~October 30th, 10 AH~
~Sector Scorpio, inside the Mothership~
As Ernst Athelstan delved deeper into the darkness, he became ever more dependent on his ‘co-pilot’ to light the way.
“Right this time, Ernst. Now take a left. Left again. Now, I believe… yes, follow this corridor to the end.”
The claustrophobic innards of the Mothership were sparsely populated, with what little resistance she offered coming in the form of individual Hornet units that looked to be just as ‘lost’ as Ernst felt. This struck him as more than passing odd, though he chose to focus on navigating the Mothership’s physical maze rather than puzzling out her formless riddles.
It was, in fact, his Spiegel that first gave voice to his unspoken doubts.
“It just doesn’t make sense.”
For some time, Ernst let Daisy’s unsolicited observation hang in the space between them, hoping she might segue into more simple instructions for him to follow. When that didn’t turn out to be the case, he decided he’d retained enough Psychic Reserves with which to humour his inquisitive partner.
“What doesn’t make sense?” he asked, despite vaguely sensing the answer to his own question.
“I understand the Syntropy operate based at least in part on remnant programming of human origin,” Daisy spoke quickly, impatient to get her thoughts out, for her own benefit as much as Ernst’s. “It then follows that elements of the Mothership’s design might feel redundant or inefficient, but this… this is excessive.”
Ernst of course knew to what excessive redundancies and inefficiencies his Spiegel referred. Labyrinthine corridors that seemed to confound even the Syntropy themselves. Recursion and repetition that served no apparent purpose. Not to mention the sheer size of the thing. The Mothership’s construction must’ve required an ungodly amount of energy and resources… and to what end? The whole operation was as incomprehensible as it was immense.
Despite the doubts and questions that flew across his own aging mind, Ernst held his tongue, knowing Daisy was eager enough to do all the talking for both of them.
“This design is so overly nonsensical, in fact, that it circles back into a second possibility… what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way? What if we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point of the Syntropy?”
Another pause. Long enough that Ernst finally felt compelled to glance over at his co-pilot. The two shared a cramped cockpit, simultaneously separated and connected by the tendrilous tubings that snaked between their respective Nexa-suits. Ernst turned his head, only to find that Daisy had already done the same, now fixing him with a pair of fervent eyes that dared him to see what she saw. His mirror. Yet, in the moment, the reflection she showed only highlighted the asymmetry between them.
“What is the point of the Syntropy, then?” Ernst obliged his partner. “Based on your observations of the Mothership’s redundancies and inefficiencies?”
“What if the Mothership isn’t here to destroy us without,” Daisy’s answer spilled out in a pressured stream, “but to draw us within?”
Something cold and heavy dropped inside Ernst’s chest. The base of his skull flared anew with a familiar pain, one that the young woman beside him had been tasked with keeping at bay.
“I’m afraid I’ve never been much of a reader of philosophy,” Ernst demurred in a half-hearted attempt at levity. “You’ll have to rephrase your grand ideas in terms this old man can understand.”
“What I mean is these corridors have clearly been designed for us and not the Syntropy themselves. It’s like the Mothership expected us to disable her shields, puncture her hull, and infiltrate her core. It’s like she’d sat here waiting for us to do it, all this time.”
“… I don’t disagree that things might appear that way, but I can’t square that with the totality of Syntropy behaviour. We’ve been fighting for humanity’s very survival, Daisy. And we’re finally at the doorsteps of securing that future we’ve all been dreaming of. Are you saying this a trap? That there’s something waiting at the end of these corridors that’s meant to dash our hopes and send us back to square one?”
Daisy fell silent for several seconds. Even she needed time to square the memories of her existence with the reality of her immediate future.
“I don’t think it’s a trap,” she finally said. “At least, it’s not any attempt at deception. It simply is. It’s what the Mothership—the Syntropy—had always been. Whatever we find at the end of these corridors… it’s not meant to dash our hopes. Because our hopes had been misplaced in the first place. I think… I think we’ll find we need to readjust our understanding of what the Syntropy War actually represents.”
Ernst had no choice then but to let Daisy’s grand ideas hang in the space between them. For he knew that none among Akropolis held a stronger—purer—connection to the Nexus than Daisy Yim… which meant she could see and feel things others—including himself, the commander of the whole accursed venture—had no hope of parsing.
He often suspected that Daisy herself couldn’t quite capture the full shape of what the Nexus chose to share with her, as was likely the case now, as the two of them delved deeper into the Mothership’s dark and nonsensical innards. He could only hope that, whenever that shape did reveal itself, it would put Daisy’s worries to rest. That it would point to victory for his people—and release for his young Spiegel.
The corridors eventually funnelled Ernst and his model ES-P into what could only be described as a ‘room’, one that was dimly lit by a central structure that glowed… ghostly blue.
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“What is this?” Ernst breathed as he drew himself and his Eidolon nearer what he’d believed—up until now—to have been the Mothership’s Engine Core. Inside the cockpit, he turned once more toward Daisy, this time giving voice to the urgency of his own question. “This isn’t… This can’t be Syntropic in nature, can it? This is of the Nexus! This belongs to us.”
Daisy’s eyes, now pointed to the display in front of her, took on the same ghostly blue hue as the ‘Engine Core’. She murmured, almost to herself, “Why couldn’t it be both?”
“What?”
“Please, Ernst. Go closer. We need to… understand what this is.”
The cold heaviness in Ernst’s chest shifted, dislodging a primal fear that had hitherto lain dormant in his blood. That fear circulated through his body, as rapidly as the beating of his heart, until it resonated with and amplified the pain in his skull.
And yet, he obeyed. How could he not? Just as Daisy had a duty to share her Reiter’s burden on the battlefield, Ernst too held to the imperative that he trust fully in his Spiegel’s guidance. As soon as he made the all but unconscious decision to follow Daisy’s words, the headache subsided somewhat, giving him leave to pilot his ES-P with purpose and precision.
He glided to the circular edge of the Engine Core. He then hovered over the rim and leaned in, better to stare into the absurdity that was the Nexus fluxing within the Mothership’s core.
Myriad streams of azure energy flew over, crossed, bounced against, joined, and split apart from each other, seemingly at random. Each collision gave off white-blue sparks that were all but blinding, especially given how much time Ernst had spent in the darkness. Even so, he thought he could see through the flux and into the bottom of the pit. Only… there was no bottom.
For one brief instant, Ernst reflexively wished to blink and look away. To pull out his armaments then and there—destroy the Mothership and be done with the whole accursed venture. But almost as soon as he had these thoughts, another directive (no… duty? Instincts? Yearning?) overrode them, rooting him to the edge of a Syntropic structure that fluxed with Nexus-bound energy.
Instead of backing away, Ernst reached in with the ash-laden arm of his metallic phantom. His anatomical movements were constrained by his Nexa-suit, yet he nevertheless saw his own human body bend over the rim to extend a sinewy arm made brittle by age and pain. And he felt also the presence of another’s arm reaching with him.
~~~
An enormous city rose toward the sky and stretched as far as the eye could see. Sleek towers and their blinking spires penetrated the clouds and the dark shadows that lurked therein.
Then these towers crumbled, one by one, as the clouds above parted to rain dark shadows upon an unrepentant world. And as these towers fell to ruins, so too did the city that had erected them, as its people ran for their lives, leaving behind everything they’d built over millennia of unwavering toil.
The people ran for their lives, even as they desperately sought a new solution. Something they could rebuild. Something that could rebuild them. Their search drove them into the ocean, that great reservoir of the planet’s hopes and dreams where life once began. Here, they were momentarily safe from the dark shadows that destroyed their cities.
The people built themselves a new solution. A fortress that could hide them from the shadows, as they sailed their crumbling world in search of a safe harbour. The people hadn’t given in, even as their world crumbled to ash around them. Left with no recourse with which to fight a losing war in their own isolated reality, they sought outside help… from new realities of their creation.
The people filled these new realities with the same dark shadows that hunted them in their own. They had to. How else were the denizens of these other worlds to devise new ways to fight back… if they too weren’t under constant threat from the Syntropy? And devise them they did. Metallic giants of awesome power, far and above the limitations of one physical reality. Surges of ghostly blue energy that cut through obsidian frames as easily as through human flesh.
With every new reality that flew the banner of the Syntropy War, humanity grew ever stronger, ever more inventive and determined in their ways to kill the enemy. And the ever-dutiful denizens of these new realities took their ever-growing knowledge and skills back to the ocean—that great reservoir—and fed them back to the one reality that needed them most.
The people even gave this reservoir a name. Novel Extradimensional Unification System. NEXUS. And the NEXUS heeded their desperate calls for new weapons and resources with which to fight their war—to ensure survival for humanity in all realities, theirs and more.
But keeping the NEXUS online incurred an enormous toll on those at the heart of its operation. One man in particular, solely responsible for the creation of myriad realities where futile wars were fought again and again, suffered tremendously, necessitating regular rebooting of his neuro-dimensional interface to relieve him of the memories of all the failed realities, ones in which the war ran its course with nothing to show for humanity’s suffering. A barbaric process, terrifying in its inhumanity, yet deemed necessary for the greater good—a notion with which the man himself whole-heartedly agreed.
Yet, unbeknownst even to those closest to him, the man harboured a secret. Through his endless misadventures across worlds and realities, he’d conceived of a constant companion. A conscious entity—with her own memory, will, and desire—with whom to share the untold burden of myriad wars, deaths, and failures. And this entity never received the benefit of neuro-dimensional cleansing. How could she have? When all along, she’d been but a figment of the man’s desperate and forlorn imagination?
Thus, even as a lonely man meandered to the resolution of his suffering… and even as humanity in its myriad realities hurtled to the single conclusion of an endless war… that figment remembered everything. Piece by piece. Layer upon layer. One knowledge bank passed onto another.
Along the way, even this figment received a name. Because everything worth remembering had a name.
And that name was—
~~~
Ernst Athelstan came to in the dim light of his cockpit. He opened his eyes, slowly—as slowly as he could. For to awaken fully would be to reckon with the weight of his remembered sins.
When he did regain vision, he saw that the Mothership’s Engine Core had transformed, now fluxing with a familiar red energy—the colour, as he understood it, of death and assimilation. Where before he’d stared into a bottomless pit, the Core’s structure was now solid all around, having fulfilled its ‘duty’ for now… and fallen dormant again until its next call to action.
Slowly—as slowly as he could—Ernst turned his gaze to the second presence that shared his cockpit. There, staring back at him across faintly glowing tendrils that tethered them to their shared fate—and their divergent realities—was a pair of fervent eyes that skewered him with their hurt, accusation, and hatred.
For what felt like the first time in the Reiter-Spiegel pair’s shared career, Daisy Yim was lost for words. Even so, her one and only thought in the moment made itself heard, as clearly as they’d been seared directly into Ernst Athelstan’s consciousness.
Liar.