dash let out a breath. “Okay, so I’m no astrophysicist or whatever, but how come, when we look at things, like two hundred thousand light years away, we don’t see some sign of this?”
“This galaxy is approximately fifty thousand light years in diameter,” Sentinel said. “The light from these events long ago passed into intergalactic space.”
“Ah. Good point. So what we see is the aftermath, like nebula and stuff. Like the Shadowed Nebula. That was caused by the war I guess, right?”
“That is correct. It is, in fact, the volume of space most affected by the culminating battle.”
“So I guess the Unseen, you know, won?”
“You exist.”
“Well, gonna have to thank them for that, if I ever get to meet them. Oh, hey, you let me see one of those Golden. How about an Unseen? Can I see one?” Dash smirked. “Or are they Unseeable?”
“I acknowledge your attempt at humor,” Sentinel said.
“Tough room,” Dash said, but he stopped as a new image appeared. It looked like a lanky, bipedal dog.
“That’s an Unseen?”
“It is the form of the Creators, yes.”
Dash wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Probably something huge. Or with an enormous brain. Or made of light, or a swarm of nanobots—something, anyway, that wasn’t a lanky, bipedal dog.
He almost chuckled at the absurdity of it, until he remembered these lanky, bipedal dogs had constructed the Archetype, and the Lens, and the Ribbon, and all of the Pasture, and probably all sorts of tech he hadn’t even encountered. Moreover, they lived and traveled through an entire reality that existed on the membrane separating real space and unSpace.
Sure, they might look like lanky, bipedal dogs, but from a human perspective, he might as well be looking at a god.
Dash blew out a long, slow sigh. “Okay, so I’m guessing that the Unseen have gone back into this Darkness Between.”
“Many have. Some remain in the Kingsports.”
“And those are?”
Except, like many other concepts that should be entirely alien and unknowable, Dash knew what they were. Vast fortresses, so silent and dark they simply couldn’t be detected. They existed in real space, outposts of the Unseen, from which they could monitor what was happening there.
“Okay, so if they’re still here, in real space, in these Kingsports things, why all this complicated stuff about the Pasture, and the Messenger, and the Archetype, and finding these components? Why don’t they just lurk until they’re needed again, and then come out shooting?”
“I do not know.”
That slammed Dash’s thoughts to a halt. It was the first time the Archetype hadn’t known something, or caused him to know it. Dash found the fact of it being ignorant of something so obviousl
y important profoundly chilling.
“So what about the Golden? Are they still out there, somewhere in real space, in their own Kingsport things?”
“Again, I do not know. I do not believe the Creators, the Unseen, do either. They have not been able to discern where the Golden come from, or where they return to.”
“Well, Sentinel, that sucks.”
Dash considered it. Based on what he knew, the Unseen were masters of warfare, despite being a race that wasn’t particularly warlike. They’d obviously been forced to become militant in order to protect the galaxy from the Golden. That was actually both pretty noble and kind of sad. But it hadn’t stopped them from throwing themselves into the task, developing weapons like the Lens, and fighting machines like the Archetype, to do what they needed to do.
The Golden were another matter. They remained elusive, launching their attacks from long range, focusing in particular on compromising things that were themselves technology. It probably originated from them being essentially technological themselves. That seemed to be why the Archetype, the Lens, and Ribbon all had attributes of both machines and living things. It gave them some protection from the effects of the Golden.
“So, to sum this up, it’s been two hundred thousand years since the last war. These wars happen about every two hundred thousand years. So we might be due for another war between these two races…well, any day now.”
“Possibly.”
“But even if it’s only a hundred years off, which, you gotta admit, is a pretty small margin of two thousand centuries, then this will all happen long after I’m dead. That makes me being the Messenger pretty pointless, doesn’t it?”
“That would logically follow.”
“So, hear me out. That seems to hint that it’s going to happen, well, soon. So the bottom line is that there’s a war coming, sometime in my lifetime, isn’t there?”
“Again, logical.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
That is because there is no answer that could be absolutely correct, Dash. The future is unknowable, even to the Creators. There are too many variables, too many factors to do more than offer conjecture. But, as you have stated, a reasonable conjecture, based on what we know, is that there will soon be another war between the Creators—the Unseen—and the Golden.”