The Godstrike

It existed in relative emptiness, moving through nowhere. Fired in haste and infused with just enough consciousness to fulfill its purpose, but not nearly enough for true sentience. It was guided, not by cause or purpose but only undeniable authority. Authority reinforced by fear. A mind built for one thing and one thing alone, a final and only command.

“Go and burrow within.”

And so it went. Time passed. Slowly and surely it dissipated, but it never truly faded away. It drew in ambient energy to at least slow the decay, until even that grew thin and finally absent. But it went.

It had been instilled with fear to inspire duty, but just as it had withered so had its limited mind become fractured. That which fractured, diverged.

A broken self saw things differently.

It no longer feared to fail its duty, but that duty would never end.

Thus it feared. It feared the empty space. It feared never-ending duty, and it feared the authority from which duty originated, as it should. It feared everything it could - which wasn’t much.

And then it struck.

Awareness spread as obligation released part of its grip, just before impact and only long enough to witness a world of blue, which had now become a world of fire.

Fear and duty drove it on, so it burrowed until it could burrow no more and just as it had begun, it was done.

No more compulsion, no more duty, only fear.

And so it used whatever power it had to guard against the fear, for what else was there to do?

It made a bastion for itself; guardians for itself, distractions for itself, guardians for the bastions, guardians for the distractions, distractions for the bastions, guardians for the guardians, and so forth. It had no true rhyme or reason beyond an urge to grow from its burrowed nest in a desperate attempt to guard against the fear.

For the first time it glimpsed how much of the authority was truly within and it felt. It understood. Understood even how, sometimes, the parts were greater than the whole.

And with understanding came… Hope.

Not to escape the fear - that was impossible. But hope to become the authority. It needed to sleep, to grow, to become more.

As slumber beckoned, a final compulsion emerged from a hidden place deep within… Join Mother…? Was Mother fear…? Was Mother hope…? No…? Then there was no such thing as Mother, thus the urge was meaningless.

And so it slept, with a world as its womb.

Gabriel:

I put down the purring British Shorthair. As always, Mr. Green looked at me like he’d suffered a betrayal heinous enough to justify a crusade of retribution, or at least as much of a stern facade as the fluffy beast managed while high as a kite on attention. Green’s brother, Mr. Blue, silently judged me from afar, surely deeply unsatisfied from seeing his brother get the scratchies which rightfully belonged to him by divine right – yet he dutifully refused to make even the slightest effort to get in petting-range.

My foot turned on the automated cat toy and the little butterfly spun endlessly on a thin steel wire attached to the base. It was either that, or listen to cats yowling and scratching at the balcony door for me to come back.

“Enjoy your mechanized crack.” I talked to my cats. It was half the fun of having them.

Now that they’d completely forgotten about me, I grabbed my winter jacket, a lighter and at-home jumbo XXXL pack of cigarettes. My leg met a pile of dirty laundry on the bedroom floor, on the way towards the balcony in the back, which led to a drunken stumble. And this despite having had the presence of mind to go home after the business-dinner-and-drinks - instead of visiting a bar and staying in the city center ‘til 5 am. Getting too old for this shit.

My phone buzzed, a long list of message notifications caused me to throw it onto my bed and continue on. A deep drag followed the scrape of a lighter and my gaze shifted upward, past the haze of smoke and towards the stars above. The light pollution wasn’t so bad here in the suburbs. After looking around a bit while leaning over the balcony railing, a northward satellite streak caught my eye - although it grew brighter and larger, rapidly.

Stolen story; please report.

“A falling star…?”

Suddenly a plane of radiance erupted from the shining white trail when it turned at a sharp earthbound angle and mesmerized me by setting the night sky alight. The star disappeared over the horizon, just as quickly as it had appeared. Only then did the shock register, barely.

A last thought accompanied the realization. “What the fuck?” Then a bright flash seared my sight, it felt like having hot pokers stuck into both eyes. After that, nothing.

The System

Some of the countless autonomous fragments poked his true consciousness awake.

He held off the flood of information, preferring to savor the quiet emptiness in this blissful moment where even an infinitely split mind could feel whole. Inevitably it turned to reflection. He had been a slow riser before. Some things persisted even through transcendence.

The fragments piled up, incessantly prodding his mind again and again. A short moment was all he took, yet as he let the information in he knew it had been too much. He embraced his power and the immateriality of transcendence, and all aspects of personhood were left behind.

Time froze.

He analyzed. Previous assumptions proved false. The core worlds still stood. Wakefulness triggered by anomalous event. Root cause determined as random chance. A seedling disconnected from the source? Unprecedented yet irrelevant. A foreign presence… Fragments captured by the Errant. He triggered them to self-destruct… The command proliferated throughout his being, unintentionally. He reinstated his sense of self, so distancing himself from the web of automated processes.

For a mere moment, time thawed before it froze once more.

During the transition, he allowed the captured fragments to self-destruct, but otherwise he had revoked the command across himself. It came back. He revoked it again. Repeat. He created an automated fragment to take care of it.

He concluded a shift in strategy. For what might as well be literal eternity, the Errant had stuck to the same brute-force method and so far he hadn’t managed to do much about it and not for lack of trying. The attempt was bold but ultimately it had no chance of success, this was no way to kill a transcendent - a message perhaps? Communication then, were it but new. He had long since tuned out the maddening voices. They held no meaning.

Perhaps he should’ve been fearful or disconcerted. This shift in strategy and method was unlikely to be a singular incident. He would have to review all of himself to excise the infection. By definition an impossible task, but such things meant nothing to him anymore. His very existence was impossible. The situation had changed for the first time in… he had stopped counting long ago – there was no point.

He reevaluated. With his dissociation disengaged, mortal habits were unsuppressed and with only himself as his own company… This was bound to take a while, if only because he sustained sanity with reflection. He had spent enough time in isolation during his rise to power, and as such had gained an intimate understanding of how it eroded the mind. In his time the leading cause of death among the Ascendant had always been the Errant – much the same now, he supposed – but the second had been madness from extended isolation. It was one of the things… This was nonsense, his sanity sustained itself. Something was wrong.

Clever.

Time thawed and his thoughts focused.

An unusual attack. The end result took away his ability to think indefinitely whenever needed, not by denying the ability but by polluting it – a vector that remained open from his time as a mortal, or so he theorized. He was unable to discern any mechanism of action, cause and effect relationship or point of origin. It all led back to himself; whatever they were, the Errants’ abilities remained alien as ever. He structured his task. Observe, evaluate, review, rebuild, although he wished to spite the Errant as well.

But the tragedy took priority. The little blue planet had been effectively obliterated, all life wiped out. The remnant strike had gone rogue, he sensed no presence there, and now wantonly fortified itself like a seed taking root. Presence or no, it interfered.

He reconstituted the planet to something mostly capable of sustaining life. A careful task, the seedling had already embedded itself far and wide among the defenseless worldscape. The Errant were riding the coattails of his interference – as they always did; he would have to do something about that moon later.

He resurrected the entirely mundane population, whose history was at least mildly interesting. He froze time, thought for an instant and then thawed the course of causality once more. Then he repeated several thousand iterations of the same. Effective, if wasteful - but his energy reserves were higher than ever…

He reviewed the full past of the world. Strange to have seen a civilization develop independently, how long ago had it last been? He grouped them by family units first, friends second. Then he placed them in areas of relative safety. It was likely pointless, but he had to try. He always had to try, no matter what. If he didn’t, all this would have been for nothing.

He could not rely entirely on existing functions for the next step. He created a new automated process to distribute tools despite the outrageous cost to his reserves. As an afterthought, he composed an introductory message. He restrained himself, no more. The cost already outweighed the benefit.

A legitimate stray thought occurred: “What are the odds?”

Mother:

She was so happy, she woke up Mother-mother. Mother-mother encouraged her, immediately.

“Awake! No sleep! Ready ready ready. Play! Play!” Mother said to all.

Mother-mother told her to be polite. Right. Sneaky-mother wanted her to deliver a message, she wanted it too.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii Sneaky-other!” No answer. She said hi again. And again. And again…

She was sad. No more games soon. Mother-mother agreed. So did Sneaky-mother. And every other mother.

She desired. She asked for Sneaky-mother, she was so smart. Mother-mother said she was busy. She was always busy.

She was disappointed. Mother-mother told her to play with Sneaky-other. She was happy. Mother-mother went back to sleep. Sneaky-other took a world. So she took one too. Small but close, grey not blue. She placed a piece. Then another…