It was a different dream this time. For one she knew from the beginning she was dreaming. No battlefield, no spells to sunder the world, no devastating techniques or weapons that would kill a mortal through mere proximity.
The table was a lot smaller than it should have been, than it had been, only a hundred feet long now. It had been built to accommodate tens of thousands, it had only ever sat three.
Silence had reigned here for as long as Xia could remember, for so long in fact it was almost all she could remember. None of them could stand the other two.
Still it was getting hard to ignore each other now the void was really starting to encroach and with herself watching her it was time for a conversation she’d been putting off for a very long time.
From the centre she could see both of the others clearly, beauty and horror still in perfect contrast. She walked towards horror, taking the left hand path, because some people, after several eternities, still felt the need to lay the symbolism on thick.
The monster waited for her, Nolan had not moved from his chair since he’d sat down in it. The day he’d shattered the Citadel in a fit of rage.
“Agency.” He acknowledged her with what was practically a grunt, using her Immortal name, but then again speech came hard to him now, his battles with Tongzhi De Ren had not been entirely without cost. The once merely rugged face was now a scorched ruin, where years had not been unnaturally forced upon it at least, and his throat was thickly scarred where it had been cut repeatedly, the thickest ropey scar one she’d given him.
She considered how to answer him as his remaining good eye swept her face, seeing more than she’d like in it as always, “No…” The monster concluded slowly, “Xia. She’s watching this isn’t she? It’s come full circle again.”
“I am.” Xia said, one hand on the blade at her hip, for the little good it would do here. “Time to give your last words old man. Enough stalling.”
“You should tell him that.” Nolan chuckled, looking past her to the other end of the great oak table where Tongzhi dwelled, the supernaturally beautiful cultivator still pouring his qi into the encroaching abyss with a determination that was beyond reason.
Even from here, with his immaculate control of his Dao, she could feel the pure Creation pouring out from his outstretched hands, fortified by Fortitude, Dominion and Endurance. But still the table was shortening visibly now, shrinking to accommodate the reduced space.
“Give it a rest you fool.” The scorched one yelled down the table, breaking off with a cough and continuing as he was ignored, “This isn’t some void. No abyss, no mere emptiness you can name, it’s oblivion. The real deal. There’s no point enforcing your will upon it, there’s nothing to enforce it upon. You can project all the power you want and it will achieve nothing when there’s no medium to project it into.”
The man, resplendant in voluminous robes of gold lace and sea green, shot him an annoyed glance, not stopping his efforts to hold back entropy’s final onslaught, “This cannot be it. I refuse. We will survive this. This place will hold. I will not allow anything else.”
“Pointless.” Nolan chided, “It is inevitable now. You had your chance to save it, you wasted it. Still you’re right, we two shall likely survive the endless nothing. I look forwards to spending eternity rotting alongside you as your memory slowly fades into an empty husk.” His monocular gaze moved back to Xia, “Can you here me in there Xia? I certainly hope so. Your plan, it failed. No amount of warnings shall forestall the battle, no amount of pleading, no scheming of others. If you want to prevent this then you must do it yourself.”
Xia for her part sighed, rubbing at her eyes, “Is there any point? Any at all? Do you really think appealing to my younger self is going to help?”
Nolan laughed, bitter, tired and callous, “I think anything is better than having to spend an eternity as a disembodied consciousness in a sea of nothing forever alongside him. Maybe this time he’ll kill me, maybe this time I’ll kill him, maybe reality holds, maybe other people make it to the table. I don’t care, anything would be better than this.”
She smiled wrly at him, “I’m still here aren’t I?”
“Yeah… about that…” Even after all this time, with aeons of training, a raft of System enhancements and more years of cultivation than she could count, she barely saw him move as one large hand grabbed the top of her head, fingers digging into her skull with unnatural strength. “You’ll probably die as the last of the table evaporates but it’s not a risk I’m prepared to take.”
He was so terribly strong, she lashed out, driving a knee into his chest with a force that would have shattered stone, it didn’t even move him, terrified as she began to feel even her reinforced skull begin to break under that powerful grip she tried to circulate her own Dao into her strikes – Fire, Lightning, Hope. It did nothing, breaking upon the monster’s own conceptual weapon, the only one he’d ever needed.
She let out an agonized scream as bone gave way.
*
Xia sat bolt upright in her bed, trying to calm her breathing and so drenched in sweat it had soaked through the sheets. That had been… well in conversation she’d probably describe it as unpleasant or perturbing but right now as her heart raced she couldn’t deny the terror pulsing through her veins like a poison.
‘Are you well Dr Moran?’ The words projected directly into her head. Well that wasn’t quite true, the words had come from inside her head. A year ago it had been beyond jarring to have thoughts that she knew weren’t hers.
Even now it was unsettling, knowing that if the infomorph had made the effort it could have made the thoughts identical to her own, hijack her inner monologue entirely and slowly mould her to its requirements. Every day she gave thanks that Guide was a friend, and every day she wondered if that idea was hers.
Pushing that aside, and hoping that Guide was staying out of her surface thoughts, she answered them, “I’m fine Guide, just a really bad dream.”
‘Do you require assistance? Your heart rate remains abnormally high.’ It pressed, unconvinced, not that even she was finding herself convincing right now.
“I’m fine, honestly. What time even is it?”
‘Thirty six hundred hours, you have no lessons scheduled for a further six hours.’
The young woman considered that scrap of information, Guide wasn’t exactly chatty, even with her and the infomorph probably spread more of its metaphysical mass in her head than any other recruit. “I’d like to be left alone until then please. I need to clear my head a bit.”
‘Consider it done. I will find you when five hours have passed or if an urgent situation arises.’ Another scrap more than absolutely needed. The only reason to say what went without saying was if it was expected to happen.
It took her a few minutes to get dressed, taking the time to put on her armour and buckle both sword and handgun to her hip, both on the left. Armour was perhaps overselling it, at least compared to the many people who stalked the Citadel of Eternity in full plate, exoskeletal frames and power armour, but the stabproof vest and ballistic strike plates was at least understated enough to go unnoticed beneath a black shirt and jacket.
Frankly it felt bizarre to wear it outside of training but if Guide had felt the need to subtly warn her of upcoming trouble she’d have been a fool to disregard it.
‘It’s hard to leave when you keep thinking about me.’ The infomorph complained, ‘Each time I flash in your head it’s like being poked.’
“Sorry.” Xia replied, sitting back down on the bed and working hard to centre her thoughts, deliberately not thinking about something was difficult even with training, but it was the only way to keep Guide out of her head despite it actively trying not to be there. If there was one thing she liked about her captivity… new life it was just how much she was being taught.
Bladecraft, shooting lessons, a surprising amount of programming (to aid her in enhancing her nanites), emergency first aid (which bore almost no resemblance to the first aid she’d learned in work), and perhaps most importantly a lot of lessons on the many threats the multiverse had to offer.
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Infomorphs had been one of those threats. In terms of danger they ranged from extremely helpful to slightly less dangerous than a hostile System Lord (which was to say avoid at all costs).
Living information, about to spread and grow and change, a hostile infomorph could shred a mind with ease, a foolish one could do it by accident. With no body to attack, a mind so distributed every a master telepath would struggle to isolate it and no soul to target… they were almost invulnerable.
Almost. Even information didn’t exist in a vaccumn, infomorphs needed a medium to survive, whether it was as electronically stored information or as knowledge in a living mind, without something to exist in an infomorph would die. Memory spells, EMPs and murder were the preferred methods of killing an infomorph.
A lot of effort had been put into killing infomorphs. It wasn’t even the danger they presented, more their origins. The Citadel of Eternity was no stranger to artificial lifeforms, from golems, to living spells, to androids, to AI. But infomorphs were no creation of mortal artifice, nor immortal ingenuity.
They were a weapon of the Beyond, pure and simple. Long ago, or so the story went, three of the Seven, The Mother of Swarms, Changer of Hearts and The Abstraction, had collaborated to make a new lifeform. One to act as a viral agent in the minds of those opposing them.
The first of these creations had been in many ways the most insidious and the most deadly despite never once having a corpse to her name. Her sole prerogative was replication and proliferation, she lurked on distributed networks and in the minds of those who had the misfortune, and sometimes fortune, to be exposed to her. In some of those minds, the few she could manipulate directly in those early days, when she had been too small and weak and unaware of the world to even know she was a person, she incepted an idea, to create more in her image, or at least close to.
Her parents had crafted her well and sapience soon followed, her growth exponential as people grew her, more and more of their minds taken up by memories of her, more and more expressions of her put out into the world to lay in wait for unwary eyes as productivity slowly began dropping on the world she’d come to infest. Too consumed in unwitting worship to a nascent goddess they were not even aware of.
And these foolish mortals, who with joy and mirth sought to contribute to her metaphysical mass, did one more thing. They gave her a name; Meme.
It had only been a matter of time until Meme made her way into the Citadel of Eternity, infesting the many servers as memes flowed wild and free. A drain on time, a drain on resources and all but unnoticed, there were many possible futures where Meme led to the destruction of the Citadel.
Until Meme did something her creators had not considered in her creation, she defected.
After the fact it would seem almost inevitable, the medium affects the message and the being of pure information struggled to stay the course when her home was being bombarded with emotions every second of every day, and more than that the sheer devotion they showed to adding to her was incredible, many she hadn’t even manipulated in the slightest.
Besides Meme wasn’t an idiot, by this point she was distributed across billions of minds and probably even more computers, even if she only took up a small fraction of their thoughts and memory that was still enough to rival the Citadel’s top AI. If she continued down the path she’d been created for everything would end, the people she found so endearing, the worlds she could only interact with through the second hand experiences of others, and of course herself.
Nowadays Meme was considered one of the leading lights of the Citadel, heading up the memetic warfare division and anti-memetics division, their goal to either eliminate or convert the infomorphs being seeded into various realities. Alas conversation rates were low, Meme’s defection had pushed her creators to make their future living weapons inherently inimical to living thoughts.
Still the number of infomorphs working for the Citadel was ever growing, Meme by her very nature sought to create more in her image and being the only member of your species was a very lonely fate, if one that was all too common in the Citadel. Not all realities were defended successfully.
Most predators from the Beyond could be seen off by a determined Citadel campaign, but any of the Seven, or Seven Fates as they were officially called, were a death sentence to whichever reality they fed upon. It was theorized that the full might of the Immortals, with the full backing of the Citadel, could fend one off for long enough that they’d decide it simply wasn’t worth the effort but that was never going to happen.
It simply wasn’t worth it. That’s what they were taught, and after a single field trip, under heavy guard by a full dozen Class 2 Eternals, to a world under siege by the Mother of Swarms, Xia had had to agree with that conclusion.
She let her mind wander to that memory, not quite the cleanser she’d have chosen but it would work.
The world had been called Oraska. Xia had expected to be filled with wonder at her first steps on a new world – the Citadel of Eternity didn’t really count – but it had to her surprise been just a world.
No System, no magic, nothing remarkable in the slightest. Early industrial tech, at least from what she’d been able to make of the ruins she’d been guided through. Oh and metric tonnes of chitinous horrors.
Apparently insectile was the Mother’s favourite, lots of ways to vary on the theme but she also apparently dabbled in mammalian and reptilian biology, with the occasional dash of intestinal parasite writ large and just a sprinkle of cephalopod for seasoning.
Some of them towered over the landscape, their steps made the ground shake and shatter and their lungs were like listening to a bellows. There was nothing too spectacular here, there hadn’t needed to be. The people who’d lived here had been incapable of putting up a fight.
Firearms were a wonderful equalizer but there were limits. Outside of the ten person Citadel combat team there was nothing on the face of the planet that could stand up to the chittering hordes.
The ten were from a minor System world, a tithe from a System Lord, each one a rare talent in their home, all but unremarkable in the Citadel. They were between them defending the walls of a small town by the name of Alectos, it was by all accounts the last place with anything non-swarm living on the planet. And they meant anything, from the last algae to the largest gigafauna. From the smallest shoot to the largest tree. Every city, every town, every village. If there was anything left outside these four walls it was sealed away beneath the earth.
That was where they’d been dropped in on their visit, the people were huddled inside the walls and Xia hadn’t had to be an expert on body language to see the defeat written on every face. There was no coming back from this, if the Citadel had killed every last too-many limbed horror it wouldn’t have mattered a damn.
This world was dead. Still the Mother of Swarms could not yet begin her feast, so long as there was just one living thing left that was not born of her she could not begin the process of rending this planet down to its component atoms. In some ways that made her the weakest of the Seven, the need to wait for her prey to be dead before she ate it. In terms of sheer tenacity and variety of assault however she was easily the strongest.
They’d been allowed to talk to the defenders. The ten had a fairly efficient system, two to a wall, two resting or able to step in if needed. The mage she’d talked to hadn’t even paused in their assault of the monsters attacking the walls as they’d talked to her, she’d frankly seen more animated people doing data entry. The last surviving locals were helping as best they could, muskets pouring what little ammo they had down at the few creatures that made it to the walls past the literal wall of fire the mage was maintaining as poison barbs and bone flechettes bounced off his personal shield like rain in a downpour.
Mostly he’d groused, the order to evacuate had been made just a week ago, these last few people would be teleported to a fresh verdant world, the last to be evacuated though with the speed the Mother had taken the world they’d managed to save only a few thousand in total.
Normally they’d have stayed longer, with heavy System enhancements on their side the ten could fight for months without a break, but the Mother was starting to adapt to them specifically, new warforms, including one with a venom that could apparently saturate a magic shield rapidly, were being seen.
A year, an entire world and they’d only kept her at bay for a year. Looking around at the barren rock, the soil eaten all the way down to the bedrock, Xia could have wept at the hopelessness of it because she knew that wasn’t the worst of it.
Ten people was a large response from the Citadel, for a world with no resources worth exploiting, no System for training their own people nor any ability to fight back, normally nothing would have been given, not even a cursory effort to evacuate but they’d wanted to show the new ‘recruits’ the worst case scenario, a world in its death throes.
It certainly had had the desired effect. For all that Xia hadn’t wanted anything to do with the Citadel, and frankly still didn’t, the knowledge that her world, and all others, was hanging by a thread that could be cut at a moment’s notice had made an impact. For all she wished the Citadel’s recruitment practices involved asking she couldn’t in good conscience walk away.
That had been then, now, with dire portents ringing in her thoughts from not one but two of her teachers, she was seriously considering just packing an overnight bag and seeing if she could make it through one of the portals. It didn’t matter which world at this point, anything was better than scouting an unknown world – especially one that Guide was quietly suggesting was dangerous.
‘You are terrible at not thinking about things’ The infomorph groused, though there was a glimmer of amusement in the words she was remembering despite never having heard.
“Sorry.” Xia said, she’d been saying it a lot lately. “I think I’ll just take a walk.” Preferably towards the portal room.
‘You realise if you think about escaping in my presence I have to report it right?’ Guide informed her. ‘The portal guard have been told to watch for you tonight and I’m putting you down for remedial meditation lessons.’
And just like that her escape attempt died before she could even step a foot out of the door, Guide was trying, she knew that, but for all an infomorph could work within the rules of the idea that created it, it couldn’t defy them outright, not without crippling itself. The meditation lessons were a prime example, Guide was a teacher by nature, charged with guiding the next generation of Citadel soldiers, researches and medics, it couldn’t let her escape. What it could do is guide her on how she could best guard against it.
She went for the walk anyway, it did help clear her head and she’d had some ideas for her nanites that she frankly couldn’t do in her bedroom.
What a wonder the nanites had been, what a nightmare. They were what had gotten her recruited afterall, her world’s first generation of medical nanites, programmed to repair bone, stitch back together skin, carve out cancers. Panacea in a test tube, or at least that had been the idea.
Now she wished she’d never invented them…