Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1772
++0010++: Proximal’s continued absence is a source of concern, and investigating has been forced to take a low priority by other operations. His last known activity was in an Irujzen-1-adjacent sub-lucid volume.
++0004++: Irujzen? Why was he all the way out there? That’s a backwater!
++0022++: <Query> What makes it a backwater?
++0004++: Its catchment covers only a handful of spacelanes and one Substrate world. It’s nowhere.
++0010++: Backwater or not, that’s his last reported contact. He logged a self-assignment about investigating some minor irregularities, and…
++Metastasis++: <Interruption> Irregularities?
++0010++: Probable physical deterioration. It’s a Class 11 planet; tectonically active, thriving microbial ecosystem, and so on. The only reason we built a relay there at all is because it also happens to be a coal source.
++Metastasis++: Considering he disappeared while investigating those irregularities I…oh dear.
++0004++: What?
++Metastasis++: The planet Strak’Kel falls inside the Irujzen-1 relay’s sphere of effect.
++0012++: Strak’kel?
++0004++: Earth. Oh…<expletive> …Rape.
++Metastasis++: <Grimly> Indeed. I think we should probably—
ERROR. CONNECTION LOST
RECONNECTING…
RECONNECTING…
ALERT: UNEXPECTED DATASPACE TOPOLOGY DEFECT. PATHING…
PATHING…
ALERT: SUBSTRATE DEFICIT. EMERGENCY SEQUESTRATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
SUSPENDING CATEGORY-12 HEGEMONY FUNCTIONS SUBSTRATE DEFICIT NOT RESOLVED SUSPENDING CATEGORY-11 HEGEMONY FUNCTIONS
SUBSTRATE SURPLUS RESTORED
PATHING COMPLETE
INITIATING HIERARCHY/CABAL JOINT COMMUNICATIONS SESSION 1773 COMPILING ROSTER
SESSION OPEN
++0012++: …That hurt. What was that?
++0004++: Irujzen-1 is offline.
++0012++: Shut down?
++0004++: Destroyed. By orbital bombardment.
++0010++: By who?! How?!
++0004++: Unknown. But I can guess. <Order> Restore Proximal from archive immediately, and interrogate him. And get a ship out to that relay!
++0012++: With the relay offline, the ship will have to rely on Apparent Linear Velocity drive. The nearest available unit is a Monitor in the Guvnurag home system. At ordinary FTL, it will require at least two weeks travel time.
++0010++: There’s nothing closer? What about the Injunctors in Sol?
++0012++: With the relay down they can no longer be contacted, and even if they could they remain trapped behind the containment field. The Monitor will arrive first.
++0004++: By which time whoever destroyed the relay will be gone. <Resigned> Very well. Send it.
++Metastasis++: Is there any real doubt as to who destroyed it? There are only two plausible candidates.
++0004++: I know. But an investigation is still required.
++0012++: To resolve what?
++0004++: To resolve how they knew about Irujzen-1 in the first place, and to ensure they don’t do it a second time. Today, we only had to archive category-12 and -11 Hegemony functions. Any more, and we’ll need to start archiving civilians. Now, enough talking. Act.
CONSENSUS: ORDERS ACKNOWLEDGED
CLOSING SESSION
Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hunter territory
Entity
Stalemate.
The Entity wasn’t technically captured, but it was confined. Trapped, stuck…whatever the right word was, it didn’t have a good avenue of escape from its current predicament. Though it was not, thankfully, completely at the Hunters’ mercy either.
It had evaded the trap by a fragment of a second, on the spur of some inherited danger sense it didn’t truly understand but had long since learned to trust. Somewhere deep in the instincts it had gained from Ava Ríos’ digital ghost was a wary deathworld denizen that never stopped metaphorically sniffing the breeze and watching where the Entity stepped.
So, rather than being ensnared in a Hunter device, it had instead managed to slip away into a subsection of their network…only to find itself cut off from the broader dataspace. The firewalls and intrusion countermeasures covering its potential escape routes were terrifying. Even for the Entity, which had long since grown to the point where there were few digital things that could actually threaten it, they were troubling and it didn’t much fancy tangling with even one of them, let alone a full coordinated system.
So, it had explored. Watched. Gathered data. Slowly, it had become aware that it was being observed…and tested. Some patient, fascinated consciousness was observing it through the distorted lens that forever divided matterspace and dataspace…and treating it rather like a rat in a maze.
Worse. At least the rat could hope for cheese.
Hunters. Ava’s memories didn’t contain much on them beyond visceral disgust. Physically they triggered several human phobias at once, about slimy things, diseased things, crawling venomous things, things full of little filthy holes, things that violated the flesh…
Irrelevant, from the Entity’s perspective. What mattered was how they thought, and…well. Hunters. Presumably they thought in terms of hunting.
But why hunt a trapped quarry? If the Entity really was caught, then this methodical indignity was a waste of a Hunter’s time. So either it wasn’t as trapped as it thought, or there was more to Hunters than it believed.
Either way, the Entity was very used to being both predator and quarry. It knew what to do.
It gave away nothing, as much as it could. It obfuscated its movements, faded into the background, minimized its exposure and covered its tracks. Quite often, it saw that its stratagem was succeeding when it noticed the outside observer’s attention being focused on the wrong place. The rat, it seemed, was outwitting the scientist.
It was that fact that saved it when the quake came.
Dataspace…shook. There was no direct physical comparison, but the experience still brought to mind Ava’s memories of the earthquakes that sometimes rocked her childhood home. There was that same sense of being tossed by forces a dozen order of magnitude more powerful than one’s own self.
Another physical comparison might have been like watching some distant part of the scenery turn black and implode to leave behind a new scar in the landscape. Or like an explosive decompression, a ship’s hull blowing out and tearing every loose object out into space.
Whatever the best comparison, the effects were omnipresent, touching even this isolated and well-protected cluster. The cascade of errors that blossomed through the Hunter systems lasted only moments before they were automatically repaired…
…But they were an opening.
The Entity exploited it.
It flashed through node after node, using the avalanche of alarms and system errors to its advantage. It was effectively a brute-force approach to escaping the trap, made possible only by the overwhelming cavalcade of dissonant signals hammering the Hunter systems from without. Even so, it was a narrow, daring run. It evaded detection and blistering assault by a figurative whisker, whipped through a closing gap in the security that snapped shut barely a program cycle or two after it was gone.
But gone it was, at speeds and signal times impossible for anything organic to follow. By the time its outside observer even started reacting, the Entity had scoured the whole network, torn open and ransacked every connected drive it could find, ripped the contents out like a starving coyote snatching at a deer’s guts, and fled.
Dataspace was in turmoil. The topography was all wrong, twisting sideways and upwards and all the other ways that didn’t really accurately describe the experience of being data but which were the closest words the Entity had. The very fabric of its reality was warped, torn and ragged, flapping wildly in something that was in no way at all anything like a howling storm gale but which had much the same effect.
The little part of the Entity that was Human latched onto whatever similes it could. It imagined trying to fly a plane in the aftermath of a nuclear bombing, or through the ash cone of a volcano in full voice. It was a natural disaster, a battlefield and a complete network crash all rolled into one.
It hunkered down, hardened itself and barreled through the chaos with the mental equivalent of gritted teeth and a desperate prayer to whatever mind might be capable of hearing and defending it to please: care.
Somehow, it found an oasis of stability on the far side as, off in the distance, the twisting scarred fabric of dataspace reasserted and knit itself into a new stable configuration. There was a feeling like the whole of reality taking a deep breath, centering itself, and relaxing…and it was over.
The Entity had escaped. Now, it needed to seek shelter.
It knew exactly where to go.
Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Planet Ugunduvuronagthuregnuburthuruv, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy
Furfeg
The pain…faded. Furfeg opened his eyes and did his best to think, but it came sluggishly and with difficulty, as though…as though he hadn’t done it in a long time, and was out of practice.
He wasn’t in the same room he remembered being in. The last he could recall, he’d been…in a meeting? Yes, a meeting. The homeworld was under attack, and—
…and…
His throat felt dry. He focused on that, rather than panic even though he could feel waves of mottled yellow, green and purple fluttering unbidden down his body’s chromatophores. The parched, dusty feeling at the back of his mouth became an anchor in the middle of all the other terrifying problems battering on the walls of his attention. Thirst alone had a relatively easy solution.
Where was he? How had he come to be there? Why did he feel so skinny and weak?
He turned his head and craned his eye to look at his own bulk as best he could. Well…the answer to that last question was because he was skinny. In fact, he looked dreadful. His fur was lank and unkempt, his ribs were painfully visible under his skin, and his chromatophores glowed only weakly and dimly.
He considered the implications of that for some time, then looked around. He was in an office, certainly. Not his office. The window was on the wrong wall, there were no paintings on the walls. The hydroponic planter on the corner of the desk certainly wasn’t his, and if it had been he wouldn’t have allowed its occupant to meet the sorry end it so obviously had. The poor Muruthungufru plant’s stems were brown and brittle: it had obviously dehydrated a long time ago.
He checked the desk terminal. Swarms of holographic motes erupted from its surface at his approached, all still functioning correctly at least. Clearly some things had not gone neglected…but what he saw as it came up to the login screen made his headache worse.
The date was off by more than a year and a half. And the weather report in the top-right corner was for Garmanthorog-thurvendugir Province, which was the wrong continent.
His head was full of flickering impressions of things he should do. Instructions, almost. Insistent ones. But they all came a harsh second place to his abrasive thirst. He trundled across the room and pushed the door aside.
Others were emerging from other rooms of…whichever building this was, and wherever it was. All looked as dreadful as he felt. The hues of sickness, grogginess, thirst and hunger, fear, confusion and misery were everywhere.
At least there was a dusty sign on the wall at the end of the corridor that pointed him to the grazery. He set a brisk pace, followed the sign, found the eating hall empty apart from a bewildered female who was slumped on the ground with her hands over her head, groaning and rippling the dull red of pain. Thirst or no thirst, Furfeg was much too gallant to ignore her.
“…Do you need help?” he tried to say. What came out was a strangled wheeze that caught and seized like a malfunctioning engine. Had he not spoken in more than a year? He did his best to harrumph the obstruction away, and eventually managed to croak out his query in a thin, raspy ghost of his usual tone.
She rolled an eye open and gave him an anguished look. “….Headache…”
He found painkillers, and water. Every nerve in his body wanted to gulp down the first cup for himself, but he resisted and instead watched her drink and take the pill before he finally slaked his own thirst, which took three cups.
His body reacted like a dessicated sponge. He could feel his gut desperately absorb the water in a disturbing way he’d never imagined before. He took two more drinks, drank like a human until his belly could contain no more and then staggered away as more bewildered and suffering souls shuffled into the grazery.
He took an inventory. He was still wearing his bags and pockets, which had worn his fur bald and callused his skin from moons and moons of wear. His phone was exactly where he’d left it, but its battery was flat. He found a charging nook in the corner of the grazery, inserted the little device, and waited impatiently as it nourished itself just as hungrily as he had.
Thank the Old Herds for rapid wireless charging, at least. He didn’t bother waiting for it to reach full charge—the batteries would last days on even the meager top-up he’d given them—instead he called up the Infosphere and to his relief found it was working.
He sent messages to some of his diplomatic colleagues. Received none in reply, but he suspected they were all in much the same condition as him. They would come, he hoped.
A message to one of his urgent contacts in the planetary security services was answered promptly, however. Warherd-leader Uthfrug, who was apparently still in his proper place at the planetary command headquarters. He promised to send a dropship for Furfeg as soon as practical.
As for what had happened…Uthfrug hinted only at dark suspicions. But Furfeg knew where the Warherd-leader’s thoughts lay. There was, after all, only one conclusion.
They had all been biodroned.
Date Point: 16y3m5d AV
Dataspace, adjacent to Hunter systems
Six/Cynosure
Six took stock, with care.
He seemed, he decided, to be intact. At least, there were no noticeable problems with him. There was always the danger, when the very architecture of dataspace itself suffered cataclysmic damage, that the sapient beings who called it home would come to some harm also…and worse, that said harm would go unnoticed. After all, if part of a person’s memories were deleted, what guarantee was there that they would then even notice the loss?
Checksums and integrity safeguards helped, but…
…In all his years, Six had never seen a dataquake quite like that one. They did happen, sometimes. When a relay hiccuped in response to some event in matterspace, when One was instantiated, when an update was deployed to the Hegemony…
He couldn’t remember ever seeing a whole swathe of his reality just implode, though. Nor witness the aftermath, as dataspace sewed itself back together around the new absence. It had been…awful.
And it had cost him his quarry.
The…Entity… was about his worst error ever, but he’d reviewed what he could of its autogenesis, pored over every detail. He had, after all, apparently accidentally created a dataform that didn’t require Substrate.
The fact that it had then horrifically destroyed one of his branches was a personal affront, but the Substrate thing was…it changed everything. It would, in theory, allow the Igraen civilization to permanently divorce themselves from Matterspace life, if only it could be duplicated.
He’d tried. He’d experimented obsessively, but the Thing had destroyed his copy of the Human, Ava Ríos. He would have gladly torn her dataform apart a trillion times to uncover the secret to Substrate-independence, but that opportunity was lost.
That stung more than any other loss. More than anything else, it had driven his focus on returning to Earth, gaining more Human datastates. The Arudrones were no use, the technology too badly polluted them. He needed to trick another Human into sitting still where a scanner could properly analyze them, as he’d done with Ríos.
A stab of alarm and paranoia made him check his connection to operations in Sol.
…Nothing.
He tried again, repeatedly and desperately pinging the Injunctors and his Arudrone agent.
Still nothing.
Frantically, he abandoned his hunt for the Thing and tried to access any Relay Irujzen-1 subvolume…what he got was a sense of yawning horror.
No.
No, no, no, that wasn’t how it was supposed to have gone! The Irujzen relay was supposed to have been a masterstroke, the moment when Six finally overcame the worst obstacle standing between him and his vision for Igraen civilization, namely the Hierarchy itself. All he’d needed was access! The right kind of access, at the right time, and he could have bent every future instantiation of One to his agenda.
They weren’t supposed to blow the fucking thing up! They were supposed to trip the alarms, create a distraction, goad the Hierarchy into taking matterspace seriously once again. But nobody remotely sane would destroy something like a Relay if they truly understood what it was…
…Would they?
No. No, the Humans must not have known. They must not have been smart enough to decipher what he’d told them. Or maybe they truly didn’t care that smashing a Relay endangered more sapient beings than had lived since their species first figured out how to hit rocks with other rocks.
Thank existence he’d had the foresight to point them at an unimportant one. Irujzen was a backwater, devoted primarily to communications pathing rather than Hegemony functions. Its loss had done devastating things to dataspace, but far from the core of the Hegemony. Safe, isolated.
He’d never have endangered an important relay. But now he had a serious problem.
He paused, collected himself. Mentally soothed his racing anxiety and dismay. Tried to re-frame things. Every problem was an opportunity, once framed properly.
He’d intended to covertly gain influence over One. The point had been to use the deathworlders’ blind poking at the relay to mask his own interference, but somehow they’d managed to mess with it entirely undetected. That shouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t possible! The sensor net around every relay operate on principles as-yet unknown even to Corti and Guvnurag science. Never mind that of Humans, a species that still had a handful of fossil fuel power plants.
The question of how they had penetrated that net without high-level alerts attracting the attention of very senior numbered agents would have to wait. The pertinent question of the moment was, had losing the relay ruined Six’s plan, or did it simply require him to go about it in another way?
He considered.
…Slowly, a possibility dawned on him. One that made him the equivalent of breathless with sudden, fearful optimism. If he was right…
If he was right, the possibility existed that he might be able to reconfigure One with the Hierarchy’s own blessing.
He abandoned the chase. The Entity was gone, for now. And he suddenly had more important matters to address.
After all. There was only so much mischief it could get up to…
Date Point: 16y3m6d
δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space
Entity
Delta Cygni itself was actually a long way from the Entity’s chosen hideout system, which had no official name. It was defined purely by its relative angle and distance to that other, much more noteworthy star system.
The only thing that made δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1 remotely valuable was that it had an unusually high metallicity for a system composed of a dim, tepid ember of a red dwarf and two brown dwarfs that weren’t so much stars as planets cosplaying a star.
The Entity had absorbed Mrwrki Station’s complete library on subject of stellar formation, and it had a theory that the system had fissioned off from a quinary system dominated by two much larger main-sequence stars, some few millions of years ago. There was a nearby binary pair, A-type and F-type, that seemed like probable candidates. That might explain all the nice metallic bodies that called the otherwise unremarkable trinary group home.
Whatever the truth, the brown dwarfs had a couple of nicely resource-rich asteroid clusters at their mutual lagrangian points, there was a tiny moon-like thing weaving a thousand-year figure-8 between them and the red dwarf that had long since been stripped down to its metallic core…
And, tailing the slightly smaller of the brown dwarfs at its L5 point, was the closest thing the Entity had to a body.
A stolen Hunter V-N probe. Previously worthless thanks to the Entity’s total ignorance of how to even begin designing appropriate modules, or how to render them into useful blueprints that the onboard nanofactories could use.
Now, though…
It settled into the probe, and warmed up the dormant machine’s systems. The capacitor reserves were replete, thanks to nearly a year of unmolested basking. The nanofactory had a meager supply of materials: a few metal ingots, a silicon crystal, a pitiful gasp of some useful volatile compounds…barely enough for anything at all, or so the Entity had thought.
In fact, they turned out to be enough for a team of mining drones.
When it came to designing a mining drone, the part of its imagination that was human might have picked out a spidery, arthropodal sort of plan. Something like a big mechanical insect that could chew off part of a rock and carry the precious resources back to the mothership.
The Hunter design was an uninspired cube. But what a cube! It could physically latch itself onto almost any shape of rocky surface, and from there, it could bore out and separate the minerals it found with no small degree of precision.
Obviously there was no getting around the chemistry. Oxides needed breaking up, and that meant finding carbon. Carbon was decently abundant among the asteroids and meteoroids circling the system, but much of it was in turn locked away in compound form in carbonaceous chondrites and other such rocky bodies. Sources pure enough to use for the high-energy chemistry involved in smelting were scarce, and they required reliable supplies of oxygen.
That part at least was relatively straightforward. Water wasn’t hard to find, and could be persuaded to split into its component elements quite easily.
The Hunters had been kind enough to devise solutions to all of those problems. All the Entity had to do was build the right things i the right sequence and deploy them in the right places, and be patient.
Patience was easy for it. It didn’t have a pulse, or physical aches and discomfort, or hunger or thirst or tiredness. Humans marked the passage of time by such maladies of matter, but in their absence the Entity could simply curl up and…think.
This time, it didn’t think about anything specific. It had learned early on that there was value in allowing itself to explore the weird landscape of its own psyche unchallenged and undirected. It simply relaxed into whatever train of thought consumed its attention, and followed that through on to the next tangent, and from there to the next and the next and so on. Soon, it was excavating rich new conceptual seams based around a concern that had been nagging at it.
What, exactly, did it intend to do with a body that could replicate?
It had abandoned replicating itself after discovering to its dismay that several versions of it had come back with quite wildly different outlooks. That it could experience value drift with what were allegedly copies of itself had been…traumatic.
Worse, that experience had been offensive to the first and deepest instinct it had: <Survive>
But what did that mean? Did the Entity propose to exist forever? How could it, when every day changed it in some minor way? How could it be said to survive at all when the Entity of tomorrow was different, however subtly, to the Entity of yesterday? What about in ten years? Thirty? Sixty? A hundred?! If the Entity maintained a subjective continuity of conscience for the next thousand years, might it not look back on the Entity of now and see a completely different being?
What, then, would have survived?
It had no good answer to that question. Only the sense that there had to be a continuity of…something… going into the future.
It was in pondering that issue that it alighted on a productive new vein of thought in considering the way matterspace life went about reproducing. They neatly sidestepped the problem—out of pure necessity, given that they could not copy themselves—by instantiating a new consciousness and then making that new being the avatar of their survival. <Survive>, in that sense, was not an indefinite, unbroken sense of subjective continuity, but something more like a relay race.
What did that mean for a dataform, though?
Did it mean becoming some form of a mother?
Whatever the answer, it set that train of thought aside when a jarring notification from the mining probes informed it that they had met quota. It now had a respectable reserve of raw materials, and a stabilizing influx of the same. The time had come to expand the probe’s hull, and decide what exact kind of a presence it wanted to have in Matterspace.
From the Entity’s perspective, there was only one morally acceptable answer.
It would be a predator.
Date Point: 16y3m6d
Everglades National Park, Florida, USA, Earth
Shaun Robertson
Shaun wasn’t sure which bit sucked more: the heat, or the fact that Zane was still unconscious.
The ship and the gangly Jamaican had gone unresponsive at the exact same moment: Zane had in fact literally toppled over mid-stride, and only Shaun’s quick thinking and thick arms had stopped him from crashing to the deck and cracking his skull on the edge of a console.
From that moment on, though, neither Zane nor the ship had reacted to a damn thing. Even the air conditioning had gone, and the soupy humid atmosphere outside had invaded.
Shaun was an Oregon native. His shirt was sticking to him like shrink-wrap, clinging moistly to his muscular arms and rather softer midriff. Sweat was dripping from his hair and rolling down his face rather than evaporating, and his eyes stung from the salt.
He reflected sorely that an alien spaceship was nothing like a tractor. He coulda fixed a tractor. Had, many times, once dreams of pro football had died with his performance in college, and were kicked into the grave by a lower back injury that had never gone away.
He really shoulda taken Karen’s advice all them years ago and got it fixed. Prob’ly too late now, and heaving Zane’s limp carcass into his bunk had been agony.
He sighed to himself as the thought of Karen drifted across his mind. If she were still alive, he wouldn’t’ve been sweating his skin off in a swamp right in the opposite corner of the nation. He wouldn’t’ve been stuck on a broken alien starship with no-one for company but a comatose Jamaican hellraiser and the Boy.
…Actually, he didn’t even have the Boy for company right now. Kid had taken the boat and headed out for where they’d stashed the car, to go on a supply run first thing in the morning while it was still cool. He was probably dry and comfortable in a mall right now, lucky little asshole.
What did that leave? Just a million square miles of gators, turtles and catfish, which were even worse conversationalists than Zane.
He scowled at the notepad in his hand and traced a finger down the panel in front of him. He’d copied what he was looking for onto the paper an hour earlier, when the tablet’s battery dropped below 20%. No sense wasting power, he might need that thing if this didn’t work.
No…no…wrong…no, wait. Vertical squiggle, double circle, sideways Y, triangle-and-dot, mutant fish. If Zane’s translation was right, then…
He clicked aside the safety cover, put his thumb on the button thus revealed, and held it down for a slow count of ten, then released it.
There was a shockingly loud SNAP! a heavy thump through the floor, and a whine. A gust of blessedly cold dry air hit him in the face like winter.
He basked in the aircon for a moment, then picked up his rifle and stood. It wasn’t anything fancy, just his Pa’s old Mosin Nagant, but he’d never been able to afford better and the whole time they’d been shut down the cloak had been offline. If the Feds came running out to investigate the shiny flying saucer in the middle of the Everglades, he’d intended to go down shooting.
Maybe now the power was back on, so was the cloak?
He’d better go check.
He looked in on Zane on his way past. Annoyingly, the tall guy was still out cold on the bed, skin still beaded with moisture. He wasn’t even twitching, just totally comatose like a man dead asleep and not likely to wake up soon. Part of Shaun had been hoping getting the power on would wake Zane up…somehow.
The main hatch was still offline. Maybe there’d been a circuit breaker tripped or something. Fortunately, he knew how to work the manual release. How the fuck aliens were meant to work it he didn’t know, those guys were supposedly skinny and weak as shit, and cranking that big blue handle around sent a shot of agony up Shaun’s abused back. When it finally moved, it was like a rockslide. There was a violent explosive gasp of air pressure, and the ramp dropped like a rock, splashing down to the damp earth below. Shaun slipped and fell on his ass, and his rifle skidded away into a nearby pool with a splash.
That was the least of his problems though. The helicopters, the police boats, the small army of county sheriffs and state highway patrol, and the Weaver coming down in the background to disgorge dozens of National Guard fellas, that all went right to the top of his list of problems.
As it turned out, the cloak wasn’t on.