David sighed and swiped a wrinkled hand over his face, looking far into the distance at nothing in particular. “Five thousand years?”, he said wearily. “I had guessed we might be offset, even by a few centuries, but I had never expected it to be so long.” He shook his head. “Five thousand. And you’re that old too?”
Jesri nodded, managing a small smile. “I’ve been told I look younger,” she replied.
“Hah!”, David barked, his laughter dissolving into another series of wet, hacking coughs. “You know, jokes about my age are one of the few things I have left,” he said ruefully. “Having you around is going to make me work at my conversations again.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Jesri said, her smile warming, then disappearing as reality edged its way back into her consciousness. “I wouldn’t count on having me around for long, though. I expect I’ll be dead within a few hours.”
David frowned and peered at her owlishly. “I had assumed that your incursion here was part of a plan. Did something go wrong?”
Jesri nodded again, taking a few seconds to choose the right words. “We had a plan,” she said quietly. “A poor one, as it turns out. Your team’s various instances and I were going to use the command protocols for Emissary communications to tie up the Gestalt’s resources while my sister Anja led a fleet to sever crucial network links in the inner shell.” She looked over at David sadly and shook her head.
“We didn’t know about the hyperspatial connections underlying the realspace structure. Trelir… showed me the Gestalt,” she said, her eyes growing distant as she tried to recapture the experience of seeing the tower of light. Her mind’s eye shuddered at the effort, flitting through a jumble of distorted impressions. “It was so beautiful,” she whispered. “Our plan was doomed from the start. Destroying the physical links was never going to be enough. Now that I’m stuck here and the Gestalt is free to act again it will almost certainly destroy our fleet and me along with it.”
“Hrm,” David grunted, deep in thought. “Who is Trelir?”
“An Emissary,” Jesri replied distractedly. “We first encountered him on a planet called Ysl, where he was posing as one of the local populace. His personality reemerged when I connected to the Gestalt.” She paused, replaying the conversation in her head. “He said that he was there because I expected him to be there.”
David hummed softly to himself, tapping a finger on his cheek. “Interesting,” he muttered. “That implies a fair degree of control over your interaction with the Gestalt. The command protocol must have enabled you to create a micro-instance under your administration. Very interesting.” He shot a piercing glance at Jesri, his sudden intensity startling her. “Have you attempted to revisit that instance?”
Jesri blinked, nonplussed. “How? Trelir kicked me out of it, and I haven’t been able to break the connection to this simulation regardless.”
“Trelir shifted your connection from that instance to our simulation,” David mused, “but the fact that he only diverted you rather than terminating your connection entirely tells me that you’re likely still protected by the command protocol you used.”
“I don’t see how that helps us much,” Jesri objected. “Even if we figure out how to get me back into that instance, what’s stopping Trelir from just booting me back here? Even if I get there and he doesn’t send me back, what am I going to do afterwards?” She threw her hands up in the air and turned away. “David, I have no experience with this stuff. I’m completely lost here.”
“As should be expected, given the circumstances,” David agreed. “But this Trelir may have inadvertently done you a favor by routing you here. I’ve been the rat under the Gestalt’s floorboards for quite some time now, and I’ve picked up a variety of interesting tricks and secrets over the years.”
Jesri perked up, looking back at him, then her face fell once more. “David, I…” She walked over to the bench and sat down. “Even if I could keep running interference for my sister, there’s nothing she can do. No realistic amount of damage to the physical shell will accomplish our goal, and if we can’t kill the Gestalt we die. Maybe not today, maybe not in a week, but it will kill everything.”
David shrugged, giving her a wry look. “Just means we have very little to lose at this point, don’t you think?” He scratched his chin and stared up at the shifting leaves, then looked back at Jesri with a thoughtful expression. “Your connection, how are you linked to the interface? We always had issues with direct mental interfaces to Gestalt systems, but your method seems much more successful.”
“A gift from MANTRA,” Jesri replied. “Do you remember the ‘primary network router’ schematic?”
“Hah, so it was an interface device! But how did you solve the biological interface issues?”, David asked insistently. “We were never able to efficiently translate human thought patterns to a format the Gestalt systems could parse.”
Despite the circumstances, Jesri found herself smiling at his enthusiasm. “Well, we never solved that problem,” she said. “But then, I’m not precisely human…”
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The cannons roared, stitching an incandescent scar across the Emissary’s side and sending a gout of fragments belching back towards the Grand Design. “Maintain our distance!”, Anja shouted, gripping an armrest as the ship thrummed with the recoil. The fountain of debris caught the blazing sunlight, components outgassing in brilliant flares as they were suddenly exposed to the brunt of the star beneath them.
“That’s easy-”, Rhuar said quietly, his voice a dead monotone. He was panting with the stress of evading their shots, the ship bucking and twisting near the limits of its engineering. “...easier said than done,” he finished. “They keep microjumping-” He trailed off again as another volley of space-rending projectiles barreled their way, evoking tortured screams from the ship’s hull as metal strained under the twisted gravity. Red lights blossomed on Anja’s console, showing failures from three railguns on that side.
David gave her a worried look. “They might not have to hit us if we have too many more near misses,” he said. “Eventually the gravitational flux alone will tear us apart.”
Anja’s fingers danced over the console to direct another volley of fire that punched deep into the Emissary’s hull. Secondary explosions rippled within it, then stopped as a net of golden light wove its way around the ship. “Cheating bastards,” she spat, retargeting to fire at the other ship. “Misses will kill us slower than hits,” she called over to David. “Given a choice, I have a preference.”
“Dead later is still dead,” he replied morosely. Neither of the others replied, their focus wholly on the remaining Emissary. Rhuar pulled the ship into a lumbering sideways glide that sent shivers of protest quaking through its beams, rolling to give Anja a clear shot at the target.
Another volley of slugs rippled out through hyperspace, materializing in a punishing salvo right against the Emissary’s hull. The bow shock of their reentry swept a meter of hull clean away in a spray of plasma and glowing fragments before the sabots lanced in behind it. The Emissary returned fire, a brace of shots going wide before another fusillade from Anja sent it retreating behind its cocoon of protective golden webbing.
Rhuar let out a long breath. “That’s it on the scanners,” he said tiredly. “No other contacts for the moment.”
“They should be out of commission for a little while,” David said, slumping back into his chair. “But only for a few hours, if the last ship was any guide. We’ll have to deal with them on our way back out.”
“So we deal with them,” Anja retorted. “If we complete our mission, it may knock them out entirely.”
Rhuar shot her a skeptical look. “Weren’t they supposed to be knocked out already? We didn’t have any Emissary traffic until just now, and they were shooting much better than the surface guns we faced before. Are we sure the Gestalt is still out of action?”
“We’re still in our window,” David shrugged helplessly. “Jesri is still hooked in and the incoming stream from the resistance cells is still going strong. The Emissaries have some degree of autonomy, perhaps our attack doesn’t impact them as much.”
“Or maybe they found some way to block our transmissions,” Rhuar shot back. “If they have, it won’t matter how many Emissaries we knock out of commission. The repair drones will relink the nodes faster than we can blow them up.”
Anja shook her head. “Irrelevant,” she said quietly. “There is nothing we can do about the effectiveness of the network attack, so disregard it. We have to focus on completing our part of the plan to the best of our ability.”
“And what about the other parts of the plan?”, David asked. Through the screen beads of sweat were visible on his forehead, as if the heat of Apollyon’s sun could reach him even there. “Anja, we barely dealt with those two ships. If the Gestalt sent Emissaries after the other two groups-”
“-then they will not make rendezvous, and we will adjust our plans accordingly,” Anja finished grimly. “Focus on the now. Destroy the nodes on our way to the meetup point. For all you know, those two were the only Emissaries in-system.”
“And for all you know, the other groups are fighting twice as many!”, Rhuar shouted. “We don’t have the ammo for another fight like that, and if the other ships are destroyed-”
“Then we die!”, Anja roared, her eyes blazing. She leveled a glare at Rhuar, then at David. “Then we lose,” she said more quietly. “It was always a possibility. We knew going into this that we were outgunned. We knew from the outset that we might not survive. But like you said, David, dead later is still dead. We may as well die here fighting if the alternative is to let the Gestalt wipe us from the face of the universe regardless, even if it is years from now.”
David shook his head. “I just don’t see how we’re going to win this,” he said sadly.
“We may not,” said Anja, giving him a small smile in return. “For the moment, focus on not losing.”
“Thin fucking distinction,” Rhuar grumbled, focusing to set the ship back on its course through the radiant hellscape. “All right, if we’ve decided to be optimistic then let’s go blow some more shit up.”
“That’s the spirit,” David said wearily. “Yaaaay.”
Anja settled into her chair once more, her eyes flicking to the console where Jesri’s vitals were displayed. They were slow, steady, much the same as they had been for the past several hours. The pulse of her heart lit the screen in quiet intervals as she watched, and Anja laid her hand over it for a few seconds. “As much time as you can give me,” she whispered.
“What was that?”, David said, peering at her through the screen.
She shook her head and reset the targeting controls to resume their destruction of the inner shell. “Like Rhuar said,” she replied. “Time to blow some shit up.”
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Jesri felt a tickling sensation, as if a net of cobwebs was being draped around her from all directions and pulled tight. “This feels strange,” she muttered.
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David looked up from his tablet reproachfully. “Oh, stop whining,” he admonished her. “We need a full picture of how your interface operates, it will only take a few more seconds. Think of ice cream.”
“Ice cream?”, she replied quizzically, trying to parse the non-sequitur. After a long moment considering, she shook her head and gave up trying to make sense of it on her own. “Are you trying to do sensation mapping or something?”
“No,” he replied, his rheumy eyes squinting at her. “I just needed you to stop talking for a few seconds while I finished up.” He peered at his tablet, ignoring Jesri’s indignant look, then smiled and clapped a hand on his knee. “Yes, there it is,” he enthused, tapping the screen with shaky finger and reversing it so Jesri could see. “Here’s your connection feed.”
Jesri looked at the offered screen, noting the cavalcade of graphs and numbers stacked together. It was utterly incomprehensible. “Interesting,” she said, “but how does this help us?”
David tutted at her. “You have a privileged connection to the Gestalt, courtesy of your command protocol,” he said. “Unfortunately for us, it is a star-sized four-dimensional collective intelligence and you are not.”
“Well, sorry,” Jesri said, rolling her eyes.
“Shush, I’m not done yet,” David retorted crossly. “Your resources are very limited compared to our opponent’s, so it’s crucial for us to maximize the potential throughput of your link if we want to keep saturating the connection. This will not only buy your sister room to maneuver, it may also cause overflows and expose system weaknesses that we can use as a force multiplier. In the best case, it could let us permanently cripple or suppress the Gestalt’s higher functions.”
“You think that’s likely?”, Jesri asked.
“Hah, no,” David scoffed, scrolling through the various data feeds. “But I’m feeling optimistic today. The problem we’re going to run into is that you’re bottlenecked. The link and the pedestal don’t seem to be stressed at all by the amount of traffic you’re putting through them, so that leaves your squishy biological bits as the likely culprit.”
Jesri gave him a flat look. “I’m beginning to feel personally attacked,” she snarked. “Fine, though - it makes sense that the biological components would be the limiting factor. How do we fix that?”
He shrugged. “That is the conundrum, isn’t it?”, he said. “The rest of the hardware is dependent on your input.”
“Well, I’ve only got the one brain,” Jesri said exasperatedly. “Maybe we could spoof traffic or-” She cut off, noticing that David’s face had glazed over. “Ah, David?”, she asked.
“Only the one… Aha,” he said dreamily. “Hahaha, oh dear. I’m fine. I’ve just had a terrible idea. A terrible, terrible idea.” He refocused and turned to her, his aged body practically quivering with excitement. “You have administrative privileges within the Gestalt framework,” he said rapidly, “at least to a certain extent. With that access and some tweaks to the cognitive translation protocols from your link hardware… we have all of the biological bandwidth we’d ever need.”
She stared at him, his implication seeming to echo through her in slow motion. “No,” she muttered disbelievingly. “That’s insane.”
“Is it?”, David asked hoarsely, his ancient eyes full of vigor. “You can’t hope to compete with the Gestalt in terms of raw processing power. It is truly peerless, it has no equal. With this, we can turn its biggest resource against itself.” He gestured around them, his arm sweeping to take in the entire park. “Billions of human minds in unknowing captivity. A resource we never had the tools to make use of, until you brought your link code. You can make them an army.”
Jesri shook her head, an odd ringing noise seeming to fill her ears. “David, we can’t,” she objected. “It’s one thing for you or I to put ourselves on the line, but these are civilians, noncombatants, innocents-”
“Nobody in this simulation is a noncombatant,” David said grimly. “Whether they know it or not, they are an enemy resource and a prisoner. That goes for me too.” He shook his head and slouched back on the bench, wincing as his back cracked. “I can only speak for myself, Jesri,” he said quietly. “I’m old, in some ways more so than you. Most of my life has been lived in secret, wishing I could scream the truth from the rooftops but knowing that it would be futile if I tried. Nobody here can feel the boot on their neck, nobody realizes that our universe has a malevolent creator with an all-seeing eye.”
He looked up at Jesri, tired yet resolute. “This is the one chance we have to tell them the truth without condemning them to die. Help me give them a chance for the first time in their lives.” His eyes bored into hers, unblinking. “Let us fight back.”
An image of Ellie’s face flickered unbidden into Jesri’s head, her sister smiling just a bit too wide, her eyes disturbingly bright. “I can’t, David,” she insisted, “the link isn’t meant to be used like that. It’s dangerous, unstable-”
“More dangerous than guaranteed death?”, David shot back. “If stability is servitude then I would welcome a bit of disruption.”
“Death isn’t the worst-case scenario,” Jesri said, remembering the blank faces of the Irri. “Don’t ask me to do this. If it’s too much, if I’m not strong enough to handle it - I’ve seen what happens when the link drives someone insane, and I’ve seen what happens to those they’re linked with.”
David sighed, seeming to crumple in on himself. “So this is it, then?”, he asked sadly. “Five thousand years and you give up right before the end.”
“I’m not giving up!”, Jesri shouted, suddenly angry. “I’m rejecting a bad fucking plan. You have no idea, David, you didn’t see. My sister Ellie nearly forced Anja to kill me, and Anja was forced to kill her in turn. An entire civilization was subjugated and enslaved to her will.” She shot a withering look at David. “A better version of you spent years fighting against her, trying to save those he could from her control.”
The anger fled from her suddenly, leaving her feeling exhausted and hollow. “I won’t be that person,” she said quietly. “I won’t make Anja kill me too. What you want from me is something I was never meant to give.”
“I’m not just asking for myself, Jesri,” David said. “They’ll all die without you. When the Gestalt finally completes its plan and remakes the universe, do you think it will take us with it? There’s no path where both the Gestalt and humanity survive.” He grabbed her hand suddenly, his papery skin rasping against hers. “This isn’t the sort of enemy you fight without taking risks,” he said, a pleading note in his voice. “We have to try something.”
Jesri looked at the desperate old man in front of her, seeing the barest echoes of the David she knew under the wrinkled and spotted skin. Ellie had surely thought that she was taking the only option she had in service of the greater good. Was this how she felt, right before she tampered with her link and stopped being their sister? Jesri stood on her Faustian precipice, trying to gauge just how far she would fall if she jumped.
Above all else, she wished she could talk with Anja. What would she do if she was making the decision for her sister? If it was her mind and freedom in the balance? For her, Jesri would choose-
No, she realized. She wouldn’t.
“It has to be them,” she whispered, almost inaudible against the morning birdsong. She felt an odd sense of vertigo, immediately wishing she could take the words back.
David looked at her, confused, and she cleared her throat. “We need to give each person a choice,” she explained reluctantly, but this time her voice was louder. “We can’t impose this on anyone. We need to tell them the stakes, detail the risks, and let them choose to help.”
“You’re going to severely reduce the available bandwidth,” David warned. “You can’t fight the Gestalt with one hand tied behind your back.”
“I won’t conscript the unwilling, not even to save them,” Jesri said firmly. “I won’t be a monster. We’ve been fighting this long to save humanity. If we force this on them we might not even save humans.” She glared at David, summoning what steel she had left to her expression. “That’s my condition, take it or leave it.”
David scratched his head, then let out a long sigh. “Well,” he said. “I suppose it’ll have to be enough.” With a grunt of effort, he heaved himself out of his seat and turned back to Jesri. “We have a resistance lab not far from here, but I’m not as fast as I once was. Lend an old man your arm?”
Jesri stood and offered her arm wordlessly, and the two walked down the sunlit path towards the end of the world.
----------------------------------------
“Contact!”, Rhuar shouted, jarring Anja from her contemplation. They had been idling at the antipode rendezvous point for nearly thirty minutes, and so far none of the other groups had checked in.
She leaned over her console, calling up the sensor feed. “Emissary?”, she asked, her voice tight with anxiety.
“Not sure, it’s just one ship,” he said, straining as he focused on the sensors. “Let me do a narrow active ping.” A handful of rapid heartbeats passed while Anja and David waited for his response. Suddenly he sagged with relief, his ears pricking upright. “It’s the Subtle Blade!”, he said happily.
Anja’s anxiety didn’t let up, merely unwinding into a different shape. “Just one ship,” she muttered. “Rhuar, are we close enough to open a channel?”
“Yessir,” he said distractedly, and a second later Anja’s console hissed with static.
“Tiln!”, she called out. “Subtle Blade, this is Grand Design, do you copy?”
There was a pause before Tiln replied. “We copy, Grand Design,” he said, his voice rough and scratchy. “All assigned targets were destroyed, sir. We were intercepted by one Emissary a few hours ago,” he said grimly.
Anja winced. “The others in your group?”, she asked, knowing the answer.
Tiln gave a low growl. “Our weapons were ineffective,” he rasped. “We decided as captains to follow Neryn’s example. The ships were forced into their protective shells, but they were not destroyed.”
“I see,” Anja said, her lips pressed into a tight line. “I am sorry it came to that.”
“The others did their duty,” Tiln replied. “Have no other groups checked in?”
She shook her head, suddenly feeling exhausted. “We were the first.”
“In that case, we should wait,” Tiln said. “For the Warfather and, with luck, our brothers in the East group.”
Anja made a noncommittal noise of agreement. Tiln seemed convinced of Tarl’s survival, but a part of her wondered whether either missing group would make it. The Grand Design was by far the more capable of the Terran ships, and Tarl had no others in his group to sacrifice themselves for his escape. In many ways, his was the weakest of the four teams.
She looked up to catch Rhuar and David sharing a wordless look - by her guess, they had come to similar conclusions. There was no talk of how long to wait, but each of them privately snuck a glance at the time and marked a number in their mind - that was when they would call the others dead.
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Jesri shifted in her chair, trying to find a comfortable way to rest on the bare metal. Harsh lights shone down from above, deepening the far corner of the room in shadow that cloaked the trio of resistance scientists. David hovered nearby to grumble directions and commands at anyone who passed close enough. She got the distinct impression that he hindered as many people as he helped with his zeal to see their task done. Conspicuously placed black boxes hummed from every corner of the room, hiding their activities from any eyeless gaze that should wander too close.
“It feels strange,” she muttered. “For something like this we should have equipment, facilities.” She shifted again, causing the chair to creak as its flimsy supports flexed. “This is a folding chair.”
David shot her an annoyed look. “Do you need upholstery to save the universe?”, he grumbled. “Leather, perhaps? You have all of the equipment you need back on your ship. We just need to, ah, prepare the ground a bit.”
“You realize I have no idea how to do anything in the simulation,” Jesri said, her nerves awash in anxiety. “The interface did all the work when I connected, and Trelir did all the work booting me back out again.”
“Don’t worry,” David reassured her. “We’re going to draw all the targets for you. Once we finish the network map, it should be like lightning following a channel in the air - it will happen on its own.”
Jesri shot him a skeptical look. “You sound awfully sure of yourself for someone who’s never done this before,” she pointed out.
He had the grace to look abashed for a moment. “We’re under the radar still,” he replied. “If this fizzles out, it shouldn’t attract any more attention than you already have. Anyone monitoring will see what they’ve been seeing - a bunch of insignificant little humans scurrying around doing nothing of consequence.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself for someone who’s never done this before,” she repeated.
“Oh, shut up,” David snapped, although the ghost of a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “We mere mortals have less patience for nailing down precisely every detail, given our limited time - and today I seem to be feeling my mortality more keenly than usual.”
“Measure twice, save the universe once,” Jesri retorted. “Or did that saying not get carried over?”
David snorted. “It’s good that you’re able to joke about it,” he said. “I’d be pretty nervous right about now.”
A pang of nausea shot through her gut. “Why?”, she asked. “Are we about to start?”
“Hah!”, David laughed. “The network map has been building itself for five minutes already. I’d say you have only a handful of seconds before things start to get interesting.”
Jesri’s eyes snapped open wide. “What?”, she yelped. “Fuck’s sake, David-”
“Get ready to ride the lightning!”, he called out jovially. “Talk to you in a few seconds.”
“Wait, no,” she said frantically, “I have no idea-”
There was a sudden twisting, and then Jesri was everywhere.