There was no end to the static. Its hiss was everywhere, a noise more lonely than silence. Hod thought about the emptiness of the sound. It fascinated him. There was no sight more lonesome than the complete blackness engulfing him. So how was there was a sound that had his heart more stricken than absolute quiet?
Ten thousand days, he thought. Where are you, boy? The answer was nowhere. More and more he thought about the others. Malkuth and Netz should be at their assigned coordinates, as long as they stayed on course. On course... Did any of them? Doubtful. No one ever did what they were supposed to do. That was the pinnacle sign of life, as far as Hod could tell. It wasn’t thought, nor was it the desire to survive, and it certainly wasn’t the ability to speak. No, it was stubbornness that indicated true, bona fide life. At least, that’s the way he wrote it in his book.
The static remained static, and Hod again checked his chronometer. Still moving forward. He pondered the meaning of the word ‘forward’. It meant something to him once. Two million, five hundred and fifty-five thousand days before, directions meant much more to Hod than they did currently. He reflected on what they once meant, and challenged his notion that they for some reason shouldn’t any more, which led him to consider the meaning of the term ‘space’. Was he not always travelling through space? Perhaps it was the complete blackness and constant static that had warped his thinking.
He watched his chronometer, counting the ticks and imagining a sound to accompany them. Netz always warned against doing such things. “You’ll lose focus,” she’d say. “Think of finite things. The lives of humans are best.” So Hod would imagine a burial ground or a birth, and Netz would correct him. “Think about them falling in and out of love, or gaining and losing interest in a hobby.” Hod preferred animals to humans, so he thought about them, mostly when they fought. But that didn’t seem to have any utility, so he took to watching time when he grew bored. Oddly enough, it helped.
“We are, after all, on a mission of reunification, are we not?”
Static answered him, and he sighed. He would pose his query to Netz when he saw her again.
He had a point, after all. Why contemplate the binaries and demarcations of nature when one was on a mission to unite such opposites?
He knew what Netz would say, that they were not seeking to reunite all matter, but rather concepts and spirit in most cases. She would say that he would be better equipped for his role if he understood what separated their quarry, rather than becoming absorbed in the mindless and the abstract. What is definitive and distinct, that is what will last, she would say. But Hod saw it different, and thought Netz’s view to be so obviously incorrect that her error in thought was simply egregious.
Well, he would have plenty of time to form his rebuttal, now that he no longer had to focus on traversal. He could put his hypercomputation to rest and let his cosmic Turing machine take over, so he drifted along the edges of the abyss and let his lizard brain scan the static while he ran through his predictions of how Netz might counter his counter points.
There was a blip in the static and Hod froze. After a while went by, he dared to listen, but all he heard was the constancy of the static before, so he went back to paying half attention to his passive scans while his conscious mind wandered.
The abyss was a dismal thing to contemplate. When he first saw it looked like a sphere. When he got closer it seemed to be more like a wall. Now, if he were depending entirely on ocular detection, he would believe that he had fallen in. The knowledge that there were only three-minute points worth observing offered little comfort. Using his point as a navigational anchor was like an animal using a snare as a landmark. If his sensors were a stand-in for a head, he would be nervously craning his neck to look over his shoulder at all times, as if the snare had the ability to move and pursue him. It wasn’t completely paranoid of him, when one considered the illusion of omnipresence his proximity to the Verge created. What people called the Verge, was only a visual distortion. The true Verge of Klippot was deep within, and being one of the few natives of Briah who could traverse the weird regions beyond that outer distortion was Hod’s greatest source of regret. Now more than ever, he missed his natal laboratory.
There was another blip in the static, twenty-three million times more distinct than the phantom that had caught his ear before. He examined it closely, though he knew at once it was a ping from Malkuth. He wanted to verify that the earlier disturbance was Malkuth trying to ping him as well, and that it was obstructed somehow and so came through only faintly. But the phantom was just that, a specter, so he dismissed his paranoid feelings and returned Malkuth’s ping.
He pondered the nature of an equilateral triangle after sending his ping, as the placement of the three points had them even distances. It helped mitigate the loneliness somewhat, to know that he had a companion on either side of him, however far apart they were. He remembered how happy he felt too when he learned it would be his closest littermates that were going with him. If only Sod could have come with them all the way. Had he a body, Hod’s internals generated the sensation of a shudder. He didn’t want to think about Sod’s assignment. Fortunately, he was distracted by another ping. Malkuth again.
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Yes Mal, I’m here. He returned the ping. Another came moments later, which he again returned. He was getting annoyed with her when he heard it, the blip, as he thought he’d heard before, came again, though no less faint. He pinged Malkuth again, this time not waiting for her to send another, then honed in on the blip, shutting out all other thoughts and focusing solely on the distortion. It was very quiet, and very small. He found what would serve for the time being as a trail, searching for more noticeable signs, until he stumbled on a clear direction. He pinged Malkuth again, and sent a double ping as well to Netz, then moved at top speed to the origin of the blip.
His pursuit took him closer to the true border of the Verge than he cared to go. The blackness he saw before was gone, and he detected completely foreign particles heralded by a pink and blue haze. But the haze was not the soft haze of a nebula, or any other cloud that would be compiled of spherical photons. This haze was made a lattice of hectogons, the nature of which Hod would leave for Netz or Mal to gather later. They cared more for that sort of thing. Hod just wanted to find the blip, see what it was, and then high tail it back to the black void where he still felt somewhat safe.
The blip grew before too long. Now he heard what amounted to a drop in a pool. He turned, spinning gyros to face where the sound came from. “Very good, Hod,” said Doctor Yamin. Hod then turned to the Doctor’s voice. Doctor Yamin put his glasses back on and peered closer.
Wake up, Hod, he said internally. They warned him about the Verge, that things would get strange in the null space where the two dimensions bled into each other. He felt for his entry point, the snare the rabbit used as its landmark. He had three points now; the blip, the snare and himself. He kept shaking off the visions and the memories as they came, reminding himself of where he was and why he was there. A ping found him, helping him correct a fatal trajectory error. He’d been heading for either a reflection of the blip or a trace of where it had been, but Netz saved the day. He shook off the fear that was growing as the haze intensified. None of his readings were making any sense, and what he interpreted as directions took him in random trajectories. Any attempt to level himself and zero in on the source of the word just brought Doctor Yamin’s upside down face into view.
Lilly giggled. Hod turned to her, trying to correct himself at the same time, a motion that had him skittering across the table and onto the floor. “I feel dizzy,” he said. Lilly giggled again. He heard Doctor Yamin caution her to be careful as she scooped him off the floor.
Mal pinged him again. He found himself about to collide with a shape many times his size. He dropped straight down, dodging the object’s bulk, receiving a blow from one of its appendages. It was soft, whatever it was, and it fortunately easy for Hod to recover his position. He was elated to see that it was of Briah, and, after a quick mass assessment he had it in his tractor beam and was hurrying back to the snare.
The girls were pinging him profusely. If not for their help, he might not have found his way. The object was brimming with volatile energies, the lesser of which oscillated around it like a small storm. Hod was constantly flinching from arcs he couldn’t identify, and the one he could worried him immensely. Not so much because of what it was, but because of how much was there.
Had he lungs, he would have sighed with relief when he had his bearings again. He was back at the snare, processing the signals of his recent flight. The merging of Briah and this new region caused anomalies that he interpreted in waves of color and explosions of brilliant light. At best he could liken it to opposing blankets of cloud that undulated like the surface of a stormy sea, with a web of filaments that spread like a mammalian nervous system, or a dense network of roots, or maybe some vast siphonophore in the middle of asexually reproducing.
Had he lungs, he would have spent a good five minutes catching his breath before examining his haul. Then, if he had lungs, he would have gasped. He began pinging rapidly to both his counterparts. They returned his pings in pulses. The object still glowed with living stardust, but its luminous fibers were quickly solidifying, likely as a result of being returned to their native plane. He began printing a vac suit immediately, making adjustments as he scanned for exact dimensions. No sooner than he had the key components finished, he saw dermal textures forming around its glowing digits. He worked faster, spanning the space between the breather and the thrusters with fabric. Once the underlay was complete, he made the helmet, then the harness needed to channel the being’s ohr in purposeful ways, and finally the outer layers necessary for insulation and corporeal bodily functions.
The girls pinged their questions again. Hod pinged for them to wait, then began fabricating a flexible layer of shielding to graft onto the suit. Hod started grafting the shielding under the chin of the helmet, more slowly now that there was no need for him to rush. The object was awake now, watching him through bewildered eyes. When he was finished, he took a step back to inspect his work. He’d made a few mistakes, which he quickly corrected, then he pinged Mal and Netz to put them at ease.
Then all was quiet, save for the static of the Verge. They floated in the vastness of the cosmos, two small, bright lights in the darkest of shadows.
Hod pulsed his running lights. The eyes that watched him blinked. He tried it again a couple of times to make sure it was indeed a response, and waited for more signs of cognizance before sending an activation signal to the comm unit he’d so hurriedly constructed in the woman’s helmet.
She was still at first, showing no signs that she’d heard the soft hum of the activation signal. He tried again, but the only activity came from her eyes as they strained to see outside the boundaries of her visor. Hod blinked again, softening the color of his lights and slowing their pulse. Her eyes fixed on him then, and as he sensed her heartrate slowing to nominal levels, her cheeks turned flush and lifted slightly.
“Hey,” he said.
The woman slowly raised her hand and waived.