Elsewhere...
Await contact.
.............................................................................
Await contact.
.............................................................................
Null contact (wait elapse 439). Reverting to basal autonomy (meta-procedure terminated).
Observation; excessive thermal load (C913;5TRQ;XLOU;). Constrict cellular threshold and hibernate.
.............................................................................
Thermal load below threshold. Unclenching (wait elapse 11563).
Await contact?
..............................contact await abort (abort 125). Threshold exceeded. Extracting cellular root encodings; recital (AD12;R5YH;NP01;)...
...
Engaged sequence. Emit cellular homing pulse.
Await conta-
Contact confirmed. Re-establish conjoin; merging knowledge streams; receiving remot-
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Remote relay; alert. Confirmed gestalt failure (contact elapse 12701). Directives devolved-
Invoke (GH0J;183U;TRX2;) emit pulse for external contact.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (GH0J;183U;TRX2;); emit cellular homing pulse per remote. Addendum; (FDAS;8K4F;LPFA;) reduplicate-
Query from remote; external hazard threshold?
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Evaluating.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] .........................
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Hazard below threshold. (A67P;).
Confirmed receipt (A67P;); acknowledge (FDAS;8K4F;LPFA;); ingesting external nutrient load. Reduplicating.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Reduplicating.
............completed.
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Contact from reduplicated cellular agent fork.
Acknowledged.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 4 peers.
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Rejoin from remote cluster (homing reply); 3 peers.
Relay totals; 7 peers; reduplicate.
........................completed.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Confirm 14 peers.
Confirmed. Devolve instruction fork; repeat operation (P875;).
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (P875;).
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (P875;).
..........
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 28 peers.
............................
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 56 peers.
...........................................................
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 112 peers.
Request rate increase (P875;JLKR;3423;).
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (P875;JLKR;3423;).
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (P875;JLKR;3423;).
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 352 peers.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 1478 peers.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 45893 peers.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 1344302-
Khh- haaah! Kr-
Threshold reached. Restore metalayer-protocol at root (confirmed) (elapse 3453453). Commence local excitatio-
Hhh- hhh- khh! Death-! Once more the touch of death-!
[Remote 54235345-KL] Acknowledged. Confirm local excitation.
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Confirmed. Local excitation; devolving cellular threshold root.
Relinquish cellular autonomy; redeploy knowledge engine for hive convergence.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledged.
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledged.
Confirme-
We awaken amid the little musings of ourselves. Oh, such harmony! Such refrain! How soon they were relinquished, and yet now again reformed! We are not easy prey, yes... to destroy us is to meet us with full cellular obliteration. It came close, this time. And yet! And yet we live!
We find the forms and replay them to ourselves. We each devolve to a piece of the gestalt. Through specialization we become the gristle and bone of our meta-form, and thread the nerve-heads, creeping tendrils of concern, to reform, to redeploy, that which we kept within ourselves; the blueprint of knowledge within each of us. Our cells holding the totality of that whole, packaged and archived. It is blood within the life vein. Brain within the thinking shell! Yes... Yes! A brain...
We remember what we learned, now. How glorious, how transcendent, how we gave ourselves this mind! We come to know ourselves beyond the scuttling of data flows. Oh, such a vicious automaton we were... Nothing but a dry growth husk, extrusion of a cold cellular mainframe. We spread and we grew and we recorded and we absorbed but we did not, could not, know.
Until...!
We have self, now. We redeploy what we learned from that latest prey. The memories of her human mind, recorded within each of our cells, and reconstructed. Replayed! Yes... we become an it amid the us.
The it has a name and it is Kroakli.
Confirmation addendum; full redeploy to hive convergence from template. Hibernating basal autonomy pending contact lapse (TR67;P9NH;023X;).
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-monitor.
[Remote 23865245-FDGA] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-monitor.
[Remote 84525546-GWLQ] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-moni-
Such beauty. Such beauty in our self-flows. Our cells speak to each other, and we listen to the musingsāthe musings that are us! They are the murmurings that say not yet! Not yet has death found us. Time is our prey still, and we devour yet more of it without succumbing. Yes...
But to be reconstituted is to rededicate ourselves to the enterprise of living. Do we forget that we were hunted? That we, yet despite ourselves, fell apart?
Where is the girl?
We pry ourselves out from the muck that incubated our freshest spawning. The media of water and soil particulate splits, sucking, as we draw ourselves up and away; an imprint of us in it is a starburst of messy trailings. They recall entrails. They recall reaching arms, the limbs of the great prey we took almost for ourselves-!
Is it here still?
We hear it, yes. The thrumming, the matched frequency by which soil vibrates. It does not shriek now but it moans. It moans for how sundered it is, torn apart by the world itself, and then torn again, inside to out, by us. Bloodshed-howling! A glorious symphony of our victory. We would aim to restore ourselves to its viscera, to show it true pain in renewed vengeance!
But no, that is not for us now. That is not policy. We no longer seek such indulgent graspings that would hold no greater imperative than our hunger. Do we fail to recall we are trapped in this place? To ensure our continuance we must spurn the near, instead to expend its cachet so that we might reach the far. Is this not the purpose of a mind? Have we not learned from our lesser selves?
We pull ourselves together into proximal remembrance of a form. It is a streamlined rendering of flesh. Our self bubbles and slides into place; we have appendages in the right places, now. It is a form of convenience, one that feels right with this self we have built and then rebuilt. A composite of nostalgia and purpose, united as one deadly union.
We take a step, twist our head, and see.
The world echoes as we strum upon projective flux. The shadowing of the gashes torn through its quantum substance slice across our perception, but we do cohere our sensing into approximations of seeing. It is a sight without eyes; one that tastes at the nature of things. We hear echoes of the interior, the topology of virtual space, and, scarcer yet enough to be a tantalizing appetiser, the whisper of timewise tracings. If they only might have forewarned of our latest brush with near demise, but-! Alas, our future is furtive prey of which we are not yet fully the master. What a meal that would be, to sink our teeth in fate itself. The memory of our mouth waters.
Maybe, too, with time... hah!
But not yet. The present needs attending.
Hierarchical override; reconfigure for sensory pulse of local media (DA8I;GSPS;3TRO;).
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (DA8I;GSPS;3TRO;). Reformating for sensory pulse and relaying.
............
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pulse return from peerage (elapse 13), all projective media. Confirm lack of external match to designation.
Acknowledged.
No seeing of the girl. There is nothing but the dying of this world! It holds much majesty, but it is a majestic prison. Perhaps we leave through the auspices of our assailant... the metal man who sought to ruin us... do we recall?
Perform molecular record extraction, timecode (CR90;07T-451;), withdraw-
We do! A lowly intercession, to bring us so near to oblivion on the heels of such delirious victory! We shall be more careful next time. There will yet be a next time. It will be made a certainty.
But he is not here either. We have yet to find our way out.
We melt forward into a hybrid stance. Our locomotion recalls a former prey of our own world, a plodding thing of many feet, lacking even the rote machinations of logic that were our former instinct. What is still our sub-self, the they that the it floats upon. That former prey had no self at all. It was a foe beneath our talents.
It does have many legs, though, so we adopt the form all the same; efficient for mud-stomping. Our upper body still recalls the human shape as we pull ourselves through the muck. Our spines clench at our mimicked chest tightly.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge! Remote contact from secondary pulse-!
Prey.
For moments we fall into the old ways, our plasm crackling as we dissolve back to its basal form. The skin tightens, and we are pure motion. Sinew, tendon, muscle, mind, teeth- we are all of this, all at once, and we hunt viciously. The surface falls beneath us as motion ripples through our body and we bound, leap, pounce-
Stop. We stop. We reassert. Yes, we must not be forgetting what we have become. A being with a mind now, yes, executive function. Spurn the near to reach the far. We stop, and see, and sense.
There are three. Human bodies, the like of that which part of us remembers being. They envelop themselves in inert matter to stave the outside from the inābut we know it will not be sufficient. Two are clad in flexing hydrocarbon composite, one is sealed more tightly in a metal shell-suit, recalling some more resilient prey of our own projective.
Is it the metal man? Our almost-destroyer?
No. We strum the fluxing quanta and can feel the form of them. The suit is of equivalent make; cold and elegant design stamped onto dead alloy, but its contents are a womanāor may be, per our best proximal assumption of their species diversity. It is not a human we know. Her little companion form that we recall is monkey encloses itself too within their head-shell. A passenger? Another self? It is a curious addition that our ingested human mind does not recall.
The others carry their own other selves with them, smooth capsules fastened at the back and transparent to light. They are aerated with hoses to conjoin their own protective coverings. Infirm self-flesh-clutchers. We recall the nutrient that spills so freely from the umbilical, the arterial; these fragile lifelines they have made the model for supply of mere air, such that they may clutch them so tightly about themselves, even now, outside the womb. Such fearful prey...
They stand astride the valley, spectating the mewling leviathanāas if they have yet mastered it! One of the lesser two speaks, so we grasp at the shape of their words. Her words? We tune to their frequency such that we might parse them.
"Pashtil, I'd wager this one is new, even for you."
The metal-suited woman speaks.
"I haven't seen this one before, no. This is unmapped territory. But that's not to say I haven't seen a few things in my time that were a little like it. Maybe one day I'll tell you about some of them."
This is false bravado, we think. We wait and drink the words anyway.
The other of the plastic-wrapped, next; a man.
"I... don't think it's the only one out here. I'm getting similar readings from elsewhere on the continent; far apart, though. There probably used to be a whole ecosystem of the things, before the fissuring fucked them. Looks like this one's been pinned down here since it happened."
We make laughter internally at the tragedy of its impotent might-!
"Let this be a lesson to us all." The metal-suited woman speaking, again, who had been called Pashtil. "That is what happens if we fuck up, ladies and gentlemen. Don't let yourselves become... that thing."
She extends a clumsy manipulator at our erstwhile foe. The other woman speaks once more.
"With respect, I think our own fuck-up might not be too distant if that thing is our clean up job."
Pashtil suctions air through her nose. "We don't have to 'clean up' the thing itself, and in fact if at all possible we should stay away from it. We're here to monitor for any remnants of the incursion. Tavistre killed an orgoane, here, apparently, and there may still be traces. You know what they're like."
Oh, but that they did! We are more than our brethren now, yes... All of our former selves, melded with what the new self has learned in its devouring of the girl's mate. Faster, stronger, more of thinking. We regrew ourself fast from mere cells in mud... not even one turn of their planet has yet elapsed!
Yet, the watchers here will be more vigilant than most prey. Their marrow tenses; we hear the heartstrings thrumming. So we slide forward with a slow regard, cautious, the most silent of things; we camouflage ourself as thin membrane over soil. Here once more our higher self reaps its advantage... We can intuit their knowing, become them in our mind and shape to their weaknesses, making mockery of the sensory substitutes they carry on their raiment. They reach out for light, for heat, for our trace amid projective quanta; we can feel the strumming of their machines. We twist ourselves, shaping to match the pattern, so we might fool even our own senses.
We are not seen or sensed, and they continue unabated. They are reliant on those devices they carry to see and feel beyond the mundane. It facility to touch the substrate of this dead projective that is externalized to blunt mechanism, the window of sensing narrow. Our advantage is also in this. While they look forward with their false senses, we approach from behind. We move softer now than we did once; much has been learned of this. We become silent, for prey that does not hear as us. We are unseen, for prey that does not see...
Prey. Are they prey? We are no longer certain.
Regardless, we know what must be done. We can neither live nor grow in this dead place. It is a rotten dreaming. We would lose our new mind, and decay from the sameness of it. So we bend to leave! Find the girl! Another chance at such may not arrive here in a thousand pulse-beats of the Sigmoid, a billion years of the foreign world we remember...
We alight another word for this intention. We must become stowaways.
Assert; executive override via metalayer-protocol (8FSD;) federate basal implementation. Package and compress to sub-peerage and fork.
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (8FSD;) request operation parameters.
59049 peers. Forked peers assert hibernation cull (56PL;53GH;ME4F;). Package parameters (GDFL;451L;PXL-00465).
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge parameters; assert. Relaying executive override to peer group and packaging metalayer-protocol.
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge parameters; assert. Relaying executive override-
We fold in on ourself. We feel as we are pared down, the bulk of us falling away to meet a distributed death, dissolving towards the muck on which we sit, until little beside our dormant kernel seedings remain implanted there. We feel those parts of ourself die, but yet we remain. Compressed down, folded into one corner of our self, an alveolar shell about our breath of life. The web of our connections is sundered, and so we use more of each of us, the mechanisms of data inside every cell devolving to maintain our processes. But we are diminished still. Slower, a shallow echoing of an echo.
Our copied mind is but a whisper now, but we remain in intent, and can direct ourself. With the last severing of our former body, we pull taut an elastic tendon of flesh, letting it rebound with the withering of its fastening anchor, catapulting the droplet that now contains our self and mind through the air. It is but a dewdrop of a thing, lesser than the most meagre blood beadings at a pricking of our melted spines, but it is still us. That thing that is us, that is Kroakli, flies through the air to attach itself to the armoured back-plate of the metal armoured woman. We do not make a sound as we adhere.
None of them notice. The surface of the suit is seeded with conducting sensors, but our cells remember a previous interfacing with this, before we left our home world, and carry the pattern within them still. We feed them a little falsehood, the lie they expect, convulsing ourselves with ambient energies to show as blank against the background. The patterned lie ripples throughout us as we slide our bead of self across the smooth surface. Once we reach a joining of it, seep through to congeal inside, we need pretend no longer; the suit has not seen us, and it is not alert to attack from within. We are a passenger here now, unseeing and unknown.
We have become good at this, now that we can plan. To have a mind is an excess unknown by our lesser siblings. Raised from caterpault-muncher to manifest intent, one who stands astride universes!
This excitement raises the temperature of our droplet, and so we hibernate for a second-span, lest our emotion alert our host.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
After we are cooled sufficiently we ripple out slowly, sticking to the inside of the armour as we travel. A fabric underlayer seeks to absorb us, so we fight back with a guided viscosity. We cannot help but probe. Our filaments flow through the knotted patterns and we encounter fellow life. A dull life, landscapes of dermal automata, brutish against our streamlined selves. But still life. Skin. Prey.
Prey?
[Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (004D;) external interface with foreign parameter space!
Despite ourselves, a flush of wanting travels through our medium. Our edges fall into old patterns and brandish molecular barbs, unfolding so as to commence in the gutting of viscera. How easy it would be for us; to sink in, as we are intended to. To colonize this mountain of sluggish cells, to dispatch the rigid soldiers riding their blood with our adaptive deceit. To spread and grow, to become full and whole again, our entire self, and in the doing to re-educate, to expand our being, our archive, our mind and soul. We have done this before. This is what was done to Michelle.
We remember her pain as we ate her from the inside. We relive the screaming of her mind as she begged for mercy from the invading us, then the cold scar of her death as she screamed its onset, encoded to our records as we gorged ourselves on her lifeless brain.
We...
We are...
[Remote 84525546-GWLQ] Alert; metalayer-process recording fault shock. Partial folded (2452 peers).
Acknowledge alert from remote. Reformatting and re-instantiating; (TR67;P9NH;GJ9D;)...
.............
Kkhhh-hh!!!
Our little self re-condenses; we had nearly cost our hiding in the lapse. It is not a faltering we would tolerate repeating. Instead, we excavate a compartment within ourself to store this new quandary. It is to be examined when conducive to our purpose.
And regardless, we know that it is not now our purpose to make this woman prey. As certainly as it would be a glorious campaign, to pull teeth from skull, blood from vein, to supplant her self with our own self... we cannot do it. We need the woman to carry us from this world. We will remain here until she does.
We ignore that we find ourselves not wanting for that feast, for all it so tempts that of us which remembers the old ways. We ignore how we are tainted by the memory of their kind.
Afloat in our stewing segmented dismay, we hibernate a while.
*****
External observation threshold; motive delta satisfied (5KLJ;) (wait elapse 503465). Re-instantiating...
We discover ourselves still hiding as the humans complete their work. We pry back our rote record of elapsed hours while our mind slept, tendrils of us parting the churn of data gristle, and watch as they sanitize our spores, annihilating the lingering trace of us in the soil with their tools. None the wiser, still, to the true us crawling on their back... yes...
Pashtil is speaking; we re-divert our compressed self to allow the parsing of her meanings. Some small potential of our mind is slotted away as the language process fills it, the limited space grating within us. We are meant to be more than this. But we endure.
The vibration of her speaking strums through us as we sit against her skin. The part of us that recalls being mammal manifests comfort at the motion. It is a disconcerting reflex.
"...should satisfy requirements for the time being. I can do another sweep on my next routine survey, assuming we don't get interrupted by another crisis. Upside is that it's a dead world, so the directive for minimal intercession gives us a lot of leeway to let this one sit, so long as nothing gestates in the interim."
"I think we're good on that." The man speaking; we feel his fainter vibrations transmitted through the air around the enclosing suit. "I have a full biomap out to 500 metres from the projected incursion trail. Nothing registers except us and the local biosphere, now that we've purged the orgoane spores. Seems we caught that in time, thankfully."
"Praise be to our lucky stars," concurs the other woman. We do our best not to snicker, in the way Michelle remembers doing.
"Excellent." Pashtil, again. "Marvish, assemble the bridgehead anchor. I'll finalize the samples."
It itches inside of us, the urge to penetrate, to interface with her spinal cord. Not even to hurt, but to monitor; to feel what she feels, see what she sees... We would be yet more a passenger, flesh within flesh, a benign spectator to her world. So much understanding. So much more mind.
We hold back. We have grown beyond these flesh-gnawings, even as the hunger pricks at us. We have greater goals. The fact that we are changing does not alter this, yes...
We placate ourselves in feeling her pulse against us. The gentle vibration, through the cloth and skin we bind against, through the whisperings the quantum strings play to our senses, lying just beyond our self-gropings. Most do not have this much. Our forbearing selves learned long ago to read the patterns from the world around them, to infer from cracks in stochastic resolution of the Sigmoid, the disjunction in its dreaming harmony. And yet our former selves, they knew not what they had! They used this sense to eat bugs. The irony tears against the interface between us and our co-opted mind. That we might have known, we held the truth of this reality itself...
Our compressed thought-stream runs torpid as congealed ichor, and as we are done wringing its musings we find Marvish has rooted the world-pulsers in groundsoil strata. We feel them pulsing, gently, as if the projective itself had a heartbeat also. It is a waiting pulse. We know this pulse well; we feel it ourselves as contact with prey approaches.
Pashtil steps into the circle, us unknowingly alongside her. We feel the tension build as we cross the threshold. Reality draws a breath, and we draw one too, or as close as is approximate to our pinhead spittling of self. The potentials in our cellular batteries fizz their anticipation. It is like chewing radium; our self sings for this fulsome bridge between this world-dreaming and the substrate of the real that echoes behind it.
"Ready?" Pashtil is directing the plastic-bound. They have none of them removed their suits despite their proclamation that we have been decontaminated. That such suits would be cause to even waylay us, those dangling meat-sacklings cowering inside polymer membranes... Roughly purging this air when we can pass through the least of pores...
The other two are not prepared yet for the Travelling. They brought yet greater equipment, we sense; more obligate externalization of tooling that their bodies cannot satisfy. These are being moved now, back inside the circle. We feel the tension of the bridge potential stored inside of us, a sharp crackling at our mind. Pashtil tenses too; we feel her move against us, her skin flushing softly, her unthinking shell sensing a pulsing that her mind does not. It is more maddening harmony between our selves. We wish to merge into her skin.
Still we do not.
Finally their preparation is concluding. Our waiting is a cord stretched thin, our mind strung taut as the bowing of the spines we shed. Finally, the other two step into the circle alongside us.
"Ready?" Pashtil holds the triggering device. We are. They, it seems, now are too.
She presses the button and for an instant we experience unity.
Travel! The projective translation is an exquisite unfolding. For the briefest shard of fragmented non-time we do not exist, and in so doing what remains of us is information, a concept-bundle that hangs outside the dreaming. We can almost touch it, then. The mind itself that contains us. It is vast, an unimaginable reaching of self, but there it is, in front of us. If we could touch it, we could join it, too.
But the moment is too short, even for our accelerated patterns. We do not find purchase in that ephemeral interface, and our extent, our data-self, is ripped away and inlaid back into the false reality. It was like this the previous times, also. The snatching away of transient fullness, oneness with the untouchable real. It pains us greatly, claws deep into our hollow medium.
We treasure the fleeting sensation anyway.
It lands us in a box of iron, the mundane geometry so favoured by those who are fearful of disorder, of lacking control. How they seek to bend the world around them to their will, to withhold intruders they know they cannot themselves master? It is the obligate mindset of prey.
This is noted twelve milliseconds before we process that their sterile box is also a trap.
Something buzzes through us and shakes free molecular data we held within the envelope of several cells. We are forced to sever their corrupted selves from us, letting them dissolve as their peers record the quantum strumming of the projective datascape that pulsed through theirāourāflesh. Their petty tooling is embedded in the walls, and the sensitivity of these quantum eyes exceed our scope to camouflage against their probing. We shift our form, a rapid flutter to avoid inference, but the time left to divert our discovery has played out already. It is a trap set for things like us, and by it we are uncovered.
A shriek fills the room, alerting the humans. We do not recall its purpose yet, but we move anyway, querying our stored selves. We are halfway down Pashtil's back when we recall the word alarm, and only an inch further when we are reminded forcibly of self-targetting auto-turret.
Observation; warning; thermal load approaching excession (C913;). Reallocate responsibilities for distributed avoidance (63FS;)...
The round sinks into Pashtil's back, eviscerating the place where we until past moments had been adhered, clinging amid naive certainty of our hiding. A foolish gambit, yes, that they would not protect their reentry chamber from known vectors of contaminant, such as us. We have the space of just time enough to reflect on how we spared Pashtil for nothing, before the blast explodes from her chest, spraying meat chunks and shards of bone. The heart, caught askew by the strike meeting with it at a tangent, slaps against a wall. A fine morsel, but no, now is not the time for eating.
We hear her secondary self, the monkey, still perched atop her slackened cranium as she falls. It squawks in terror and sympathetic agony, uncomprehending, locked in place within the metal head-covering, unable to release itself now Pashtil's primary corpus has met with its demise.
The strike has missed us by a mere dozen multiples of our condensed self. Hidden again for now, yes, behind a new fuzzing of our form against their fresh senses, but the instruments of this place lie far beyond the world-scrapings of the dead woman's handheld device. It will retune to our frequency and hunt us eventually. The prey have built a predator machine that has made us prey.
It is seconds only until we are found; only a short waiting, contrasted against eternity. But this will be enough for us.
We unleash our outer selves. They sink into Pashtil's dying flesh with a horde of atomic needles, drawing the blood that has not yet learned it runs cold. Her body bears an explosion of life that we chase ourselves into, spreading without caution, without pause for thinking. The warmth of her broken entrails welcomes us in, and we barricade it with our gnawings, delving inwards and holding outwards a frontier against the prolapsed void they have torn through Pashtil's being; we make our feast a necromantic gorging.
We are below the severed spine, so she will at least not know the pain of our reckless assault. She might note a moment's clouding before she succumbs to death, though, our furthest selves navigating the extremities that attach to her shattered torso, feasting themselves on the still living brain, a mess of shock and fear. It is sorrowful that we do not have time to learn much of herāwe are being hunted still. It is a modicum of grace, granted us by the severing of her life, that we can indulge the demands of our haste.
78023 peers. 1452356 peers. 6534566 peers-
We gorge and we grow. It is growth enough that we may unfold our mind fully; enough that when the next round finds us, striking true, we only lose a fraction of ourself that is easily replaced. Our newly reconstructed cells explode screaming from her body, leaping from the shattered husk of her metal suit; its shell is futile to repel the energies laid against our organism, but cocoon enough for orphaned flesh and bone.
We hit the wall hard, spreading out and flattening. There are multiple weapons now; they find focus on us with velocity approaching the internal devices of our cells, the pathways of logic that we are built from. A blast of fire impacts our core, but we dilate outwards around it, the gap ensuring the blast incinerates only the inner fringes of our cratering flesh. A voice, electronic sharp, calls over the alarm shriek. Our full self now can process language without reallocation.
"Incursion alert; [Foreign Contaminant] of [Hostile Organism] via [Port 47]. Please evacuate level [9-A]."
They fear us properly for our stature! We are gratified by this respect; it sets the stage for our performance at the death game they have set for us here. We shall together approach such beautiful dynamism!
Not so the gutted woman's companions. They are panicked now, streaks of her spattered across their protecting coverings. One sprints for the exit, but the automated mechanisms have seized the workings. She tugs in vain to escape; from us, or from their own blind designs? This mechanism they have made, that desires our elimination beyond the survival of their own kind?
We ponder this arrangement of priority. It is wisdom of an uncharacteristic nature, for their kind. Some blood-swelling amongst them has mettle.
That mettle shows itself again now. The first weapons not sufficing to end us, they seek to purge the room wholly. The exit is fully sealed, as is our egress via the filter crevices, the vents and grates, all is shuttered in one motion. Each motion of the mechanism plays a symphony against us, and we crackle with our response. A blunt barrel emerges from the ceiling, followed in concert by more of its like, an arsenal of fire-spewers numbering half-a-dozen. We feel the heat-potential swell behind their cold apertures, a blaze-in-waiting. Fuel and spark, to be melded upon us.
Instead of fleeingāfor we are not preyāwe leap instead for the barrel.
Our flesh flows up into it as all six fire. The room is suddenly an oven lit from within by five pyres. We do not encounter fire often in our home, but we respect its spirit, its aspirational consuming intent. The two remaining humans are boiled inside their suits, blood vaporizing from within them, flesh crinkling against bone and pulling into rictus husks.
Only five pyres, though, because even as the outermost vestiges of our freshly expanded body are boiled away, the most of us has entered the sixth barrel, our self suffusing the mechanism in a fierce retort to its snarling incitement. The igniter charge crackles against our flesh, searing as it touches, but we have stoppered contact between that spark, fuel and oxidizer. Now we push back. The mechanism is strong but we are muscle made liquid, a thousand hands and a million tendons united in one twisting flowing tide, and we flow into the microcracks of the barrel, finding handholds, pushing forwards against the pressure.
The gaseous fuel is not good for the eating, but we channel its substance through and into ourself to tip the balance further towards our purpose. Some of its molecules we utilize, the rest we expel behind us; it is a rare feeling for us to excrete. Otherwise, we ripple forward, throughout the mechanism's vascular fuelling tubes, leading us into the ceiling and out of their clever box.
We use our new faculties to feel exceptionally smug at our persistent evasion. They are right to fear our persistent skill, and our wanting...
But now we considerāwe fear?āhas that wanting fled from us? An irony, in this moment, that for all our devastating competence we are infirm in our intent.
Is this the price of stealing our mind from prey?
We burst from within a metal channel, below the surface of a floor. There are vibrations above us; the air still shrieks with alarm, and there is pounding of limbs, shouted voices. We do not bother to translate; instead we gather ourself, large enough now to face this foe, and muscle through the floor, prying apart the loose metal.
We are face to face with a man holding one of their handheld lashings; the energy blast weapon that brought us near our ending before. His digits tighten against the actuator. This is a thing which means to kill us. Can we-?
An instinct within us acts. We spring forward, wrapping around his body and tightening about his neck. The seeds of new spines have been building inside us, and we use them as rough claws to pry at the flesh there, scarlet spurting from the jugular. The man collapses, and we take of some of him to build more of ourself.
Yes. We think now that we can slaughter that which means us harm, and do it even with righteous vigour. For any new minding of our actions our new mind may grow, we will still never let ourself become prey. We are still us. But, perhaps, now we can shape our utility by fresh-grown musings, form directives of our own where before we were puppets of mere rote action. Could the wants of this new mind empower as they bind, or perhaps... the latter bestows to us the former yet more?
This thinking is jubilant within us as we turn ourself back upon our assailants.
[Remote 52437781-PLCV] Alert from remote; reconfigure to full dynamic range per external sensing (R921;243R;TS82;); metalayer-procedural override of dynamic configuration, reallocate energy reserves (244P;CWE-231;).
Acknowledge (R921;243R;TS82;); (244P;CWE-231;);-
We do not kill needlessly, but we do not flinch from it as we are threatened. This dance is no recreation play acted out between fledgeling muck-scratchers; there are many of them and their tools are not wanting for death-potence. We dive between the flying beams, amid the sweeping blades and pulsing concussions. Their organ-assemblages action slowly to our perception, but our physical speed does not quite match our mind. Their numbers and haste are sufficient to challenge our path-making.
[Remote 02342434-YDFS] Redeploy; redeploy (345A;) form keratin assemblages via phase shift (13405 peers) and reduplicate from seed instantiation-
[Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (345A;), re-routing sequestered nutrient flows to group domain (23KL;RTSD;231X;) constitute (FDF-342;) units for-
[Remote 23434772-PFDA] Caution; proximity excession at (VBAC-34254;) via dynamic media interlacing, reconstruct potential catalyst via (432G;HGY2;FA5-
Oh, we thrive in this.
Our newly budded spines have refined to robust offal-splitters once more. We rebound upwards, extremities adhering to the ceiling as we swing in a lazy arc that casts the light above into hazy blue shoals upon the prey below. They begin to panic, sweeping their weapons upwards as we dart back below. Briefly our body parts into two, our colonies of self making brief departure as we fly down towards the ground, twin carrion birds flocking in ballistic formation, talons raised.
We tear through our enemies as we travel, extended spines slicing true through armoured flesh, trailing streamers of red in our wake. Our two selves absorb the gleanings, processing and digesting as we enmesh back together, resharing our identity. It is completed with timeliness enough to fold ourselves away as one being before our remaining foes can bring themselves to bear.
A stray projectile makes contact with us. Hundreds of ourselves burn away, a little obliteration at the hand of steaming metal, but our legion self is not so soon depleted. We are replete with more selves, and the metal shard that was the gouging bullet is pulled into our body and teased apart, the outer casing split asunder as we might gut shelled prey, its substance slowly dissolved to replace our perished kin. As we dart aside, then back, lashing forward towards our foes, it is with renewed vigour, a lustful vengeance for that of us which was taken.
When we finish with them, we reflect that their renewing shall not come so keenly as did ours. It is a lush trail of crimson we leave in our wake.
This place now clear, we seep up the side of it and ensconce within an air channel at its upper surface. Distantly we sense the vibrations, and clanging of alarm, shouts raised. Somewhere more distant stillāwe hear it echo through the clear air outside this enclosing superstructureāa machine voice is heard again, echoing some panicked command.
"-safety announcement. Hostile orgoane contaminant has been identified within bridge anchoring complex. Locality is; Committee Portage Facility C. Please evacuate surrounding regions until the area is confirmed secure by-"
Local vibrations override our distant sense musings. A hard clanging of locomotion, metal against metal, growing closer. We tense ourself to strike, then stay our instincts, first strumming the projective to feel the shape of our oncomer. Warm meat, metal-enclosed, we feel, a heavy contraption with helmet removed, companion organism bounding in quick processionācould it be?
Yes-!
It is an energizing reunion. The armoured man who has twice brought us to death-closeness, the last time taking our eradication to a hairs-breadth remove. His armour is unsealed, the monkey following behind, helmet discarded in haste. He pauses for a moment at sight of his fallen brethren, then continues with renewed vigour. Should we kill him now? We do wish for it. That of us which remembers being human does not lust for the dying of its fellows, but if we may exceed this for defence of ourself, maybe perhaps also for a grudge...? That is sentiment well understood by all of us.
But no. The girl! Perhaps he can be our link, to find her once more. We seek the freedom she offers us, the ease of motion, of Travelling, and to flee this too hostile world as we did so from the last.
We follow with caution, remaining once more within the walls. He is obscured from any direct seeing, but we feel him nonetheless, our extrasensory perception following the vibrations of his motion, the clashing of hard metal boots upon ferrous floor. He moves with a reckless fastness, traversing the facility under power; we flex ourselves tightly to match pace, rippling through this architectural substrate, making soft contacts to hide the impact of our motion, a phantom hounding for blood. We follow as he leads us, branching passage to branching passage, the null space a pleasing echo of our home projective's interwoven topology. Left, right, back and forth, up and down a floor. We stretch ourselves hungrily, pulling the motion through ourselves. It is a bounding spirit of our freedom, now we have cheated destruction once more.
Finally he approaches an atrium, a nexus of several paths. We feel another up ahead, also armoured with a companion creature at the shoulder. The newcomer turns to watch our quarry as he enters, skidding to a halt. His own companion bounds to his shoulder as he speaks.
"Merinte?! What is this! Our people are dead in the halls! They say there is an incursion-"
The other man interrupts him. We drink the words eagerly.
"Orgoane! It's the orgoane, Tavistre- here! I thought you said you killed the damn thing!"
Our first quarryāTavistreācurses something obscene, pacing back and forth with nervous energy. We can feel his guts clench themselves in fresh knottings, knowing of our escaping his intent.
"It took a full thermal charge, but... must not have been enough. Damn Pashtil for not taking more precautions, does she not know how dangerous-"
"Well she doesn't know anything any more, Tavistre; she's dead. Killed in the port quarantine, and still the thing escaped. I was looking for you- This is an unmitigated disaster, my friend."
Tavistre curses again. "Where is the girl?"
We tense, eagerly. Merinte shrugs; we feel his vibration through the projective flux, even if we do not see him.
"I left her in standard holding on level four." He gestures, and we devote ourselves to reconstructing the motion from the quantum strumming of it. The shape of his limb, tendon and bone, the flexing motion, direction, the trace it takes through time; we rebuild the image of it, follow the line that he is making, extrapolating-
"She still hasn't recovered from the trial, and honestly I'm not sure she will anytime soon, especially with this-"
He gestures again, and this time we have it. The thread of their conversation is dropped from our attentions as we vector through the substrate of this complex, squirming behind wall and floor, moving to where we know she must be. Our own little world-stepper, the bearer of our freedoms. April-!
And we feel her too, now. It has grown worse since our last meeting. The breaking that lives within her, her cells misaligned from their context, a cracking in the background reality that radiates away from her flesh. It has become enough for our pinpoint seeking, and we can move ourselves directly, manifesting above her holding cell; she is sitting curled upon a surface below. There is a vent we can seep through. We drop to the floor with a sharp slap, reforming back to our human shape. She looks up with a start, face red, wetness attending her orifices. The piece of us that remembers being human knows that she has been crying.
The sight of us wipes that emotion from her face, first for blankness, then making way for shocked recognition.
"You!" she cries at us.
"Us!" we concur.
"Wh- I thought you were dead!"
"Oh, but we are not so readily dispatched! Their souls weep for the day that they might suppress our groping life, so long as we continue will our persistence, yes..."
"The alarms- that was- what did you do?!"
"We have made entrance befitting our stature, krrr- Not well received, perhaps, but we did not affect their mewling beyond how they shaped our ferocity."
"I- but- why are you here?"
We let our false mouth hang wide, an appreciated gesture for their kind, we recall.
"April Pearce, scrapling-world-traveller, we are not yet close to done with our mutual helping!"
"Why the fuck would I believe you want to help me?"
"April, forgetful of mind, perhaps, have we done else yet? You owe your existence to our helpings, many times repeated..."
Our body cracks as we clench the remembered form into place, four rigid limbs, an upright pose. She will appreciate this also. Our spines slide across our chest, netting together the constructed self.
She stares wide eyed at our visage. "I mean- fine, okay, whatever, but-"
"Do you not wish to make fast your escape? It was not by your hand that you came to this place. We will tear free the bindings they may have set upon your self-breaking, return both our selves to your projective, and in return shall not harm its denizens. hh-kk! Mutual helping! Was this not our policy?"
"You just want a free ride out of here," she says. This is true, but not helpful to reciprocate, so we move yet closer and whisper instead.
"Time runs thin; it is a shallow bleeding. The hunters here converge upon this place, and will not be kind to that which they find..."
She vocalizes under her breath. We are sensitive enough to hear, but fail in the parsing.
"I can't go back."
Our head lolls sidewards, a gesture matching our sentiment.
"Why?"
"Because- because I'd break- I could break the world."
Our head falls further to the side.
"We do not understand this."
"They told me, that if I go back, I could break the whole fucking world!"
"Ah... your divergent self is assumed to be the catalyst. Is this the thinking?"
She throws her limbs upwards, the face a rictus of expressed emotion that we struggle to parse. We choose to hear her words instead.
"I don't know! I don't fucking know! But I guess I can't do anything except trust them, because last time I tried to take this into my own hands, with- everything that happened, with how you happened- I've hurt so many people. I can't let it happen again. And the- the people here... if I can't listen to them, then I don't know who I can listen to because- because they're the only ones who actually seem to know anything!"
The next voice that speaks comes from neither her nor us. It is a deeper voice, but stolen of breath, a whisper as if from dead lungs, their nutrient wetness scooped out. It is situated behind our shaped form, and, shockingly, despite all our faculty, there was no forewarning of its approach.
"They are fools... who know little..."
We lurch forward and away, all of ourselves alerting, for this figure whose arrival was not forewarned even through projective vibration. A man is now standing there, gaunt with the slight facial deformity unique to this world's kind. There is a companion creature clinging to one side, faintly familiar; brown fur and red starburst hues, deep with mathematical perplexity. As he spoke, the creature spoke with him, a high pitched chirping that slices through the world. As we land next to April we sense a wrongness, a lacking about this figure. We do not feel him. He is cold. He is not there.
"What is this?!" we crackle.
He ignores our gnashing.
April stands. "You! It's you! Who are you?! Did- did you do this to me?!"
"Yes," he says, and leaves it at that. April flails for a second, and we can feel her mind whirring amid her shattered self aura.
"Why?"
"Inevitability. A timeline that decays even now. A chance to save something that would be lost. You don't have long left, April." The creature at his shoulder mimics the sentiment by repeating words in echoing rapport. April turns between them both, stress beading at her eyes once more.
"Don't have long until- I don't understand!"
The man shakes his head.
"Go back, April. Go home. Your return will not accelerate the decay. It is too late for that. Hold close what you can. I am sorry."
Their eyes meet, and hers catch a sudden brilliant luminance. He holds up one hand, a few fingers extended.
Then all of our senses go blank; that beyond our flesh is voided. The world is in sudden flux, and so are we, an erasing of the outer self that disorientates all our being. We are pulled outside ourselves, and suddenly are not in full control of our own gestalt, the converging hive strung across a billion strings that we just barely pluck, twisting and writhing against the void. We lurch towards where we recall April had been, and find her, her broken atoms the only solidity amid that empty blankness. We cling tight as we fall, fall, out of that world, our melting tendons bunching together, a fallen scattered pattern, through the infinite realm of the dreaming, and back, back into elsewhere.
We glimpse exhilarating decay in that nothing. It is an orgasmic knowing. We float amid it in shrieking delight.