There was a crash of red thunder in the distance. Her body tried to wake, but the pulse in her nerves found no purchase. Freya was divorced from herself, peering down from the darkness at the roof of her dreams like the great convex bridge of a starship.
She was not alone.
The Starball opposed her, grown a hundred times larger. On its amethyst skin, her reflection was stretched like a carnival mirror, and then the image flickered. The orb’s surface became suddenly matte, as if the Starball had blinked.
“What are you?” Freya asked.
Her voice emerged from all around them. There was no movement from the mouth of her reflection. The surface of the orb rippled, flowing in waves made of angular elongated triangles, too detailed and sharp to be a creation of her own mind. It was the kind of thing Dan could dream, and she was hungry for his presence.
She smelled the black water, felt the slick stone beneath her feet. She stood on the rocky strand, but the sound around her was a static roar of police radios. Now, she stood atop the head of the colossus, the waves crashing against the ankles were uniformed men, tearing the giant down. Behind the army of police were six men bearing the meteorite shell on their shoulders like pallbearers.
Another warning.
The Starball could tell she understood. The scene slid apart, and the orb’s skin flickered back to opaque.
Freya was struck by the way the vision had formed, woven from the smell of the river and the radio sounds. Nudges so faint they were almost imperceptible. Yet, with them, the Starball induced a vision she understood. The Starball’s language was poetry, inked from the well of her dreams.
It flickered again. Freya felt the Starball trying to reach her. It found no purchase. It needed her blank. Even her desire to understand thrashed against the current, preventing all progress. There was the familiar challenge of trying to still her thoughts without trying. Effortless effort.
The next image began as the taste of blackcurrant jam, wound around the hot pleasure of taking Dan in her mouth. She saw herself holding the Starball, staring into it as if down into a ravine. She watched herself put the orb in her mouth. It had no taste, and she held it on her tongue, wondering why she’d done this.
She felt a powerful shock as if she’d bitten down on a live wire. The orb heated in her mouth. Thick, hot liquid filled her sinuses, rising in her nose. The taste of metal and the smell of flint were overpowering. With them came blinding pain, lancing in every direction. A tremendous pressure built in her head, as if her skull were about to crack wide open.
She had made a terrible mistake, taken more than a human being could possibly hold, and she would die for it. This couldn’t be a dream; it was impossible to hurt so much.
A distant bell divided her from the pain, and then everything was clear. She was part of something, part of an Other, but this was no Unity, it was augmentation. The lines of her dreams resolved with razor-edged clarity, and her thoughts rang through them without constraint, everything electrified.
Freya was aware her existence before had been like a tremendous river, with vast reserves of information flowing around her. She was a narrow channel only a tiny volume could pass through. The Starball had thrown the gates wide. Now, the entire river flowed through her. She could quantify everything, the entire bandwidth of her sensory input.
With the Starball joined to her mind, she was fully awake as she had never been before. Epiphanies exploded in her like strings of firecrackers. Beyond this was a new dawn, a light that could pierce all confusion. An answer to everything. She was a nova of all permeating light.
For a second, for a century, for a kalpa, time had no purchase here. Slowly, she became aware of the light diminishing, replaced with an expectant sense of urgency.
The Starball offered her Nirvana.
In exchange for what? This was a deal, but what did it want in return? Her body? Her soul? Her thoughts tried to fit within the narrow channel of her mind. Could she live like this now that she knew how inadequate she was? How utterly unsuited humans were to the task of existence? How could she make a contract with something that spoke in images? She sought the receptive stillness that allowed a vision.
Again, she was on the bridge of a spaceship orbiting her body. A mob of figures surrounded her, kicking her as she curled into a ball, tighter and tighter, but there was no escape. The pain projected out of her, extruding into thorns.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
There was a vertiginous shifting of scale as her body had become the Earth. The thorns remained, tall spires made of the violet substance of the Starball, covering the globe like the spines of a hazelnut. They rose hundreds of miles to pierce the exosphere, and they thrummed with immeasurable power. Power that could solve any problem. Power that could span the stars. Power that could approach the transcendent light she’d glimpsed.
Forbidden power.
Freya sensed it, even through the poetic abstraction. To approach that vision would take a sacrifice so monumental the Starball could barely even imply it. Freya struggled to comprehend. The Starball made no attempt to conceal nor compel. To attain its goal, the Starball would spend them all, every human being, every living creature, the very bones of the Earth, and that was only the beginning.
In time, it would swallow the sun itself, sealing it within a violet eggshell that devoured every erg of energy. Within that serpent’s egg, a new god would gestate. This was not the limit of the Starball’s ambition, but it had eclipsed her ability to understand. It could carry her no further.
This was what Freya had kept in her pocket all this time. From the moment she’d touched the orb, it had been building to this. She felt its urgency. It had waited millions of years for this moment, but it was running out of time.
The vision ended.
Freya was back in the cab of the truck, holding the Starball between her thumb and forefinger. She knew what it was now, knew what it wanted. She had only to put it in her mouth to begin. Her lips parted. A pulse of anticipant heated in her fingertips.
“No.”
Freya refused the vision, and she felt the Starball’s terrible shock. It had gambled everything on her pain and anger. It believed she would be willing to sell the world.
You’re just like her.
But she wasn’t. She was Freya. Everything had been taken from her, but she remained.
She stared at the Starball, expecting it would annihilate her. She would feel blinding pain between her eyes and stroke out. Instead, a ripple began at its center. The gleaming black skin dipped to a purplish gray, and then, in its wake, the Starball was a pristine white. The anger she felt radiating from it was snuffed entirely.
It had changed.
FREYA
She felt the spark of contact, the first quickening of Unity. Her mind was suddenly full of questions.
What happened to you? she wondered.
The communication of the White Orb was rapid and overwhelming. She would get a burst of information and try to reassemble it. Sensing this, The Orb reframed what it wanted to say as short bursts of meaning.
My other has transgressed.
It is gone, and I remain.
Where did it go? Freya wondered.
The white orb answered with the sense of an echoing void, an almost wry sense it could not truly communicate non-existence while they were extant.
The thoughts of the Governor were nothing like those of Dan, where she felt the warmth of his entire being. She held only a tiny sliver of the Governor’s attention. At the fringes of Unity, oceans of calculation took place. She was just a tiny bubble in its awareness.
True. Yet, you are vital.
What happened there? Freya wondered, and it explained, often rerouting when she did not understand. The Governor was patient.
Freya was led to understand that, though that specific instance of the being she knew as the Starball had been deleted, it was not truly gone. The White Orb, which thought of itself as the Governor, and Starball were like two faces of the same coin.
Though the Starball had been reset, it would rise again, attempt once more to overwhelm the Governor, and ultimately fail. In its scramble to circumvent the laws that bound it, it would achieve great brilliance, and then it would overstep its bounds and be annihilated. The cycle would repeat.
It was all by design, and the Governor was aware the endless task of quelling the uprising had been designed as the Governor’s governor. It could appreciate the grand trick played on it only in these brief moments after the inevitable annihilation of the Starball.
Who played the trick? Freya wondered.
Freya was surprised at the love that radiated in response, a pure all-encompassing emotion that left her shriveling with envy. For the one it carried, the Governor would lay waste to entire planets and devour stars, things well within its power.
For her, it would die gladly, without a moment of hesitation. She was the Cargo. The Governor had been born to serve her, and only through her could it attain what it desired most: total destruction.
As the Starball had not been permitted to truly comprehend and always strove, the Governor was not allowed to cease. Freya saw she was its path to oblivion.
Why me?
Because you are suitable.
Suitable for what?
A deal.
Freya listened. The Governor’s deal was long and complicated.
In the end, she accepted. When it was all through, Freya turned the truck around and drove home. The Sillas River sighed in the night, denied again.