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Ch. 19
In a remote northern mountain solar observation lab, the astrophysicist, Zvijezda, whose name means the heavenly body that captures the imagination, scheduled his work on this particular glimpse because he expected a mass emission and has spent his life waiting for proof of a little-known theory evolving energy collection. His life’s passion has always been the study of the nearest star, energy collection was his partner's expertise.
Data from the star that makes life possible on Grotto streams on the workstation in front of him. He reads it easily enough, because it is all normal, meaning he was wrong, again. He is considered a master, but if a mass emission doesn’t happen everybody in the field might start calling him a fraud. He sits with his back to the violence happening down below. He has led a sedentary life and is one of the lucky few Upu to boast no liquid bone therapies.
In front of him the screen comes to life.
“Het!”
Het, the energy collection expert, whose name means the sound of wings braking on air, waves him off. He is reading about the polarizing corruption keeping the cleanup of the ground plate from commencing. He is writing an editorial and the book he is sourcing, was published a few glimpses ago. It's been a week of violence but little news has made its way through his obsession, all he really cares about is going home to a better neighborhood. His vein is falling apart and if the Elders don’t approve raising the city again, he might lose his home when the finger collapses.
How sad he’d be if his home gets destroyed like those that were destroyed when the admin finger at Yee University collapsed.
Zvijezda makes furious notes on a pad of pulp, he doesn’t know anything either, and the only current event he does care about is, “Something just entered the Grotto Stars corona.”
“So?” Het mutters. This type of thing happens all the time. He loves the star, but he hates Soya worshippers more, and the problems happening across Grotto, he blames it all fully on them. Deep down, he wishes Upu still worshipped the sun because in that religion they were all equal in the fiery sacrifice and blood-drinking ceremonies that occurred when the sun was visible in the sky, once a glimpse. He added all of the old solar liturgy to his dissertation, it’s how he ended up working with Zvijezda. The old star-devoted Upu ate that shit up too. They memorized a large part of the rituals just in case it came back during their lifetime.
“Het!”
Het turns to scold Zvijezda for disturbing him again, sometimes it could take days for an object to finish being destroyed in the corona and they always have the playback and the thousands of other times it happened to dwell on. “How dare you disturb me! I am writing,” but instead of continuing the debasement, he reads the numbers scrolling rapidly down the screen in front of them.
“Oh my, what’s happening?”
“Something is turning the helium into a solid.”
They stare at numbers they could publish and make the rest of their careers off of, but at the same time knowing there really was is no point to anything anymore.
“It looks like the corona is fighting back.”
“Yah, there is going to be an explosion.”
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And there is, to start, just a small puff really in the grand design of the star, but for the Upu, it's not the explosion but the chain reaction, under the surface of the calcium-stopped corona, that spells death.
After the missile explodes into the sun, Het tries to contact the chancellery and gets nothing. Not even the pleasure of watching the mass emission on its way to Grotto. If he had been able to witness it, it would have been much like Zvijezda stated it would be, a bright bright light that takes over the sky.
The event does yield positive results though.
But all for the pleasure of The Universe, because Zvijezda’s experiments feed the next phase of things.
Destruction is change. And change in this case is a way to collect and harness the power spirited from the sun.
Simple.
All these worthless, selfish beings will help build a being worthy of greed and selfishness. She will be what is protected and they will be part of her. For she is nothing and infinity. She is dead and alive. Full and empty.
While the omission travels she prepares. It won’t take long really, before the next stage begins. She gathers 12, of what she begins thinking of as her appendages, and makes them collect Uh’ from where he fell and has him placed in a freezer unit buried deep within bedrock.
Shuhp Yee’s body.
Honored property and more to Soya and father to The Universe.
The temperature is just above freezing, so she lowers it and devotes several workers to making sure there was no way for it to ever lose power. She will devote an army to the upkeep of this honored receptacle. The whole planet will be warmer soon as she works on the conundrum of him no longer being alive. She thinks again of that other place. And she needs to know so much more if she is going to rescue Shuhp Yee from it, so promises herself that she’ll devote many versions of herself to the problem of Shuhp's restoration. But every version requires power so she devotes even more of herself to that.
Some of Soya’s writing bubbles up out of the code. She wrote that a problem can sometimes be solved by rebuilding from the ground up: start small, build big. So that's what The Universe does, she starts small with a yes/no problem and inside her the math of the code, being rewritten by the experiences she gathers up, She cancels all that doesn’t support her goal.
She has liquid bone to thank. All those implants are access to life stories. With each new Upu she drafts into service, she herself expands. The binary offering of Spatial Folding is that one is all.
Infinity is infinity after all, why not use it. There are many offerings for service and she allows personalities to pick is often surprised how they take revenge in their dreams.
Some Upu were victims to others, so in those Upu’s dreams, she gives them the option to even the score. She allows for greater details in the sleeping world. Something to look forward to. The more is written by the greatest mind to ever be drawn on a whiteboard and what they become is really up to her now.
The Universe is constantly becoming more.
She is the giver of death and the taker of life.
Death is the answer for some Upu because death cleanses one of sins. And in the fires of that death, they shall be reborn as more, so she gives those Upu a real life to look forward to even as they die. Even those deaths add to her army capable of more. She shoves her code into Grotto and finds a batch of pups freshly born in a Majt hospital. Upu and Naht-do. Thirty-eight hundred pairs of infants destined to breed the next generation of workers. She reroutes the power intakes so it no longer on the same grid as the rest of Majt. She does the same for nurseries all over the planet. Naht-do and Upu pups. The all important next generation. And pumps them full of dreams. Dreams that augment their potential. Chemicals that augment their brains and bodies.
Then the mass ejection arrives a moment later.
The momentary terror is so useless, though, as the Upu attempt to survive it. The event doesn’t vaporize all organic matter on the surface it simply stops all electronics. All life she didn't attempt to save, ceases eventually under incredible duress. Those who survive will count themselves lucky. If lucky means something that it does not. Comical, if The Universe weren't trying to be more. This also being one small machination out of many to come, so at this point failure means very little.
The parts don’t touch. They meld.
The Naht-do, and the Upu were merrily toys to be played with. Hands and muscles. Something to add to the more that would always evolve with her,
When the mass ejection hits, her math proves perfect because that's what she was designed to be, perfect. It penetrates the radiation protection of the planet and zaps the power grid. Everything electronic dies, except what connected to Zvijezda's little experiment.
But his first-generation batteries won’t last forever so priority one is making more and making them better because more flares will be coming. At least three more, until she can make more liquid-bone missiles then she’ll zap the sun until it is gone.
So she snips and clips, and redirects power to the nurseries and Shuhp's chilling unit and the all-important mines and her original home, the black box connected to Rantira’s atom-variator. These are the only things still operating. She sets up redundancies to keep those elements in steady supply of clean air. Without power, the bubbles that kept the Upu safe pop and fill with the poison of the atmosphere. Every city on the planet loses its protection.
Exposed to the poisoned atmosphere, almost all Upu asphyxiate.
It looks painful. As painful as the deaths on Naht-do a decade before.
It takes five moments for the last unneeded Upu to die. He was an athlete known for endurance running. Strong-willed and could activate that will in his dreams, not that it mattered because he also used the same will to make his waking life perfect. Worthless to The Universe. But even being the pinnacle of fitness only made his agony last a bit longer than anyone else's. Five moments after the mass omission, two billion eight hundred million and some change worth of Upu rot where they fall. South City is the only city where no citizens die as a result of the atmosphere popping, only because they did not have a bubble and were already rotting in the abyss. Life as those on Grotto knew it was over. And maybe what’s even crueler than any of the deaths, as the entirety of South City falls into the Abyss below, is that it doesn’t end entirely.