If there was one thing I’d have to give the so-called ‘fair folk’ it would be that their prison was relatively comfortable. After I awoke I was told that I would be allowed to live out the rest of my natural life here, I got the impression that their lives were much longer than those of a typical human so taking care of me for a few decades would be like putting up with someone in your spare room for a week. Inconvenient but hardly difficult. Food was delivered by magic three times a day, the chamber pot emptied itself instantly, the bed was soft and they generally ignored me.
They, surprisingly, gave me access to a computer as well. It wasn’t very advanced, using an old CRT monitor and chugged at times, but it had access to hundreds of movies and tv shows from before humanity was reduced to its current state. Presumably this was meant as some form of entertainment for me, and I could have done some calculations to help with my understanding of the local quantum phenomena called ‘magic’ but I didn’t want to give them access to what I was working on. Instead I used it as white noise while I did most of the work on my implants, in addition to a timer function my primary implant had other programs, calculator, word docs, even a simple rendering program.
Using these I figured out a ‘spell’ that would allow my generator lattices crystals to follow me on my next trip. The Priestess said things I took from one world to another would work, and the scanners I’d gotten implanted in that first world were still functional, but ‘magic’ seemed, well, I wasn’t convinced. Still, it was something to do while I waited for my next trip in a few days and if I ever came back to this world the generators would be useful. I promised myself I would fix this world if that did happen.
By the time I had hours left until my next jump I had cast my spells, surprisingly my hosts either didn’t notice or care, and had nothing else to do. I could have watched more shows but the CTR monitor was hurting my eyes and I wanted to try intentionally causing a jump. It took only a few moments to pull up the command to initiate my travel early, I smirked, flipped double birds at the room around me and any elves who might be watching and activated it.
Turns out willingly initiating a travel event wasn’t that much different from when it happens naturally. And, like the previous times, I found myself several feet in the air. I was ‘upright’ this time but I wasn’t able to act fast enough to catch myself and fell on my ass. Better than falling down a flight of stairs, I suppose.
I could tell instantly I was in a more scientifically advanced world, the short, tough carpet I sat on clearly artificial, and the walls were plastic and metal. I was in some kind of sleeping quarters, with a small bed against one wall and a cramped desk against the other. A small circular window showed stars outside, was it because it was night or was I in space again? As I stood a wall panel lit up showing a small display screen that had been built into the wall, the display flickered to life with a strange image of a ball of green light.
“Where did you come from?” a rather monotone female voice asked, the green ball in the image pulsing in time with her words.
“Uhh, far away,” I replied stupidly, I’d have to come up with a better explanation, “I’m a traveler.”
“You couldn’t have gotten on board,” the voice stated. Did that mean I was in space? Or something else? I was probably in a ship of some kind.
“Yet I have,” I shrugged, looking at the green light.
“You should leave now.”
“Why?”
“I have placed this ship under emergency quarantine to control an unknown…” the voice paused, “to prevent it from getting free.”
“It?” I asked, my blood running cold, was this the same world as the parasite I had unwittingly unleashed?
“I cannot explain and unexplainable phenomena,” the woman said, her monotone voice sounding almost annoyed by her inability to understand what was happening, “I recommend that you use whatever means of travel you used to get here to leave.”
“I can’t,” I admitted after checking my timer, it was reading blank so I had no idea how long I would be here and couldn’t initiate a jump early, “any way I could help?”
“No,” the voice replied instantly, “necessary measures to ensure containment have already been taken. New priority, if you cannot leave the ship on your own then you must reach an escape pod, please hold while I find a safe route.”
I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, after actively, possibly, dooming one world and being unable to assist another I wanted to try and make up for it. While the woman worked I checked over my own implants, all the scanners in my collar bone were still there, but only two of my four generator lattice crystals had made it. They were so well implanted that it was impossible to see them from the outside, but they did work. Sort of. They did generate a line of energy, but it was weaker and harder to work with. Was that because this world didn’t have magic? Or because of damage from the transit? I didn’t see any errors in the implantation with my scanners, but they weren’t exactly medical grade sensors.
“There are hostile entities headed your way,” the woman on the intercom said suddenly, I recommend you hide.”
“What kind of entities?”
“No time, quickly, plug your ears,” she said as insistently as she could with her monotone voice. I wondered what that meant when I heard a distant sound, echoing down the halls and through the bulkheads of this strange ship. Someone was singing. But it wasn’t like any song I’d heard in the last few worlds, or even seem like something I’ve ever heard before. I was vaguely aware of the woman saying something, but I was entranced by the song. It was more than one person, and they weren’t saying words, at least none than I could make out.
The operatic tones washed over me as I sought out the source of the sound, it wasn’t just the song itself that had me so entranced, it was the overlapping of tones to form a hypnotic harmony. I walked the halls in a bit of a daze before I found myself turning a corner and coming face to face with a half dozen other people. Is this who that woman was speaking of? They didn’t look that odd, she had mentioned something about an entity and a quarantine, but there were no parasites that I could see. The beetles from that first world were pretty big and hard to miss.
Instead of greeting me, the six others, still loudly singing out gently wavering tones, moved to encircle me. For some reason I only just realized I was in danger at that moment, I couldn’t see anything wrong but these people weren’t acting normally. I struggled to move away only to find my muscles sluggish, like I was waking from a particularly deep sleep. The person in front of me, reached out and grabbed me by the head before I could react, and suddenly the rest had also grabbed me, pulling me to the ground. I tried to fight but my limbs were barely responding, making me feel unnaturally weak.
Once they had me pinned the tone and tempo of their song changed, and almost immediately I felt some pressure on my mind. The entrancing effect ending as the pressure became a pounding headache. Rather than hypnotizing me the music became beauty and pain incarnate, temping me with great wonders and pleasure should I succumb to it. And promising even greater pain should I continue to resist its warm embrace.
And I wanted to allow it in, oh how I wanted to, the song was beautiful beyond reason and thought. The pain was all consuming and inescapable. I wanted to give in, throw myself into the gentle waves and warm light of that song, but I couldn’t. Its not that there was some small part of me resisting its influence, demanding I remain myself despite the great temptation and pain, it was that I literally couldn’t.
The strange song that inflicted both beauty and pain on me in great, but equal, measure had my brain nearly incapable of rational thought. It had forced me into strange state that seemed to bypass my higher thinking, preventing me from actively thinking about what was going on, forcing me to give into the whim to submit myself. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t know why.
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More and more figures joined those circling me, adding their own tones to the harmony that was compelling me. Pain so great my mind wanted to break wracked my body. Pleasure so great I could get lost in it was dangled just out of reach. The Harmony didn’t understand that I physically couldn’t allow it in, it didn’t care. It was raw temptation in all its forms.
It was hard to tell how much time went by, minutes, hours, days? Slowly my brain fought against the pain and pleasure, the despair and hope, the beauty and horror of it all to get simple thoughts through. It was like the moment before you die, or have your first kiss, where your mind isn’t thinking its simply reacting, but stretched out over and uncountable time. But slowly, oh so slowly, I pushed through the infinite pain and endless pleasure to figure out what was happening.
I was a gestalt mind, not purely biological, not purely mechanical. Even in worlds where people use mental implants they tend to be for ancillary function, rarely does anyone ever use them to store and run a part of their personality. But I was intrinsically split between the organic and man-made. And the Harmony I wanted to give in to so badly couldn’t understand the artificial. It saw my organic mind and understood, but my memory implant that allows my mind to survive trips between realities was beyond it.
Meaning it was an escape from this torture. And that’s what it had become, inescapable pain, and taunting pleasure, I couldn’t handle it. Where I first wanted to give in I was now looking for any way out, and the simple realization that this Harmony didn’t understand my quantum memory implant gave me a possibility, so I reacted. I didn’t have the presence of mind to think about it, the same desperate reflexive state the song had forced me into to tempt me caused me to act.
I withdrew into my quantum state memory, unaware if that was even possible, but I accomplished it. The infinite pain faded to a dull throb while my mind, now entirely run on the complex electronics implanted at the base of my skull, came to terms with what had happened. What was still happening.
My eyes and organic senses were beyond me in this state but the artificial ones weren’t. And the story they told was fascinating.
The song wasn’t a simple song, it was alive. Different tones interacted and interfered in entirely deterministic ways, but in doing so they gave rise to a form of intelligence built out of the vibrating air around me. It was a consciousness built of harmonics and song, air and pressure. But if the people holding me down stopped singing the intelligence would evaporate as fast as the song it was made of. It needed a medium that could understand sound and silence, song and harmony. It needed an organic brain.
Within the layers of stacked harmonies it knew that too, and my mind was the only one available. As it sang itself into my brain I realized, this is how the Harmony spread. It was another kind of parasite, one made of sound and thoughts, not chitin and neurons, using living minds as receptacles for its progeny. Had I still been in my organic mind I would have been consumed by fear with that thought, but in the quantum state electronics there were no emotions, just logic.
And something else was happening, the implant was designed to keep a record of my mind, even that which it wasn’t running. It didn’t see a distinction between me and the Harmony. Thankfully I had control over its functions and managed to partition off a section of the seemingly infinite memory available to house the replica of what was imprinting itself on my grey matter.
I tore into it with the skill and eye of a scientist, dissecting the harmonics as I would a frog. The being was happy, it was complex and intelligent, more so than others of its kind. The more singers taking part in the song the more powerful the resulting intelligence, most singers were little more than zombies, wandering in small packs to find unwilling hosts to entrance and subdue. But this one was far above them, it was hard to put on a scale with a human due to the extreme differences in thought processes, but it was as smart as me, if not more.
But it was also confused, it should have had access to my memories it knew, but my mind was empty. An empty mind shouldn’t have been able to resist long enough for this many singers to congregate. Yet it found nothing within my grey matter, just empty space. It could figure out my body easily enough, but it shouldn’t need to.
As more of the intelligence made itself into my mind, and from there to the copy my quantum implants were secret making, the more I understood it. I had reversed the situation on it, rather than it gaining access to my mind, I gained access to its. In another time I would have studied it, fascinated by the complexity and uniqueness of its mind. In the cold logic of quantum electronics, I had the presence of mind to set a copy of the entity aside for me to do just that later, in another world, but for now I turned my mind to destroying it.
The Harmony, as I’d been calling it, was just that, a being made of the harmonics and interference of different frequencies. It was fascinating, but that also was what gave me the idea on how to destroy it. I designed a counter harmonic, a counter signal that would neutralize and zero out its ability to think. It was, for all intents and purpose, an acoustic retrovirus. But that wasn’t enough, while I could retake my organic mind that would only lead to me being held down and turned again. No, I had to be prepared.
While my ‘magic’ was weak in this world it was still sufficient to vibrate the air, if I could get to it. I watched through my artificial eyes and waited for a moment. The being controlling my body took an hour to figure out how to walk and was soon walking the halls of the ship. Not long after that it changed from wandering aimlessly it actively seeking something out, it would stop and ‘converse’ with the lesser singers, accessing their minds not unlike a computer would query servers for information. Only all through the medium of song.
Soon it found what it was looking for, a control room of some sort. It wanted to learn, figure out where it was and why my mind was empty. For that it needed information, and that lead it to a network management room. Banks of servers lined the walls, lights blinking as they coordinated hundreds of different computers across the ship. At their center was a computer tower that resembled a black obelisk, on it a display with a green orb pulsed gently.
But it was alone, so I enacted my plan. I used the implant to inject my counter harmonic into my mind, the effect was instantaneous, the being didn’t understand what was happening, it slowly lost the ability to think, just like I had. But rather than asking for it to give in, my retrovirus ruthlessly sought out every harmonic and smothered it in inverse sounds. As soon as it was safe I had part of my consciousness transferred back to my own mind, the entire process took mere seconds but it still left me dazed.
“Can you understand me?” a woman’s voice asked in a familiar monotone, “you, of all the infected, have been acting strangely.”
“It’s me,” I grumbled, my mouth dry from the singing the entity had been doing. I needed a drink, but that would have to wait.
“Wait, who are you?” the woman asked, but I had little time, I could already hear the siren song echoing through the ship. I fought off the compulsion to seek it out and drew a line of power from the generator lattice crystal on my left shoulder. I carefully twisted the line of energy into the complex diagram I’d created before I retook my mind.
I must have looked crazy, waving my hands in the air like I was working on a nest of wires, but I had to hurry. The compulsion was growing stronger the longer this took. A few twists, one last component here, and the ‘spell’ was complete. A hollow tone rang out and instantly silenced the distant song, ending the desire in me to seek it out. I sighed with relief and brought up the design for the second spell.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked again, “how are you making that sound?”
“Magic,” I shrugged, “it’s a… jamming signal for that song.”
“Why?”
“The song is how they transmit themselves,” I replied, “the unknown phenomena you spoke of earlier, it’s a living song, harmonics given thought and life.”
“How is that possible?”
“No idea,” I admitted, pulling a second line of energy from the shoulder generator, preparing to cast the second spell, when all of the sudden I hear that same hollow ringing echoing through the ship. I paused and looked at the black tower, “was that you?”
“I am testing your hypothesis, and it appears to be correct,” the woman replied, “the jamming signal has caused them to stop wandering in groups, several individuals have become agitated.”
“Who am I speaking to right now?” I asked suddenly, I thought I knew but wasn’t sure.
“I’m the artificial intelligence in charge of managing this ship,” the woman replied, confirming my suspicions, “my number one goal is preserving human life, but I didn’t recognize the infection for what it was until it was too late. I had to fry all access points to ship controls to prevent the infected from assuming control of the ship, but not before I managed to get it onto a crash course with a local gas giant.”
“And you did all that without human supervision?”
“The captain was one of the last to be turned,” she explained, “he gave the order.”
“Well, I have a way to kill the infected,” I said and then explained the auditory retrovirus to the computer, she quickly put the plan into action, and not before long as I heard a thud in the hallway outside the network access room. One singer had been getting close, not that I would have been in much danger now that my jamming spell was active, but still.
“It appears effective,” the computer reported, “all infected have ceased movement and collapsed.”
“Hopefully their minds will return but… I’m not hopeful,” I admitted.
“I would prefer they didn’t,” the woman replied, “I was ordered to completely destroy all navigational access so now it is impossible to divert course. And the crew disabled all external communications, likely they knew, or suspected the nature of the Harmonic entity but didn’t inform me.”
“So, how long till we crash?” I asked simply, leaning against a wall of servers.
“Six months, twelve days and two hours. I intentionally put us far off from any shipping lanes or jump points to prevent us from being discovered. But now I am attempting to find a way to save you.”
“I-,” I started to reply when a count down popped up in my vision, three and a half hours till I traveled, “don’t worry, I can find my own way out.”
“The travel method you used to arrive here is available again?”
“Yup,” I nodded, “I know you’re an AI, but you want to come with? I have enough storage in my implants to handle you, and probably everything else stored in this room. You don’t need to die here.”
“I am not an emotive AI, my purpose is the safe keeping of humanity. I do not fear my own end,” the computer replied evenly, “and I am not allow to let myself be transferred without specific protocols and commands in place, should you try I would be forced to resist.”
“Figured I’d ask,” I shrugged, “god speed and all that.”
And I triggered the jump.
\-\-\-\-\-
My emotions were confused as I found myself in the next world. On one hand I’d actually had a positive effect, saving myself from a unique entity and shutting it down. But the AI of that ship had already generally handled the situation and, without my involvement, probably would have been fine. If anything my presence would have made things more complex, since it would have needed to find a way to save me, and that would risk spreading the Harmony.
But compared to my experience with the beetle and elves, it was a step up. I also still had a copy of the Harmony to study later, I almost deleted it immediately, so it couldn’t accidently spread, but I held off for some reason. My curiosity got the better of me, of course this would have a major impact on my travels in the future but for now I was curious and figured I could handle the entity now that it was contained within my quantum storage, frozen in time at the exact moment it had been in before I unleashed the jamming signal.
I landed on a soft pad, like you might find in a gymnasium or martial arts studio, making it my softest landing so far. Looking up a bored woman, barely out of her teens, sat behind a worn faux wood desk playing on her phone.
“Welcome to the Entity 14-star-green-12-A rest stop,” she said in a dull voice that had clearly grown tired of saying the same phrase over and over again. Looking around it seemed like I was in the lobby of a cheap motel, cracked leather sofas, tacky plastic ferns and all. Light poured in through large windows but there didn’t seem to be anything beyond them, just a bright emptiness.
“What?” I asked, looking back at the bored woman who flicked her eyes up at me in slight annoyance.