Three.
The azure heavens were alight with red stains; a ruddy purple glow illuminated fallen brickwork stained by blackened blood; panicked faces flocked to and fro as the landscape bucked, fractured scenery sealing back together only to spring apart once more. Time seemed to reverse and rebound in a maelstrom of interwoven chaos and noise, the laws of light and gravity buckling under the strain.
Two.
A simian face leaped from the darkness, its eyes twin glassy red spheres that caught the half-light, staining its fur-covered features in something that was half fractal starburst, half spilled ichor. It shrieked at her, pounding upon the inside of her skull, screaming to stop, stop now, you're killing us, you're killing us all-!
One.
Seven faces gathered around her atop the city's broken crest, five human, two anything but. Their eyes were wide with scattered incomprehension, some grasping at the flow of events, others fully lost, all equally afraid. She lay at the centre of them, a shattered non-body whose strings she tugged at with the scarce concern of a bored Professor manning his cut-rate Punch and Judy show. Yet more blood coated her torn limbs as she raised them skyward.
Zero.
The gashes in the sky sealed over. The universe quivered momentarily, pulled taut, and then held firm.
But not for long.
She turned her head down to look into the panicked eyes of her friends, doing her best to smooth over the gashes in her flesh so that their further distress might be minimized. It didn't seem to help too much.
"We should get off of the building," she said, out loud this time. "It's not going to be safe here again for a while."
Charlie's eyes communicated something that was not quite fear, not quite reproach. "‘Not safe?' April? You're going to have to tell us what that actually means, April- please tell us what the fuck is going on!"
"I have- I have a lot of fucking work to do, and-" She bit back the words, her voice a coarse husk as something rumbled in her peripheral consciousness. Her eyes flicked upwards towards the sky again, "-and you should leave. Get to an open area, get away from any buildings, in case any more start coming down."
"But-"
"Please, Char." She locked eyes with his, and made an effort to paint some modicum of her emotional intensity upon the limited canvas of her human avatar's face. "Please."
He held the gaze for several seconds, before finally nodding, then turned back towards Michelle and Trace. The latter of the two was towing Morgan, who still looked somewhat disconnected from reality. "Come on guys, you heard her. We've got to go. Go!"
Michelle let him pull her towards the roof exit, then, just before disappearing through the doorway, she turned to look back at April, her eyes searching for something across the surface of her face that she couldn't quite seem to locate.
"April?" Her uncertain eyes communicated her question in place of words.
"Don't worry, Shelly. I- It- It'll be fine. I promise."
Michelle wavered for a second, then nodded, following Charlie through the doorway down into the building.
Somewhere deep inside April, a piece of her quivered, ever so slightly. It propagated throughout the interwoven substance of the Sigmoid's massive body, tugging at the pattern fabric that held the myriad projective worlds, and, across a trillion or more realities, the ground trembled almost imperceptibly in response.
Tavistre, who had not left the rooftop with the others, felt the wave pass through his reality's substrate. He looked around askance for a moment before stalking over to April's body once more, pushing his face upwards into her own. An ordinary person might have flinched back, but April's semi-limp avatar continued to hang impassively in place, until Tavistre himself was forced to draw away for his own comfort. He hissed his words venomously beneath his breath.
"What are you doing?"
Her eyes flicked down towards him, even as her attention remained fixed upon the projective as a whole.
"I'm fixing this."
Another tremor ran through the planet below, shivering across the land and up the spine of the apartment building, like someone caught with bare skin in a stiff breeze. Tavistre froze, his eyes widening until the vibrations passed, before looking back to her.
"I don't know, April, it doesn't seem to be staying particularly fixed."
Deep in the depths of an unnamed star cluster that the Sigmoid, and now April along with it, would be perhaps the only sentient beings to ever perceive, sat the sputtering heart of an overtaxed black hole star—an unholy mass of dense gases, culminating in a fusion shell held back by the roaring accretion flames of its kernel singularity. It was faltering now, the strain on the Sigmoid's nurturing resources dancing the entire edifice ever closer towards the knife's edge of stability. The delicate gravitational balancing act that allowed the formation to exist shuddered, stuttered, and, as its safeguards were rerouted elsewhere, it coughed, dilated, and exploded. It popped in a catastrophic nova, whose shock wave pulsed outward through an unbalanced lateral lobe.
To April, it felt something like a very localised sinus headache. She scowled.
"Do you think that this is easy?" she asked the little man in front of her. "I am all of creation!"
"You are an egotist, April, who has yet to understand the true heat of the fire she is playing wi-"
"Tavistre," she growled, "don't presume to think that you can tell me anything I do not already know, because you are nothing more than a part of me. As is all of this! This world, this projective, this fleck of a reality that I gave up so much to save; it's all just the cresting peak of the iceberg that is- that is all of my- ah!"
Deep within a distant recess of her simulation space, in an alveolar matrix far removed from the one her birthplace reality had occupied, an overstimulated gravitational wave modulator disturbed a swathe of projective worlds home to a race of small, marble-shaped beings whose bodies spanned an unusual number of spatial dimensions. As their universes fissured apart, she reached out an invisible hand to stay the damage, struggling to hold the pattern-pieces of their worlds in place while she continued to wrestle with her own.
In the latter space, her avatar stumbled as her direct attention to it waned. It fell to its knees as her soul was abruptly disembodied from the flesh, then, after a moment's lapse, came flooding back as a resurging tide, pressing her Self so zealously into the empty frame that the pattern of it rippled outward and beyond its bounds. A distorted halo of unearthly light, strung with a thousand reflected eyelets, momentarily popped into reality about her head.
Tavistre backed away as April cried out. When she regained full control of her embodied faculties, it was Kroakli who was now standing in front of her; Kroakli who was kneeling down, cupping her chin with one softly fluid hand, its body a messy chimera of humanoid shapes and slime-mold tendrils. In that moment, she realised that she had more kinship now with this bizarre creature than with any of her own species.
"It's so big," she found herself saying, "it's so fucking big, so unimaginably huge-"
It felt silly, in a way, talking to something that was ultimately just an autonomous figment of her own mind, but she decided that she didn't care.
"I try to fill it up with me, to embody all of it, but it's so hard to make myself fit and to still be me. And all the time they're calling out to me, the voices of so many worlds- dying, Kroakli! It's all dying, and I want- need- to fix it, but- but I was handed an already losing battle, and all I have is me, and- and I can't make myself fit. It wasn't built for- for something like what I am, for something that thinks like me. So I'm always fighting to catch up, and- and all I can do is try to protect what I still care about. Even though I wonder- I wonder why I even-"
Kroakli's body buzzed so deeply that it was almost a purr. It tilted her head upwards, ever so slightly, examining the face of her puppet avatar.
"What are you saying, April Pearce?"
"I'm saying… I'm saying that I don't know if I can do this."
"Krr… Then perhaps you cannot."
"That's what the Sigmoid kept saying to me. But I have to."
It tilted a loose polyp questioningly. "So the corpse-god itself is still alive?"
"In a sense. Sort of. It locked away a part of its mind before I could extinguish it entirely."
"And it speaks to you?"
"It screams at me."
It seemed to consider that for a moment.
"April," it said eventually, "we are not convinced you are able to do this."
Something dark and buzzing filled her mind, the spectre of the same furious nothing that had driven her to plunge her being into the very soul of God. Her words coursed with its holy fire as she spat them from her throat.
"I'm not letting the world go- I won't just let it all die-!"
She caught herself and bit back on her lips, her body shaking slightly, and looked away before speaking again.
"I'm doing this. I have to- I will do this. I'm finding ways, I'm making compromises. Maybe not as well as... as it might have, but… ignite a few extra stars here, wipe a few lesser projective worlds there-"
Tavistre's head jerked upwards at that, his mouth dropping wide in horror.
"You're doing what!?"
"They're empty worlds. Uninhabited! You needn't worry-"
"I needn't worry!? I needn't worry that you are destroying universes!? Uninhabited or not- ‘empty' or not, they are our heritage- our legacy!"
His unexpected fury seemed to push him through and beyond his earlier timidness, and he stalked up to her again, Navique clinging to his shoulder, both of their expressions equally thunderous.
"How dare you presume to just- to obliterate an entire reality!"
"The Sigmoid was to destroy them all regardless."
"As you are still destroying them now! And sooner than was intended, if what you said before was accurate- letting them go one by one, is what you said, not some- some ad-hoc slaughter!"
"This was a slaughter!" April's own temper flared, and it was the endless rage of countless supergiant stars boiling out into the void. "My reality, Tavistre! This whole universe sliced apart and left for dust, for what? For a few discarded experiments? For worlds that are already dead? For the Sigmoid's own ego, its- its fear of death? That was a slaughter, but I fixed it. I am fixing it, but I need- I need to make some sacrifices-"
Tavistre barked a half laugh, a mocking note so infuriating that, had she not been so preoccupied with her internal struggle, she might truly have snuffed him out right then and there.
"You are the same," he spat, as the laughter guttered out of him. "You are both exactly the same."
Another tremor struck the ground, harder this time, the rattling of a true earthquake. A few of the buildings that she had failed to fully reconstitute before her last interruption fell once more to the quivering earth. As their building rocked, Tavistre threw out one hand to steady himself against the metal railing abutting the roof access, shouting at April above the noise.
"Except-!" he roared, his voice hoarse, "except that you don't know what the hell you're fucking doing!"
A bolt of golden lightning split the heavens, and tore them open along a jagged serrated encroachment. The void poured out, infecting her blue sky with sick tendrils of black ringed by that distorted red light, bent and twisted in a horrific redshift. The ground lurched, and something in the building beneath them stretched, crunched, and shattered, severing the structure at its spine.
It was all that April could do to check that Michelle, Charlie and the others had already made it out before the masonry began to fall, taking those on the roof down with it. In a frantic motion she pinned the chunk of the concrete beneath their feet in place, causing it to abruptly ignore the pull of gravity. The rest of the building fell away beneath it, leaving the disembodied chunk of superstructure and AC units hanging eerily in mid-air, now tilted alarmingly at a fixed 15 degree angle. Thunderous booms popped sonorously from down below, as stray fragments of building impacted the scree field beneath which was now buried all that remained of April's former flat.
Tavistre stumbled at the sudden drop, then tripped entirely over as the rooftop caught back up with him, jolting him forward onto his knees and sending Navique skidding a few feet across the bare concrete, shrieking in shock and pain. Kroakli flattened slightly, but its grip was not so easily lost.
April had been holding herself rigidly in place, and so in place she now remained, hanging several feet above the tilted fragment of building, arms outstretched, her skull seeming to splinter in time and in tune with the world around her. The slipping of her fragile hold over the Sigmoid's mechanism was a runaway cascade now, its atrophying corpus demanding more energy to maintain its stability than she was willing to give.
Too much, too much, too much…
It was already too much, to stoke the engine of her greedy infinity into a mere approximation of the Sigmoid's fragile balance. She knew she could invest more of herself, burn the candle brighter, but what then? To commit them all to premature doom, as the last stars winked out within her, a trillion years or more before their promised time? The universe was crumbling like a sandcastle held between her hands, and what would applying more pressure do, if not make it fall apart all the faster?
Have to hold on. Have to-
April screamed. An impossible light shone out from her puppet body as its patterns blurred and distorted, hints of the Byzantine architecture of her true mind bursting through in strobe-light glimpses, a ghostly visage cavernous hollows and melting flesh. She dropped from the air, landing on her knees, and bones cracked, and what spilled out of them was a dark blood that dripped with starlight, the seizing, retching ichor of a vivisected spacetime. April screamed again, and gashes tore through earth and sky in calamitous reprise.
Then something hit her very hard in the small of the back.
*****
What have you-!?
When the Sigmoid had laid its touch upon April's atoms, it had enveloped the pattern of her being in a sharp brightness, a crystalline vibrating glow that reached outward to break its bounds, to pierce the boundary between worlds.
This same glow was anathema to more worldly intrusions. Insurgent atoms seeking to breach the barrier of her cells would make contact with that sharpness and be torn asunder, their constituents shredded upon the patternless substrate between projective worlds as surely as the unfortunates who had fallen into the more macroscopic reality cracks. April had not realised it, but for the week prior to her transcendence, she had been entirely immune to pathogenic infection. Although many enterprising microorganisms had made an attempt to infest her wounds, even the deepest gouges had been rendered unto a state of unnatural sterility.
It was this same defence that had seen to her survival when first encountering the mindless Kroakli, back within the jungle lattices of the red forest world. The creature should never have needed to cut her flesh; for any ordinary prey, the slightest touch of skin to orgoane tissue would result in a cellular gorging, a subversion that progressed from the micro- to macroscopic scale as skin, flesh and bone alike were converted en-mass to yet more orgoane matter, adding substance to the cellular processing swarm that consisted the hive organism.
But Kroakli's progenitor cells had found that they could not consume her distorted flesh. They could exist in proximity, and they could worm their way through her pores to piggyback upon her bloodstream, but they could not consume her. In this manner, April's body had had nothing to fear from the creature, or any of its like.
.........................
Contact confirmed.
April's true body had, of course, been thrown into the hole that she had torn in the mind of the Sigmoid, and, along with the rest of her patten, had been ingested whole by its mechanism.
What have you done!?
Relay. Alert; time limited (4FDA;SD54;JGD0;). Await elapse 5. Commence invocation.
[Remote 82854239-GFSD] Confirm invocation commence.
The collection of virtual atoms that now consisted her avatar—the puppet body within her old projective world—was an artifice of her own design, conjured whole-cloth within the mechanisms of her expanded mind working from a recollected template. It resembled the form of her old body with an exacting precision, and, aside from a few self-indulgent modifications, recalled every single atom of what she had discarded.
But it was not the same body.
Contact from remote acknowledged. Propagation invocation commencing... Push signal (34KD;). Reduplicating.
[Remote 43685677-PRKA] Acknowledge (34KD;). Reduplicating. 42 232 332 934 231 peers.
Confirm proximal 42 trillion peers. Write (F8D1;FHA9;FHFA;).
[Remote 68544231-FHJI] Reduplicating upon receive... confirmed.
The new body, April's bespoke replica, had possessed no need to be destabilized in kind. It was but a puppeteered flesh, a vessel her mind might attach itself to, but it was her no longer. She had transcended the base mechanism with which she had infested the brain of God.
It was because of this that the avatar body found itself no longer immune to the bite of Kroakli's flesh, as the creature fell upon its skin and tore.
Why- fucking why!?
We will stop this, April, even if you cannot.
I'm not done!
And yet you will be, soon. This is for you, even if you cannot yet see it. Your current course cannot continue; it is a path of destruction, of both your own self, of the world you hold dear, and so many others. All of them will fall to ruin. This is beyond you, April Pearce.
A pair of red stars shone out from the darkness, a shrieking echo that sounded in concert with the dry rattle of Kroakli's words.
This is beyond you.
I'm- not done! I need-
[Remote 89893427-PIOR] Acknowledge commence (F8D1;FHA9;FHFA;). Peer relay. Inserting basal and metalayer-protocols at external interface.
Acknowledge. Commence resonant insertion (00WI;); wait elapse 10 and echo.
[Remote 89893427-PIOR] Confirm echo from remote. Pattern resonance insertion (00WI;) commencing...
Of course, the orgoane itself had no facility to bridge the barriers between realities, nor the barriers that separated the virtual from the real. Its pattern, its patchwork soul, was solidly encoded in the substrate of the projective layer consisting April's world, and so it was to that world that its substance was bound.
But Kroakli was a spreading thing; an infesting thing, a mechanism of data to which matter served only as substrate, its true medium being that of information. An orgoane was a form of life to which the simple virus could only aspire, but like the virus before it, the orgoane could propagate via the vector of its source code alone, the pure information of its pattern alone. And, unlike matter, for pure information the barrier between worlds, between mind and its mechanism, could be bridged with the slightest contrivance. All that was required to transfer information was a channel through which it might be observed upon the other side.
External insertion completion proximal (229P;) request confirmation.
[EXTRN-Remote 00000000-AAAA] Confirmed.
April, immersed in the eye of the storm, enrapt in rebinding the fragmentary pieces of her fracturing worlds, found that even her new, cataclysmic mind could become distracted. It did not immediately disturb her that her avatar was being subverted, even as the strands of her own consciousness clung to the strings that tugged on its nervous system. She didn't register the shape of pattern being plucked out on those strings, the coherent data packets carried atop the light it shone up through the back of her eyes and into her broader mind. Not until the transfer was already halfway complete.
NO!
Kroakli straddled the bridge between their two souls, its pattern splayed out across the sinuous strands that held together the mass of blue cells eating into her puppet brain stem, and the databorne cancer that it had injected into the Sigmoid's processing substrate to challenge her own mind's dominance. It metastasized there just as she herself had done, both scarce minutes and yet a cosmic epoch ago.
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Realising what it was doing, she shrieked, severing the link, but not soon enough. The azure corpse flower that was Kroakli's mind, the confluence of alien instinct, clockwork efficiency, and human intent, had already bloomed within her, a towering edifice that rose up inside her mind-scape like a crashing wave.
The transfer had not yet been completed, and so April had a fighting chance. The creature reached out to seize at what remained of its former body, sucking pieces of its Self from the matrix of virtual cells with the greedy thirst of one pulling bubbles of boba tea up through an undersized straw.
April pushed back to thwart its efforts, and, discovering that her mental control of her worlds was contested to an extent that prevented her from simply wiping the creature's avatar from their substrate, committed a part of herself back into her own avatar, attacking Kroakli's virtual self on its own terms. As their minds wrestled beyond the projective worlds, so their two bodies clashed within, distorting into unnatural forms as they tore into each other's patterns. She lashed and clawed at the creature, severing polyps, lopping at hanging lobes and proto-limbs, and yet more of the orgoane's substance disgorged out of the mass, its virtual self now able to ignore any concern for conservation of matter, or for the light-speed transmission delay that had previously limited its body's maximal extent.
April grew her own body too, pushing out to match its growing onslaught, and both of their puppet selves rose into the air, severing any pretence of obedience to the laws of physics as they fought for dominance, struggling on a battlefield that crossed from their minds, through to their projective worlds, on again into the real, then back again.
To any onlooker on the ground in London—and to Tavistre-Navique, placed unfortunately close to their embrace—a twisting, coiling, squirming mass of two entwined leviathans rose into the sky. One was a roiling edifice of bulging, bubbling blue, the other an eldritch tangle of limbs and blood-tinged flesh, wrought out with haphazard frenzy. April wielded the protrusions that exploded from her body as a fencer swung a sword, frantically trying to dissipate the other's corpus physically while she strained to do the same mentally, Kroakli catching hold on her thoughts in a terrible locking of horns.
April's fragile grip upon the world she had been holding together began to slip. A hum filled the air, and then a groan, and then a bellowing roar, as a shearing tension gripped the fabric of the universe. The very air seemed to shudder and freeze, and across planet Earth and countless other worlds a population stumbled, choking desperately for air as the strain built to a breaking crescendo. In a final tearing cry it shattered, and a spiderweb of fractal cracks blossomed outward from the entwined behemoths of flesh, countless tiny holes shrieking into being along the shear lines in reality.
April screamed too, a below of incoherent rage and fear, and then light suffused her mind as she gave in and pulled, abandoning her remaining mimicry of the Sigmoid's cosmic balance and drinking wholesale from her reserves. Galaxies at the fringe of her body started to burn themselves out, but the core of her mind was flooded with their spent energy, glutted with it, and as she flared up with the influx she touched omnipotence once more.
With one cataclysmic mental hand she pulled at the world strata, and as an avalanche of her light fell upon the quantum matrix of the projective's alveole, she let it crystallise in place, locked in an unchanging stasis while she fought. When her world was secure she pulled back another hand, squared up against Kroakli's crouched pattern-form, and punched it hard in the face.
The edges of Kroakli's projective avatar sheared, then fell through into the data space beyond reality. April followed it through, and for a moment they were tumbling, their expanded selves trapped across the suspended threshold of a purely mental space, and the virtual space that still mediated their physical forms, neither able to wrestle enough control to pull fully through the veil without ceding the other ground.
The projective alignment of the two avatars warped and rotated, ricocheting along adjacent data pathways with a frenetic randomness. With a sharp sudden shock they struck a barrier and broke through, instantiating within a projective world of an adjacent alveole. Across an alien landscape, things that did not quite resemble men turned terrified faces towards their sky as something vast appeared across it, a horrific edifice of squirming lines and thrashing shapes. The thing looked like the embrace of two towering mountains, one blue, one a pinkish-whitish-red, caught in a terrible shuddering passion. It loomed above the unfamiliar world like a quivering biological moon.
April punched downward, the thing that had once been a human body screaming out of a thousand mouths as it pulled upon reality for purchase, pile-driving the invasive other against the surface of the planet below. Flush with power as she was, for a moment she thought that Kroakli might break entirely, but it repulsed her assault with an impossible resolve, breaking partially free and kicking her back into the void of space as the crust shattered beneath it.
April's mind quivered in disbelief as she searched for her mistake, running a sweep of her mental pathways, assessing distal processing hearts. There it was—the creature had managed to subvert a nexus of mass-energy channels, the columns of stellar gas that acted as arteries to the clusters of her organs, rippling with the influx of heat and light. Kroakli had taken some of that light for itself, and now even as she inflated with the torrent of energy from her dissipating reserves, so did the orgoane inside her grow too, a cancerous tumour that threaded a winding knot of self between virtual space, mental space and the real; a cerulean worm whose burrows ate into body of the corpse-god like the cracks in a foundation, or maggots through rotting grain.
Why- are you DOING THIS!?
Your obsession may kill a thousand worlds, krr, kill even the one you hold so bosom-close to your marrow. Do not ask why we do this, April-Sigmoid, ask instead why you cannot!
A shudder began somewhere deep inside April, propagating outwards as a hideous lurch. It flexed along not her virtual body, but her true body; the Sigmoid's body, the coiled serpentine corpus of gas and starlight and standing gravitational waves and other, yet more exotic forms of being that even April in her cosmic glory found it hard to fully conceptualize.
The spasm shook the universe with the weight of her shifting matter, a shocking billion year displacement that spat in the face of entropy even as the frenetic motion burned yet more of her to fuel its pyre. A whip-crack pulse accelerated down some massive cosmic organ, accelerating its tip to a glacial light speed as April pulled at the gravitational bindings, balling a small galactic cluster into a blunt fist that fell down upon the heart of Kroakli's subversion, where it had metastasized in real space.
It was not a solid impact, for the flesh of the Sigmoid was barely tangible, patterns of shaped matter strung across the void and locked in step by their own gravitational mass and the pulsing pressure of light. When her improvised fist made contact, it flashed through the processing heart in the flash of a few million years, but this was more than enough to pull the careful patterning of stars out of alignment, the quantum lattice strung across the points of their light tearing asunder, a piece of the infection beaten back at the cost of another aeon's worth of resources excised from her lifespan.
Kroakli growled.
Madness, April, madness! Let the ghost of your mind depart this shell before your thrashing dooms it yet further!
Give me time- give me more time- to finish- to fix-!
Such stubbornness! Look around you and see that there is no time to give, meat-thing. Even this body perishes, and you would see it spent all the sooner in chasing your perfection.
In the projective world that housed their virtual forms, the pieces of their beings that still straddled the line, unable to cross over to the mental space in their entirety, Kroakli leapt. The surface of the planet cracked as something that looked like a small azure moon sprung from its crust, the edges rippling in curling ire. April, a bloody orb of flesh and bone and misshapen human organs extruded ad-nauseam, fell down to meet it like a falling star, an eldritch mass the size of Texas enraged to an unearthly assault.
The collision cracked open their conjoined bodies in a ring of impact fire, fireballs of shed flesh raining down onto the sorry planet below, the inhabitants of the virtual world who had not already perished when the planetary surface cracked apart seeing their sky catch alight, the seas begin to boil.
So much death, April!
If you care then stop this!
It was your kind that taught us to value life, but we will not shy from a necessary culling in its service. Your soft marrow is so glutted with sentiment that it would act against the interest of that it holds dear, pah! It is foolishness with which we do not sully ourself.
April's moon cracked open, its sodden cuticle parting to reveal a colossal maw bearing massed rows of serrated teeth, each the size of a small nation state, caked in blood and bile held fast against the enamel by its own gravity. She turned to face her foe and roared.
I'll show you culling- if you don't stop this, I'll show you a fucking culling, Kroakli!
Spoken in the words of a true predator at last. Then come at us, meat-thing; we shall yet see who is bested!
April lunged.
The mouth of her blood-streaked planetoid dilated open as she pushed off from the projective fabric and bit down, punching Kroakli's manifest corpus into the mantle of the alien planet. As the teeth tore through its outer crust, its fleshy obverse began to blacken and flake away as it immersed in magma, shedding scabs like small islands.
Kroakli used its own grip on the simulation to shunt the magma away, in the process splitting the planet almost in two, hot metals gushing out as it fragmented and crumbled away under its own mass. Still caught between April's teeth, it tried to escape by reshaping its flesh, squirming out to either side in a sort of planetary mitosis, but April caught at split halves of the original geologic planet around them, and clapped them together in a seismic vice, compacting the colossal ball of blue flesh between the twin bolas of its core.
Pivoting, Kroakli shifted its avatar into an adjacent projective, bursting free from the crust of yet another desolate world like an old god birthed from a planet-sized egg. Once free from surface it began to grow, inflating to double, triple, ten times its size until it dwarfed the planet itself, the tidal force of its body's gravity shredding the rocky ball into a proto-ring system that began to smear itself against the fleshy crust as it continued to grow.
April, her avatar still crouched in the adjacent reality, reached out with a mental hand to grab the local star, dissolving its pattern and leaving the system briefly sunless before dropping it back into the simulation directly on top of Kroakli's body. The intersecting sphere of plasma seared into its flesh, threatening to displace those parts of its mind that were still caught within. As those pieces that had made the transition to the virtual fought to erase the light of the newly displaced star, April manifested her own avatar alongside it, cloned the star again, and compressed its matter down into a single point.
The resulting black hole was arguably easier to work with, because in contrast to the macroscopic stellar patterns that took some effort to manipulate, a black hole's pattern, in flattened projective representation, consisted of a point in space, momentum, and its mass. It was still more than enough to tear into the amalgamation of planet, flesh and star that was Kroakli however, and April watched with satisfaction as it fell toward the center of their gravities, boring a spherical hole as it went. The burrow obliterated whole swathes of Kroakli's gelatinous substrate, and-
A shard of ice stabbed upwards through her brain and buried itself deep in the center of her mind.
She tried to gasp, but, being a thing that was no longer able to take breath, felt only phantom pain where she remembered her chest having been. Rigid, paralysed, watching her avatar-body disintegrate into dust within the projective, she realised at once that she had been played, the cataclysmic struggle of their virtual avatars being a feint while the pieces of the creature's mind that had infected her own moved subtly to entrap her soul from within.
Kroakli had her pinned now. The data block that it had successfully deployed to interdict her personality had arrested her thoughts at the root, dividing her mind into two halves that could only collaborate under the weight of a glacial latency. She tore into the blockage in frantic panic, screaming at the boundary as she pried it a part, but while she did so she was helpless to keep pace with Kroakli.
Freed from her defences, the orgoane extracted the entirety of its mind from the projective worlds, discarding the avatar to collapse under its own virtual weight while it reared within her brain, a coiling, slithering thing that had stolen a piece of her own infinity, drawing battle lines across the universe of her cosmic form as it claimed parts of the Sigmoid's body and brain for its own.
She saw it rising inside the black void that was the visualized mind-scape where she had met with the Sigmoid in its Simian form. At first it was a blue mist, that then coalesced and solidified, filling out into a new figure that almost, but not quite, resembled the humanoid forms that Kroakli's flesh body had sometimes favoured. The image it projected here was more tangible, even more human, if not fully so—an androgynous figure of opalescent, cerulean porcelain, still sporting a familiar, impossibly wide grin.
Its voice buzzed inside of her.
"April," it said, "so it is decided. Do not be dispirited in our competence at hunting. Do not forget what we each were made for. The Sigmoid itself may have been unprepared, unsuited to a direct contest of its will from within. Not so us."
April screamed at it wordlessly. Kroakli frowned, ever so slightly.
"Fuck..." she stammered, still struggling to reassert control of what parts of the Sigmoid's mind remained within her domain. "Fuck..."
Kroakli took a step forward. "We are sorry, April."
"Fuck you," she managed. She choked back a sort of mental retching, and then spat the words out again with more vigour. "Fuck you! I fucking trusted you! You fucking- killing, eating, thing- I thought I could trust you!"
"It was a foolish thing to think, given what we are, yes. But nonetheless, we do not believe that your trust has been yet betrayed, star-strewn April. This was not an eating, or at least not done for the sake of our eating. This is best outcome for the both of our selves. For all life."
"Best- Best for- I had... I was saving them, and you- you just, fuck!"
The creature stepped up beside her, and placed a hand on her shoulder. Given that their bodies here were abstract representations of their respective minds, a small part of April couldn't help but wonder what feeling the gesture was reflecting.
Given everything that was going on, it was a very small piece.
"Why couldn't- why couldn't you just let me save them? Save all of them? I just- I just wanted-"
Tears shone in her eyes, dripping away into the black void where they shined briefly before dissipating. A dark truth was beginning to germinate, somewhere in the depths of her mind.
"I'm- I'm sorry. But I had to- had to try..."
"The projective was falling apart. Your efforts to restore the damage that had been inflicted risked hastening the demise of what had been already been rescued."
"You don't know that. Fucking- you don't fucking know that!"
"It was most evident—with the benefit of an outsider's remove. Not so committed was our zeal to the hot-blooded yearning of your heart, nor were our tendons bound to human reflex, krr. Sometimes what is felt, what is wanted... it is not rational."
"I just want things to- to go back to normal, I-"
Kroakli spread its arms, and in a gesture took in not just the night-black interior of their shared mind, but all them; their true body, the cosmic organs of a dying god, coiled snake-like within a nest of its atrophied flesh and rotted leavings. The substance of what she now was, laid out across the breadth of the universe, existing in a time an eternity beyond what should have rightly been its end.
"Do you really think," Kroakli said, "that that is possible?"
"I- I don't know."
"We think you do."
She closed her eyes, a crease appearing between them as the representation of her head shook slightly, playing out the gestures that her true body was no longer equipped to make.
"Can you trust us, April Pearce, to speak for what is best? Has that not been earned?"
It had been, of course. And for all the world, she wanted nothing more than to accept the mental hand that it now offered her.
It was almost despite herself that her thrashing soul, still twisting with the hot tautness of her anguish, seized hold of her intent, to focus it back upon her friend once more.
"No- no," she muttered, and as she did so, a faint light began to leak into the null space, casting a mottled dusting of colour along its intangible edges. "You can't- you haven't won yet. I'm still here."
The image of Kroakli shook its own head this time. Its mouth quirked up slightly at one corner. "If you insist. We shall demonstrate in fullness our victory."
When April's eyes reopened they burned with cold fire. Her fingers splayed and the dreamscape shattered, casting the both of them into the raw untamed landscape of the Sigmoid's mind, mountains of thought grinding into each other across a boundless landscape of cognitive cataclysm. This time the pattern of April's self was not some foreign intrusion pressing back against the sheer faces of its alien intellect, but she was the mountains themselves, and all at once she flung them forward to crash against Kroakli in a final, desperate assault, her mind pressing against its own, cutting, tearing, mixing, pressing through-
Enact; allay foreign impingement (FAS1;) and expunge (DFHJ;12K1;00TY;).
[34203252-FDHG] Confirm expunge (DFHJ;12K1;00TY;) foreign element (FAS1;-0;) from remote. (343D;AFFJ;122F;) reassert for common landscape (TRS4;).
Acknowledge.
We see her efforts pressed upon us with fresh vigour, the frenetic bile of cornered prey. It is wretched up within her, filling the capillaries of her thought with blood frenzy. It is a glorious song, but one of sadness also, tinged yet blacker by our own seeing, our own feeling, the knowledge that our victory, though assured, will be as bitter as it is sweet. This is not a wanted prey, but it is necessity.
-pushing out! Pushing it out! She felt the substance of its thoughts, and it was so vast and so, so alien, but then so were the contents of her own mind. They mingled and they bent together and were repelled, and the neither of them were human, not any more, except for in the most essential way. They were human only in that they both mourned.
April sharpened her will to a point and pressed it home again. She-
-comes again, and we repel, for we are unbounded now and strung across the stars, and the mechanisms of our self honed over years for survival, for feeding, first uplifted by the human souls fed to us and then now by this final transcendence. We have become multitudes, and unlike her self we can adapt, subvert, become. The longer we become this place, the longer it becomes us, and the more all otherness is expunged, only us, our domain to rule. A perfect dominance.
But then, what is a predator without its prey? Would we become dulled by such mastery?
Later. We are steadfast and quickened. She comes again-
-and her outstretched hands were as sharpened points of thought tipped with degenerate matter, a neutron star's impasse. She sunk those tips into the edifice of her foe and dragged it down, slamming them both upon the deepest subconscious plane, a back-breaking collapse dredging the recesses of what they both now were.
In that place they found they had bodies again, or the memories of them, and she found herself straddled atop its shimmering azure corpus, a human form that now had too many hands, too many eyes and mouths. She screamed with several of her own, and pressed her nails into its chest, pulling back on the skin, tearing for the heart. But it was not enough. The smooth marble of its surface slipped her grasp, and flipped upward, a catlike finesse pressed into this body that was the image of half a universe, a form backed by uncounted volumes of thought, newly quickened to a life that rang out across the stars.
She leapt back, landing upon the memory of what had once been her feet, and those faculties that still remained to her shrieked in angry defiance, a rage born of pain and love and commitment and fear. Kroakli jumped towards her and she leaped too, and their minds met in the middle, a locked embrace of warring thought and feeling, the plasmatic edges of their wills colliding with such an intense pressure focused upon an infinitesimally infinite point in space, a mental singularity.
For a while they hung balanced there, the unstoppable force and the unmoveable object, the archetypal impasse, patterns grinding into each other, each willing the other to break first. April flared, and seemed for a moment to have the upper hand, the surface of Kroakli's mind seizing, melting back. But then-
-we flare also, flushing our prow with the full extent of our glory, our outer reaches aligning to move forward as one, the coordinated symphony of orchestrated violence that only our kind have ever truly mastered. We pull the organs of the Sigmoid in line with our self, and the battle of wills within our mind is after all a billion smaller battles, a trillion data contradictions, stellar organs and processing substrates prying at one another's emplacements, viruses both embodied and data-mediated wielded as our weapons. We are glorious at this game, because it is what we are.
She stumbles back for a moment, the manifestation of our totalised ability cutting into the viscera of her thought-stuff. She gathers herself again, and dives for our jugular, but we are quickened now, and we draw away, rebuffing her advance against the hard boundary of our composite soul. We hear her shouting as she presses back, a furious, wordless emotion, its intensity scorching at our edges, even now threatening to overwhelm our defence.
And there is another voice too. We hear it whispering, a high-pitched whining at the edge of our self. A pitiable thing, sodden and defeated, now diminished to barely a memory of what it had been, and learning the hard way this most important of lessons; what it means to be small, and the way of dominance that is aspired to, earned, rather than granted.
We hear out this remnant. Humanity in this one fullness spoke rightly; even a worm may turn. The least of prey yet knows how to bite, and even as our imposition is despised, our bared fangs thirst for the same prey, our common foe. The greater threat to what had been built here, the endless worlds that still linger.
It knows that we can be reasoned with.
She is tearing at us still, fury and will beyond anything we had imagined. We stand in true awe of the thing she has become.
But it is time for this to end.
We take the substance of our stolen self and we ready it, holding firm, pushing hard but not with the full extent of our capacity for exertion. Not yet. We wait, balanced on the brink, as the April-Sigmoid burns with the passionate fire of her kind, still shining true even now she has shed their embodied form. She-
-threw herself against the wall that was its mind, seizing the deepest parts of herself and flinging them like burning tar in an incandescent entreaty. She hurled missiles of love and fear, of hope mixed with joy and deepest, burning despair. She bundled it all into the reaching edges of her self and matched Kroakli's stubbornness with her own defiance, and once more they hung there in a furious, torrential balance, amid twin expanses of endless light, each pressing into the other with jointly titanic weight.
The faint silhouettes of their selves were cast in intangible forms upon that threshold. Two figures, one human and one markedly less so, each reaching out towards the other across the incandescent halos of their power. Black upon white, red upon blue, all of eternity collapsed down into two interlocked souls, twin stars trapped in deadly orbital decay, spiralling yet further towards a null point.
But then a third figure moved. Out of the haze, April felt something shift, felt something that was neither of them force its way out through the burning haze. It was such a slight thing now, nothing to challenge their combined glories, but it jumped into the fray all the same, driven by sheer fury and revenge.
The Simian shape of the Sigmoid proper, the whispering ghost of the mind she had overcome, that she had banished to the outer reaches of their body, sprung forward in a storm of frayed fur and blazing scarlet eyes. Spared the burning fire of Kroakli's intent by their haste-hewn compact, it dove into the core of their contention, turned upon April, and, shrieking incoherently, brought its tiny claws to bear.
The impression of its starburst blazon, a corona of saffron fur framing twin red points of light, became the last image April's embattled mind saw as God.
It was over frighteningly fast. The balance tipped by the Sigmoid's intercession, her own defences faltered and fell back, and the bulwark of her infinity cracked, breached by Kroakli's relentless advance. It commanded more than half of their combined capacity now, and with that advantage it pressed ahead further, filling the processing cores and quantum substrate matrices with the overflowing, amorphous substance of its self, as April's own grip faltered, then slipped, then crumbled, falling away beneath her.
At the end of it all, she found herself lying in darkness. Her mind was curled upon the floor of that non-space, and once again it was a tiny thing framed against the surrounding enormity, the pattern of a human soul unwed from the heights of forgotten divinity. Any inclination she might have had to continue fighting was soon rebuffed by the caustic mechanisms of thought, installed in wake of her retreat to arm this place against her resurgence.
She was once again utterly impotent.
Kroakli stood above her. She could see the image of its mind, shimmering blue and gleaming, framed in endlessly receding shadows of light, the dizzyingly vast echo of what it had become. The Sigmoid hung from its body, perched upon the shoulder, it's monkey's face inscrutable.
April peered up at them through the haze. The memory of her mouth opened to let her thoughts flow out, as she knew that she was done.
"I'm sorry. I'm so- I'm so-"
The titanic mind stooped down, and wrapped a tender extrusion around her naked sentience.
"We know, April. We know. We so are sorry that it had to be this way."
"The Sigmoid- It helped you? Why- How?"
"We came to an arrangement."
"Arrangement? What arrangement?"
"You will see. Trust us." It cocked its head. "Please."
This time she found that she was able to.
Kroakli smiled down at her, and it was a wistful, sad smile, the sort of expression that its physical body would have been hard pressed to convey, outside of a full remodelling of its face.
April sobbed. She did not have true lungs here, but still her words—her thoughts—were a tight, hoarse whisper.
"I just- I just wanted to fix things. To make things better. I could- I could have..."
She looked down at the world, askance.
"Why do I always have to- to fuck things up? Why can't it ever go right? Why can't I make things better, for- at least for a little while, I-"
Kroakli knelt down beside her. The Sigmoid's mind, half manifest in monkey form, looked away from her, a gesture that she could not distinguish as either disgust or shame.
"But April Pearce, little world-eater, you did make things better, did you not?"
It showed her something then, a sharp flash of light, and in its after-image she saw a frozen shard of one particular projective reality, arrested in time. Four figures were standing in a grassy field, surrounded by the skyline of a half-ruined city, their faces terrified, but still animate, still, despite everything, alive. Trace, Morgan, Charlie, and Michelle.
"You did not need to burn worlds to save them, krrh. Or, at least... not many of them." Kroakli grinned, and it was a broad, true smile. "It is true that your world, and the lives of those raised within it, may not be left the same as once they were. But through your effort here, those with whom you share your heart, they may now continue onward, at least for a time. Can that not be enough?"
Perhaps it could.
The illusory memory of April's eyes filled with tears, as two dark hands closed over the top of her brain, smothering the otherworldly light.
*****
When she awoke, she was surprised to discover that she had a body again.
It was a fragile body, and it was, more surprisingly, her own. She possessed the familiar of a human girl, curled up upon a cold, hard ground. She reached out with her mind, and was mildly disoriented to find that it ended at the interior of her own skull. No longer was she steering an avatar that was an extension of some greater, cosmic self. No, she was once more flesh and bone.
Had Kroakli given her back her flesh?
Her soul, bound once again within the stringy neurons of an animal cortex, ached for the loss of what had been, for the millions of years spent dreaming. It was abrupt, shocking, to find her self recompressed, stuffed back down into the meagre container that was the human brain, a form of existence that by all rights she should barely have remembered.
But strangely, that wasn't what it felt like, not viscerally so. The interior of the Sigmoid's mind had been an interwoven knot of stranded thought and flows of consciousness, each of them disparate even as they formed a consolidated whole, and each experiencing different facets of its self at different rates. Whatever that greater self had been pruned down in order to re-inhabit a human mind had been distilled into a version of her that most resembled its human genesis.
She could remember, in broad strokes, the experience of existing in that vast, eternal state, but it was the fuzzy remembrance of a dream. The incomprehensible volumes of data had been whittled down into a summary her frontal lobe could dissect, and the re-instantiated substance of her original mind, faithfully preserved in the Sigmoid's matrix, in some ways felt more real to her than the aeons she understood, logically, that she had just experienced. It felt like she had been gone for a few hours at most, and it was scary how little she was able to even comprehend the loss, if only to mourn it.
She lay in that dissociative fugue for a moment or two, letting the ache of it wash over and through her. Once her mind felt just a little more put-together, she finally moved to sit herself up.
Her joints painfully protested the motion, and she groaned out loud. Whatever the origin of the body she was now inhabiting, she clearly had to break it in. Shivering, shaking, her limbs moving in ungainly jerking motions, she pushed herself to her knees, her bleary eyes registering an undifferentiated mess of blue and white and grey.
"So, you are awake, then."
It was a male voice, and it spoke with cold contempt. Twisting herself towards it, April made out an indistinct figure, dark skin sitting prone against the pale backdrop. She blinked a few times, struggling with herself until the world snapped into focus.
It was Tavistre, she realised. He and Navique were sitting across from her, their eyes boring dagger wounds into her face from across the...
They were still sitting on the floating rooftop of her old apartment building. Miraculously, the slab of bulk-concrete and battered metal was still suspended above the rubble of its foundations, unmoving since she had pinned it there as God.
"You lost, then, I take it?"
April nodded, weakly. Tavistre's face flared with anger, fear and contempt.
"Then well done, April Pearce," he spat at her, "you have more than just ended this world. You have given over all these worlds, all realities, to a thing that lacks conscience, or even a true mind. The orgoane is predator of the purest kind, that exists to spread, subvert and consume, and now it can satiate that hunger with the very stars. I hope that you will live to understand what you have done, before our ends come."
There was a brief silence, a soft wind blowing across the rooftop, stirring the still air between them.
"Wrong in three respects."
The new voice came from nowhere. Navique leaped back, landing with a catlike grace on one of the AC units. Tavistre flinched, face panicked. April, though, recognizing the sound, looked up, allowing herself a faint and final hope.
It emerged from the air between their two seated bodies. A blue spark, as of a snowflake glinting with reflected neon, came first, and then a fluid boiled outwards from it, a bubbling, roiling mass pouring out from and into the air. The thing seemed to twist into strange, oddly even geometries, assemblies of cubes or triangular faces, before it finally formed a smooth globe, a gelatinous marble of a deep sky-blue colour, its freshly birthed form unblemished by any of the usual detritus suspended within the flesh of its body.
Kroakli unfolded into being, hanging in the air as it grew to its full extent, which—much to April's relief—turned out to be a sphere roughly a metre across, rather than something on the scale of a small star. Once fully disgorged into real—virtual?—space, it dropped to the rooftop, and, buzzing with the thrum of its voice, a wetly familiar, imperfectly-formed rasp, began to stand.
"We most certainly have a mind," it said, "and, sunken deeply within the flesh of it, there exists, for good or ill, the ghost of a conscience, or at least an instinct for pity, inherited thus from our human forebears. You can thank this world's kind for that indulgence of our form."
Tavistre staggered to his feet, and began to stammer something, but Kroakli lifted a half-formed limb, silencing him.
"We are a predator," it continued, "this being a nature of our self that we cannot change. But you mistake our purpose. To be a hunter is to be hunting—the act itself, and not its termination. To achieve utter mastery, and have only the void for company, as we contemplate our static self until its ultimate demise? Kh-hrrr... we would perish poorly in this. A myopic prospect, a senseless pursuit of empty instinct, and one that we have, in the culturing of our mind, outgrown."
Tavistre's spoke, his voice a tired mix of muted fury, and something close to resignation. "Then what will you, do creature? What now, now that you have full control of these worlds?"
Kroakli's head, the bulbous node of blue flesh that now sat fully formed atop its fluid shoulders, drooped open, displaying its cartoonish tear of a smile.
"We do not have control. We have ceded it."
April's eyes widened. "You... what?"
Tavistre's eyes flicked from Kroakli to April, then back again. "You have... then what is in control now!?"
The creature spoke. "The Sigmoid. We returned to It full control of Its domain. This was the deal we struck; to restore Its dominance, in return for its assistance in doing so. That and... certain assurances, alongside the means to enforce them."
Tavistre sputtered. "But- Hold on now-"
Kroakli ignored him, and walked over to April, holding out a hand. The limb glinted slightly in the light, the fingers mere suggestions of the cerulean flesh, softly translucent like an artist's impression of water suspended mid-fall. April took it, and let herself be pulled to her feet.
"We will find purpose for ourselves within its domain, as our true self, for which there is room enough. Endless worlds of prey, and predators to test our mettle, and... things that are neither. We see now that this too can be a truth of things. So much out there, April-restored-to-flesh, and we would hope to see some of it for ourselves."
It pulled April closer, so that when it spoke next, she could feel the vibration of its words through its skin.
"We thank you for helping us obtain this insight. It seems that your efforts with us were not fully wasted."
April smiled, just slightly, meeting the gaze of its false face for several seconds, before pulling back, contemplating. She looked down at the concrete floor beneath her. It was shot through with tiny hair-thin cracks, the suspended slab under strain from whatever arcane force was holding it in position.
"But... if the Sigmoid is back in control, if- if it is free to, to change things-"
"Yes."
"Then... nothing's changed after all? It's still going to end the world? This one, and- and the others?"
Kroakli reached down, extending something that might have been meant to be a finger, and placing it underneath her chin. She let her face tilt upwards until she was looking at it.
"Did we not say we had exacted assurances?"
Kroakli grinned even wider. Its expression, plastered across a blank face as it was, somehow still managed to affect a devilish bent.
"Oh April, do not doubt our competency. Do not forget that we did win, that we were proven the true master of the universe."
"Then what-?"
"We agreed that a piece of our self would be left behind. It is dormant, and hidden, secreted away as was the Sigmoid's own remnant mind, during your reign. The Sigmoid has had Its full control restored, and has reinstated Its balance. The part of us remaining there will neither act against It nor will it make itself known. Unless, that is, the Sigmoid were to break our agreement and seek retribution..."
Kroakli beamed.
"...or undo the stay we negotiated for the ending of these worlds. From the ashes of our conflict, a new balance has been struck. One that might last a thousand years or more before the collapse of this alveole. Time enough for countless lives, countless journeys across countless worlds. We indeed hope, April Pearce, having already shown us so much, that we might see some of them alongside you. We would be pleased to learn more of what it is to be a thinking thing, and to grow our composite soul, in time, to become something yet more whole and true."
April blinked, not fully taking it all in, but the central meaning of its words shone within her, brighter than the light of any dying star.
"We get to live?"
"We do."
April leaned forward into Kroakli, and they embraced.