Dysphoria: Permanence (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 7)

by Terra Whiteman

  I lifted a brow, looking at her from over my shoulder. “Us?”

  A small smile. “Me.” She nodded at the wall. “Any closer?”

  “Nope.”

  “You should come down and make an appearance. The others are growing concerned.”

  “I don’t really care, honestly.”

  Leid frowned. “Well I do. You’re still part of the court, and we don’t need another thing to worry about.”

  “Alright, fine,” I sighed. “Tomorrow. I have to meet with Yahweh and Pariah to oversee the designs of their machinery, anyway.”

  Leid smirked, leaning on the doorframe and crossing her arms. “Look at you, so… pedagogical.”

  I shook my head, saying nothing.

  She turned to leave. “I have to meet with Adrial. Your plate needs to be empty before I return.”

  “Or what?”

  A mischievous glimmer wicked across her eyes. “Or you’ll be punished.”

  I hesitated, thinking that through. “So, do you not want me to eat? I’m confused.”

  She didn’t respond, stepping into the hall and closing the door behind her.

  *

  I awoke shivering in the early hours of the morning. I could see my breath; not even Leid was able to keep our cot warm.

  I sat up, wincing at the strain of my shoulders from overexertion during my “punishment” yesterday night. Leid stirred beside me, but only turned over and kept sleeping.

  I made sure she was sufficiently covered and reached for my coat. Tae’s mangled image was crouched in the corner, still watching me. I’d made the mistake of looking at her—more out of surprised dismay than anything else—but it was enough to make her smile at me with a row of broken teeth.

  Fuck you, I thought, vacating the room.

  Normally whenever I was restless I would smoke, but there was nothing to smoke and so I just stood on the fortress’s keep, letting the cold wind have at me. The abandoned bonfire was on its last legs below, the charred wood having all but turned to ash, sparring a pillar of smoke into the sky.

  Metric tensor.

  I said the equation aloud, as if that would bring some clarity to it. I wanted to work through it again, though Leid wouldn’t be pleased if I woke her by scribbling on the walls.

  No, I needed more sleep.

  Waking Yahweh was a lot less dangerous than waking my wife so I left the keep and returned to the hall, heading toward his room. I was certain he had some sedatives left in his stash. Most of us preferred to get high, not tired.

  I knocked on his door, counting to ten.

  I knocked again, this time louder.

  Five seconds after, he opened the door just a crack. He looked tired and annoyed. “What time is it?”

  “I need something to sleep,” I said.

  Yahweh studied my face, sensing my tumult. His own softened. “Alright, one moment.”

  He moved away from the door, giving me a clear line of view into his room. There, in his cot, lay Zira. He was sound asleep, one arm lounged above his head, his clothes crumpled beside the sheets.

  Yahweh reappeared and I averted my gaze to the floor, but not before he realized what I’d seen. He cleared his throat, smoothed his hair and shut the door. “I don’t need your commentary.”

  “Commentary on what?” I asked, feigning confusion.

  He shot me a look, one that relayed ‘You know what’, before venturing down the hall. I followed him, trying not to smirk. “And don’t chide Zira about this later, either.”

  “Do you really think I care where you shove your dick?” I snapped, mildly insulted.

  Yahweh cringed. “Thank you for your understanding.”

  “Any time.”

  III

  FERAL CODEX

  Regalis Sarine-376--;

  REALITY. WHAT WAS IT?

  If we were capable of creating something so indistinguishably tangible from what we knew, could we even call it a simulation anymore? Did we, in fact, create an extension of reality? An addition to it? I had never been inside of a sim until now, but I couldn’t tell the difference, other than its suppression of the basewave.

  I watched Halcyon’s white sand slip between the fingers of my curled glove, marveling at the detail. Not a single flaw in its design; not the tiniest hint that this place was created by us. Surreal.

  But very real, too.

  Dracian and the Feelers waited at the entrance of the spear-cave, watching me. The Feelers never wore any sort of expression, although Dracian wore one of impatience. He said nothing, however, and only nodded once our eyes met. He was being more forgiving than usual because we had found Lelain’s dismembered remains slightly north of the tower’s entrance. I was unable to locate his head. Lassiter was completely gone—destroyed, probably. When the tightness in my chest became too much, I knelt and clutched at sand, pondering reality until my breathing evened and I was able to think clearly.

  I concluded my philosophical musings and joined them at the mouth of the cave.

  They sent in the Feelers first, a safety protocol that hadn’t been used in a thousand years. It was in the Breach ephemeris nonetheless, and still resided in our operating procedure when dealing with possibly-aggressive hybrids. Lelain should have brought a Feeler. I doubt he’d even read that part of the SOP.

  Feelers were… tragic things, really. They were the oldest of us, having shifted too many times. It wasn’t known back then that neurotransference could scramble our streams, make us lose most of our identity. It is recommended now that a Framer should only shift a thousand times in their existence, and only every three hundred years. Feelers were the reason these measures were practiced. Too many shifts and you would end up in Section Five.

  But they were very useful as well. Their self-awareness was replaced by a strengthened sensitivity to the basewave algorithm. All of the public vectors were powered by Section Five and their ability to operate Grid without rest. They were the pillars of our civilization, and despite their tragic fate (concerning a sentient existence), we treated them with the utmost respect.

  Feelers looked indistinguishable from us, although their carapaces were always generic—without hair, without gender, painted with fluorescent face markings distinct of Section Five. Their eyes were more vibrant, sparking tenfold into vortices that nullified their irises.

  Dracian (very gently) asked the Feelers to descend into the cavern beneath the blades. They bowed their heads and without question or response drifted to the entrance, their silver and black mantles fading into shadow.

  We waited, watching Grid in case the Feelers could sense any subtle activity in the cavern; anything we might not be able to detect with our suppressed skills. A moment later the Feelers—who Dracian had named Asepoei and Kima for reasons eluding me—alerted us of energy and potential resonating with a Vel’Haru label at the base of the cavern. Thankfully the resonance was coming from an inorganic source. Asepoei and Kima were perfect engines. Clearly the only thing keeping us from 100% efficiency was autonomy.

  Again with the philosophical musings. This was unlike me.

  *

  There were a lot of petrified remains in Halcyon, and the numbers grew as we made it into the deepest chambers. Fehe’zin statues decorated the highest levels, but here in its depths was a glowing statue surrounded in half-buried piles of corpses that weren’t statuesque—they weren’t Insipian at all. Gnarled and decayed limbs reached from the ground, others were preserved perfectly in geodic capsules embedded in the walls. It was as if the room had eaten them.

  Dracian stood at the only Fehe’zin body present, sprawled atop the ground in front of the statue. Asepoei and the other Feeler waited at the entrance.

  “It appears the Vel’Haru did your job for you,” needled Drace. “Although I’m not sure why.”

  “The drawings on the walls at the entrance; they depicted us,” I said, ignoring his taunt. “The biological markers on the walls are saturated with Fehe’zin imprints. They drew them, and
with the care in which they drew them we can safely assume that they were here for quite a while.”

  “But this is Vel’Haru,” said Dracian, nodding to the statue. “The energy of this place is also Vel’Haru imprinted. I wasn’t aware they knew about each other.”

  “They didn’t,” I said, prompting him to review Grid’s time-graphing data. “This statue outdates anything we found in Exo’daius.”

  Drace circled the statue, ponderously. He was the most animated Framer I’d ever met. “So, Halcyon was here before Exo’daius, which means the…what did you call them?”

  “Proxies.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Yes, they were here.”

  Kima shifted. Asepoei twitched.

  “They must have built this place,” I said.

  “And shielded it,” he added, and then frowned. “Which still doesn’t explain the bodies.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find a satisfying answer for them, regrettably.” We didn’t need to know why, only what. “The sand particles of the landscape match that of this structure,” I stated, which solidified our theory that Halcyon had once been part of a larger city. No, not just larger; if all the sand was accounted for, it would have been massive. But… “Why did they leave this construct?”

  “You already know,” said Dracian, now docile.

  The statue.

  I took his side, studying it. It stood no higher than my waist, sculpted smoothly from obsidian with grooves and markings. A sphere floated just barely above the surface, tethered in blue sparks. If I focused, I could hear a rhythm pulsing from it.

  “Asepoei, come and sense this,” called Drace.

  The Feeler drifted from the entrance, moving between us. We stepped aside to give it more space. With a measure of courage I’d never seen anyone possess, Asepoei clutched the sphere in its wispy fingers. Its head rose to the cavern ceiling and its eyes widened; Asepoei’s mouth opened and I heard the crack of its jaw unhinging. From its mouth, came a scream.

  It was the same scream I’d heard from Lelain’s relay.

  That scream had come from the statue.

  Asepoei recoiled and nearly collapsed. Kima, the other Feeler, resumed the scream until I could no longer take t anymore, holding my head and backing away from the statue. “Dracian, are we done here?”

  ***

  Leid Koseling—;

  I froze as icy shocks spurred at the base of my neck. The pile of wood I’d been carrying up to the fortress fell from my arms and hit the ground around my feet. Attica warned of a foreign interference. One of our portals had been compromised.

  Halcyon.

  It was them.

  The hunt had begun.

  Adrial appeared at the fortress bridge, having felt the same thing. He looked at me; bewildered, frightened.

  “Deactivate all of our obelisks,” I said, though I doubted how much good that would do. I ignored the scattered wood and hurried across the bridge. We would have to work faster, as our deadline was just cut in half.

  ***

  Regalis Sarine-376—;

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Dracian once we had returned to his aperture. “The Fehe’zin never saw us. We tasked the Khilikri to wipe them out. How could they draw our likeness?”

  “That statue was teeming with code encryptions,” he responded, stationing himself at the console. “I imagine they retrieved the information from it. The Vel’Haru proxies would have known what we look like if they lived alongside our dissenters.”

  Just minutes after Asepoei and Kima mimicked the scream I’d heard from the relay, the statue’s flicker ceased. The sphere that had floated atop it fell back to the base. Someone had manually deactivated it, which meant somehow it had alerted the Vel’Haru of our presence. We’d left shortly after. Dracian and I suspected they had something very similar to Grid that they used; something that could monitor the sims, perhaps even powered by a collective consciousness. We would take more precaution in the future.

  Dracian began to sort out and expand upon our fieldwork, arranging all of our captures and findings into a tidy and concise report. “It felt real, didn’t it?”

  I removed my visor and tied my hair back, already having regretted modding it past my shoulders. “What?”

  “Halcyon. The entire pulsing Sim,” he explained, barely.

  “No need for foul language,” I said, confused as to why he’d bring something like this up.

  Dracian turned in his seat to look at me, his youthful face marred with discretion. Children never wore such expressions, so it was strange. “If the Codebreaker sequence was excised, would you live there?”

  Was this some sort of test? “Doing so would be a violation of the Codemaker’s Law.”

  Dracian rolled his eyes. “Forget about the Codemaker for a minute. Would you want to live there?”

  “You are an Inspector from Teleram,” I said, carefully. “Forgetting about the Codemaker and his Law should not be in your script.”

  “Sari, we are protected in my vector,” said Dracian, equally as careful. “You can respond truthfully to questions here. You’re not being interrogated, I promise you.”

  I placed the visor on the console and sat at my station. My movements were intentionally slow, my gaze never leaving his. “Would you?”

  “Shatterstar, yes.” He smiled and looked at the Grid’s cast of Avadara. “We could make even more. It could never end. Don’t you realize the universe is infinite? It goes on forever, in whatever form we want.”

  “The consequences of leaving Insipia are very heavy,” I reminded him, still in shock that a Teleramic Inspector would casually proclaim a dissenter’s view of the Codemaker’s Law. Especially an Inspector so old, and so experienced.

  “They overrode it,” he replied, switching the cast to the Vel’Haru statue at Halcyon. “I wish I was there when you had one in captivity. I would have studied his code, seen where and what the deviations were. We need another one.”

  “So, this isn’t about exterminating them,” I said.

  Dracian shrugged; another thing Framers seldom did. “Leid Koseling offered you a truce. You never mentioned that to Authority. Why?”

  I was about to inquire how the pulse he knew that, but then of course he would—he had access to anything he wanted, including my final moments as Sarine-375. “Because the Codemaker’s Law states that we cannot—”

  Dracian’s eyes narrowed. “Have you ever met the Codemaker?”

  I didn’t respond, as that question was evidently rhetorical.

  “Neither have I,” he said, smiling again, the ice in his eyes all but gone. “I’ve been alive for tens of thousands of years, an Inspector for half that, and I’ve never seen him. Or her. Or whatever it is.” He waved a hand.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been decommissioned, with those kind of thoughts.”

  Dracian laughed. I hadn’t heard any of us laugh in so long that I actually flinched. “Why do you pretend to be so true to the Law? To me? I know you had no intention of euthanizing the Rhazekan cross-breeds until they pushed back. They killed Lelain and Lassiter, yes, but you killed one of theirs. What Leid Koseling said was true. Would you have stood by and let them kill us, unprovoked? Because you aren’t doing that. You have been provoked. So have they.”

  “Whose side are you on?” I demanded, cursing him for making me feel things I shouldn’t ever again. He was no different than Lelain, except now I was pitched on the opposite side of the fence.

  Dracian hesitated, slipping on his visor. “I’m on the side of Framers. Whichever path that may lead.”

  Before I could respond, Grid sent us an alert from Authority. Apparently a third sweep of Exo’daius had found something still intact. They urged us to come and collect it from the Audit vector. Thus concluded Dracian-786’s philosophical reveal.

  And, thus began my questioning of the Codemaker’s Law.

  IV

  IT LIVES INSIDE YOU

  Yahweh Telei—; />
  IT WAS SEVERAL DAYS SINCE being notified that the Framers had returned to Halcyon and found our portal obelisk. And, since then there had been a lot less downtime. We ate our meals while working, we slept no more than three hours at a time, and Leid was constantly checking the perimeter shield around the Gantzt Fortress.

  Last night I’d heard Adrial and Leid arguing about something outside the Keep. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but they were being very loud—loud enough for me to hear them all the way up in my room, on the third floor. Leid had said something like ‘we need more,’ and Adrial had shouted, ‘for what?’

  We were seeing less and less of Qaira. Whenever we did see him he looked tired and removed from his surroundings. He answered questions in only single words, sometimes not at all. His expression was always tight and I thought I’d heard him talking to himself in the halls. I meant to speak to Leid about this, but alas, I’d been busy.

  In fact the last forty-eight hours were spent analyzing Lelain’s crystal samples by transmission electron microscopy, laser-induced breakdown microscopy and atomic emission spectroscopy (which nearly set my laboratory on fire due to faulty wiring and integration; luckily Pariah doused the instrument with the last of our root juice). We had learned enough about the composition and chemical nature of the substance, now it was time to see what it could do.

  Pariah and I spent the evening building a machine to test harmonics. Qaira was supposed to review our design and method, but he never arrived and didn’t answer our attempts at telepathy. Neither of us were in the mood to go hunt him down and chose to make do with our own intuition alone, but it was clear Pariah was growing irritated with Qaira’s continuing lack of attendance.

  As far as moods were concerned, Pariah was always an open book. The way his jaw set and the short answers I was given when inquiring for an equipment part or opinion were all easy tells that he was sour. Likewise he was courteous enough to never badmouth a higher-ranking member of our Court—not even Qaira—but words seldom told anyone what a scholar truly felt.