PHANTASIA

by R. Atlas

  “Did you pass?”

  “Both my mother and I passed, but my mother refused to get on the ship, she couldn’t leave Wren. I don’t think it was a matter of choosing between me and him, I think it was more that she couldn’t bear the thought of just leaving one of her children to a worse fate than herself.”

  Red was about to comment on how brave he thought her mother must have been, but the sound of a deafening horn filled the room. Judging by the direction, Red imagined that it must have been coming from the mountains.

  “What is that?!” Butz groaned.

  “The warning bells from the extraction plants,” Raven replied. “It’s happening.”

  Chapter 6: A Memory of Hope

  The village had gathered atop the highest glacier on Rockmire, a plateau made of thick rock and ice whose views extended into the mountains beyond the swamps. The slopes of the mountains reached so high up into the atmosphere that when he saw the army of Xenosite descending from their peaks, they looked as though they were running down from the skies. Thousands, millions, no, an infinite amount, Red thought to himself, fell from the cover of the clouds like an avalanche. The sides of the mountains were filled with other villages, from which Red saw flashes of energy and the fiery collateral of artillery. But the sounds and flashes of resistance lasted for only a few moments, seamlessly devoured by the black maw of the swarm as the avalanche descended towards the base of the mountain in relentless pursuit of oblivion.

  The rumbling of the ground as the avalanche approached was suddenly drowned out by the same oppressive noise that Red had once heard in Professor Kep’s class, but this time a hundred fold louder — a piercing requiem that boded extermination. It sounded as though the mountains themselves had begun screaming. More flashes of energy burned, casts that filled the sky with thunder colored the planet, and the sound of heavy weaponry cut into the screaming of the mountains. But the avalanche never ceased for more than a few moments, continuing its tour de force straight through any points of resistance with sudden spasms of carnage that were so one-sided they reminded Red of the violence in an abattoir.

  Then came the rain. They looked like meteorites from afar — pod shaped vessels of various sizes that flew through the sky in trails of fire and cosmic dust, crashing into the glacial swamps of Takis with deafening explosions that sent tidal waves in every direction. The creatures inside were the largest Xenosites Red had ever seen. Their most powerful breeds he guessed. They looked to be bred purposely for extravagant combinations of power and brutality. They roamed the swamps as soon as they had landed with such an uncouth level of ferocity that Red was sure they must have been tortured before they were sent down. Some had strange mixtures of limbs like wings to let them fly, fins to let them swim, and burrowing claws to let them traverse underground.

  The screeching and howling of critters filled the swamps as the Xenosite took a liberal approach to infection. Red could not help but think of Avalonia in place of Takis. He imagined what it would be like if every living thing he had come to love and appreciate were suddenly converted into an unfamiliar strain of existence with its own purpose. Everywhere he looked, the writhing of creatures signaled a mass decay in the planet’s biosphere. Different species were infected one after the other with female hosts blending with each other to expand the limits of evolution while male hosts returned to their hive clusters to begin a rampant process of reproduction.

  It was then that he felt it, the ominous presence of another self-aware conscience. It was alien, certainly not human, nor elf, nor anything he was already familiar with, and sentient in a way that expanded how he understood the term. A vividly perceptive and intensely deep mind inside the dim sanctuary of a cold intelligence, a rational being with a capacity for thought, reason, empathy, and acumen, that far exceeded any human standard he could recall. It felt endless in its depth. If he touched it, even grazed the surface of its thoughts the way one does when recalling the bare details of a forgotten dream that felt like another lifetime when it occurred, it would overwhelm the contents of all his mind.

  “It’s the queen,” Raven said as she stood next to him. He realized that for all the intensity of this other mind, for all the pressure he felt on his own mind from experiencing this consciousness that threatened his understanding of reality, he was seeing a mere shadow of a shadow. He was feeling everything through Raven’s memory, displaced from the actual event like the observer of an observer.

  “The queen?”

  “Over a thousand queens landed on Takis during the invasion. One was right here, nestled just beyond the mountains. They communicate like the gemini, not through words but through thoughts and perceptions. I felt her, for only a moment, before blocking off my mind.”

  Knowing it was a Xenosite mind, he had expected to feel some absurd level of hatred, or an animalistic desire for destruction, but there was nothing there except for a clear and concise obsession with evolution and an elegant distaste for imperfection. Embrace the purity of annihilation he could hear it say, not to any one person but to the planet as a whole — a single thought broadcasted to all of Takis over and over again. Only a few people heard it, he knew, and even fewer understood where it was coming from.

  “They say there are over ten thousand now, all preparing for the invasion of Iris,” Raven added.

  “There’s something else…” Red began, but was cut off by a sharp look from her.

  “Don’t go there,” she said, referring to that spot of black in the mind of the queen, that eternal consciousness that he would never dare to look at directly. But there was indeed something else there, and he knew by her reaction that she had felt it too. It was the answer to a simple question; the queens may control the swarm, but what controls the queens?

  “I understand now…” Magnus whispered. He stood a few steps behind all of them, with the same astonished expression as Red. They all felt the brush of contact with this other conscience, the queen, an experience that felt like a brief intersection with a higher being. “I once took this class on Ontology and knowledge, it had mentioned something about different levels of sentience.” For once, Red was listening intently to one of Magnus’ explanations, desperate to understand how to grasp what he had just felt.

  “Sentience begins at its first order, or simply non-sentience, exhibited by things like rocks, objects, and other inanimate bodies. Second order sentience begins with the ability to replicate and store knowledge in any form. Things like most plants, robots, and creatures display second order sentience. While these bodies may “desire” certain objective goals, the way a program might desire to execute a command, they aren’t cognizant of their desires. They have deterministic wills and aren’t capable of acting beyond their designs. Third order sentience is the highest discovered among intelligent life in our observable universe, thus far at least, and what was considered to be the maximum potential for organic life. This is where free will begins. It is sentience that has developed the ability to be self-aware of its own desires — to be capable of imagining things that are not real and deciding to pursue them, or to be able to observe its own desires and to decide not to pursue them.

  “And it goes beyond that…” Butz whispered, sounding like he already grasped what was coming next.

  “Fourth order sentience has been observed, but not in organic life. It is sentience that is not only aware of its own sentience, but in control of it. Able to manipulate and improve it, alter the core of its structure. While humans are self-aware of their own desires and have some degree of control in terms of pursuing them, it’s a very primitive and imperfect control. We all experience this imperfection, it can be as simple as loving something and not being able to stop desiring it, even if you want to. Similarly, our intelligence is hard capped by a natural limit on how much knowledge we can retain, and the extent to which we can correlate that knowledge. In fourth order sentience, you can change your desires, your perceptions, your cognizance as you choose — altering your consciousness t
o achieve higher levels of perception and intelligence. This is why it’s a breach of imperial code to build any form of self-aware artificial intelligence that’s unregulated. Because of technology’s capacity to improve itself, self-aware artificial intelligence always extends into fourth order sentience, which because of its unpredictable potential, poses a threat to anything it interacts with. I’ve heard that the imperial guard of every planet and MegaCORP themselves use fourth order sentient machines to manage their infrastructure.

  And then you have fifth order sentience, a term that’s been deemed super fictional. We can say that something is fictional if it’s limited to our imagination, or something that doesn’t exist in reality, only in our minds. Something super fictional, not only doesn’t exist, but isn’t imaginable. They say fifth order sentience is beyond the ability of third order sentient creatures to fathom, understand, or imagine, and thus, is impossible to exist even in fiction. It is perfect sentience, something that possesses perfect knowledge and an infinite will, including objective knowledge over its purpose and place in the universe. A level beyond free will that’s impossible to describe or understand for anything that’s limited by free will.”

  “What we just felt..” Red began

  “Was fifth order sentience. The mind of the queen. Or no — a spot in the mind of the queen. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  Red had wanted to ask him more about what fifth order sentience meant but was interrupted by a single black pod that hurled through the sky and drove straight into the glacier they were standing on. Someone from the crowd had screamed ‘look out,’ moments before, but the warning had come too late and a small group of villagers absorbed the impact point-blank. Everyone atop the glacier scattered and rushed back towards the village, screaming in a frenzy of different commands.

  “Where are they going?” Red asked as he turned to Raven, imagining that these people must know that they wouldn’t be safe in their homes anyways. A tiny fissure in the glacier began forming and he worried that the iceberg would crack into pieces before they had a chance to get off. They began climbing down quickly, ready to leap off in case the plateau broke apart.

  “To shelters built deep underground in the village. Everyone who failed the bentham or were apart of the active resistance settled in subterranean shelters. There are shelters in the cities as well, and all of them form a network of underground roads to allow for travel and transportation between each other. The system had been built over the last two decades, every since Carnaega had been invaded.”

  “You went there too?”

  “No, I go to the rafts,” she said while pointing to a number of flatboats that were rushing down the village and picking up most of the children. “Their engines run on Cron, they’re fast enough to take people to Nyle in less than an hour. Its the nearest city, and where the ships are docked. I’m supposed to board the SH-4, headed for Avalonia,” she smiled faintly.

  “Wren… and your mother,” S chimed in, pointing to the two of them who had walked down and were now speaking at the base of the glacier. Amidst the chaos, Raven’s mother seemed to be talking calmly to Wren, although at an extremely rapid pace.

  “What’s she saying?” Red asked.

  “She’s giving me and Wren directions on how to survive. She said no matter what, we have to live.”

  “She doesn’t seem to be crying.”

  “She didn’t, I know she did after we were both gone, but not when we were talking now.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “For the last time ever.”

  “Are you going to go to her now?”

  “I already know what she says, there’s no point.”

  “I know but…don’t you want to go anyways?”

  “No.”

  “I think you should,” S remarked. Raven said nothing but walked over cooly to Wren and her mother. Red noticed that her mother spoke to the two of them with the same distinct manner as Raven — giving sharp and concise commands despite their circumstances. She hugged them at the end of it, a scene that left a thick lump in Red’s throat, and then she and Wren walked over to where the Rafts were taking off. This must be the last time she gets to see her, he thought to himself.

  Magnus, Butz, and surprisingly even Linx, were helping villagers evacuate their homes and enter the tunnels that led to the shelters, or board the rafts headed to Nyle. Linx had his own way of encouraging people to move faster — by describing what infection must feel like to anyone who lagged behind. Despite being a dream, their reaction to their surroundings was genuine. It was a refreshing reminder of their devotion to duty and what they would do if this ever happened in Avalonia; or when this happens in Avalonia, Red thought grimly.

  “What’s her name?” Red asked when Raven had walked back to him and S. Wren and their mother had now walked over to where the rafts were being sent out and seemed overly attentive to a single one that was preparing to take off.

  “Heron.”

  “Did you know this was going to be the last time you would get to see them?”

  “Yeah, but I knew what had to be done. My mother raised us to be strong, always strong. Wren comes with us for a while longer anyways. You’ll see,” she said. “It should come out any second now.”

  “What?” Red asked, but saw the answer to the question as soon he had asked it. It was an infected creature that looked like a mix between an arthropod and a giant cat. It had claws pinching through its back that seemed like they could snap a man in two, a tail that ended in the shape of a double sided axe, two heads, and a muscular body that pulsed with energy. Its skin looked spectral in nature, but the light that it gave off was corrosive. It jumped out of the water onto a platform near the rafts. It must have come from the pod that landed in the glacier Red thought as he berated himself for not realizing that the vessel would carry a Xenosite.

  “That’s not what I saw…originally,” Raven whispered confusedly. The creature’s spine had a mane that began to light up from its tail. When the light reached the top of its body, both heads began shooting out beams of energy from their mouths that incinerated anything they touched.

  Butz and Linx were the fastest ones to react, running towards the creature at full speed while leaping around the village to dodge its beams. Linx, despite being half the size of the creature, tackled it to the floor and then rolled over to distract it while Butz grabbed onto one of the necks, and snapped it into a quick paralysis. The other head reacted violently and lunged for a bite as Butz dodged it by a hair’s width. Wren, who was the second one there, dashed underneath the creature from behind it and slid out from its forelegs, a moment before it had a second chance to bite down on Butz, and unloaded as much pure energy as he could give off in a single burst, straight into the creature’s mouth. Energy, when not focused into a specific element or force, came out in a form called plasma. It was a rare method of manipulating mana, as the purity of its form made it more unstable and difficult to control. As a tradeoff, it was more efficient and one could generally do more damage using less mana. Red and Raven both ran towards the fight, but it was over by the time they had gotten there.

  “That’s an infected Aeyz Cat,” Butz breathed as he lay on the floor. “How could that be in Takis? Aeyz Cats aren’t even from the outer planets, there’s no way one could have been caught for infection.”

  “It’s not supposed to be, that’s not what I originally saw,” Raven replied.

  “Its quite obvious what’s happening…” Linx said absentmindedly while pacing around them. They looked at the cat for an explanation, but Linx seemed disinterested in elaborating further.

  “Please enlighten us, oh great one,” Butz said while rolling his eyes.

  “Your dreams are beginning to mesh.”

  “He’s right,” S replied instantly. “Of course… Butz, you’ve had nightmares about Linx being infected, haven’t you?”

  Butz didn’t reply but his look of understanding was answer enough.

  “W
hat do we do from here on then?” Red asked just as Wren got up and began running towards the village. It seemed like an awkward burst of movement, but then Red realized that it must have been in sequence with Raven’s original memory. By the time Wren had run back to them, most of the village had left, either through the tunnels or the rafts.

  “Raven, I’m coming with you for now. I’m riding next to your raft, to make sure you get to Nyle safely. I’ll come back here and enter the tunnels myself. Are your friends going with you, or are they going into the shelters?”

  Magnus was the first one to reply after a brief moment of contemplation. “We may as well leave on the ship. It was the way out for this nightmare when it really happened, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Raven replied.

  “I think it’s our best shot too. You think it might end the nightmare?” Butz asked, turning to S.

  “I don’t know…” S replied uneasily. “It could be… but if it’s not, and we just missed something entirely, we’ll get cycled through this entire thing again.”

  “We have to risk it, just staying here as the invasion progresses will only put us in more danger,” Magnus said.

  “He’s right,” Raven replied. “Follow me, I know which raft to board.”

  The flatboat they boarded was shared by three hundred other villagers. Wren rode next to them on Slink, and three other Gnashers followed behind the two of them. From the raft, Red could see the length of Slink’s entire body, an enormous serpentine frame that split the water apart as it gushed through the swamp. Everyone was quiet on board, except for a crazed preacher who managed to amass a small group of loyal listeners and a few small groups of older people that were discussing the fate of the planet.