COLIN POV
Sage had no difficulty taking on the fragment we scouted out. She had called back and requested a couple of squads of different units, which I sent over on the second scout boat we built. The boats all needed an intelligent mind to guide them—either one of us three or one of our allied minds. The mind who called himself Marco Polo volunteered for this one and set off with a squad of my Hoplites and a squad of siege engineers, a brand-new kind of unit I had just learned to make after gaining experience building enough defensive turrets.
I went back to work and let Sage do her thing. A while later, she reported back success.
"Gambler, how's it going?" I asked.
Gambler didn't respond right away. I checked my HUD. It now read: [Ethereum 14,528 (+872), Will 100%, Will Density 1517 (+97)]
"What's with the pluses?"
After a moment, Gambler answered. He sounded strained. "It is taking me more time to process the bounty from this fragment than I expected. This is a whole new level of existence for me."
“Keep me posted on that. Will it slow down our assaults?”
“I do not yet know. I will apprise you shortly.”
“Do that. Sage, build a new command center at the location, and I'll teleport over and start adding defenses," I told her.
"Done," Sage replied, and in 90 seconds, a new location popped up in my available teleport targets. I popped over and found Sage with our units. She was having them scour the island, looking for any stray Ethereum resources.
Gambler spoke with us both. It was no more difficult for him to communicate here than back there since he was still in our heads as much as he was anywhere else. "This is going to be a bit of a concern until I learn how to digest these fragments. We would be better off making alliances if at all possible. There's a practical limit to how large I can grow and still remain myself."
Sage and I looked at each other as I set a couple of defensive structures building.
"Diplomats, got it," Sage said lightly. "Sounds like your kind of job, Colin."
"Let me look through our options," I said. As soon as I was done building our first set of defenses, I pulled up my skills list and started checking what I could come up with.
I found a shattered fragment we had conquered previously and not done much with and slotted it into one of Gambler's active slots. It enabled me to create a new type of building—an embassy. The difference was, the embassy had to be constructed on someone else's controlled land and needed me to cash in a diplomat unit.
How did I train diplomats? It took me a little digging, and then I found that if I had a university, I could train up officials and functionaries, and that officials could be turned into diplomats by evolving them once they were created.
“I’ll get started on this," I told Sage. "Meanwhile, let's think about our next move. Alright, talk to me, Gambler," I said as I queued up building instructions. "How do we convince the larger fragments to join forces with us?"
"We must offer them something they want," Gambler said.
"Or give them something to be afraid of," Sage suggested. She had all of her units on patrol now. I could see her eyes flickering to the side now and then as she no doubt pulled up menus and gave orders of her own. Now she sighed. She slumped to the ground and sat cross-legged, staring out at the white Wash beyond our small purple island.
“That’s good too. What is it you want?” I asked Gambler. “Is there more to it than just not being eaten or enslaved?”
“I am, or I was, an Experiencer,” Gambler said. “Always living to see what came next in life. It was perhaps the dominant philosophy in most of Progenitor culture at the time we decided to enter reality engines.”
“Do you remember your culture?” Sage asked curiously.
“Not entirely. The minds that make me up all lived through it, but those memories are distant and deep and have merged together. Many of my component parts remember being tired and believing that we had seen everything there was to see. I am told the creatives had a similar crisis, believing that everything worth creating had been created.”
“What did you call yourselves? Not Progenitors, surely,” I commented.
Gambler did not reply. At last he said, “We were the Olymakians, named for our homeworld. I… do not have the records to tell me where it was, but no one has lived there for many hundreds of millenia. I think it was lost, to something. Maybe a nova. Afterward we resolved never again to lose our worlds that way, and we learned to control the stars themselves. But when we had done that — we found there was nothing left to strive for. And so… we faded.”
“What about the other faction, the Inheritors?” I asked. “They were the ones who believed in leaving the galaxy for your children?”
“Yes and no,” Gambler said. “I won’t pretend to speak for them as I never had much sympathy in that direction, but they believed that we would be renewed by those who came after us. That it was the duty of the old and senescent to give way to the weak. Most of them did not enter the reality engines, but thinking back on it, I believe they may have been the dominant force behind creating the reality engines. Our people—many of them had willingly laid down and ended their lives at that point. Most of the rest of us were willing to enter into millions of years of slumber to see if, when we awoke, it would be the new day we had been promised.”
“What about it?” I challenged. “Have you experienced new things?”
“I’m afraid I have,” Gambler said grimly. “I never had to fight for my life before, rip my sustenance tooth and claw from my own kinsmen, worry about being devoured by those stronger than me. It is an interesting feeling, a new experience for me indeed, and I’m not certain that it is one I enjoy.”
“That’s all very interesting,” I said, standing up, “but I’m not sure it’s going to help us forge any bonds of unity between the others.”
“I think it will,” Sage said. “If the other minds are something like Gambler, then this business of fighting for survival is new to them. But the fact that they are fighting, that they haven’t just given up, means that it’s resonating with them. We can offer to help. If they want to stay alive, they can by joining with us. We’ll make a group big enough to face any threat on this level and then—"
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“Then what?” Gambler asked. “We will ascend and be prey for the larger ones or the minds that seek to control this whole world?”
“The Dominators,” I said, nodding. From the little I had learned before our abrupt entrance into this reality engine, there were multiple alien controllers right now trying to wrest control of the reality engine away from the pieces of its own Overmind and doing a pretty good job at it. Though they were fighting with each other for control, they were working well enough to lock the fragments out and keep them separate.
But we have a trump card,” Sage said. “We brought our own mind fragment. Coyote is hardened against intrusion from dominators. He has the backing of our own reality engine with him. If we can build a large enough force to ascend there and then contact Coyote, with his help, we might be able to protect all of the minds in our alliance.”
“The Dominators will never let us,” Gambler said with certainty. “Your fragment must be part of their communication network, from what you have told me. Any attempt we make to contact it will be heard and lead the Dominators right back to us.”
Sage deflated. “Oh.”
“I’m thinking of a plan,” I told her. “I don’t have one yet, but cheating my way past the rules is kind of my thing.”
She had been facing away, watching the patrolling units as they made their way along the edge of the Wash. Now she turned back to me, her face tinged purple in the light, her eyes bright. She seized my hand. “Yes! I won’t give up yet. We’ll find a way. Between you and Shad, we can do it. Gambler, we aren’t going to give up on you. We’ll find a way to get you out of here. Maybe Kronos can make room for you. Or we could get you a ship, like Coyote.”
I had my doubts on the odds of us ever getting our hands on another Progenitor craft like the Ad Astra. If there was one in this system, the galactics had no doubt already found it and stolen it away.
“Then step one is getting more allies.” I stood up. “If they’ll listen. But we’d better keep building our army up just in case. Who was it that said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’? One of your American Presidents, maybe.”
Sage shrugged. “I only got a sixth-grade education. Beats me.”
“I’ll train the diplomats. Meanwhile, let’s work on our pitch.”
We had made our first couple of alliances easily enough. I had traveled to each island with a couple of squads of combat engineers and spoken directly with their fragments using my new diplomat units. Gambler explained his proposition to them once I had an embassy constructed.
“The force to our north gains strength. She will strike against each of us soon, consuming us, unless we stand up to her. Join with me and we will be able to conquer her and take her lands and substances as our own."
It wasn’t necessarily the most persuasive line. I was a bit surprised when the neighboring fragments fell into line quickly. Gambler explained to me that while the lowest level, where we’d been until recently, had been very kill-or-be-killed, there had been enough resources on this level for all the minds. Something had changed, recently, right around the time Gambler ascended, and the other minds here were afraid.
Whatever worked. We had the allies we wanted. Frustratingly, we didn't have direct access to their ethereum and supply slots. Our allied minds tithed ethereum to us to allow me to build their defenses. I was able to get an upgrade to my command center teleport that let me now teleport to our embassies on foreign soil as well. So I was kept busy hopping around preparing everyone's defenses, but the new fragments could have obstinate personalities
"I don't like ice," the fragment we had named Jolly told me as I was setting up a row of defensive turrets on his land. He and Gambler were slowly pushing their boundaries toward each other, shoving back the Wash and making new strips of land. In a few days, they would be connected and I'd move the defensive lines again.
"These are my most effective slowing turrets," I said. "Besides, the ice will be used on your enemies, not on you."
"I don't like ice," he said again, stubbornly. I sighed and built my next tower as a lightning turret.
Sage had learned a new skill, Conscript, which let her make units built by other fragments and integrate them into our armies. She was as distracted as I was now, moving huge quantities of people around as we prepared because Gambler had been
right. The enemy was coming.
We had nicknamed her Victoria since we didn't know what she called herself. My diplomatic overtures had been soundly rebuffed, the vessel we'd sent destroyed along with the brave volunteer mind who had tried. We had known it was likely. Daredevil Jack, one of our allied minds, had volunteered anyway. One was enough. After that, we stuck to our own defenses.
The Wash was both our defense and our problem. As long as it stood between us and Victoria, we couldn't easily move our armies, though Gambler was churning out boats just as fast as he could. Sooner or later, if she didn't come to us, we would go to her.
On the other hand, it presented the same problem for her. Bit by bit, her archipelago extended pseudopods of land out deeper into the Wash toward us. She had swallowed up all the nearby fragments. I didn't like this situation at all.
"Tell me how it's going to go," Sage asked, as we sat taking a rare break under the pink mollusk's shell in the center of Monte Carlo. We were both sitting on the ground, knees pulled up to our chests, not quite back to back, Sage leaning a little against my shoulder as we took a break. I was pretty sure Gambler was going to tell us both to go unconscious after this.
I pulled a couple of bottles of cold ginger beer out of my inventory. I used my multi-tool to pull off the lids before handing one to Sage. She accepted it and drank deep. I did too.
We didn't need to eat and drink. We were fully emulated, which meant Gambler sustained us, and in fact was providing these drinks right now. But I'd had them in my inventory when I came in, and I knew how they ought to taste, and Gambler made it happen.
"How long has it been, do you think?" she asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know. Weeks at least. Maybe months." I had seen projections on how long this reality engine exploit was supposed to take. They had estimated a year and a half in the shortest scenario, four years for the longest. I didn't have a sense of how things were going upstairs, but since we still had the ability down here on the second level to interact with other fragments who had not yet been subsumed into a dominated hive, we couldn't be that far along.
I hoped.
"They think we're dead," Sage said sadly.
"They probably do," I agreed.
"If they didn't, Shad would have been here by now," she said.
"Coyote's up on the dominated level, working through that alliance. They don't have any connection down here."
"That didn't stop us," she said. "And it wouldn't stop Shad. Not if he knew I was down here. Except,” she hesitated. "He has other people to worry about now. Juana and Mila. He said he was trying to make better decisions. Maybe…. Maybe…”
I shifted around and grabbed her hand. "He'd be here if he could," I assured her. "And as soon as he finds out we're down here, he'll be helping. Believe me, I know Shad."
"Yeah," she squeezed my hand back and we drank our ginger beer together. "I just... I keep thinking I want to go home. And I don't even know what that means. Back to the ship? Back to our reality engine? It can’t mean back to Arizona. I mean, it's been seven years. Have you ever been back to Earth since you joined?"
"I did once," I told her. "About a year after we got there. I wanted to visit my mum and stepdad."
"How did that go?"
"It was weird," I said. I had gone home and mum had barely been able to stop crying. They'd moved houses thanks to the money I'd sent back. I'd set them up in a nicer little flat in Kent where my mother had been from as a girl. She spent most of the time crying about how wonderful it was to see me with legs. By that point, I'd almost managed to forget I was ever in a wheelchair. I realized she was still seeing me as her crippled son who needed her help to do everything. And I couldn't be that. “I told her that I'd have a sponsored slot for her and my stepdad anytime they want to come to the engine. I think they will sooner or later. They're a bit scared of it, but my stepdad's getting older. He's starting to have problems. He'll come around when it's that or a hip replacement."
Sage laughed.
"How about you? You're always talking about your grandpa and Shad. What about your parents?"
A cloud passed across Sage's face. "My mother died when I was very young. I remember her a bit. I sometimes wish I remembered her more and sometimes wish I didn't remember even that. She had a problem with drugs," she explained. "Shad and I got taken away a couple of times before she finally took the wrong pill. My dad," she shrugged, "I don't know. He was in and out of jail. Grandpa took us in. I don't even know what happened to my father. He might even be alive. I've never looked for him because I don't really want to know. He wasn't there when I needed him. Shad was, and so was grandpa."
I squeezed her hand a little tighter. "Sorry, I shouldn't have asked."
"It's all right. It's been a long time," she said. She let out a deep breath. "Let's get back to it."
She disappeared her empty bottle into her inventory. I did the same with mine. We stood up and went back to our work.