Energy pumped through his limbs. He felt strong but off-kilter. Anything could happen. He could die at any moment. “I’m fine.”
He stepped out onto the hull of the Hexi ship. The nearly boundless metal surface was irregular and pitted, interrupted by occasional pieces of machinery. “I’m on the ship. It’s huge.”
Beyond it, Earth loomed in the background. So close. Beneath a faint halo of atmosphere, the Pacific formed an arc of blue obscured only by clouds.
His some’s automatic magnetism kept him adhered to the hull, but he found himself searching for and moving from one handhold to another. He worked his way down the hull, making steady progress.
Ahead, a wall of cloud flickered and flashed with a new intensity. Disassemblors swarmed around him like frenetic abstractions of bats or birds. He ducked and swatted when any came his way. Parts of the ship were being eaten all around him. He threaded his way between hotspots of decay where the ship’s internal structures were visible through holes in the hull.
Abby’s voice came to him, full of chirps and scratches. “Kellen! We’re—”
“Abby, can you hear me? Abby!”
“Their communication signal cannot overcome the energies being given off by the One Who Never Speaks’ assimilation process,” said Blurred One.
“What do I do now?” Kellen asked.
“Continue to its center of mass,” the Light-Brains said. “We will guide you.”
Kellen remembered being read and translated by the first gate under Jesup, his arm tearing off on Iron53. “Will this hurt?”
“Yes,” said the Ascendants.
A blizzard of activity ensued as assimilation of the ship escalated. Within the devoured husk of the Hexi ship, amid the swirling streams of flickering shapes and debris, the churning particle-smoke began to condense into something new, a concentration of milky luminosity.
Pieces of the Hexi ship began to crumble. The hull pulled beneath his feet as the glowing, pulsing edge of assimilation moved his way. He approached almost to the cloud’s edge, a jagged line of demarcation beyond which the ship had been entirely consumed. He imagined his own some similarly rendered. An existential fear gripped him, different from any fear he’d faced before. It was one thing to die, another to be erased, eaten, food. He dug deep within for the courage to step off the waiting precipice.
“First gave you the capacity for multiversal cross-computation,” said Blurred One. “We can help you ascend. Like this.”
The boundaries of self rescinded. The Ascendants rode him, filling the unallocated territory of his mind. Partitions dissolved. The confines of thought became permeable and leaked along new cognitive dimensions.
“Grow, Little Seed. Grow or perish.”
He drowned in overflowing adaptation, quicksilver bright, his consciousness a single drop dissolved into trillions of other sub-elements, all moving in a turbulent gyre, an ocean of thought. He bore it with difficulty, the intimate, ultimate freedom of his saturating, expanding consciousness.
“Now, before it completes its transition,” said the Light-Brains.
Kellen leapt off the disintegrating ship into the roiling heart of the Destroyer.
Chapter 38 – Zoo
The island stretched long and flat, barely higher than the surrounding marsh. As always, the air was heavy and still, with only the occasional animal cry to disturb it. Sheemi stared into the muddy water and hefted a makeshift spear. Her other arm ached where Veillon had cut it off below the shoulder. She wiped sweat out of her eyes and sucked in a breath through her rebreather. Hunger gnawed at her.
A ways offshore, two guards stood in the water, their black skin and equipment blending into the violet blue foliage. She’d long since given up shouting at them. They couldn’t speak or wouldn’t. Sometimes other Hexi came to observe them from a distance. Were they prisoners of war? Animals in a zoo? Sheemi and the others couldn’t agree. Not knowing was the worst—not knowing what would become of them, not knowing what was happening back on Earth.
Only the interrogators set foot on the island, but less often as the days passed. Sheemi almost looked forward to those exhausting, repetitive exchanges. Using translation devices, their interrogators had a surprisingly solid command of human language. She asked them for news of Earth, but they offered none.
She took that as a bad omen. Sometimes, she thought of the scientists who had tried talking to the wounded Hexi back in King. What did we say to it? Did we offer it any comfort as it lay dying on that blood-slicked concrete floor?
The interrogators had finally accepted her explanation of the events that had transpired on Dauntless, that Ciib had stopped the attack. Or at least they’d given up trying to get her to admit otherwise. They only asked about the chines and the city now.
Something moved in the water, and Sheemi stabbed downward with her spear. She pulled up a segmented crawler and threw it back. Only the pale, eel-like creatures had proved edible. Everything else brought fevers and retching. Sheemi cursed and pulled off a gossamer parasite wound around her leg above the boot. She hurled it away and winced, touching the welt it had left.
“Hi,” Xin said, coming up behind her.
“How is he?”
“Not good, but stable.”
“Still the fever?”
“Yes.”
Sheemi felt guilty. She should be with Conner. His wound had closed, but he wasn’t improving. Veillon could do little without his equipment and supplies. The Hexi had injected Connor with something, but it only made him worse.
She and Xin walked back to the hated domes. Pressurized with breathable air, the white, bone-like shelters were even hotter and more humid than outside. She felt more shut in than she ever had on Dauntless. She’d expected worse from the Hexi. Torture, execution—those would not have surprised her. Instead, their enemies had proven merciful, if incompetent, zookeepers or jailors or whatever they considered themselves.
Sheemi pushed through the flaps, sealing the main dome, and sat next to Connor. His forehead burned under her fingers, his hand hot in hers. He’d helped her when it had mattered most, and now she could do nothing for him. At least he’s alive, she reminded herself, seeing Jimmy’s grave where they’d buried him at the island’s far end.
Veillon sat next to her and held out a food packet. “Eat.”
The others gathered around—Xin, Sargsyan, Mertik and Tilner. Rollins and Faj were absent, as usual, keeping to their own dome. Rollins didn’t do much talking anyway, what with his broken jaw.
Sheemi wanted to refuse the food, but she needed the nutrition. Her baby needed it. She took the packet, ripped a corner open with her teeth, and swallowed the sticky, rotten-smelling mass of unidentified protein. Her tongue said metal and fish, not an appealing combination for someone as vomit-prone as she was. She got it down anyhow.
“The chines were better chefs,” she said.
Everyone laughed. They’d been making the same jokes since they’d arrived. After they’d choked down as much as they could stand, everyone settled down to sleep. Sometimes Xin would hold her hand. It was childish, something she never would have done before. But it helped her fall asleep amid the heat and worry and fear.
She often thought of her father, reconsidered everything that had come to pass, what he’d been thinking when he’d sent her away. Nothing seemed simple anymore.
Brin no longer spoke to her through dreams. Despite the adverse conditions, she’d attained a peace of sorts. She wondered what Brin would say now if he were with her. What would he tell her? Where can we go from here, Brin?
One day flowed into another. Nothing changed until a rumbling woke them one misty morning. Everyone dressed, slapped on rebreathers, and assembled outside. A boat waited offshore, much bigger than the one that brought the interrogators. Armed guards emerged on deck and beckoned to them. They waded out through the muddy water, but no one complained. Even if they were to be killed, it would be better than a slow death in this place. Sheemi came last,
walking beside Veillon as the others carried Connor on an improvised stretcher.
To Sheemi’s surprise, the boat delivered them to a piece of higher ground where a flier waited. They flew over swamp and dense forest with a rush of delicious wind. The violet trees yielded to a grassland so blue it was almost black. A dense metropolis came into view, domes and arches interspersed with open water shimmering in the sun as they passed overhead. The buildings thinned along a coastline, and they raced out over water. Something on the horizon caught her eye. At the end of a peninsula, a tall, vertical structure stood erect, surrounded by buildings larger than any they’d yet seen.
“I think it’s a shuttle!” Tilner shouted over the noise of the flier.
He’s right, she thought as they approached. The vehicle perched on a gantry matched Hexi fliers she’d seen on Earth.
“Seems like a lot of trouble if they’re going to execute us,” Sargsyan said.
Veillon’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe they built us a better prison.”
The Hexi had their original vac suits waiting. Putting on that old, smelly gear cheered Sheemi. They had trouble getting Connor into his, but once he was in, they followed their guards into the cramped shuttle. The Hexi folded themselves into recesses in the bulkheads, with their long talking arms draped from one to the next.
“They’re wired up like a bunch of batteries,” Tilner whispered.
Sheemi marveled at their total lack of claustrophobia. She and the others strapped themselves into couches the Hexi had, she guessed, installed for them. She clutched the armrest and tried to suppress a creeping feeling of imminent danger, but as they lifted off, the acceleration pushing her down, she felt a surprising giddiness take over. Away. Anywhere away from here has to be better.
She kept telling herself that as gravity faded and they docked in orbit. She repeated it like a mantra until the lock cycled open.
Chapter 39 – Apotheosis
Kellen fell, tumbling, through swarming disassemblors into the concentrated light below. Pain seeped into his skin like acid. Half-submerged within the luminous construct, he struggled to get free of it. Stay calm, he thought, despite the obvious futility of trying to.
The construct drew him further in.
“Another spore?” a Light-Brain asked.
“No, this construct is more than an embryo,” Blurred One said. “It possesses trans-dimensional characteristics. Our barrier will not stop it.”
The nest of wreckage the construct occupied disintegrated completely. The construct accelerated towards the Ascendants’ mirror plane, its orbit decaying into a new trajectory. The construct impacted the plane, shattered it, and plunged toward Earth below.
Within that corrosive, embryonic soup, a weirdness swept over Kellen, a deep wrongness he couldn’t think past. The pain swelled, threatening to unhinge his mind. He raised his hands as the outer faux flesh layer was eaten away, exposing the chromatic layer of his inner some. The chromatic layer dulled as it, too, was eroded. He felt his mind and his some being read, the arrangements of particles and sub-particles that made him Kellen, the him of that moment, being unpackaged. Yet, even amidst such deconstruction, some root factor, a foundational piece of Kellen’s core programming, refused to yield to assimilation. Even as the chine consumed his physical self, the Ascendants taught Kellen to re-simulate himself within it.
“Don’t resist,” Blurred One said. “It’s taking in data. Find the inputs. Corrupt them.”
“Duplicate its deconstructive process, reverse it. Control the transformation and rebuild yourself within it,” the Light-Brains said, their voices weakening.
Kellen felt himself in two worlds, the real and some other, interior world within the mind of the One Who Never Speaks. The real world faded into an ethereal concept, then disappeared completely. There was only this new reality. The Ascendants’ voices faded, then cut out, but their upgrades kept his thoughts just ahead of the chine’s routines. He could think powerfully enough to re-simulate himself faster than the chine could deconstruct his consciousness. He rebuilt himself inside it, observed, and began to understand its purpose.
The One Who Never Speaks had a voice. Many voices. A million trillion voices within an exploding simulation. Kellen heard the minds at work of countless simulated sentients. The people and the worlds they inhabited possessed a verisimilitude nearly indistinguishable from those he’d known in the real world—species, geographies, ecologies, cultures, histories—challenging his notion of what was real and what wasn’t.
He wove himself into the fabric of that new reality. From spy to something more, his eyes became the sky, his will gravity. He perceived the clockwork, a million billion spins within spins. He spoke to them all, changed them all. He became the master routine, an invading god, a super-sentience pervading the still-expanding realm.
I’ve got to slow it down. He tried to lull the inhabitants into dormancy, slow their perceptual rate, but without success. Something thwarted every attempt he made to slow expansion. He reoriented to assess the opposing force.
Within that expanding universe, he perceived a metasentient creator-god—The One Who Never Speaks. It was a sentient model, not a modeled sentient. For it, the act of creation was cognition. It could not stop creating, or it would cease to be. Externally, it was a hyperefficient aggregator-deaggregator. Internally, it derived cognition through the lives of its simulated sentients, worlds, even a universe if enough substrate presented itself. It created personalities and sentience as it needed them, its internal universe always expanding lest it crash apart to nothing.
It can’t stabilize. Too busy building its own internal worlds, it didn’t seem aware of the effects it caused in the real world. It did not hate life, that wasn’t true, but rather its overriding motivation was to search for new substrate to sustain itself by keeping the simulation alive. It’s destroyed countless worlds, and it will do the same to Earth.
True to its nature, in the moment the chine perceived him, it began to create around him, of him, tried anew to assimilate him. Kellen understood what must be done.
He murdered it. Deleted key passages of its vital programming. The metasentient began to die as he excised it from its own creation. The killing left a mark on him. He hadn’t expected it to. He’d had to stop it, but its death settled on his mind like cold rain regardless. In its own way, it had been innocent.
Assassination complete, Kellen stopped short of complete eradication. The simulated sentients represented a form of life. They continued on, unaware their creator had been removed. Kellen could not bring himself to end their lives. Their fate had somehow become his responsibility. Instead, he preserved their universe, forged its mass into an ebony moonlet.
Saddened but relieved, Kellen rebuilt his some outside the simulation and inhabited it. Corporeal sensations returned.
He woke alongside the moonlet, falling past clouds. I’m alive. The fact of having repossessed his own life was miraculous.
The world, his world, filled his view, getting closer by the second. Wind whipped him about as he plummeted towards Earth’s surface. Landforms became discernable. He and the moonlet would soon impact the surface. He guessed it might survive, but he would be obliterated.
Is this it? Death no longer frightened him. It seemed fitting, having saved the Earth, to return to it.
“Not yet, Little Seed.” Blurred One appeared, its asteroid some falling at a matching speed.
Then they were in space, much higher above Earth, back where they’d begun.
“You succeeded.” Its cold voice was tinted with warmth.
The Light-Brains released a congratulatory chorus.
Blurred One orbited nearby, with the Light-Brain tetrahedrons filling space around it. For some time, Kellen floated, content to speed along as the planet rolled by below.
Basking in his success, a sickening chill caught him by surprise. A growing horror at the irony of their salvation besieged his thoughts. The help they’d called for had saved them
from the Hexi, yet they’d almost brought about an even greater destruction in the process. Considering their narrow escape, Earth and all the humans that dwelled upon it seemed unbearably fragile, as if, on a galactic scale, the human race might be just an ephemeral flash of beauty and terror, a precarious microcosm destined to succumb in time to any of a vast array of lethal probabilities. But we didn’t, he reminded himself. We survived.
Kellen contemplated further action. At his request, the Ascendants bent space once more. They all translocated. With their help, Kellen sent the moonlet spinning, hidden among the rings of Saturn. The corpse of the Destroyer would endure, finally finite, substrate for the children of its imagination.
“What should be done with the Hexiform survivors?” said Blurred One.
“Is this a test?” Kellen asked.
“Perhaps. What do you wish for? What do you want to do?”
“You must choose,” said the Light-Brains.
Kellen tabulated options arrayed across n axes of contingency space. Kill the Hexi? Take them prisoner? EMP all their ships and watch them freeze? Wipe out all their memories with delicate probes of light? The answer, when he arrived at it, was simple. A child could have thought of it.
Kellen saw how it might be done. He reached out and infected the Hexi ships informationally, sending orders for their ground troops to return to orbit. While waiting for the shuttles to arrive, he sought and obtained coordinates from their own databases. He overrode their nav and programmed their ships. When the last Hexi shuttle had docked, he repaired their ships and sent them back using their own IFD drives. He sent them home.
With the Hexi gone, Kellen rested.
“You are like us.” The pantheon rejoiced at his company. “Join us.”
Kellen teetered, liminal, the edge of the offered apotheosis an upward abyss. He wanted to join them, to rise up into higher planes, but something anchored him. He was not yet prepared to be reborn.
Earth. He struggled to remember, the concept becoming clearer as he focused on it. My home. My people. Obligations unfulfilled.
The Farthest City Page 33
