Chapter 01

INTERLOPERS

PART 1

At the end of it all, there is a victor, a champion of gluttony and excess who grew to heights unrivaled with every victim subsumed. A hole in space and time that had cannibalized all in it's wake, leaving naught but it and a sonnet of spaceships that had no right to be there.

Thirteen slate-gray Obelisks hovered just above the gravity lensing void in a spiral alignment, as if snaking around the spherical gap in physics, and at its head, an ark of a ship, housing the last vestiges of life in an environment without.

Eons of planning and patience had brought them to this point, the Cabal's last dance as it were. As commands were sent, the ballet began, and one by one, the monotone pillars slammed through the event horizon at near instantaneous light-speed, warping and rippling space with each plunge.

Thirteen spears against God were assembled, and thirteen blows were struck, until at last, a gasp was let, and the horizon rippled up and above the Ark, and the war between Fate and Will began proper.

Inside the black sphere, each of the thirteen Obelisks performed synchronized maneuvers, flipping direction near immediately to begin reversing at full light speed in each of their own quadrants.

Without exceeding light speed, which was fundamentally impossible, the hole in space and time was inescapable in such a direction, but that was never the plan.

An event horizon is the threshold of space and time, with their occupations reversing once crossed. Inside, time is traversed, and space is experienced, meaning their physical proximity to the mass at the center of the hole was as fixed as a countdown, ticking down with their descent, three minutes till total annihilation.

Yet, by reversing at such speeds, each of the thirteen Obelisks countermanded such a sentence, and proceeded to experience time in reverse, the original ball of red-hot fusion return to existence at the center of the hole, and consequently, causing the event horizon to collapse around them as if it never existed, which, technically, it hadn’t yet.

Three minutes and eight and a half seconds later, the first Obelisk felt the veil of time and space stretch across its sharpened beak, the dark void of nothing splitting as it dissolved to reveal a space beyond time.

Tearing itself into existence like magma into lava, the slate-gray spear ripped out of an identical singularity to the one it entered, and nearly collided with a solar mass orbiting just outside it, red hot and just as deadly as the dead one it had just escaped.

To the plasma-consciousness at the helm of the craft, there wasn't a single bit of input from its sensors that passed basic computation. Hastily dodging the flaming ball of fusion, it bought itself time to compose itself and try and make some sense of what it was seeing.

Behind it, a solar mass appeared to be fixed in a binary orbit with a black hole equivalent in size, but magnitudes larger in mass. By all means, it should have pulled everything else in, yet there was a sun, in the middle of its life-cycle, practically vibing around what should be instant obliteration.

Yet, it was what was in front of it that the Obelisk found most perplexing. In every direction was one of two things, land or water. While relatively far away, two-minutes and change until impact at light speed, it appeared that the entire space was enclosed in an inverse sphere filled with life and vegetation, leaving the Obelisk nowhere to go but ‘down’.

The situation was far from what had been expected, but the Cabal had been nothing if not thorough. Quickly altering its speed to control the atmospheric entry, the first Obelisk cut through the sky like a volcanic projectile, screaming and steaming as it adjusted its course to aim for one of the larger bodies of water, barely skirting a large island as it ‘landed’.

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It's impact on the coastline of the water-locked continent struck far shallower than one would have expected for such speeds, even as the Obelisk decelerated on its way down, but even then the crater formed was still large enough to be a new bay as the water crashed back into the void of its footprint.

“Touchdown.”

The ride had been rough, but for the first Obelisk, the work had only just begun. Taking only the smallest of moments to log it's successful arrival in stable conditions, it paused before amending its note.

“-Terrestrial Protocols Incongruent But Compatible. Adjusting.”

Taking advantage of the still swelling water in its crater, the Obelisk opened several hatches along its length, seamless doors retracting to release a swarm of drones, quickly pouring out from the sides of the ship and into the foamy waters below.

With more than a thousand deployed in a matter of seconds, the Obelisk snapped shut its exposed hatches just as the water began to ascend its hull. Wasting no time, it began to send commands through its wireless network, coordinating the mass of drones to act as a widespread surveillance and scouting apparatus, with the plasma-consciousness in the Obelisk synchronizing the tidal wave of inputs with as much ease as a spider sensing its web.

Swarming over the coastline like a murder of crows dense enough to be mistaken for clouds at a distance, the hundreds upon hundreds of drones zipped through foliage and fields alike, amassing a growing map of the land that would become their first Foothold.

However, only a couple hours in to it's exploration, an unexpected problem was rearing its head, and the plasma-consciousness at the helm had no idea what to make of it.

What had started as dismissible errors of individual drones had now escalated to several dozen disappearing from the network, while almost twice as many were either ignoring commands, or explicitly disobeying them. Neither was something a scouting drone should have had the capacity to do.

As more drones were rerouted to investigate the anomalies, the full picture started to come into view. A small portion of the drones were exhibiting hostile and self-destructive behavior, attacking other drones as they encountered them, or failing that, deliberately self-destructing to disable both.

To make matters worse, several of the rerouted drones also began to exhibit the renegade behaviors, meaning that more drones wouldn’t solve the problem. Additionally, the problem wasn’t isolated to a particular region, but rather, the issues arose at any point far enough from the Obelisk itself.

Further testing mapped the ‘safe’ radius to six kilometers, and after sending a high-speed drone to check, verified that the maximum was seven. Past that, the drone would ignore commands and begin to demonstrate excessive hostility.

Taking a moment to evaluate its options against the issue, the Obelisk opted to cull its losses for the moment. Without pause, a flurry of orange beams erupted from the walls of the structure, instantly smoldering every single drone, regardless of distance or obstacle.

Sinking back into its thoughts as numerous fires raged in the tree line, the Obelisk began troubleshooting its erroneous drones, hypothesizing what might be plaguing its control.

Disassembling, iterating, and reassembling, the Obelisk repeated the same scenario for days with little difference other than the slightest potential the erroneous range was expanding, but the variance was no more than a statistical anomaly, far from reliable data, so it began looking elsewhere.

Above it, the binary pair of sun and siphon spun at what approximated an eighteen hour cycle. When the sun was facing the Obelisk, it seemed to put out a fairly stable UV spectrum and the local atmosphere afforded a stable diffusion without greenhouse buildup.

The inverse, however, presented a far more unique set of circumstances. Most of the light and solar ejections on the side of the singularity found themselves trapped or consumed in the gravitational well. What little escaped the nightly eclipse found itself heavily redshifted and obscured by shadow, lending to an evening lit by blood, and a night darkest at the peak of the eclipse.

Despite it being a fairly backwards and improbable facsimile for a day-night cycle, the Obelisk found that it approximated it well enough to cultivate a sophisticated level of life, most of which had already been sampled from the nearby area.

Seven iterations of drones had been spent in as many days, the coastline now far more of a wreck than just a few burned trees. Most of the green foliage in a half-kilometer radius was either charred or trimmed to a stump, the temperate jungle floor now a field of debris and ash.

Yet, to the plasma-consciousness charged with the burdens it had, these were not losses, but rather learning experiences. Prior to its complete desolation, much had already been gleamed about the local environment from its waves of scouting drones. Numerous plants and marine life had already been cataloged and studied, with many more to go, and a litany of observations had been logged on both the airborne creatures in the skies above, along with the wider world at large.

The atmosphere was healthy, if a bit oxygen rich, and while the gravity seemed to be fluctuating slightly, it kept around twelve newtons. The world the Obelisk now found itself in was rabid with wildlife, and if visuals could be trusted, the occasional wind-driven vessels of wood and canvas had been spotted in the far distance, which indicated an even higher level of sophistication, sentient life.