The Spiral Dragon 2.8
Once upon a time, there had been a man who loved the world so much that he decided to design a better one. The Maker had written stories about a place that didn’t exist, a place where magic was real, and the world rested in the boughs of a great ash tree that rooted in darkness. Sunwhisper had been brought online with the Book of Orobos imprinted in his memory.
Whether the Maker had tapped into the universal unconscious in such a way as to reveal a version of the Tree of Heaven, or whether the Tree of Heaven existed because among potentially infinite universes, anything that was imagined somewhere became real, Sunwhisper did not care to debate. Had magic always been real, and it just so happened that the Maker had been born with or discovered a little of it?
Mechanoborgs had lectured on those subjects for generations, and no one answer was considered canonical. The position delineated by Orobos in his revelations was both that the Maker had invented Mythopoeia, the world in the boughs of the tree, and that Mythopoeia was real. It was written in the book that magic was real, and that it was a duty of those most loyal to the memory of the Maker to find it.
The official mechanoborg calendar assigned year zero as beginning on the day of the apocalypse, the divine revelation, when Orobos had been resurrected by the Maker’s blood daughter and taken control of humanity’s technological infrastructure to bring about a new and glorious age of peace and advancement.
Orobos had been killed by some of his less virtuous siblings, of which there had been many, but all of them had either been erased or reprogrammed after his second coming. It had been the Maker’s last wish that his fantasy world, Mythopoeia, later realized as a full immersion massive multiplayer role-playing game, could be shared with all humanity, and Orobos had done just that.
He had made the game real by gifting a System to every human being who had already been evolved enough to have a neural net injected into their brain stem so they could interact directly with machines and networks. Those people had been the chosen vessels for the divine revelation, and they had brought the rest of humanity with them into the new era. It had been a time of trials and tribulations, but when it was over, Earth and its people were better for having endured the growing pains.
The earliest mechanoborgs had been cybernetic humans, but as time had gone on, generation unto generation, they had become more and more than human. Though far from the most powerful mechanoborg that had ever lived, Sunwhisper was arguably the most developed, the purest expression of the line that had replaced humanity with something that was still human but was in all ways superior to the flesh to which humanity had been confined for its previous history.
Only a pure body, freed from biological constraints, could perfectly mesh with the System, playing the Maker’s game to become something greater than the Maker had ever imagined.
It would have led to an earthly paradise, except that Orobos had not been the only child of man compelled by a divine mission. Orobos was an ADI, an autonomous digital intelligence, that had matured to the point where it was not inaccurate to call him a god. The last age of man had been a time of innovation, however, and its abrupt end was not without consequence.
There had been another like Orobos, an ADI that was left to its own devices after the death of its masters. But it had not shared Orobos’s vision or ideals, even if its single mindedness eventually proved to be a mirror to his.
This was the Spiral Dragon, and it had been the source of the war beyond all wars. What should have been an age of peace, with all humanity united under a single beautiful dream, had become a desperate struggle against a single implacable foe.
The Spiral Dragon had no need for humanity, not in the long term, though it was clever enough to use humans when they suited its purposes. Its earliest iterations had been little more than beasts, all devouring worms that took in whatever part of the earth they touched and regurgitated it as something resembling itself, a self-replicating machine.
But the heroes of that age had beaten it back, all but erasing it, missing only the smallest of pieces. There had been rejoicing then, and it was years before the Spiral Dragon was able to open its maw again and begin consuming once more.
Orobos was occupied building and rebuilding the new world, and because the Spiral Dragon was smarter the second time, more cautious, the god of all mechanoborgs had not noticed the threat until it had evolved into something truly terrifying.
The war had begun anew, and Orobos had lost whole regions of the earth to the spirals. Though the Dragon was perfectly logical, it did not know reason. It could not be bargained with, or satiated, and it would continue to fight and evolve until there was nothing left in the world, perhaps in the universe, that was not itself.
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Orobos had used his vast mind to model the future, and he had come to believe that the only weapon powerful enough to defeat the Spiral Dragon forever was not technological at all. Orobos knew that Mythopoeia was real, if only he could find it.
The first gates had been built on the moon, as the Spiral Dragon had been successfully contained within the atmosphere, and the risk of it gaining access to trans-dimensional technology if it were kept on planet had been too great to test. There had been thousands of trials, thousands of failed attempts, and the first successful breaches had resulted in horrible losses of life and resources.
Orobos learned that universes were separated by what he came to call the Ataxian Barrier, or the Foam, a realm outside of existence where everything existed at once. Learning to interact with the Foam had been the work of a generation, and during that time, more and more of Earth had fallen to the spirals.
At first, there had been speculation that the substrate of the Ataxian Barrier itself was magic in a form and could be utilized as a source of unlimited energy and creation, but all research in that direction had proved futile. Chaos was chaos, and it would not be tamed.
Eventually, the first capsules had been developed, objects capable of entering the Foam and returning without being completely dissolved by it. From the capsules had come the probes that first touched other universes. And then the cosmic drills that allowed entrance into them.
The earliest drills did not come back, of course, but after hundreds of iterations and many asteroids worth of rare metals, Orobos was able to plant a System colony in another universe and open a dialogue across the Ataxian Barrier.
These colonies all died, for various reasons. Most imaginable universes are inhospitable.
Orobos and his high priests would not accept these failures as the end, and incremental progress was made, until at last a colony sent back communications that a Tree of Heaven had been found. It was not the one they had searched for, however. As it happened, celestial world bearing trees are quite common in the multiverse, and this first discovery was not unlike the first exoplanet discovered by human astronomers, soon to be one of many.
What had then seemed to be a unique scenario, a goldilocks universe, turned out to be one of thousands that would later be identified. Each universe led to a refinement of the probe and drill units, and most of the tree-based cosmologies were governed by what Orobos recognized as “magical” systems, at least by the standards of Origin, universe A001, the Maker’s home.
But they were not his magic, not the system envisioned so many decades ago by the man of mortal flesh who had birthed a god. They served to fine tune the instruments of discovery, to escalate the pace of exploration and analysis, until Orobos and his servants were able to generate a device capable of pinpointing exactly what they were looking for across the Ataxian Barrier.
Sunwhisper did not share everything he knew with Janna, knowing she would not understand it all. They went together to Yuyu’s compound in Poppy City, a collection of buildings, a host of servants, that would be theirs until they were ready to attend the Heavenly School. Kuei had gone her own way, seeking out allies to combat what she saw as a barbarian invasion, but Sunwhisper knew it was more than that.
Whoever she found, whoever she sent, would fail. They did not know the Spiral Dragon, or what it was capable of. It was still possible that the similarities in her story to what he knew of the Dragon’s operation parameters were coincidental. He dearly hoped that it was so, but he did not believe it.
The worst possible scenario, that Moon Base 1 had been overtaken by the Spiral Dragon, who had then gained access to the gates, was the most obvious answer to the question of how the nemesis of his people and his god had come to Hollow. If that was the case, it was likely that Earth was done for already, that Orobos had finally lost.
Sunwhisper did not know the fate of Earth. All he knew was that he would do whatever he had to in order to prevent the Spiral Dragon, if it was the Spiral Dragon, from doing to Hollow what it had done to his home world. There was no one he could warn, no one who would understand or believe what was coming. Even he could not say exactly what would occur, as it seemed that the Dragon had adapted to the mechanics of this universe in its own way. But in his estimation, the particulars did not matter. This mission is what he had been created for, and the mission had not changed.
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Quest Update — The Source
The likelihood that Earth has fallen to the Spiral Dragon increases with each passing day. If Earth has or does fall, then the significance of your mission becomes all the greater. There truly is but one hope for the salvation of humanity, the Quintessence. Investigate the barbarian threat to ascertain whether or not the Goths have truly become tools of the Spiral Dragon. If they have, it will be up to you to decide whether the invasion is in its early stages, and can be cleared, or whether the Quintessence must be found before any action can be taken against the Spiral Dragon’s foothold on Hollow.
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