Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  turnings after that both before and after there were a number of other species some of which are no longer extent our own first visit was 000

  turnings ago when you were just a brash new species entering the celestial neighborhood when the verse Dini announced their great discovery the rest of us considered it old news this guy could only shake her head in wonderment at this fresh reminder at sentient life’s limitless capacity for corruption and you never told us pure goth answered her before her path could his mercantile pronunciation marked by a notable working-class New London accent don’t take it too personally we never told the Burstein e-either we thought they were next and were forbidden to interfere Skyee turned from one inexpressive rear Gaul face to the other determined to dig truth out of visages who could not have better evolved for the telling of lies next to do what and forbidden by who bill goth crossed to the ridged bar across from Skye and lowered himself onto it with what her eyes insisted on interpreting as infinite exhaustion you must understand young human despite everything everybody has ever said there has never been anything particularly unique about your kinds connection with the Villani dance everything your species has experienced here other races went through before you we all came here we all found this strange species with its enormous potential and its enormous mystery we all commenced studying what we saw and we all looked on with growing upset and unease as an increasing number of our children heard the calling and came here faltered by strange surgeries and eager to die in the Villani ritual we all found ourselves caught up in forces that we could not understand and we were drawn in even further than your own kind has been our own history tells of a year a terrible year when almost half of the dancers who died in the ballet were not Fulani but ryuko 000000 ryo gong-myung killed with more to come all for a cause that was never our own and then Skye produced in time our kind decoded more of the dance than we have ever let on we were able to learn from the Villani about the AI sauce quest for self-destruction about the AI source rogue intelligences and about the part of Lonnie had been engineered to play in the conflict between them we learned to how we’d been chosen by the AI source to for lack of a more appropriate phrase fertilize the played out soil of the Villani ballet with our own racial contribution had the powers responsible for using us in this manner been anybody but the AI source it would have been cause for war but you know how powerful they are Skye we would have been wiped out in the first salvo their only possible next step was dark and terrible and as contemptuous of moral considerations as any open act of war would have been but it was also inevitable

  the only possible compromise of a proud species pressured by a stronger one so instead you made a separate piece yes her path said we won as much freedom as we could ever have as much freedom as any organic intelligence can have in a universe that is also home to a sentient as powerful and as manipulative as the AI source we came to terms terms that prevented the Villani ballet from ever again calling to the young of our species terms Skyee said that included your promise to help them on the ground once they found another species to plug into their dam program yes so you spared yourselves she said you sat back for a few generations just living out your own history until one day the Burstein II stumbled upon flan all cleverness and enthusiasm and deep appreciation for what they imagined to be their own great discovery you thought they would make their own connection to the dance sooner or later a tragedy for them that you were willing to accept as long as it wasn’t your own yes but then something unexpected happened the Burstein e’en the Fulani didn’t click I don’t know why maybe in compatible software or maybe there was no reason for the AI source to use bursty neon the ballet when a species they had greater hopes for a bunch of quarreling disorganized primates was also exploring the region than just as easy to lure with a fascinating mystery you could even help to arrange it as long as all the other civilizations involved were willing to pretend that this phenomenon was as new to you as it was to us then the stupid evolved Apes wouldn’t suspect a damn thing the two rear Gong said nothing they just sat where they were averting their big black eyes the curve of their jaws turning their congenital smiles into the shit-eating grin z’ of children caught committing a prank against the others in the playground the Porrinyards had often told me that i was too quick to condemn too eager to rage against the petty crimes committed by others they had told me that I spent too much of my time angry and invested too much of my soul in punishing the guilty they weren’t wrong it’s a common disease among prosecutors and an even more common one among those who have been among the victims but right now Skye saw the - we are gone through my eyes she saw a pair of petty bureaucrats reeking with the sins of a race that had sloth an ancient evil off its own shoulders and onto an unsuspecting humanity it didn’t matter to her that these two hadn’t been alive when the original sin was committed or that their ancestors had been facing a threat that they could not resist any other way they were still willing collaborators and their openness and sharing the truth with her now was a matter of too little too late those poor doomed kids like the Thar see and Maren Schiff wherever she is you’re part of the machine that brings them here their blood is on your hands her paths only response to that was an odd yes you’re unbelievable bastards we are flotsam swept along by the course of history and must recognize that changing the course of this river without proper understanding of the forces involved is likely to only increase the number drowned in its wake Skye was not mollified that’s certainly convenient for your own conscience it is and so this the only reason I am free to share these terrible confidences with you is because I know that you and councilor court work for the AI source as well and because I know that in this at least we all fight for the same cause anything that helps our secret masters find the means to end themselves helps us all in the long run you could have told us this earlier her path looked away I did not count on our present circumstances this guy thought of the almost carnival atmosphere of those last few minutes at the amphitheater before everything fell apart and sentient began to die it had all seemed so routine then a death vigil to be sure but a routine one based on a brand of carnage that had already been measured and quantified and allowed to enter the realm of the routine nobody had felt any urgency then waiting for the Vani and their altered human partners to do what they had always done they had just hunkered down for the big show the biggest event of the local year the Holocaust that had yet to overflow its banks it was more than she wanted to face as a singlet even an unwilling and temporary one she needed all of herself to bear this weight she felt even more unequal to the task when she peered over the side and saw that the character of the land had changed yet again the desert far below was still a vast plain as flat as any landscape the Porrinyard s had ever seen there were no Hills no outcropping no sign of any history but for the salty deposits that streaked the land like the signature of some ancient God but now it was populated a river of glittering blackness had congealed on the earth it’s narrow tributaries all coming together to form a river and then a flood flowing toward the horizon with an inevitability as terrible as it’s probable purpose it was a flood of Lonny not just tens of thousands but millions marching as if with one mind away from the prior destiny of their species and toward another that rendered the bloodiness of the annual ballet a footnote to the even more terrible consummation yet to come up here it was impossible to see them as individuals and compelling to see them instead as an unstoppable force of nature they could be a tempest or a wildfire or a supernova destroying everything before them and the only thing before them now was another patch of darkness up ahead nestled against the grey waters of one of lhans inland seas the pilgrim City Nureyev.

  CHAPTER 16

  Transformation

  Meanwhile it was impossible to know how

  much farther we descended in the whips of our Villani guards the darkness was total in our direction unknowable but it was only a few minutes before my eyes began to sting from the unaccustomed presence of light it was a dim
and shadowy light that I might have had trouble distinguishing from absolute darkness at any other time I still couldn’t make out what I was seeing but my eyes registered something if not the presence of visual cues then at least the possibility that visual cues might soon be provided then we entered what seemed to be a larger place with distant and echoing noises the toes of my shoes scraped rock and were left there long enough for me to realize that I was meant to support my own wait I wasn’t sure I could but gave the order to my recalcitrant legs the whips retreated I heard their sharp points scraping against stone and then disappearing somewhere nearby somebody human screamed I didn’t think it was Fox but I checked anyway counselor I’m here she said about 10 meters away that wasn’t me another scream from the same voice and there was an odd empty quality to it that I could not explain it didn’t really seem to communicate any emotion there was no anger or fear or pain in it just the desire to create noise born of the same experimental impulse babies sometimes take in yelling ah thanks a lot whoever the fuck you are you’ve told me nothing yeah third scream this one followed by mechanical whirring alright so somebody was making something but why were we here to listen i swayed on my feet fought the urge to close my eyes and let the darkness claim me inside as well as out and cried out hello my cries echoed returning from walls that may have been hundreds of meters away this was a big chamber and a busy one even without eyes I could discern many separate sources of sound I tried another loud hello strained my voice doing it felt a fresh stab of pain in my injured head and almost fell over when another wave of dizziness threw off what little balance I possessed wouldn’t do to hurt myself more with a nasty fall I sank to my knees ran my hands over the ground and was not surprised to find that it was something other than cave floor this was smooth and polished manufactured Fox yes should I come to you it was tempting but now that we’d been taken somewhere new someplace where things were actually happening and where my powers of observation needed to function unimpeded the comfort of a fellow human being might be more distraction than help No stay where you are just don’t go anywhere or do anything without telling me yes I ran my palm over the floor and determined that it was not just smooth but clean my movements disturbed no dust no grit no organic detritus left behind by the Villani or any other animals there was a chilly breeze at floor level that I could not feel if I lifted my hand more than a few millimeters it didn’t take much more exploration to find pinprick holes in the surface blowing air ventilation maybe but I could think of few purposes that would require anything this fine but I had seen surfaces like that in a number of medical and industrial facilities the micro bursts of a are prevented any particles from settling on the ground and often ran in sequence to usher dust accumulation away from precision instruments has trained prosthetist s—