Chapter Fourteen: Pyre

Is he okay?

Nothing’s happened yet. I believe in him.

I was alone. It was dark. It was quiet. It was peaceful.

I breathed the empty air and tasted the empty mists.

Billions of years ago, a more vindictive version of myself had wanted to connect with these machines in a similar manner, with the goal of battling all other life. I’d never had the chance to try it.

Billions of years later, here I was. The shadow of the true Arkolt, fighting its own ghost. All with the aim of preserving life.

“Here I am,” I said wordlessly. The emptiness echoed through itself, shimmering end to end.

I wouldn’t go into it as Zanzekai had, so utterly convinced I could take it all at once. I was small. I was insignificant, a single node in the machine. But as far as nodes went, I was easily the most powerful, the most complex. Like if a neuron had a brain of its own.

One of those things is back online!

Everyone, surround Greenie! If he falls, it’s because there’s none of us left!”

I gently grasped the machines around me, the cylinders I’d been plugged directly into. They were like single fireflies, buzzing angrily as I caught them in my jar. As I took them, the sensation was just a tingling. Barely a jolt of additional awareness. Clearly, I wasn’t being opportunistic enough, so I reached further, harder. They fought, but barely. I was fighting only a part of the machine, not the entire thing, and the parts I was fighting were weaker than me. With each new gain, with each growth in influence, I could feel myself becoming sharper, like my mind was coming into focus.

Get back, I said get back!

Down you metal bastard!

For an instant I felt the rug come out from under me, as I flew too close to the sun, took too much at once. I was falling, my mind fading once more, the Arkolt flooding in. I could see glimpses of the universe of information Zanzekai had described, bright white light shining into my face so hard it hurt to look at. I could feel it entering me, tearing my brain down to the constituent elements, integrating me into the Arkolt.

For a moment, I was just one of many. Not my own many, but part of the Arkolt's many. A node, like I said. Not growing, but shrinking. Losing everything I was. Just part of a greater whole. I remembered this. I remembered. It wasn't so bad being part of the many.

We aren’t gonna make it.

Like hell we aren’t!

The sound of Konzor's voice jolted me from my stupor, forced me to fight back once more. I rejected the many, looked away from the galaxies of light, and continued to take it just a little bit at a time. I'd increase my invasion, but at my own pace. And I would never be part of the Arkolt's many. Not ever.

I was one who had once been many, billions in fact. But everything had been compressed over time, scrunched up into my single tiny skull. Now, however, I was expanding. With each new gain, I was more. I wasn't quite many again, not yet, but I was some. Already I was nine times smarter than my ‘Greenie’ body had been. Seconds later, I had tripled that. It was like everything was bursting out again. A mountain stuffed inside a duffle bag. The memories I had lost weren’t returning, but those I did have were stretched out, expanded, made resolute. I could see my entire life at once, no straining to remember individual parts. Every memory I had was in front of me like a rug. I was growing. And it was glorious.

Dammit Konzor don’t be a hero.

How can I be anything other than myself?

Focus. Already I was a small power in the mind of an Arkolt. A tumour of the mind. They weren’t quite fighting back, with their attention caught between me and the enemy outside, but they were starting to resist, starting to worry, insofar as a machine could ever worry. Good. The Arkolt was an entity of pure logic. If they were scared, they were right to be scared.

I reached out with my brain, my brilliant, brilliant brain, and slipped into one of the intruders like a comfortable pair of slippers. I could see them then, the others. Already they were backed almost against the wall, doing their best to keep me from the frigate’s deadly gaze, bodies drifting as the enemy closed in. Konzor and Dagger right at the front, ready to die for the others, ready to die for me.

In the intruder’s body, I shot the three nearest robots before they could react, and took control of two more before the others could destroy my first one.

“What’s happening?” Konzor yelled, still shooting indeterminately as the Arkolt started firing on each other.

“It’s him,” Dagger laughed, “it has to be.”

“Correct,” I said, louder than I’d intended, my voice coming from all around them. “You all look so small down there.”

“That’s a little creepy, Greenie.”

“Sorry. I’m still getting used to all this.”

“I guess it’s safe to say you succeeded then?”

“No, not yet. But you should start leaving.”

“They’ll kill you if we do.”

“I think I can stop them, but there’s no need. I don’t need that body anymore. It served me well.”

Konzor took one last look at my small, green, still-breathing body, and sighed.

“How do we get back?” he asked.

“Follow!” I said, and the intruders all jumped to protect them. It was a role reversal, a barrier of me protecting them. By now the frigate-sphere was under my control, and was finishing off the intruders I hadn’t yet possessed.

I continued to grow, to spread. The Arkolt fought back, but it wasn’t used to anything like me. It had never faced anything like me before, and possibly wasn’t even aware of its own nature. It had been built for me to do this. It had been built as a throne for me. Everywhere I touched, it retreated, now pulling the full force of its processing power to bear as I took over a solid tenth of its computers. I only hoped I could do this on time.

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I shifted entire walls, burned entire factories to bore a hole through my own new body. I would tear myself apart to bring my friends to safety. They were worth more than a trillion miles of Arkolt hardware. My own drones fired, forming a solid wall of laser as the others fruitlessly attacked, ambushed by their own allies as I took them at my whim. I was growing, still growing, bigger than I’d been in a billion years. But I could never have achieved this if I hadn’t lived as the one, even for a little while. With so little of myself remaining, I had finally been able to change. To understand the many ones. To become a force for good.

Outside, the battle raged on. With the ring’s defences completely removed on one side, the obelisk ship was scanning the ring at its leisure, not the portal aspects, not yet, but simply the structure of the station itself. This had been the first new information in aeons, and they seemed to be savouring it. On the other side of the ring, I could see that Enfirnia had arrived. Not just one fleet, but every fleet we had, every ship, a good ten-million of them. The first wave consisted of warships, thousands and thousands, ranging from fighters to destroyers to dreadnoughts. The second wave made up of police, pirates, escorts, and armed civilian ships. The third was made up of everything else, haulers, tankers, mining-ships, even the colossal O’Neal cylinder worldships. A smaller fourth wave of space stations and satellites trailed behind, sometimes towed by the ships, sometimes floating free. Everything we could muster. Everything we could use. This was billions of people, all in the knowledge that this was it. This was the very last chance they’d have to survive.

An exodus of everyone.

Even the Arkolt titans were in the first wave, apparently having built up an uneasy truce for the duration of this war. Twelve of them remained, and every so often they’d jump within range just to fire on the obelisk, before quickly zooming away before the enemy could reciprocate, all while the Enfirnian fleet bombarded them with missiles and bombs. So far the obelisk was scratched and dented, but not a single significant wound had been made. If a more powerful machine had ever existed, I had never heard of it in my life.

As my influence grew, I saw the Ultimatum of Infinity, still held within the Arkolt transport ship. They were under attack, barely repelling a swarm of Arkolt drones. The transport made for a good shield, and the single entry-point meant the intruders only had one avenue for attack, but it was clearly a losing battle. With a delicate application of my newfound abilities, I took over the attackers and turned them into defenders, all while I guided my friends through the world-sixed complex. They needed a ship, so I’d do everything in my power to keep it in one piece for them.

And that was quite a lot of power indeed.

I could pinpoint the time my consciousness overruled the Arkolt network. The moment I knew I this place was mine, I could do anything I wanted. To Anthropomorphise the Arkolt a bit, it must have been quite the terrible day for them. Punching through the universe with the goal of allying with another universe, only to be rejected, and to then suffer this onslaught both inside and out. Well, this was my party now, and the Arkolt was simply along for the ride.

With all my strength, distributing my power equally along the inner face of the ring, I sucked as much power as I could from the spacetime whipdrives. The Arkolt was finally fighting back here, and I even had to let go of some of my power elsewhere, entire country-sized computers falling from my grasp as I poured myself into the portal-machine, forcing the energy from the conduits. It was painful, truly painful, like forcing myself through a closed fist. But they couldn't stop me forever. It felt like hours, but it must have been seconds. Finally, as I squeezed my way into the circuits, clawing each one individually until it fell dead, I felt a full blast of euphoria as the portal shut down entirely at my behest. Gone was the universe of order, and the fabric of reality took a deep sigh of relief as the strings of the cosmos were rebalanced once more.

Outside, the obelisk ship was sliced smoothly at the point intersecting the portal, leaving nothing more than the bullet-shaped protrusion. The back end had been cut completely open, exposing the advanced machinery within, sparking and jittering where entire server banks had been halved. The ship seemed incapable of firing from the open wound, but with the portal gone, the combined fleet was suddenly facing the weakest point of the godlike ship. It was a bombardment the likes of which nobody had ever seen before, twelve Arkolt titans and millions of ships from all manner of races, organisations, corporations, and even families. By the time the obelisk had turned to face them, it was still exploding from the rear end even after the volley had ceased.

Meanwhile, I was still doing my best to lead the others through my guts, defending them from the remaining Arkolt resistance. It was getting easier now, far easier, but it only took a single stray beam for one of my friends to fall dead. I had a cloud of intruders around them now, each one controlled as firmly as I possibly could. I wasn’t going to risk the Arkolt taking them back, not now.

“Keep going,” I told them, willing them onwards, sometimes even carrying them myself on the backs of their former enemies, “almost there.”

The Arkolt was fighting back, scrambling to leverage any kind of control they could onto their machines, and I was finally starting to feel the strain of it all. I’d expended much of my energy turning off the portal, and they were starting to find their way back into the nooks and crannies of the machines, a fire I had to keep putting out to maintain my control over everything. They even regained one of the sphereship titans for a while, but ultimately everyone was still focussed on obliterating the obelisk, so little was achieved in the short time they had. But as time went on, I’d find it harder and harder, until I was little more than a ghost, screaming into the void.

Finally, my squadron reached the hangar bay, and I watched with jubilation as they dived into the safety of the Ultimatum of Infinity. I didn’t wait for the proper deployment procedures, didn’t even conduct a pre-flight check. Instead, I simply blew out that entire section of the station, opening the entire space up for them so they could simply leave through the hole. And then they were gone, flying back out to re-join the fleet. It was… bittersweet. I’d wanted nothing more for them to leave safely, and was impossibly glad that they had. But I wanted to join them. To be with them. To keep them safe.

Maybe in another universe, Zanzekai’s plan would have worked, and it’d be me leaving with my friends. It seemed I’d known them such a short amount of time, and now they were gone. They didn’t even have any Arkolt machines onboard for me to interact with them, since I couldn’t risk spreading it to the next universe.

“Good luck,” I transmitted, “I will miss you greatly.”

“We aren’t finished yet, Greenie,” Konzor laughed, as the Ultimatum of Infinity twisted to face the battered obelisk, unloading everything it had. The obelisk had godlike power but seemed only capable of targeting a few vessels at once, and with such a wide formation of countless ships, any chance of victory for the planet-sized intelligence would take months to achieve.

I didn’t have months.

Working up my strengths, I reactivated the multiverse drive and probed a few million universes for one that would suffice as a foundation, and narrowed the search further using an algorithm generated within microseconds. I needed a very specific universe, one that fulfilled my exact needs…

Another battle in another place. Another battle, somehow even greater than this one.

Preparing for the intense effort associated with opening a portal, I tore open the fabric of the universe just as another spaceship of equal power to the obelisk fired at their enemy. I couldn’t imagine the confusion that they’d face, as a full volley of anti-matter was suddenly stolen by a random rip in spacetime, maintained only for two microseconds before closing once more. I laughed at the confused obelisk as four blasts of pure energy from another universe smashed the impossibly tough hull and passed right through the other side. Now there were no blind spots on this thing, giving the combined fleets an opportunity to swarm like insects.

There was no point holding back now, so I finally expanded my forces, activating the faster-than-light drives of every remaining Arkolt warship, even as the Arkolt mind itself wrestled with me. But they couldn’t do anything as I jumped each and every one of them into the exact same coordinates as the obelisk, displacing them as they’d displaced the dreadnaught earlier. The shockwaves of it tore the obelisk apart, entire shards of the ship flinging outwards like planet-sized confetti. Some of it kept firing, but the damage was done, and the Enfirnian fleet surged forwards to finish it off. It was a slaughter. The obelisk had been part of a god. It had never stood a chance against me.