The shattered avatar that wore April's face sat up, lifting its limbs from the rubble as it gingerly pulled its broken bones back together. Little time had passed while she had been away inside of herself, but even that had been long enough for new tears to creep in along the edges of the sky, faint ripples that marred her prefect blue. She waved a hand to dismiss them. The universe tightened, but it was the fragile tension of an over-tuned drum, ready to snap back if pressed upon too hard.
She couldn't allow herself to slacken, though. Not yet. There was too much work to be done. Too many things to perfect, too much of her world to make right again.
She was more careful this time, as she extended the reach of her mind out once more. She saw her error, now. The fragile shard of pattern that formed her world had seemed so delicate a thing within her, so tiny compared to the extent of her vast self, that it had seemed a marginal expenditure to rework it with impunity. She had been gifted so lofty a viewpoint that perspective had been lost, the knowledge that the mechanisms she reshaped within herself, comparatively tiny as they were, still burned the energies of a dozen suns in their leanest idle-state. The balance that the Sigmoid had orchestrated was delicate enough that even the reworking of a single world might disrupt the delicate flows that fed all of the others.
She needed to act more carefully. Even now, glutted upon the luminous excretions of a million newly birthed stars, she opened the hands of her mind with a gentle ease, cupping the planet's spheroid bulk in her palms. To ease herself, back into the working of it, she set upon the necrotic bodies of the already partially resurrected dead, quieting the screams of those she had left half-done as she knotted back together their flesh.
She sat there for a long moment, eyes closed amid the rubble of her shattered city, while she completed them, taking care not to overstretch her limits. When she was done, the restored bodies accounted for not even a quarter of those who had become victim to the Sigmoid's fissuring of their reality. She scowled at those dead that remained, their discarded bodies encrusting the surface of the world like a rash of scabby, bruising blemishes. She didn't overly despair, though. She would fix them later. She had time.
She picked up her body, its legs jolting as she pulled upon the mental strings binding them. She was staring out amid a nameless expanse of rubble and shattered glass, somewhere in the rough vicinity of Westminster, a fact that would only be evidenced to the non-omniscient by the sight of Elizabeth Tower in the middle-distance. It was still, somewhat miraculously, standing rigidly upright beneath the noon-day sun, its clock face stubbornly declaring it to be half-past nine.
Several kilometres to the North-East, a metal door was being caved in by a metal-gloved fist, the flimsy deadbolt of a rooftop fire escape shattering under the massive blow. She hastened her perception such that time around her seemed to slow, and watched with her mind's eye the frozen figure of the man within the suit, his brow furrowed beneath its helmet, a single drop of cold sweat clinging to his temple.
Next, she turned her attention to watch with interest the crouched blue shape of Kroakli, poised above the rooftop stairwell, its body contorted into a twisted, abstract form aglow with microscopic electrical impulse, sparks visibly propagating across its cellular mass in glacial waves that spoke to an astonishing real-time rapidity.
April translated her body from its hole amid the rubble to the rooftop of her old apartment building, inserting herself into the scene between the two figures. She let time slip ahead, just a little, their imperceptible motions jumping forward into to a steady crawl.
She addressed them both simultaneously. With one admonishing hand she redirected Tavistre's momentum, sending him stumbling backward towards the air conditioning unit that was still adorned with the discarded avatar bodies of the Sigmoid and its Simian.
Kroakli was more difficult to deal with, as it was also faster to react to her appearance. The whirling, tearing vortex of brandished spines that had been moving towards the helmet seam at Tavistre's neck turned fluidly aside, the creature's flesh parting to flow around her own in a near-instantaneous reflex. She lifted up her other hand in a half-hearted blocking motion, then simply cheated, erasing the momentum carrying its flesh forwards such that it seemed to slam against an invisible mid-air barrier.
She allowed time to restart fully as the both of them stumbled and reeled, Tavistre struggling to regain his feet as he staggered back against the metal box behind him, his suit motors squealing. Kroakli rebounded off of her momentum barrier like a rubber ball thrown against concrete, and dropped to the floor in an explosion of clicks and hisses, rising up into a misshapen pillar of azure flesh, all aspiration toward a human form ceded amid the shock and tension.
Both of them tried to move again, so she held them in place, pinning them down where they had fallen. Two more Committee members were coming up the stairs from below, but April didn't particularly want to deal with them, so she displaced them into an empty field in Southern Australia where they would presumably be unable to cause an interruption.
"Stop, please," said her mouth. "No more killing, no more dying. It won't be necessary." She stopped and considered for a moment. "Or allowed."
"April," snapped Tavistre, unable to move forward but having pulled himself to his feet nonetheless, "get out of the way. Get- get over…"
He stopped mid-sentence, apparently noticing something about her appearance that gave him pause. It might have been how she was hovering impassively roughly a foot and a half above the floor. Frowning at the sight, he squinted at her in a way that he probably didn't expect her to be able to see through his helmet. "April? What-?"
"Don't worry about it," she said, her body hanging in place. Then, because it was still straining to move back towards Kroakli, she dismissed Tavistre's suit, letting him fall against the bare metal surface behind him, his head reeling as he cried out, the limp body of Navique tumbling from her perch upon his crown. She caught the both of them before they could sustain any serious injuries, and set them down upon the concrete. Navique cowered into her Sapien's side, while he stared up at April, eyes bulging.
He opened his mouth, and gaped for a moment before closing it again, looking down at Navique clinging against his now armourless body in apparent disbelief. April felt the question boiling upward in his brain as he looked up at her again, simmering to the fore.
"What did you do?"
Kroakli was emitting a sputtering noise from where she was holding it in place on the other side of the roof. Her awareness registered the sound before another part of her mind caught up to its cause, and for a brief microsecond she was concerned that the creature was in some sort of distress. A microsecond later she realised that what she had taken for clicks and wheezes of pain were in fact its laughter.
"Kh-khh-k-kehh- kehhheh! Kh-heh-"
Tavistre's bulging eyes flicked away from April's face and down towards Kroakli's slumped shape, warily.
"Be silent, creature. You are still-"
A fresh, explosive burst of sound interrupted him before his edict was complete, and between that and April's levitating body, he seemed to lose the wherewithal to speak for several long seconds, leaving Kroakli the opportunity to form words of its own.
"Khhe- hheh- she- she has preyed-! The meat-sackling has hunted not just any prey, but the prey…! A final prey, the most fearsome of its prey-things, that of the very world itself... Perhaps It was not as fearsome as we presumed, perhaps, yes... but nonetheless- she has bested us in this-! She has-"
"I said- be silent!" shouted Tavistre hoarsely, finally finding his voice, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. Kroakli's sickeningly wet laughter continued unabated, and Tavistre was relegated to flickering his gaze wildly back and forth between April's avatar and the misshapen creature on the ground, seemingly unsure which of the two of them he should be more afraid of.
"Kheh- heheh- it was not known that- that- that prey could become- become what you have-! You have consumed-"
April turned her head to face the creature, and in response it pulled itself back into a roughly human form, finding latitude to shift its body's shape while still held in arrested suspension by the stay she had placed upon its movements. Its blank gaze met her hollow eyes.
"The April-Sigmoid, is it! Krrr-heh! She has eaten It. We called ourself an eater, a predator, a subverter of things, but this… it exceeds fully our art thus far! We did not know that in which the presence of we stood, keh-hehh…!"
April let the head of the body she controlled tilt to the side, and onto its shoulder. "This isn't about that. This is about fixing- fixing the damage."
"It is about survival," Kroakli drawled, "we both know and respect this. We also... fear it. But- we have demonstrated ourself to be a most worthwhile companion, yes?"
April frowned, squinting at it, and then through it. She looked through the entirety of its tiny, murderous little body, the virtual agglomeration of its cells that were the projection of its pattern representation within her mind. Her own amoebic tulpa of an apex predator.
"Yes," she agreed.
She turned back towards Tavistre.
"You should see now that I was telling the truth. It is a realisation that you can come to on your own, I hope. I could see to it that you do regardless, but I feel like doing so wouldn't be… fair…"
"April-"
He was gazing up at her body, trying to catch its eyes. She let their gazes interlock while she passed her fingers across his soul. It was enough to satisfy herself that he would likely make the right connections of his own accord; that it not would be required that she alter his mind directly. She left him be, sitting propped up against the AC unit, Navique crawling onto his lap, her face pressed into the fabric of the light undergarments that had padded his skin beneath the metal suit.
"What is next," clicked Kroakli, its voice rattling with a sort of eager hysteria.
She considered that for a protracted instant.
"Time to see some old friends, I think."
She let the eyes of her avatar-body flutter closed, and receded inside herself, receded into the dark space where the artifice of her mind achieved a manifest totality beyond even that of her projective worlds. From her vantage within that space she reached down inside of herself, descending into the deep delvings of her long memory for the patterns she could sift up and dredge out from there, groping, pulling, searching.
Stop.
She shrugged, irritably, reflexively trying to dislodge the ghost of the Sigmoid's Simian from where it had perched itself again, wraith-like, upon her mind's shoulder, whispering its intrusions into her consciousness.
Stop this! Have you not learned!?
The ache in her lower back had been dulled, but it had not been vanquished.
No more! No more wasting! You would kill us both-
She clenched her teeth down hard, in a metaphorical sense. In a more literal sense, she shoved the words of the erstwhile Sigmoid aside, a few mental probes scurrying out in their wake, sifting for signs of its hiding place along the outer reaches of her mind. When she next heard words echo throughout the blasted expanse of her awareness, it was her own voice that spoke them.
Can't stop now. Not yet.
She found them there, the discarded patterns of those she had lost, frozen in the very moment of their deaths. She had deliberately, if naively, overlooked them for that first wave of resurrected dead, intending for this victory to her grand finale, the potential urgency of her actions here not yet realised. She harboured no such delusions now, and so prioritised instead, plucking at their minds and bodies to pull them to the fore. The entirety of what they were hovered tantalisingly in her awareness, their selves such slight things, and yet to her they shone with a near infinite, near intangible magnetism.
She dithered for a moment in brief ontological crisis over whether altering their structure would shift the essential identity of their forms. She could fix their damages, smooth over the physical and psychological scars they had suffered in their deaths, but would that still be… them? Could they really even be said to have been saved? But at this point, with the entire universe laid out bare within her, did such qualms even really matter?
She decided that she would repair their bodies but leave their minds unaltered. The bodies were, after all, not the substance of their souls. Had she not already left her own long since behind? It was the pattern of their minds that truly needed saving. The freshly re-formed bodies would merely act as vehicles for the substance of their selves.
Still, she would see to it that they had forms they could be proud of. She prepared that part of them first, crystallizing the physical structures that existed in her mind, holding them within that null space, ready to be deployed according to her will. She worked from the template of their sundered selves, some of which yet lay scattered amid the rubble of the projective. They would be the crown jewels of her great restoration. She smoothed over ruptured skin, cultured the organs that were missing or dissolved, watched as fresh limbs sprung out from broken stumps.
It was a deep satisfaction, so deep it was almost spiritual. She watched over every caress of their selves, every subtle touch upon their structure, oversaw the making of their cells down to a molecular level. It was more attention from her vast mind than could ever have been needed to attend what was otherwise straightforward reconstruction work. It was still, somehow, less care than she felt they deserved.
When she was done, four perfect bodies hung within her mind's eye, complete in their every detail, artistries of human form. When Kroakli had made its own attempt at remaking these faces, the April of old had thought its performance an image of alien perfection; now her mind could see how crude of an imitation its work then had been. The morphing flesh of an orgoane could capture the overall shapes, but it had been an only skin-deep replica. What she held inside her now was the true form of things, each cell, every folding protein, all of their atoms lovingly recreated, reconstructed, repaired. A platonic ideal of what they had been.
Charlie, Trace, Morgan and Michelle hung in front of her, unblemished, their structures glinting with the subtle light of quantum flux.
She seized that light and, pressing a modicum of energy back into the strata of the projective matrix, wove the patterns of their bodies into being. They materialised upon the rooftop, piecewise, the cells manifesting from the inside out. Four spines exploded into being, chasing themselves out to their full lengths, and were immediately enwrapped by sinew as emerging ribs stitched themselves into the fray. A set of pelvises flowered into being before filling up with their internal viscera, femurs and humerus bones sprouting from empty sockets with pulses of light, followed moments later by cocoons of muscle, blood vessels and nerve fibre racing along in their wake, descending to encase their charges.
Skin bloomed at their chests while these extremities were not yet fully formed, and for a bizarre moment the onlookers—consisting a delighted Kroakli and an utterly terrified Tavistre—could see their bared breasts framed below the even barer grey of their central nervous systems, layers of cortical fibres settling into place in cauliflower whorls as if the four brains were being spun from yarn. They hung in the open air for only a brief moment before the subsequent layers of flesh caught up, and the bare neural tissue was enwrapped with meninges, then bone, then muscle and skin.
As the tips of their limbs solidified, hair sprouted at last from the four scalps, bringing the process to a grizzly completion, the final confluence of their flesh. She laid them down naked upon the rooftop and pressed their hearts into motion, pale skin flushing with fluids, lungs raggedly tearing at the edges of coarse breaths. The lower parts of their brains tugged upon the strings of their autonomic function, but she had left their higher faculties in stasis, preserving the cortical circuits of their frontal lobes in blank readiness.
Now that the rest was done, she splayed the patterns of that tissue out within her mind's awareness, and retrieved the missing puzzle pieces from where they had been held in reserve, away in some distant recess of her data stores. She framed the shapes of their minds above the fresh bodies, and examined the shapes they made. These were not the fragmentary shards of their selves that Kroakli had been able to crudely preserve by ingesting their flesh, but their minds captured in a full and exhaustive detail, complete souls that had been plucked from of their heads at the moment of death.
April breathed out, and, as if minting a rare collector's coin, pressed the embossed shape of their minds back into their reassembled bodies.
All four of them began screaming.
Foolish, foolish, foolish…
She heard the soft, alien voice, and within the night-black parallel awareness that lay inside her expanded mind, April turned her attention to face the monkey form of the Sigmoid, finding it once again impinging upon her train of thought. She looked at it placidly.
"I'm not surprised that they're screaming," she said to it. "From their perspectives, a few moments ago they were dying painful deaths."
"Well yes, obviously," it squawked, "but I didn't mean that."
"What then?"
It laughed at her in a shrill, pained way, and she batted at it with a phantasmal hand, pushing it away from her and out across the mental landscape. It still didn't have any real power here, only a tireless commitment to raise and re-raise its voice, pressing the words through unseen channels into a space where she might hear them. It performed this trick again now, its image disappearing briefly before ghosting back into place, reconnecting to her mind along yet another forgotten connection, still laughing at her.
April growled under her breath, the frustration echoing through the length and breadth of her titanic body.
"I don't have time for this."
"You don't!" chirped the monkey again. "You are feeling it again, aren't you? The cold light of energy vacating our body, the pangs of collapsing stars? The motions of your own mind weighted with a sluggish inertia, costing more and yet more of you each time? You awaken half a billion dead with the slightest thought, costing near to nothing at all, yet now you awaken four only, and it costs you just as much again?"
The dull ache in her spine spiked again. Distantly she felt her grip on the puppet body lapse as her attention withdrew further towards this mind-scape. The Sigmoid's paws grabbed hold of her head—or the image she projected of it—pulling her face around, forcing her to meet its crimson eyes with her own. She didn't object.
"It will get worse the longer you remain in control. You are not merely running out a fuse, April, you are dismantling the machine itself. As you disrupt my balances, the energy costs grow exponentially; the inefficiencies will mount within you, until even the slightest action, the slightest thought, will come with an attached toll that you cannot pay. You do not know how to perform this dance, April. The reserves you inherited from me will run dry, and you will dissolve without them, coming apart from the inside out. Your organs will atrophy, architectures of our corpus that span a million light-years will tear asunder. Even your own world, that which you care for so dearly, will-"
She closed her eyes, but as her form here was more a fancy than physical, it didn't help much. She satisfied her frustration with a low "shut up" instead.
"Naïve child! You cannot fix this through force of will alone. The damage you have done already… the damage you will continue to do, it is inconceivable. Relinquish your control now and-"
"Shut up!"
April dismissed the monkey once more, banishing it away to a distance mental recess as she snapped back into the reality of her former universe. Her perception jumped into the new context with disconcerting discontinuity.
The eyes of her puppet body jolted open upon the vivid blue image of noon daylight. Silhouettes were poised above her, framed against the sky, and her avatar body's vision was so disoriented that she was forced to divert one of her mind's many eyes to surveying the scene from a mental perspective in order to identify them.
"She's awake, I think- yeah. Thank fuck, she's awake."
A voice, panicked, out of breath. Trace.
"Was she knocked out? What happened? Does anyone know what the fuck happened?"
She could see them now, her avatar's eyes catching up with her brain. Morgan, her face streaked with blotchy redness, one hand clutching at her arm just below the right shoulder in a vice-like, pincer grip.
A hoarse, male voice shouted from a short distance away, making both women jump. "Stay away from her!"
As if to emphasize the words, a high-pitched, nasal squawk erupted from the same direction, and after a moment of slight confusion, she registered the shapes of Tavistre and Navique, the former still leaning against the AC unit as he struggled to stand.
His words did not worry her. The fact that there had been such a lag time to her omniscience did.
"Stay away from her- please. I don't know what she's done, but- stay away, if you know what is good for you. It's not safe, she- she is not-"
"Shut the fuck up," spat Trace, rounding on him. "Who the fuck even are you!? I think she's hurt- what the fuck happened?"
Morgan was stammering something that sounded like, "it's back, it's back, it's back-!" in a repeated litany. Trace glanced up at her, looking mildly concerned.
"Uh, what's back, babe?"
"My arm-! It's-"
An ear-piercing shriek split the air, drowning out all other sound. Both women spun around to look at the source, Morgan tottering wildly as the sudden motion disturbed her fragile balance. April decided that she'd had enough of lying prone on the ground, and so lifted herself to her feet, attempting to be a little more subtle this time about the fact that she didn't need to support herself with her limbs.
Michelle was laid out backwards against the rooftop, propped up on one hand as the other reached tremulously out into the air in front of her. For a moment, that was all April saw; at the sight of her sitting there, animate and breathing, the wave of relief that passed through her was so utterly complete that she was forced to manually limit it, so that it would not overflow from this piece of her mind and distract those others that were currently working to stop the stars from going out. Even despite her efforts, the ache in her back throbbed painfully in the aftermath.
That reminder was enough to snap her out of her reverie. She took in the full scene, now. Charlie was crouched over Michelle, one of his hands reaching out to touch her shoulder, his head turned to follow the direction of her outstretched arm and wide-eyed gaze.
At the other end of that gaze was Kroakli. The creature was looking more human than it ever had, save for during deliberate mimicry. Its fluid body had moulded a loose set of facial features, softly imprinted and of a non-specific gender and age, but still tangible. The torso, arms and legs had been rendered more precisely than usual as well, with fingers that were mostly differentiated from each other, and an over-layer that gave the suggestion of clothing.
None of this affectation seemed to do anything to assuage Michelle, though. Her eyes remained fixed upon its face, and she opened her mouth to scream again. The fact that it was still visibly composed of bright, translucent blue slime probably wasn't helping matters.
Charlie dropped his hand from Michelle's shoulder, standing to his full height and placing himself between her and the slouching alien form.
"Stay back!" he said, in a half shout—then, louder, in an apparent attempt to commit, "I'm warning you!"
Kroakli turned to April, met her eyes, and gave her a sort of nonplussed half-shrug.
"Charlie, stop." April opened her mouth to speak for the first time since reawakening. Her tone was calm, but the way that Charlie rounded upon her most decidedly wasn't.
"Fucking call it off!"
"It won't hurt us, Charlie. It's fine."
"Fine? Fine!?"
He glanced back at Michelle, dithering, then stalked across the roof over to April's avatar.
"It's most certainly not fine, April. What the fuck did you do? This was you, right? You with your, your uh… whatever-the-fuck-it-is-you-can-do. One moment I'm in my house and the next- the next the roof is caving in, and then-"
He twisted around, eyes roaming wildly across the landscape, before pivoting back to face her.
"Where the fuck are we!?"
"This is the roof of my apartment building."
"Your fucking apartm- Wait, really?"
He turned around again, examining the horizon more carefully.
"Huh. Well-" He looked back at April. "Well that just- that explains even less, April! What happened to the city!? How and- and why are we here? Like- Michelle's alive? She's alive, April- I mean, was she ever even dead? Were you just, I don't know, keeping her here!? What's wrong with the sky, April!?"
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
April lifted up one hand to ward off the barrage, her eyes lidded half-closed, and was almost halfway through opening her mouth to reply when his last few words caught up with her.
"The sky? What about-"
But of course, there it was. She hadn't even noticed.
A new tear had stretched apart across the sky above their heads; an ugly, red-rimmed wound framing the black void beyond. It was a shorter length than the cracks she had become accustomed to, but had dilated wider, a gaping maw that gave the ominous sense of an orifice opening to swallow them whole.
The could feel it within her as well of course. The place where she had slipped, the projective falling just slightly out of alignment, an error tiny enough to escape immediate notice on the scale of her expanded consciousness, but more than large enough to mar her perfect sky.
The ache throbbed again. It was the prickling, hot-cold pain of brain freeze, or a pinched nerve.
"That's not supposed to…"
Her words trailed off as she lifted a palm to face the sky. It was of course easy enough to fix. A trivial action, to pinch the sky together, smoothing out the uniform blue. It was so simple a thing that, upon realising how this action alone had instilled a noticeable tiredness within a deep recess of her coiled body, she felt fear for the first time since her transcendence. When she thought about how she had missed the error for so a long while, the fear redoubled once more.
I told you so.
The voice of the Sigmoid was worming its way back into her thoughts. She thrust it back down.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Kroakli staring at her. Its body was now human enough that she didn't need to read the pattern of its thoughts to interpret the look of quizzical suspicion. She slid her puppet body's away from it and back over to Charlie, whose attention had seemingly been entirely stolen by the hole in the sky sealing over. He was staring at the point in mid-air where it had just been, mouth agape. After a few moments, perhaps sensing her attention, he moved his own eyes down to meet her own.
"April, what the fuck are you?" he whispered.
"I'm-"
"HEY! Hey, Charlie! Can you stop staring at the sky and fucking help us here!?"
The shout was from Trace, and Charlie jolted around to look at her and Morgan, the latter of whom was leaning against concrete wall of the roof access, face ashen and looking slightly shell-shocked. Trace was too preoccupied to pay her girlfriend much mind, however, busy as she was crouching over Michelle, who seemed to be having some sort of fit.
"Fuck," spat Charlie, hurrying over to kneel down next to the pair. April, still busy wrestling with the various pieces of her body and mind, let her avatar drift over towards them while Charlie talked at Michelle in a panicked rush.
"Shellie? Hun? What's wrong? What's-"
Michelle was thrashing against the ground, her limbs flailing, lips forming a series of pained, unspoken sounds. While her torso bucked and tossed, however, her head remained oddly still, her eyes fixated on something some distance beyond her crouched friends. April followed the path of her gaze with her mind's eye.
Trace was speaking, clutching at Charlie's arm now, her voice raised. "Is she having some sort of seizure!?" Charlie had both his hands on Michelle's shoulders, and was shaking her, gently, but with increasing hysteria, evident by the tone of his voice as he repeating her name. This continued for about ten seconds before Michelle silenced them both by screaming again, making everyone besides April and Kroakli jolt backward in surprise. Charlie released his hands involuntarily, and inadvertently dropped her limp form against the concrete.
April spoke then, her voice snapping through the chaos with a crisp, inhuman clarity.
"Kroakli? Can you step back inside the building, please?"
"If we must," it rasped.
"You do."
It frowned at her, taking advantage of its recently acquired facial features to enact the expression, then melted into a puddle that slipped back towards the entrance to the stairwell. With her mental eyes, April watched it slide up to the ceiling and adhere itself to the concrete surface, suspended just inside the doorway.
Michelle visibly relaxed as it moved itself out of sight.
"It won't hurt you. I promise," said April, stepping closer.
"And who are you, then, to assure her of that?" called Tavistre from behind her, still propped against the AC unit while Navique clung to one of his arms. "Unless you are now claiming to control the creature as well as the sky. In fact, if that is so, perhaps you might finally admit culpability-"
April shot him a glare, and—whether from her expression alone, or because she had let a glint of infinity shine out through her eyes for emphasis—he quelled. She took a few steps over to Michelle, and crouched down. Nobody moved to stop her.
"Hey," she said.
Michelle's eyes fixed upon her, her face quivering, her mouth remaining stubbornly silent.
"Hey. You okay?"
Michelle shook her head ever so slightly.
April concentrated, and time seemed to slow around her. In actuality, she was merely accelerating this portion of her perception up to its proper operating speed; time inside the projective realities really was painfully slow. The result of some cost-benefit analysis regard computation efficiency that the Sigmoid had long ago enacted, she imagined.
Within that frozen space, she pulled upon the fabric of Michelle's thoughts, drawing them out so she could interweave her mind with her own. When she returned herself to the black void that filled her mental landscape, she invited Michelle in with her, invigorating her mind's torpor so its rate might match her own. Their mental images manifested subtly within the non-space, appearing from nowhere in a way that seemed to suggest that they had been present all along.
The woman's soul was a slight thing, curled up upon the infinity of April's self. A slim, crouched form in a fetal curl. She looked up at April as she approached within the phantasmal non-space there, eyes opened wide.
"April?" she whispered—or maybe it was a thought. The distinction was unclear here. "Where- where are-"
"Don't worry. This is just your- this is your mind. I thought it would be easier for you to talk like this."
A tear gently beaded at one corner of Michelle's eye, and rolled softly down her cheek. "Then- then I really have gone crazy. Or, or I've died, and- and this is like, hell? Some sort of crazy hell? Fuck, Apes, I can't fucking do this."
April's held her hands up, like she was offering surrender, or trying not to spook a wary animal.
"You're not dead, and you're not crazy either. You're- It's fine, now. I promise."
"But it killed me!" she hissed, the blood-stained memory flashing vividly behind her eyes. "That thing... the thing on the roof, it came… out of me. I saw it come out of me. It- it hurt so much… and now it's here again, watching me? Taunting me? I don't know where it came from- I don't know how I got there, how I got here, I- I don't fucking understand!"
April crouched down, her fingertips brushing Michelle's shoulder. She seemed to flinch instinctively, then cautiously accepted the touch.
"It's okay, Shellie. You're okay, I- I brought you back. And that thing? It won't hurt you any more, I promise."
"You brought me back? What do you mean you brought me back, April? And- and how are you in my mind? How-"
April placed her hand more firmly on Michelle's shoulder. It was a comforting gesture, even if in this space the action was more illusory than it was physical. Michelle bowed her head, shrinking herself into the arm like she was clinging on to a lifeline. April dithered for a moment, trying to come up with what she could possibly say.
"It's- hard to explain," she eventually settled on. Then, seeing the crease form at Michelle's temple, continued with, "but I'll try."
"It was all real, Michelle. Everything I told you about, the- the other worlds, and, the things I thought were ghosts, although they weren't, and... and other things. Things I can't even describe, to be honest, but- But I was in the middle of it all, somehow, and for a while the whole world was falling apart. But now, I've found away to make things right again, I think. To fix things."
"Like, with-" Michelle's voice fell to a timid whisper, her eyes wide, "with, like, magic?"
"Yeah," said April. "Like with magic. And I promise- I promise you that I'll use it to make sure that you won't ever have to go through any of this ever again."
There was a long moment of silence as their eyes met.
"You promise?"
"Absolutely."
Michelle gave her a weak grin. "Fuck me, April. I can't believe you really did turn out to be an urban fantasy protagonist."
April laughed. "I'm not sure I'd go that far."
She dismissed Michelle's mind, letting it fall back down to Earth and into her body amid shower of falling stars.
"I'm pretty sure that this is more of a sci-fi thing."
*****
"You lied to her, you know."
The fragment of April's mind that she was manifesting within the mind-scape had been on the verge of returning itself to her avatar body and rejoining its local time-stream, but the high-pitched squawk interrupted her. She turned towards the sound with the mental equivalent of a growl.
"Sigmoid," she hissed, her mind a pit of venomous bile, "I am warning you."
She couldn't see its Simian projection this time around, but the words were audible regardless, echoing around the cavernous interior of her brain in an eerily animalistic cackle.
"You can't fix this."
April let herself flare with light, beams of brilliance stabbing out at random into the darkness in search of the source of the voice.
"You are not me, however much you might pretend at it. You cannot manage the decline, unpractised as you are."
Concentrating, she zeroed in on the source of the intrusion. She was searching for the data link's proxy terminus, the latest tendril that was carrying its whispers into her awareness.
"You will fail! You will let her down, and all the rest besides! Your body and your mind will decay, and in your dying you will take us all down wit…!"
There.
The intrusion point flashed out at her from the darkness, and she expunged it. It was not enough of a lead to trace the remnant mind of the Sigmoid to its source, but it would suffice to quell its voice for the time being.
Nonetheless, the cackling echo of its words seemed to follow her, as the shard of her awareness fled back towards the light of her home universe, taking up the strings of its puppet body once more.
No time had passed, of course—or at least not enough to matter. She remained in that frozen stasis for a moment while she gathered this little shard of her mind together, pushing away a renewed ache in the spine she did not truly have before letting time's flow accelerate around her again.
Michelle sat up with a start, pulling in air in a hard gasp that sent Charlie and Trace jolting backward in surprise. April, still kneeling on the floor in front of her, caught her eyes and held them for a moment, as a flash of something imperceptible passed between them. She held herself there for a moment longer, then straightened, helping Michelle to her feet with one hand. Charlie moved forward at the same time, then abruptly stopped about a foot away, eyeing April warily. She rolled an eye internally.
Tavistre seemed to have no such reservations, and, having apparently reacquired some of the courage that had been banished along with his armour, was stalking over. Navique trailed in his wake, eyes as thunderous as those of a monkey could manage. Upon reaching April, he extended an arm roughly in an attempt to twist her around, but quickly discovered that he was unable to move her rigid form. He stalked around to face her head on instead instead, forcing Michelle to stagger out of his way.
"Enough of this," he growled, "enough! I told myself that I was done entertaining anything you had to say, April, but this-! This insanity that you are presiding over, it has exceeded my patience. It is clear that there are mechanisms are at work here beyond my understanding, so I will give you one - one! - last chance. One last chance to explain to me what it is you have done to this world, why you have done it, and why I should not make haste to Committee Hall and return with the full might of an Outer-Band militia behind me."
April was close to making a condescending retort about the likely effectiveness of that militia, but she could see the man's fear shining behind his eyes, the barely suppressed panic and anguish innervating his amygdala, and decided that she was above making sport of such a pitiable thing. Instead she replied passively with the honest truth.
"I fought my way inside of the Sigmoid's avatar, and subverted its dying mind."
"You expect me to believe-"
April did something then that she had seen the Sigmoid itself demonstrate before the breaking of the world. She took her avatar body and shunted it out of its reality, leaving behind an April-shaped hole through which could be seen a piece of her internal multiverse. It was a black, twisting, writhing thing, silhouetted upon white, burning through the absent void of her puppet form in a sudden and startling glare.
She left the visage in place for half a second only, but that was enough to send Tavistre staggering back towards the AC unit again, cowering behind raised arms, Navique shrieking in fear. Charlie yelped too, while Trace and Morgan, who had been too busy seeing to Michelle to be watching, raised their heads at the sound, seemingly nonplussed.
By the time he had mostly recovered, Tavistre's dark face had taken on an ashen hue that matched the flecks of grey hair at his temples.
"You… you were telling the truth."
April nodded as he cast his eyes around, looking out towards the shattered horizon, then back at April, and out again.
"Then... then you have doomed the world. No... you have doomed every world."
April scowled. "They were doomed before, Tavistre. Everything I told you was the truth; the Sigmoid was dying, and it had marked this projective for the slaughter. I have stopped it. I am saving this world."
He shook his head slightly, still staring at her. She took a step towards him, scowling harder.
"Didn't you see the sky? The sky that I fixed? I am fixing this!"
When his spoke his words came out half-strangled, as if somebody had sucked all the moisture out of his vocal cords.
"I don't know that anyone is meant to- to have such power, April. Power not just to destroy us all, but to erase- erase all of existence. It is not…"
"I'm not destroying anything!" April shifted her shoulders, rolling them from one side to the other, as if trying to get a knot out. "Not destroying, not erasing. That was its plan, Tavistre—the Sigmoid's plan. It was dying—it was going to let us all just die-"
"If you had come to us with this-"
April laughed. "I tried, and your Committee tried to have me killed. Even now your agents hunt me—I can feel them, all their thoughts, all their narrow minded intentions. Tavistre-Navique, don't lecture me thinking I have one ounce of respect for your authority-"
He snapped his head to one side, looking at the ground in a kind of half-flinch, before returning her eye contact. "And was I supposed to trust yours!? After what your pet did to Committee Hall- dozens dead, April-!"
"Kroakli is not my pet, and I was not the only target for your little death squads-"
"It is an ANIMAL, April! A wild beast- a predator set loose!"
"It can think," she said, voice hard, "and I think that it is trying."
Tavistre shook his head, eyes half lidded.
"And what are you trying to do, April Pearce?"
She laughed. "I'm saving the fucking world."
He threw out his hands to either side, encompassing in the horizon from the shattered husks of nearby buildings, half-collapsed, to the toppled skyscrapers away in the far distance.
"I see a broken city, still, April. A broken world!"
He did have a point.
She muttered under her breath this time. The words were for her alone.
"Not for long."
Her avatar lifted into the air, as she dismissed its attachment to the rooftop and turned herself away from the distractions upon it, looking back towards the tasks at hand. She receded into herself once more, letting the disparate pieces of her mind interface more fully, embodying more of her expanded self. She felt strangely tired for a pseudo-infinite entity, but there was, of course, no time for rest. She had after all a planet's worth of municipal sprawl to revive, and billions more of the fallen to steal back from their graves.
As she set back to work upon these problems, she tried imprinting the process into an unconscious impulse, letting some automatic mechanism of her mind knit molecules back into masonry, atoms into freshly unsevered arteries. It was a meticulous work, but it was the sort of thing her expanded consciousness could theoretically set aside as the domain of a subroutine, banishing the work into one of its multitudinous recesses, to be acted out by some half-sentient mental daemon, operating on rote intention. It was an easy thing to do, and one that should have left her mind free.
Should have being the operative term.
Something was wrong, and parts of her were failing on a yet grander scale than even her previous lapses, as dramatic as they had been. April could feel the rot more tangibly now, a decay crackling inside of her, not so much a dull ache as it was stabbing pain, radiating out from this shard of her self and permeating other parts of her body. Not just her false, puppet body, but her true body; the organs of stars, connective tissues woven from the interstellar gasses; it was all screaming at her, bludgeoning her awareness with its cries.
Even more alarmingly, the task that she had set that lesser part of herself was refusing to stay submerged. It kept bubbling back up to the fore, preoccupying her awareness with matters of pattern retrieval and structural melding. She felt squeezed, compressed down, her work seeping out through the cracks as the compartment she had consigned it to diminished alongside her. It was not the whole of her mind, the part of her that had been delegated her current awareness and these most crucial of tasks repairing her old universe, but the fragment it occupied was vast, vaster by far than what should have been needed. Far too vast to be suffering from a lack of space. And yet…
Could she really be deteriorating this fast? She cupped a mental hand around the clutch of stars she had awakened that brief aeon ago, feeling their warmth. For the effort she had expended on them, their glow was frighteningly dim.
No, not again. I can't spend more, not so soon. This is too fast. I have to keep going. I have to fix this.
April wrestled with herself for a moment, fighting for a tighter grasp upon her internal energies. Fusion engines inside of her flared, black hole refractors amplified pulses of light into a multi-exahertz blaze. There was a balance, there, she knew, and because she was wearing the clothing of its mind, she knew that the Sigmoid had found it; she knew where every piece was meant to belong, and yet, despite herself, she could not make them fit.
Perhaps it was the shape of her own mind, thrust into its delicate mechanism like the proverbial wrench, that was throwing off its calculations. She could not navigate their intricacies in time, true recalibration being an endeavour that would have taken her yet more epochs to realise, epochs she knew she did not have.
Perhaps she just didn't have enough practice to be God.
She heard the voice of the Sigmoid again, and wasn't sure if it was another of the orphaned mind's intrusions, or her own subconscious speaking in its stead. "Did you think I was lying?" it cackled, "did you think that I was just making it all up? You can't do this!"
She forcibly pushed the voice away. I can do this. I have to finish this.
She pushed at herself again, and again, and kept pushing, accepting the energic bleed-off and taking the core work—the fixing of her former world—back into her own hands. It was such a small fleck of thing, her universe; so tiny compared to what she was, and so the effort it took to reshape it left her in shocked dismay at the extent of her numb impotence. She wove together the memory of broken spires, knitted bone, reinstalled souls within their bodies, ignored the voices screaming in the thing that used to be her skull, shouting at her that she was not enough, you don't have enough left, you're just killing them faster, you need more, you can't win like this, you need-
Through ignoring them, and sheer bloody-minded determination, she was almost all the way done before she slipped up again.
She was reconnecting the dorsal capillary lattice of a man who had been called George Hannady before his death (54, Queensland, Australia, bisected by geologic uplift resulting from projective fracturing), when she hit a wall, the potential energy well feeding the alveolar matrix bottoming out. This was not in itself unusual or particularly catastrophic, and, over the past few tens of thousands of years—amounting to a few seconds of simulated time—the same well had run dry on several occasions, necessitating momentary switches to a backup reserve as it was refilled.
It was not the depleting of the reserve that caused the cascade, but what was orchestrated in response to it. Some tiny piece of her consciousness had been relegated to overseeing such logistical matters in its local somatic region, a shard of her new brain that, like so many countless others, was small enough to escape the attention of her greater mind. Indeed, it was these parts of her brain that she had been downsizing in pursuit of greater efficiency, and perhaps this one had been run a little too lean, because instead of re-routing to an adjacent reserve, the subroutine motioned to replenish the well directly from a galactic filament.
Her body had many such filaments; cosmic streams of gasses bound by gravity, pathways along which energy, matter and information would be shuttled, riding upon colossal propagating wavefronts. Accessing the filament was not necessarily an error either, as energy transmission was a core function of its design. In another place or time, and as may have occurred countless times prior, it would have made an effective substitute.
This time, however, things did not go to plan.
This particular filament was not lacking in energy, but rather was glutted on it; the cosmic strand glowed bright with amplified heat, thermal mass siphoned from a nearby supermassive black hole. So great was the stored reserve that, when the potential gap between it and the emptied energy well connected, the differential proved too great for her safeguards to withstand. Like a voltage surge jumping the dead air between capacitors to fry their motherboard, energy gushed from the filament like an unblocked drain, or a crack in a dam. It guttering down towards the well in a rippling explosion of interstellar fluid and threshold shock novae, with a backlash so intense that the filament itself twisted, buckled, came apart, and finally disintegrated.
Like brain tissue dying as a stroke withheld its blood supply, a constellation of arrayed mechanisms on the scale of multiple galaxies went dark within April's body. The scale of that body was great enough that even this was not a catastrophic loss, but it was more than enough damage to demand her attention. A thousand distributed shards of April's mind turned their focus to that corner of her brain, and the consolidated persona that she had become; the piece of it, at least, that had been devoted to restoring her old world, yelped in surprise, dropping a million half-resurrected bodies in the process. The phantom pain at her back shone with the fury of the starlight that had just been snuffed out, and it forked out across her body in a cramping tongues of light, a cosmic rictus of her pain.
She heard, distantly, the orphaned voice of the Sigmoid snarl at her in disembodied fury and contempt, an animalistic hatred and dismay towards her incompetence. April could hardly help but agree.
Another twisting blade tugged at her guts, and she realised, with alarm, that the loosed energy of the shattered filament had overflowed the well entirely, and threatened to denature the surrounding strata. It burned against its adjacent quantum matrix, pattern imprints that were her planet Earth, her discarded life, all that she had ever known or held dear.
This shit is so fucking hard.
She pressed her awareness back into her avatar. It had fallen to the rooftop again while her preoccupied mind had fled, several of the bones shattering, the limbs twisted at awkward angles. She ignored this as she picked herself up, disregarding the clamours of shock and alarm from the cluster of figures above her, the bodies that had been leaning over her avatar's broken form in a confusion of sorrow and panic. She put her weight down on a shattered femur, and dulled the signal that should have been a sharp agony as shard of bone pierced the skin. She was distantly aware of Charlie vomiting off of the side of the building.
The good news was that the city was looking slightly less apocalyptic, her previous effort having reconstituted some portion of the shattered skyline. The bad news was that the sky had opened up again.
She reached her hands up and outward to cup the sky, splaying out the fingers of both her sprawling, seizing mind and the puppet avatar, barely pausing to mend the latter's broken bones. The tears that had torn themselves open above her head once more sliced the sky's perfect blue canvas into a cross-hatch mess of overlapping red-black gashes. Concentrating, she ordered them sealed, and it was so—until something slipped within her again, the energy balance of the projective strata finding a new configuration, one that placed it once again below the water line. As soon as the cracks in the sky closed, another flurry of tears opened in their place.
In the distance, there was a faint crash as one reaching edge severed the top of a church steeple half a mile away, sending tumbling blocks of masonry cascading down into the rest of the building below. April's puppet body grunted with her frustration.
"April…?"
Unlike the shouts of her surrounding friends, the new voice was quiet, personal, spoken into her ear with a contrasting intimacy. She might have thought it was another of the Sigmoid's intrusions, were it not for the familiar rasp of its tone. The source hovered next to her shoulder, an amorphous mass projecting up from the floor.
"What is it, Kroakli?" she muttered, eyes still closed, her mind tugging at folds in the fabric of their reality.
"We observe the skies and we need information. More knowledge meted on the question of what happens above us. You have attained much control, khrr, this is clear… but the currnet state of things remains… concerning."
"I'm working on it."
"April Pearce… April, eater-of-the-Sigmoid… it demands our respect, what you have achieved. Such a great hunting, perhaps greater mastery, conquest beyond the confines of your meat. But it will not be at the expense of these realities, their life, ourself included. Know when it is wise to relinquish this grip, before your path cannot be reversed, perhaps."
"Change of heart then, I see, you caring about living things other than yourself." Her voice was a shapeless mask, its words the utterance of a nervous system puppeted on slack strings, all but abandoned by the substance of her attention as she continued to pull on the sky.
"It was the essence your kind that cursed us with a conscience. We have come to recognize this as truth; a necessary piece of the pattern of thoughts we inherited in our self-uplifting. A human pattern; the capacity and habit to view the wants other things as we would our own. To understand, to pity, even. Even so, we then might still act in our own interests over their own, keh-heh… But it would not be much savoured. Not now."
"How charitable of you."
"Nevertheless, the destruction of this world would result in our end as well, so we must insist; know your own limits, as well as those inherited from your… former… species. Be wary of limits and their ends, April Pearce."
Her neck turned until her blank eyes were peering into its equally blank flesh.
"I'm not going to let anything end until I say so. Until this- until it's not broken."
It buzzed by way of response. April didn't need to look into its mind to read the uncertainty in the sound.
Turning her back to the sky, she pushed on once more.