“I know,” I said, drinking a stasis tonic from the dispenser that had molded up from the floor. I handed him some, and he took the drink with a cumbersome gaze. “Which Framer do you think will volunteer to be the envoy? None of us have entered simulations since our tenth cycle. That’s like going out into uncharted territory without any comfort of knowing the code or feeling a basewave.”
“I will be the envoy,” he said.
At first his answer didn’t compute. “You risk your existence, and for what?”
“For us. Your feelings are showing, Sarine.”
“Your feelings are showing,” I said. “You don’t have to be the envoy, we can send someone else.” Anyone else.
“No one else will go. The Khilikri won’t return to the Breach. I’m sure by now word has spread that a ‘Framer’ roams the hunting grounds, and no reward is grand enough to change their minds.”
Lelain wasn’t a subordinate, but a peer. Framers held each other in equal regard; the only aspect separating us was our roles. I couldn’t tell him not to go, as he believed such a martyrdom was necessary in observance of the Codemaker’s Law. Others would, too, out of relief that it wasn’t them. I had no choice but to support his decision.
He moved into stasis a little while later. I was too restless for reconstruction just yet; instead I changed our aperture theme to a panoramic view of the Aephon Nebula and reanalyzed Grid-data. There was a question nagging at me for some time now. It was something I knew the Vel’Haru named Qaira could answer, but he wouldn’t talk. Not with our current methods.
Lelain had dismantled me; it was time that I dismantle him in return.
***
Qaira Eltruan—;
The cycle of interrogation and nonexistence was finally taking its toll. I was going mad; I knew as much because I started hearing Leid in the darkness, in the void. At first she called to me in whisper, as if she were hiding from something.
Then, her voice grew louder. I couldn’t see and didn’t respond, knowing she wasn’t real. This wasn’t the first time that I’d seen or heard things, and occasionally I still did—I was just able to fight it now. Fight myself.
A spotlight flickered on several feet away, and suddenly I was sitting on a concrete floor. I was real again, and squinted at the light, preparing for that Framer bitch to pull me out for round fifty. Instead, I saw Leid.
She was wearing Exodian armor and her forearms were completely healed. That wasn’t possible—not from how I’d seen her last.
“Qaira?” she called, searching the room. I found that odd, considering I was right in front of her. If this was a hallucination, it was remarkably vivid.
“Here,” I rasped. Might as well indulge my psychosis; there was nothing better to do.
At the sound of my voice, she spun. We locked eyes. Hers widened.
“Qaira, where are you?” she asked, frantic. “What is this place?”
Realization set in. Her demeanor and the pertinence of her question informed me this wasn’t a hallucination. “I don’t know. I can’t even begin to describe it. How did you find me?”
“Through attica. I was able to… access you.”
I hesitated, unsure of what that meant exactly. “Can you find my coordinates?”
“No, your section of the map is unreadable. There’s too much interference.”
“Interference from what?”
“Qaira, I-I-I—” Her form flickered, like a hologram. “I’m coming for you. Do you hear me? I will find you, just pl-pl-please stay alive. Do whatever you must.”
Before I could respond her body winked from existence, the spotlight along with it. The void returned, weighing heavier than before.
*
And then I was suddenly seated at a table—in an actual chair this time—surrounded in white walls, amid electric butterflies. Sarine sat across from me, expressionless. Her hands were folded on the table, a very anthropoidal gesture, but I noticed there were faded lines along her fingers and palms. The lines were like the kind generated from puzzle pieces, like she’d been assembled.
That startling discovery played second fiddle to the fact that I had my hands back. I, too, folded them on the table. She’d begun this sequence as if we were in deep conversation.
I said nothing to Sarine and, despite my thoughts, didn’t react. I just stared at her, and she at me.
“Lelain thinks you should die,” she said, monotonal. “Do you think you should die?”
“Who’s Lelain?”
“My partner.”
“You’re not asking the right question,” I said.
Sarine looked intrigued. “And what do you think the right question is?”
“Do you think I should die?”
Sarine hesitated, blank-faced. I couldn’t help but smirk. “I assumed that was clear from my initial question. If the vote was unanimous, you wouldn’t be here.”
I nodded, considerate. “Then let me paraphrase the question. Why don’t you want to kill me?”
“Because I value the information that you have,” she responded without as much as a beat. Her chrome-ringed, blue-electric eyes held me like dual lenses. “I will admit that you and your kind might be one particular crossbreed worth … watching.” Sarine unfolded her hands and resettled them in her lap, out of view. “Rather than cleansing.”
Crossbreed. “And what do you want in return for such mercy?”
“Tell me of you. Of what you know of yours; how you live, how you operate, your purpose.”
I looked away, relaxing my shoulders, exhaling slowly. “For what?”
Sarine abruptly left the table and walked to the right side of the room. The enclosed, blank space was lit up with swirling cosmos. It was as if we were in a tiny glass cube, surfing the outer edges of a galactic supercluster. Given what I’d seen of this place so far, there was a chance it wasn’t an illusion. I had a hard time hiding my awe—and confusion, considering I didn’t recognize this place and superclusters were something with which I was very familiar.
“This is the Halon Supercluster,” explained Sarine, indicating that I hadn’t saved face well enough. “There are over four million galaxies contained here.”
“And you’re from Halon IV,” I recalled.
“So are you,” she said.
To this, I said nothing.
The room was launched into some kind of warp speed. I actually gripped the table edges, expecting to be thrown across the room. But it remained still, even as streaks of colored light and time bent across the walls. An illusion.
No, a stream.
We stopped, suspended in panoramic view of a small, reddish-brown planet mottled with an orange and white atmosphere. A label next to the planet appeared, blinking thrice:
EXO’DAIUS , HALON IV, alpha-INSIPIA
Another universe.
Holy fuck, another universe.
I said that thought aloud, leaving the table to get a closer view. Sarine moved behind me, and although I couldn’t see her face I knew she was smiling. Her teeth flashed from over my shoulder. “The first universe,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The organic universe.”
That made me turn and face her. “Come again?”
Sarine’s smile frosted over, then waned. For the first time she wore an unpracticed expression. “And here is where we come to an agreement, Qaira.”
I lifted a brow. “Go on.”
“I offer an exchange of information. I’ll tell you everything about us, and you only have to reciprocate.”
When I hesitated her smile warmed, like I didn’t know what she was up to. I was about to hold Leid to her word; hopefully she would find me before I revealed anything fatal.
“It seems curiosity is something we have in common,” I said, in my own way of surrender.
“We have much more in common than that.”
I nodded. “You first. Start at the organic universe part.”
“I’ve been generous enough already. It’s hard to trust someone who, not
a day ago, was screaming out my death warrant.”
I snarled. “Which was a perfectly reasonable reaction to being dismembered. You’re the one with something to lose here.”
“That’s an amusing claim.”
“We’re about to dance with daggers, right? Which of our information will prove most fatal? Which of us will find the other first?” I scoffed. “What can my knowledge possibly do to you?”
“… Are you attempting to incite pride?”
“Only if it’s working.”
Sarine looked at the image of Exo’daius. Our room was then returned to the supercluster. “Very well. I will start, if only to stop wasting any more time.”
~*~
HYMN OF THE MULTIVERSE
APHORISM I
Regalis Sarine-375—;
IT ALL STARTED WITH A SOUND.
Through the darkness—the vacuum—came a cry that resonated across time and space, as time and space awoke precisely as the cry erupted. It was the cry of alpha-Insipia, like a newborn calling out for warmth. And like a parent, the universe’s cry was nurtured with matter, heat, light…
We were born on a little world, just a grain of sand in the desert of our universe. Our story is most likely your story too, as every path to progression climbs the same ladder. We learned to manipulate our world, cultivate its energy, lavished ourselves with language and art and science, until we no longer recognized our savage ancestors who had shivered naked in the darkness, evading predators.
As time progressed, like it always does, our eyes turned toward the stars. Two millennia later, we dominated our little galaxy, having overcome any great filters of which other worlds may have faced and subsequently perished. We had broken free of our mortal chains—brainwaves turned to code, to recyclable data, our bodies barely organic anymore—but there was one chain left, and it kept us tethered no matter how hard we tried.
Time.
Time was a dimension that we couldn’t wield, only yield to. There was so much left of the universe to explore—to have—yet we couldn’t reach it because it moved faster than our fastest modes of transportation. And then the Codemaker found it: the basewave.
The Resonance.
We managed to untether time from us, instead fastening the end of the line to the basewave. Very soon our reach extended from our little galaxy to its supercluster, then to others, then to the very edges of space itself. We became the universe, recoding it to our liking, manipulating the basewave, having finally achieved the prime directive of any and every smart creature born of stellar dust.
But, as you’ve proven to know, the universe is a finite thing. Although we ourselves were no longer constricted by time, time was always constricted on the universe. Things stopped changing, everything became…stagnant. It is in our essence to explore uncharted territories, to satiate curiosity through knowledge, but no one knew what to do once everything was discovered. Purpose drives ambition; without purpose, we were lost.
Thus began Simulation-1.
Or, what you term the Avadara Universe.
*
By now we were known to the mid-civ alpha-Insipians as Framers. Seldom did we interact with anyone outside our echelon, seen by them as the ever-fleeting governing entities that dictated the fluidity of our cosmos. Some of us had formed factions solely responsible for regulating conduct between galactic confederacies and their racial subsidies, thwarting conflicts and instilling universal laws which kept disturbances at bay. Everything was ours.
And we were bored.
We embraced the title given to us by the lay, adding merit to it by beginning a project—an experiment, one might call it—framing places, worlds, and eventually entire universes with the intent to watch and learn what may have been with only the tiniest deviation to our cosmological equation. We ran thirteen simulations concurrently, one after the other.
Through the Grid we watched as each expanded and molded into similar—yet entirely different—environments from our own. We drew many conclusions, but more so had satiated our desire to continue learning. Thousands of us tuned in each day to watch the happenings of places outside of our physical reach. It was exciting, and tempting.
Too tempting.
The only rule we had to follow was that of our Codemaker’s—;
And it wasn’t long at all before it was broken.
XVIII
IDIOSYNCRATIC WARMTH
Leid Koseling—;
THE NOISE IN MY HEAD GREW LOUDER, each pitch a tiny chisel picking away brain matter and patience, leaving only pain and static.
Qaira was alive. He was…somewhere.
So close, so close.
I gripped the edges of Euxodia’s central podium with white knuckles and closed my eyes, soldiering through the mounting pain. I tried to find him again, but attica wouldn’t give me a lock. His resonance was fleeting, like a faint beacon on a foggy night. I’d felt him ever since attica had brought Exo’daius’s universe online. The sensation was like feathers against my skin. I’d spent hours weaving through the conscious stream in an effort to connect with Qaira—succeeding once, but only for a few moments. Succeeding had actually surprised me, as never before could we do something like this. It made me question whether what I’d felt and seen had been real at all, or just the product of exhaustion and subsequent delusion.
But he’d seemed real enough. Only time would tell.
My breath quickened as I felt myself wince; the pain was too much. I couldn’t find him.
I couldn’t find him.
With an angered cry of defeat my knees buckled, and I clutched at the podium to keep from collapsing. A pair of hands suddenly squeezed my shoulders, and Yahweh murmured into my ear:
“Come on, sit down.”
I hadn’t even heard or felt him enter the library. I was too tired to protest and let him guide me to one of the chairs along the sectional desk. Once seated, Yahweh glanced uneasily toward the attica stream at the center of the room, his face alit in soft blue light.
“What are you trying to do?” he asked.
“Find him,” I said, barely more than a whisper. “Why are you here?”
“I felt your pain. You should be kinder to yourself, for my sake.”
I smiled in response to his attempt at humor, but was certain it seemed forced. “I need something to help me focus.”
Yahweh frowned. “Yes, you do. Food and rest are the best kinds of medicine.”
“No, I need something from your pharmacy. The strongest thing you have; give it to me.”
He hesitated, concernedly, searching my face. “Leid, anything I give you won’t be effective in your state.”
“That’s an order.”
His expression switched from concern to insult. “And I am obliged to follow your command, except I am also obliged to act in your best interest, and right now you aren’t thinking clearly.”
“Please.”
Yahweh sighed, lowering his gaze. “Only if you rest and have something to eat first. You weren’t at morning meal.”
Even though every second counted, I had no choice but to agree to those terms. “Alright, fine.”
He stood and offered his hand. “I’ll escort you to your room. Aela will bring you food shortly.”
Escort me?
My expression must have given away that thought, as Yahweh then said, “I have to make sure. You know why.”
“Yes,” I said, scathed. “You don’t trust me.”
Yahweh tilted his head. “Do you blame me?”
“No.”
With that I took his hand, relishing its idiosyncratic warmth. We vacated Euxodia, the attica stream deactivating behind us.
***
Pariah Andosyni—;
It was cold and the pain was enough to render me immobile, slumped against a grated wall woven in frayed wiring. The shock had worn off and I trembled uncontrollably as Sapphire sat at my side, encouraging me to keep replenishing with bits of metal scalped from a destroyed sentry that Zi
ra had drug along to cannibalize.
I’d awakened at the Priming facility, having missed an onslaught of guard sentries intended for Collective infiltration. There had been none, as far as I knew, as the only bodies we’d encountered were Altrian.
Sapphire and Zira were covered in wounds as well, albeit not as severe. Surface abrasions and burns marred their faces. Their hands had since regenerated from scythes, and as Sapphire offered me moral support, Zira inspected the contraption at the far end of the room. A cylindrical chamber connected to digitech wires hummed rhythmically; Zira’s silhouette stood at a series of panels with screens and keypads. He was muttering under his breath.
I dared not speak, knowing good and well that I was responsible for our predicament. Zira was obviously nettled so I chose to catch up on Sapphire’s fragment entries rather than ask them what had happened.
My legs had returned to working order, although the outer layers of skin were still molding across my shins. The tingling sensation of such heightened exposure was almost maddening. My neck was sore, but I could move my head and the paralysis was gone.
I’d been warned of this before, but had never experienced it firsthand. Qaira and Yahweh had shared horrifying stories—Qaira’s told in boast—of the injuries they’d endured during the Celestial War. We were capable of regenerating damaged tissue, even limbs and other parts of the body considered otherwise irreparable to lesser physiology. Our line of work typically removed us from receiving such injuries anymore; and I was glad because this was terrible.
“Are you well enough to walk yet?” Zira snapped from over his shoulder. “I can’t figure this out.”
“No,” I rasped. “Soon, I think.”
“We don’t have soon. There are nano-infected corpses and sentries outside that door,” he said, which prompted me to look toward the sealed entranceway on the right side of the room. It was reinforced and Zira had deactivated the lock-disengage mechanism, yet the caution behind his gaze led me to believe that our safety still wasn’t guaranteed.
Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6) Page 14
