by James Murdo
Gil was perturbed as she felt the dread of what was to come. She knew when this was, precisely. This was the time her father had set off with Yul to search for help from a nearby commune, when a sickness had infected their own. Neither of them had ever returned. The sensespace was taunting her again, showing her painful events, toying with her. She could do nothing but continue to watch.
She looked more closely at her father, wanting to take in every detail about him before his impending fate. Wishing he could see and talk to her. Using every possible viewpoint. Simultaneously, she glanced through the sensespace at the path ahead. There seemed nothing untoward, nothing to give any indication of what was to come.
She knew the craft-lect and the others suspected her father was different, not really one of her own people – if she were still able to count herself truly amongst them. It was difficult for her to reconcile any of that knowledge with how she felt. She only knew him as a communer and her father, and still could not set him apart as being anything else. He was a communer as much as she counted herself to have been one, it did not matter where he had come from before. Tait, and many of the other communers, had originally come from other communes too, but that did not make them any different, or any less real.
Still letting a portion of her presence remain vigilant for any impending threats, including that of hidden Beast-men, she watched her father. She nested her presence more densely in front of him. As she watched, she began to consider that they were all wrong, everyone but her on the ship. They had mistaken her for something that she was not, and incorrectly speculated about her heritage to make sense of their own confusion. There was even the chance they were right, but that it was not her father who was linked to whatever it was that made her different. Her mother? Gil’s thoughts continued to race and she mused over whether they had been wrong all along when…
He saw her.
Her father looked towards her densely nested presence. It was so quick that had she not been properly concentrating she might have missed it. A flicker of his eye across the scenery in front of him, ending on her before darting off. There had been no disturbance to cause it. His eye darted towards her again, as though definitively validating what he had been reticent to acknowledge.
She was certain, and excited, although unsure about what it meant. Her father continued walking forwards, saying nothing. He wore a look of light curiosity, mixed with hesitance. Beside him, Yul remained steadfastly focused on what lay ahead. Neither had spoken since she had first started observing them.
As his eyes resumed their focus on the scenery ahead of him, his face began to take on a more serious countenance and his body became more rigid. Less fluid. Gone was the look of curiosity. Gil sensed that changes were taking place behind his silent exterior. He was thinking deeply. She hoped he would speak, to say something to her.
Before she could think anything else, Yul distracted her. He had clearly noticed her father’s odd movements and had turned to face him, although her father did not immediately acknowledge it. Gil watched, as her father looked briefly down towards the ground, before lifting his head to stare towards the sky and spreading his arms wide, while slowing to a stop. Yul also stopped, waiting for an explanation.
Her father brought his gaze back down, breathing deeply in and out, and sighed. His arms softly drew back to his sides. His expression had become one of sorrow, and Gil thought, perhaps, some anger too.
“Yul.”
Her father’s voice was deep. Authoritative. Kind.
He continued, “I am sorry, my friend. The time has come.”
“For what? The sickness is–”
“The end of… meddling. Perhaps, I have interfered too much.”
“What is this you speak of?”
“There are rules, Yul. I will have to atone.”
“I do not understand. How will this help?”
“Even though it was right, to do as I did. Please, forgive me Yul. Ril will be fine, I promise you this.”
And then, without warning, they were gone. Everything else was left, the trees, the plants, the nearby animals, everything except her father and Ril. Gil explored with her presence, horrified at being abandoned again, not wanting to be left, searching for a clue about what had happened. There had been no warning.
She begged the sensespace to let them return, imploring it with every fibre of her presence. The whispers, which had been near-absent up until now, began to return. The sound returned to that underlying background hum, taking no heed of her demands. Ignoring her pleas. Nothing she tried had any effect.
Waiting, alone, Gil thought about what had happened. It was impossible, she had almost forgotten, but it had been a memory. A captured part of her father’s final few moments, shown to her by the cruel sensespace. That was the only thing that made sense, yet it also did not. Her father had seen her. That could not have happened in the past since she had not been there, not yet. Her body and presence, right now, was aboard the craft-lect’s ship, none of this was strictly real. His eyes had gazed upon her, though. There had been no other reason for him to look in her direction, twice.
The sensespace was cruel, it could all have been a lie, although having watched her father made that difficult to accept. If there had been some subtle message, whether from the sensespace or her father, she had missed it. The short conversation with Yul about meddling and breaking rules had not made sense to her, and people did not simply disappear.
Trying to rationalise it to herself, she kept returning to the same problem. He had seen her, and disappeared as a direct consequence of that. Had she caused him to leave both her and Tor? Had she caused that loss? Where had he gone?
She had so many questions, but for now, they were secondary. She wanted to leave, to exit the sensespace. It had become empty.
Forcing her presence away, and surprised at finding it easier than she had expected, her consciousness recoiled from the sensespace’s grasp.
*
She opened her eyes, her infinite eyes. She was still not in her own body, the sensespace was not yet done. She saw darkness, circling in thick currents that warped the fabric of reality around itself. Oppressively dark, more than should have been possible, and dangerous. Like the shining night, the antithesis of the sensespace’s pure white streaks that Gil had seen speared forth into space. Small greenish specks seemed to shine around it in a ring, before twinkling in and out of existence.
She felt a presence settle behind her, as before, watching at a distance. She assumed it was the sensespace. The whispering was even quieter than it had been with her father, nearly completely gone. Her infinite eyes were alone, watching the unveiled darkness.
This thing… had to be stopped. The sensespace needed its destruction, but so did she. They both did. It was too dangerous. Too powerful. Too ultimate. Ready to rip everything apart, expanding the supermassive dark core of nothingness, engulfing everything in incomprehensibly strong tidal forces. She had to go to it…
The sensespace was scared.
15
APALU
Apalu wafted its bloom, the tentacles flicking swiftly to the side so that its hull’s axis turned perpendicular to the emblem-ship’s velocity vector, before accelerating as quickly as the bloom would allow. Fleeing without pretence. The larger emblem-ship was probably less manoeuvrable, and Apalu had decided that forcing it to alter its course, if it chose to continue pursuing Apalu, would comparatively lengthen the chase, giving Apalu some time.
It fast became apparent that despite its size, the emblem-ship was nimbler than Apalu had anticipated. Perhaps its bizarre bauble configuration somehow facilitated that, allowing for unconventional, highly effective propulsion manoeuvres. Or it could have been the methodology of propulsion itself, whatever that was.
Worryingly, the emblem-ship did indeed appear to be set on Apalu, and was managing to reduce the displacement quickly between them sooner than Apalu had allowed for in any of its scenario analyses. It was perplexing. Three
-thousand kilometres and decreasing, far too close for comfort.
Apalu decided to be more actively defensive. So far, the emblem-ship had not taken any actions other than follow, but that could change in an instant.
A couple of hundred drones were released from around Apalu’s stern and spread out to form a blanket behind it. They were pre-loaded with an assortment of cooperative battle strategies and powerful arsenals with which to test the formidability of the emblem-ship.
It was surprised. The pursuer fired conventional plasma beams at them, overcoming each by brute force rather than anything remotely innovative to conserve its own power. A wasteful act, foolhardy in the vacuum. It was impossible to speculate why that had been done, because it could signify many different things depending on the capabilities and inclinations of the infected Woal machine-lects controlling the emblem-ship. They could be confident or foolish, worried or angry. Anything. Spreading confusion might have even been the point.
Soon, Apalu would have to do something else. Something more drastic. The emblem-ship continued to close in, and even if it completely exhausted itself of offensive capabilities, which was unlikely, it could simply ram Apalu.
Apalu decided there was no point in any more direct confrontation. The nature with which its drones had been overcome was confusingly senseless, but also fierce. The Woal degenerate probably wanted Apalu destroyed. Apalu decided to do something it had never done before.
It prepared to engage the N-SOL drive. Any advantage of an early lead it had in entering N-SOL space would be invaluable. It only hoped it could last in N-SOL space for longer if it was followed, before its power was drained to critical levels – whereupon it would be forced back into real space. Its smaller size and, it assumed, mass, should enable it to travel further and faster in N-SOL space.
*
In N-SOL space for the first time, Apalu nervously kept watch for the emblem-ship. It could no longer detect any signs of the offender, but its sensors were only working in their vaguest sense. It could barely discern the imprint of real space around it.
Surveying what it could, it was fascinated by the chaos. Swirling vortices and currents of whatever passed for matter in N-SOL space washed over the ship. If it survived, upon its next visit to a data exchange, it would request the most current information about the reality it had now entered. The near-speed-of-light domain was beautiful.
Its intrigue at N-SOL space was dampened by its concern about the signal it had given off. Upon entering N-SOL space, its position had become momentarily clear in real space for almost every sentient that was capable, and who cared to look, possibly in the entire galaxy. Following the events of the Great Conflation, it had been a surprise to the remnants of the galactic community that N-SOL travel was suddenly so loud, obnoxious and easy to detect. It had not been like that before. That was what had led to the Wanderer Enclave advising strongly against it as a base method of traversing the galaxy, unless safety required. It was assumed that the ABs had employed certain mechanisms to mask use of the N-SOL drives for non-ABs, which had been disabled, or failed, following their suicide.
Apalu monitored its power levels suspiciously. It had a large quantity of information regarding historic N-SOL travel within its databanks, but what it was experiencing did not match. Its power levels were holding, stable, as though Apalu were in real space. It was unaffected in all areas. There should have been some leakage, some losses. To believe this was correct would have been comically naïve, considering how ubiquitous N-SOL travel had once been and how much data there was about it. It was known that it depleted a ship’s power. That was common knowledge, a ubiquitous fact, and had been the case since the ABs had first gifted it to the galactic community.
The most dangerous aspect concerning the failure of its internal power-monitoring sensors was that it did not know when it would need to drop out of N-SOL space. Too soon and it risked facing the emblem-ship potentially still on its stern, too late, and it could become lost to N-SOL space. Apalu could not take the risk of becoming lost, it had to leave. If the emblem-ship was behind it, there was a chance it was as lost as Apalu, and that there was something strange about the patch of N-SOL space they had just travelled through. With any luck, it might even overshoot Apalu. There was also the possibility that the emblem-ship was what had caused its power sensors to fail, in order to push it to become lost to N-SOL space – a sneaky attack in the same vein as those of the quick-lects.
Apalu sent the necessary commands to the N-SOL drive. The c-automs were still asleep, safely berthed and unaware of the danger they were in. It was not necessary to wake them for the moment, Apalu was still more than capable of commanding the entire ship alone.
Nothing happened. The ship did not drop out of N-SOL space, it carried on. Apalu repeated the commands, to no avail. It investigated the N-SOL drive and performed a diagnostic. The drive was faulty. It appeared to have been successfully deactivated, yet Apalu was clearly still in N-SOL space. Alongside the drive being faulty, the internal sensors and systems monitoring the drive were having issues as well since they also reported that it was inactive.
Apalu began to worry. Perhaps, this was how being lost to N-SOL space began. Its databanks contained no information about the symptoms from the unwitting participant’s point of view – only from that of an external observer. First errors with the internal power monitors, now this. The strange thing, however, was that the rest of the ship seemed fine. Everything purported to be in perfect working order.
Real space was now gone, it had started delicately dimming behind the haze of N-SOL space, which Apalu had taken to be a quirk of the particular N-SOL region they were in. However, now, there was only the confusing rotating mess of N-SOL space everywhere. Apalu was in danger, although it was not quite sure what that danger was. It repeated its internal diagnostics, over and over again. Nothing. It was helpless, as its sibling had been when the Granthan-lect had overtaken its systems.
It was still moving at what it assumed was the same velocity as when it had entered N-SOL space, and the streaming cascades of swirling N-SOL space-matter continued to rush past it. However, with its N-SOL drive being offline, it could not alter its course within N-SOL space even if it wanted. It brought the drive back online but there was no difference. For all intents and purposes, the readings it received back from the drive showed it was now operational, but it was as powerless as before. Just in case, it deactivated the drive again. It was still concerned about losing power, even if it could not observe its levels reliably.
*
Long-range sensors no longer worked – they were not designed for N-SOL space. Begrudgingly, it turned the N-SOL drive back on to use the enigmatic sensors contained within it. They were malfunctioning like everything else, and began to identify certain, fleeting targets, on either side of the ship, before losing track of them. Diligently, it performed diagnostics on these sensors too, to the extent of its capabilities as a non-AB, but found no issues.
Machine-lects were more than capable of entering deliriums and descending into insanity. It was a process that happened far less than with biologicals, but when it did, the results could be catastrophic. It was typically the result of a lect that had been created unstable during its initial manufacture, or when the Step or Usurper Principle had been flouted. In stark contrast with biologicals, however, external events witnessed by machine-lects, especially Wanderer craft-lects, seldom pushed them into madness. That was the preserve of biologicals.
The ability of biologicals to be affected by their surroundings, in ways which impacted heavily on their states of lect, or mind, was intriguing to machine-lects. It was known to be related to how biological minds were constructed – often heavily reliant on quantum mechanical processes inherently affected by observations. It was rare, but in certain situations, biologicals had been known to exhibit intellectual leaps that far surpassed the abilities of most machine-lects, moments of hyper-lucidity. Often, prodigy, or even savant machine-lects, were
required to understand the output from these moments once the biological returned to a typical state.
Even rarer, it had been observed, in extraordinarily few cases, that some biologicals could harness hyper-lucid traits over extended periods of time, sometimes reaching to hundreds of standard seconds. Apalu wondered if those intellects had been among the first to be targeted by the sensespace. It was a facet of this uncertain construction of their minds that enabled biologicals to succumb to environmentally-driven insanity.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, Apalu did not believe it was descending into madness of any type. Not yet. The timeframe had been too short.
*
Targets were identified and lost. Sometimes collections of objects were located, sometimes the N-SOL sensors massed them together into super-masses far dwarfing Apalu, before they vanished. It considered taking the drive back offline, now very concerned both about its own sanity and that power levels were still being reported as would have been expected in real space, with no drain.
Apalu was filling with regret at having entering N-SOL space. It could have tried the singularity generator before jumping at the chance to enter N-SOL space, like a coward. In real space, the generator would have enabled rapid movement, faster than the bloom. Not as fast as the N-SOL drive, but potentially sufficient to escape the emblem-ship. It could have tested it, taken a chance. Other Wanderers were likely to have faced threats equal to that of the emblem-ship, and Apalu had not detected any of them fleeing into N-SOL space.
It mused on whether to use the singularity generator in N-SOL space or not. As far as it knew, no experiments with gravitational singularities had ever been conducted in N-SOL space. However, even if the generator worked, Apalu would still be in N-SOL space. That was the problem. It had weapons, it could send out drones and other satellites, it could probe the fabric of N-SOL space in other ways. There were various options, but each one was an experiment, and therefore a risk.
