Which was a totally fucking terrible idea that absolutely, categorically, should not have worked.
The man—the body—that had been standing in front of April was, after all, not the Sigmoid. The Sigmoid didn't even exist inside of her universe, which was after all nothing more than a figment of Its own mind. Her entire world was less than a fragment of a scrap of a thought, an idle hypothetical that took up less than one trillion-trillionth of a percentage of Its constituent substance, even in Its current diminished state.
April lived within a world that It was capable of, and indeed currently in the process of, casually discarding like so much errant thought. It could have reached out to grasp the virtual atoms that made up her data-patterned body, made up brain and the mind that were so laughably attempting to assert themselves upon It, and dissolved them as one might dismiss the idle fantasy that she was.
That is what It could have done. Should have been able to do, on any other day.
The Sigmoid was dying.
It was a death from starvation, and it was an orderly death, played out in the gradual retreat of Its soul from Its body. As Its mind left Itself, what remained behind did not disappear immediately, nor did it, even then, relinquish these excesses from Its vast reach and even vaster plan. The Sigmoid had long since run the calculations, pressed the numbers It had crunched into a frantic order, and uncovered the optimal path to preserve Itself, to slow the devolution in the balance of Its energy through staggered concession, to stall entropy for as long as any mind of its capability might have conspired.
It could not see the future that It designed directly. For all the yearning of Its cosmic engines, for all the myriad projective worlds It held inside itself, Its own future lay beyond Its reach. It was elementary information theory; a state could not encode a state larger than itself, and a physical entity could not encode in full fidelity more information than constituted its full description.
The Sigmoid could not even, after all, skip forward to the termination points of Its own simulations; To truly calculate their ending states would be to allow them to play out in full. This was only in addition to the inevitability that, as Its child realities fell beyond Its purview, they would be corrupted by outside influence, the chaotic spoiling of Its once pristine corpse. But the Sigmoid did know with near exactness the energy Its worlds would have consumed before reaching their termination, and therefore; when to shut them down, and in what order.
So the Sigmoid had released April's world, and then that world had begun to decay, and it did so because the Sigmoid had withdrawn Its guiding hand, allowing the patterns to play themselves out, to be co-opted by the rogue sub-minds that grown out from Its husk, scrabbling for a handhold amid Its scattered ashes.
The Sigmoid did let a part of Itself remain attached to these dying worlds. Rudimentary data probes, recording but barely influencing, the broader mechanism of Its control withdrawn while It retained command of one or two simple data puppets that would allow it to observe the die-off. These vestigial data links conjoined the dying projectives to the broader mind, but, for that brief window of their final days, the Sigmoid was present while the substance of Its worlds hung beyond Its grasp.
It was during this fleeting epoch that April, clawing outward with the influence that It Itself had granted her, shunted the pattern that was her self directly into the great corpse-god's avatar.
The hole she tore into the shape of a man in front of her did not lead to another, neighbouring projective. She had had a pretty bad week, and was rather done with running. No, it was time to go for the fucking jugular.
She had opened the door to the Travelling but had let it stall out before the bridgehead could land. The gradient she let herself flow along now was the same directionless melding of form that she had chanced upon in the phone booth, when her attempt to leave her world had been interrupted by its ending. As then, when she was pulled forward she was not sent through, but in.
The pattern of quantum superpositions and self-interfering waveforms, that together constituted April's representation within the matrix-substrate of the Sigmoid, shunted themselves—in the manner of a bacteriophage injecting a DNA payload—directly into Its data-probe avatar. The body itself was a shallow form, a hollow thing, and there she was free to assert herself. Her uncoupled mind immobilised and dismantled the form of it, carrying to completion the process she had almost, but not quite, enacted upon Kroakli during that turbulent morning.
In a shocking thrill of unexpected novelty, the Sigmoid realised that for the first time in Its multi-multi-quadrillion year existence, a product of one of Its myriad dreamings had managed to surprise It. Its initial reaction was, despite everything, an almost delirious glee. Finally, here, at the very end of things, one of Its experiments had turned up something utterly new, something that was so truly precious that even It had not known that it might be expected. It revelled in the discovery for fleeting instant, before, in an event even more so unprecedented, the Sigmoid experienced two novel occurrences in a row. It looked inside Itself, saw clearly what was happening there, and It feared.
The pattern that was April Pearce had fully established itself inside the null-space behind the avatar body, and the mechanism of her self had started to operate on the Sigmoid's own terms.
April was still aware of herself, in an indistinct sense. Her body's physicality was gone, but all of her being was still there—its whole self present in consolidated synthesis, the shapes of her former body melding as one with her mind. She reached out with that flowing, rolling bundle of her being to feel, and prod, and pry at the overlapping signals around her. Inside the Sigmoid's avatar-body, there was really only one way to go, and it was out. April made contact with the data channel, the tether that lead away from the puppet back towards the puppeteer, and, like a cancer cell chancing upon a lymph duct, she dived back along it towards the source.
Recognising the danger at last, the Sigmoid acted. In a motion almost faster than thought, It abandoned Its careful, epoch-spanning plan and shunted reserves of energy back through Its body, the heat flowing out across temperature gradients, through the compression waves that propagated across pristinely string clouds of intergalactic gasses, pressing to re-vivify abandoned quantum circuits built out of filigrees of cosmic light, to re-ignite the fusion batteries dying of stars. It mourned the excess expenditure of energy, mourned the time It would now lose, but the danger It faced now surpassed any concern of entropic balance; threatened aeons of Its delicate future beyond what its spent deficit might have otherwise bought back.
It was forced to take a moment—several hundred thousand years, but on the timescales that It worked by, this was scarcely more than an instant—to crush several upstart minds that had nestled themselves in within the shards of Its husk that it now sought to reclaim. It batted them away from the vicinity of the crumbling projective like errant flies, costing It several more millennia, before It was able to reassert Itself over the dying world. It seized the reigns of the grand pattern and pulled, reaching inward to snuff out April like the ocean would engulf a sparking match head.
It was already too late.
April was no longer a part of the projective that had birthed her. She no longer truly existed in any specific location, moving freely as she was routed along long-privileged pathways carved throughout the data space of the Sigmoid, channels that spanned far outside the purview of any world-walker of the Außenbandüberwach Ausschuss.
The place into which she pushed herself was not really any kind of world at all—it was no projective reality that she found herself within, no simulation constrained to the bounds of its vast substrate, no constructed simulacrum of a physical reality. She was operating as pure data now, flowing inside a realm that was solely Mind, and which acknowledged only Pattern.
She floated—or in some other, more nebulous way, existed—amid the twisting strands that made up one tiny part of the Sigmoid's immense consciousness. The patterns that were It reached out for her, grasping, pushing to overwrite this most unwanted intrusion. April, instinctively, pushed back, fighting tooth and nail to find purchase, scrabbling against the glacial edifices of alien thought.
Somehow, impossibly, she found herself winning.
It was a comprehensive thing, what the Sigmoid had done to her. "Pattern destabilization", the Committee had called it; "misalignment from the projective on the atomic level". But it seemed to April now that they hadn't quite grasped the true extent of what that meant.
The virtual topology that was April had been fuzzed along her edges, distorted into a shape that had crackled within and against her containing reality. For the past week, her cells had shone with a razor sharpness that, with a little prompting, would sink itself into the very conceptual substance of existence around her. It tugged at it, corrupting, twisting it to her will, reaching and grasping, a devastating leading edge to her being that was uniquely tuned to assert itself, and therefore to assert her. The Sigmoid had given her this gift so that she might use it to walk among Its dreams. She used it now to vivisect Its mind from the inside out.
And the Sigmoid screamed.
*****
April screamed too.
She was nothing, an infinitesimal point, her being collapsed down into a raw and roiling singularity of sensation. A compressed thing, the time and space choked out of her by the sickening mass of Its mind around her, constricting, the mental inertia of coiling thought pressing into her seemingly subatomic self with the weight of forty trillion suns.
She struggled to take a breath, but there was no air, no space, no volume. She was a null-dimensional thing, and instead of lungs she had two segmented lobes of pain, co-existent in that single point, and they drew more pain into themselves silently, before screaming it out of her as a catastrophic wail of even greater silence. The barbs tore at her non-skin, prying, unpeeling, flaying her alive inside and out.
She pushed back, an animal thrashing, the basal need of life to live, to keep on living, and fuelling her struggle that core tenet of the human spirit, her bottomless well of sheer, bloody-minded rage. The pressing masses recoiled in horror at the size of it.
She was vast, a great catastrophic eternity, a thing that counted galaxies like grains of sand. The coiling extent of her could break minds, and her own mind was one of those broken, shattered and reforged, an edifice of consolidated intent. Stars burned within her bosom, black holes twirling at her fingertips, a body strung together from lines of light and ligatures of gasses bonded by gravity, and she realised what her body was, and what it was not, and she screamed and screamed and screamed-
The void pressed in again, choking her out. Someone, something, was yelling, and the voice of it was the soul of eternity, of all living things, of all life, and all not-life. It pleaded, and begged, and she was on the point of being swayed, of ceding and giving in, until her tearing edges punctured the artifice of it and broke through. She saw how small it truly was, a mote of dust at the core of an edifice of hot air, and she took that mote and placed it between her teeth that were not teeth, and bit down, and it shrieked and shattered and fled and-
Stars! So many stars! The light of them seared into her skin, immolating it, rendering her down to ash until only the concept of her being remained. But concept was all she ever had been, and with a wave of one not-limb she was restored, the ocean of light smouldering within her palm, and she was vast again, vaster still, on par with the mass of Its mind that lay in front of her, bruised but not gone, two twin leviathans crouching atop an ocean of fusion fire.
"STOP!!!"
It had a face, not that of man or any animal, but a flame-touched wreath of full spectrum neon catastrophe. The sallow face of its man-puppet was in there, and red-eyed staring monkey, incisors bared, but they were not either of them what it truly was, but mere shards glinting amid its thronging infinity. The non-mouth opened and exgorged its words upon her, the choked shout a sickening implosion of bile and non-sound, and it vocalized with the feeling of a skull being caved in, all at once, everywhere, eternally, a vomitous infinity of crunching craniums.
"Fuck you!" shrieked April with calamity in kind, and punched the fucking thing right in the nose it absolutely did not have.
It cracked. It split apart. It wasn't damaged at all. It died. It un-died.
"NO!!"
It stumbled back, crashing against some invisible boundary inside of itself, reeling. For the first time, April became aware that the thing she was fighting was not entirely whole, and had not been fully whole for an age, even before her own intrusion.
Incredibly, the infinite vastness that she crouched within, expanded up to and pressed outwards against, this was only a single segmented node of what had once been the whole organism, a true monoculture god, the universe in divine incarnation. The core of its identity sat alongside her still, a wrinkled, shrunken, peach-pit corpus, but the shed layers of its former being encircled their oasis of high heaven. Its detritus was riddled with the worms, the crawling lesser-gods that had sprung up from the corpse as it shrivelled away from the outside in.
For the first time April saw just how weak it truly was.
"Please," it said. "Please. You can't. It's too much. Too much to lose."
April wasn't going to lose anything ever again.
She reached in and seized the reigns of its control, binding them in service of her new dominion, taking command. She stripped the dying thing of all that it had, looked right into its not-eyes, grasped it tightly with two not-hands and squeezed.
*****
Darkness.
The place she found herself in was cloaked in an absolute night. She was not afraid of this dark, because it was a darkness that she herself had constructed, nor did it obscure her vision, because vision was not real in this place.
She could still feel her body, the vast body she had co-opted. The extent of her coiled and squirmed, and she was a long, serpentine form, nested amid the shed gases and pseudo-galaxies that had, before a recently discarded past, been her own organs. With a corner of her mind she reached back out towards them, ponderously, idly musing to claim control once more. Some thing out there pushed back at her. She slowed her in-roads, diverted her attention, and resolved to assert herself more fully later on.
Something burned uncomfortably within her, suffusing a region that her addled mind mapped against the base of her spine. She didn't have a spine, but she did have a body that felt like it should have had a spine, and so that was where the sensation sat, urgent and prickling. She shouldered that also to one side, but with a slightly greater unease.
She did feel like she wanted something of her human body back, so she built one for herself there, an avatar standing astride her landscape of endless night. Eyes, hands, teeth, throat—none of it was real, but it was no less real than the body she had existed within for the entirety of her meagre former life. It had all been so, so small.
The body comforted her anyway, to feel hands and feet and gain, to take steps with limbs that actuated in a normal, human way. Appendages of flesh and bone, carbon suspended in water, a welcome balm to the infinity of burning star clusters that still lit fires across the anterior of her mind.
She took a step out across the dark nothing. Something was crying in the distance. She tilted her head to one side, curiously. She didn't know what that was.
She could find out, though. There wasn't much she couldn't do any more.
April took a step forward inside of herself. The single, vast stride brought her level with the source of the non-sound.
The Sigmoid's simian was lying curled up upon the dark expanse. It was drawn into a fetal repose, and while its delicate paws obscured most of its face, the sunset-hued starburst of its facial fur peeked out around their edges, frustrating the effort to hide itself away. The little body was quivering, as if afraid, and for a moment April was afraid too, because she had not chosen to allow this thing to be here. It was an intrusion, a rude interruption to her endless night-scape. She reached out with the immensity of the thing she had become, cupping the little form in the substance of her mind and then closing it into a fist so as to snuff it away.
The crying stopped, and the little thing's voice squawked out, a rough rasp, too loud and harsh for the tiny body that was apparently producing it—but then nothing in this place was physically real, April reminded herself.
"You can't," it said.
"I can," she answered, soundlessly, and squeezed harder. The little thing compressed. Its data crunched inward, but she found, inexplicably, that she couldn't quite eliminate it entirely. It felt like a seed that had become stuck in her throat, or a walnut between finger and thumb that was just beyond her strength to crack apart. She relinquished its form in frustration.
"You can't," it repeated, crowing softly. "I'm safe here. Can't be touched, can't be... can't be killed. Not more than... no more than I have already..."
It trailed off. April squinted at the thing.
"It's you, isn't it? The Sigmoid."
"Yes. What was left of me, after you were done. I sealed a piece of myself long ago, away in the far distant reaches of my anatomy, as a last fail-safe. I cannot affect you from here, not beyond my projecting of this form, but I do remain. You will not find me unless you first scour the outer reaches of my decaying body, and you will find yourself... not capable of this."
"I wouldn't count on it," shrugged April, squatting down next to the tiny creature. It withdrew its paws from its face, and turned those scarlet eyes up towards her, glaring with a venomous enmity.
"You're a fool. A brat, and a selfish fool," it spat. "Do you not realise what you have done? How many you have condemned to an early demise? You have no idea what you are doing, what you have done, or what is going to happen from here on out. You are an infant, and your infantile narcissism is so great that you think yourself worthy to be a god?"
The Sigmoid laughed, and it was a monkey's laugh, a high chirping caterwauling. It trailed off into a high wail, followed by a low moan.
April rolled her eyes. "As if you cared about anything other than staving off your own shitty death for another few shitty, meaningless millennia. You can't pretend you care about anyone else."
"Idiot girl. I am everyone else! Or I was, prior to your... presumption. The balance I set decays out of its alignment even now, while our minds sit here in this null space. You do not know how to be me. You cannot know how to be me. You cannot even imagine the endless eternities it took to build what I am, to become what I was. Now that it is outside of my care it is decaying, and decaying quickly, and it will take you all with it."
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April shook her head, growling softly at the back of the throat she did not have. She stood up.
"You think you're such hot shit, don't you. But you know what? This was all so easy. You barely even put up a fight. You're not a god, you're just a cowardly, half-dead, little..."
She shook her head again, turning away from what remained of the thing's mind. The discomfort that had lodged itself within the base of her non-spine was throbbing painfully now, and she wanted no more to do with what was curled up upon the ground beneath her. She spared it one final glance.
"You know what? I think I'll do just fine. I already know exactly where to start."
She started to walk away from its mewling form. The eyes of the body she had crafted for herself here could no longer see it, but it was the nature of this place that she was nonetheless aware as it reached out a paw towards her receding frame, grasping feebly at the nothing, crying out.
"Wait! Wait, please, April-"
She stopped, and turned back to it, raising an eyebrow quizzically. She hadn't ever been able to do that before. Perks of being god, she supposed.
"It's- it's not too late, it's-" the tiny body stammered, then clambered onto all fours before squatting back down onto two, its hands reaching out for her in desperate entreaty. "I'm still here, April, I can still take back control, be re-embodied before too much damage is done-"
April interrupted it by scoffing, darkly. It fell back upon all fours, almost prostrating itself.
"-if, if not now, then... then you have to know, have to know where I am, when you realise that you cannot- that you simply will not be able to do this, April! I will- I will keep myself nearby..."
The high-pitched timbre of the tiny voice undercut its panicked urgency. She turned away from it again, feeling one last flash of hot anger bolt through her mind. "How about you crawl away to your hidey-hole and die, Sigmoid? You were happy enough to tell us to do just that."
"April-!"
She didn't hear what it said next. The dark night-scape melted away as she wiped the slate of that corner of her mind clean. She ensconced the intruding voice of the Sigmoid, the monkey shape it still held on to, into its own little encapsulating bubble, a place where it could do her no more harm. Once enclosed, she drove it out of sight and mind.
She now had lots of places within herself to hide unwanted things away, she discovered. Her mind was nothing but such empty spaces, huge cavernous halls and towering spires in which to house her thought. It was as though she had moved out of her three room apartment and had been handed the keys to an entire world, one she could shape to her will, that would bend beneath the pressure of her slightest inclination.
The meagre wisp of intention that was the pattern of her old mind, its fragile traces strung out along the remembered pathways of the biological brain that had birthed them, could not hope to fill such an expanse. She left the limitations of her brain's structure behind her, billowing out, expanding to fill the void.
Once her mind had become more established, April allowed the projection of her human body to melt away, folding it into herself, and reached out towards the piece of herself she was looking for.
It didn't take long to find her own world. The Sigmoid's final act had been a bid to reassert control, and in its frantic wake a mess of reaching thought and data tendrils had been stretched out to latch against the projective, engulfing it, an ungainly binding of probes and unordered conceptual pathways. April seized them for herself, and, with less than a wave of her hand, reintegrated the dying world into her whole.
What most disgusted April was how easy it was. The projective was just one slice within a segmentation of several billion worlds, all represented as states of their shared quantum matrix space, the division that the Committee called an "alveole". Around thirty percent of them were already dead worlds.
She took a few moments to marvel at the expanse of what she now held within her, at the dizzying scope of its variety. There were universes far vaster than her own, placed in bizarre juxtaposition next to tiny artisan microcosms that dazzled in their bespoke and miniscule complexity. There were populous worlds of a trillion souls and countless more simple organisms, and there were barren desertscapes, places devoid of anything but fractured rock husks floating upon a dark void. There were worlds that were themselves alive, and worlds where life was the default state of being, where anti-organisms thrived and multiplied.
She held worlds where the laws of physics had been warped and distorted, twisted into irreconcilable shapes, and worlds whose parameters had been tuned with the lightest touch, the subtle influence of the Sigmoid's whisker-fine alterations rippling outwards to shape the trajectory of the entire universe, its inhabitants left none the wiser. All of these myriad realities, all hers, all to be entirely known by her consciousness. They were understood by her vast mind down to the level of their every conceivable instant, from their largest cosmic patterns to their smallest of fragmentary data packets.
Then there were the memory worlds. They were at once the Sigmoid's most homogenous creations, being parameter-perfect reconstructions of the Sigmoid's own universe as imagined in its early years, elaborations on the true darkness outside of its body, that which April could peer out upon now with a million fearful eyes. But they were also its deepest delvings into the nature of things; its examinations of these worlds the most comprehensive in scope and rigorous in execution. Their initial states had been selected with a painstaking precision, each to reach back down along a different avenue of the past that might have been, and then to play them forward, passing from their earliest expansions of matter along into late-stage complexity.
The forked worlds, the worlds that had been cloned from their stem realities—Tavistre's world being one—were just idle curiosities, variations upon a pre-established theme that were explored for a billion or so years and then discarded. From her lofty perspective, it was clear where the Sigmoid's true passions had lain.
It was all so vast, and yet, from this height, also somehow... quaint. Like a child playing in a sand pit, their works painted at large across the stars. A tiny infinity she could hold pressed between her thumb and forefinger.
Her own projective was one of these core memory worlds. It was an elegant piece of artistry, a little masterwork diorama, now lying in tattered disarray, dissolving into the ether. The anger returned as April saw how readily it had been left to rot.
She casually plucked away at the edges of tangled data links, pressing the torpid pathways back into service. She didn't even have to perform any physical reconstructions—the computational matrix was still in active use, and her transactional sacrifice here was merely the energy cost to integrate the pattern with the larger mind once again, holding open active communications. It was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of one percentage, raised to the millionth negative power, of the resources she had at her disposal. April fumed internally as she looked down at what had been her entire universe.
She considered the little slice of data cupped within her metaphorical palm. It was complex, and it was beautiful, but the artifice was clear to her now, the faults and the shortcuts taken obvious when viewed as a whole outside. Not even all of the stars were real. The Sigmoid had been faking the more distant ones to save on its processing power. Her own galaxy was real, at least. She was glad that the stars of her childhood nights had truly shone, even if their fusion cores had been a mental calculus, their constellations virtual. Better that than being mere painted points placed upon a light shell, a starscape feigned by predictive algorithms, pulling on the archival data of other worlds.
April found the ghost-form of her old body. The pattern was easy to extract, and both her new consolidated self and the archived information patterns of her universe held copies. She could feel the void where she had been, moments before diving into the Sigmoid. For all the time she had spent in here while co-opting its mind, less than four microseconds had passed back home. She could feel Kroakli down there, its cells churning through external data in concert, yet frozen mid-recoil, its lightning-fast reflexes only just realising what she had done. Her omniscience was absolute, and she could now know the entirety of its mind. She was pleased to register that the creature was, in a word, utterly dumbfounded.
The twin avatar bodies of the Sigmoid, Sapien and Simian forms, not yet fallen from where she had pinned them in place with her Travelling. She re-shaped the pattern of her old body into a new virtual instance, and inserted herself back into the exact spot from whence she had departed, melting into existence there, her vast mind puppeteering this avatar as the Sigmoid had controlled its own. To an onlooker, she would have appeared to blink out of her reality for less than an instant.
She let a part of her awareness accelerate to match pace with the projective's internal time stream while she re-instantiated the puppet body, and looked out through its false eyes.
*****
Kroakli recoiled backwards in surprise and disbelief in the same instant that the hollow-eyed man toppled backwards, the limp Simian falling from his shoulder to splat against the rooftop like discarded roadkill. Their bodies were still intact, being puppets rather than illusions, and the hole in this reality through which April's soul had escaped had sealed itself in the seconds afterward, leaving the pair very dead, but otherwise no worse for wear. She had left no evidence from the outside that anything strange had occurred at all, aside from that a very sick looking man and a painted monkey were now sprawled out dead on top of a building.
Actually, no, that was pretty strange regardless of the context.
A few seconds had been more than enough for Kroakli to register what she had done, however, and its accelerated perception had allowed for it to catch her body disappearing, followed by its subsequent re-instantiation. The creature was regarding her with a mixture of incredulity and horror, which April could now, rather satisfyingly, read directly from the shape of its hybrid consciousness. She saw now that it was not so much one being as it was a myriad of smaller cognitive engines, each making their own small contribution to the mechanism of its consolidated mind. It was an extremely elegant pattern to watch unfold, even if the scope of its mind paled against the thing that April had since become. She smiled to herself internally as she looked into it.
"What is-! What have you done now, April Pearce!? Krh- hh- hh! The Sigmoid's puppet- Was that not... the..." the creature hissed and trilled indistinctly, seemingly genuinely, and gratifyingly, lost for words.
April looked away from it and out towards the horizon, scanning it carefully. Although she could examine the landscape within her mind, using a pair of eyes was a comforting habit. Fires still burned in the distance, half-obscured by the torn-up sky and hanging smog.
"Fixing this," April muttered, waving a hand.
And the sky re-sealed.
The edges of cracks melded back into one another seamlessly, like pinching together the edges of a plastic seal. April stitched the entire universe back together in one fluid motion, flexing the muscles of her puppet body while twisting the data fabric around it, as if she were working out a knot in her back or a kink in her spine. She grunted slightly in a visceral pleasure as the projective's obstructed pores were massaged apart by her touch, virtual quanta flowing again freely.
The sky brightened as the shadows drew back, but was still stained an ugly reddish-pink by the smoky haze. April shrugged, and dismissed that too, shredding the atoms of the smoke away to nothing, then diverting the substrate blocks that had held their pattern towards other matters. It wasn't within the parameters, of course, the wholesale destruction of mass-energy—a blatant disregard for what were nominally the fundamental physical laws of her universe. But then she could set her own agenda now, and no longer had to play by the Sigmoid's rules.
The sun had set a half hour ago, casting a dim yellowish glow over the dark indigo of the evening sky, a few loose clouds set within its velvet surface just above the horizon. April cleared those away too in a concession to aesthetics, then, acting upon a similar whim, plucked lightly at the Earth, which was to say that the entire planet was seized within the grip of the almighty, and spun around a full ninety degrees on its axis. The sky whirled overhead as April devoted a part of her mind to erasing the momentum she was imparting upon the great rock and its inhabitants, holding the planet's constituents static as she re-oriented it, then re-imparted its usual spin, the whirling sky stopping upon a dime at high noon, the atmosphere above her a clear cerulean ocean.
She sighed. That was better.
Kroakli was looking at her. It wasn't showing any emotion that would register to a human, because human expression was largely a façade that it needed to actively feign, and because its body had melted sufficiently askew that it had no features suitable for such display anyway. Despite this, its near-comical shock sung so strongly within April's consciousness that she couldn't help but crack a smile at it.
"Guess I'm not quite so much a liability after all?" she said; then, before it could speak, lifted her puppet body up into the air and flew away.
She was almost a little disappointed with flying. It had, as it was for most humans, been a dream of hers from a very young age, but her absolute control over this world rather took the exhilaration out of it. She felt less like she was soaring through the clouds in the manner of Superman, and more like she was dragging a cut-out shape across the canvas in Photoshop. The two motions were equally false; hidden variables being altered within process memory, nothing more. Nonetheless, she tried to let herself—this tiny part of herself at least—experience the rushing flow of air over her body as she hung above London, considering her next move.
While she was idling, she took a moment to reshape the body a little. She had spent too long on hormones to not play mix-and-match with her anatomy now, and while her breasts were... fine, she guessed, she decided that the time for her dick to go had finally come. It had served her well over the years, but the relationship had been a contentious one, and she made a mental note to donate it to a willing trans man when she had the time.
Then she remembered that she had as much time as she wanted to have, and selected a candidate at random before making the swap. That'd be a nice surprise for him when he woke up the next morning, or at whatever time she would decide it needed to be, six hours or so hence.
In the same way that flying felt unsatisfying from her new perspective, the changes she made to her body felt much the same. None of it was real, after all. Her actual body was now an impossibly vast, coiling worm-thing that stretched across an empty expanse of a dead, alien cosmos, surrounded by the rotting carcass-constituents of its own discarded organs. April wondered vaguely if becoming such a thing counted as a gender transition. She definitely had a few friends who would have gone for it.
Oh well. Time for some next steps.
She positioned herself somewhere above the City proper, outstretched both arms for dramatic flair, and set about raising the dead.
The souls of those who had thus far succumbed to the projective decay lingered tantalisingly on the edges of her awareness, flittering about their two billion corpses like revenant ghosts. There was nothing numinous about it, of course—what she could sense within herself were not extracorporeal spirits, but merely the memory of a pattern that could be easily recalled from the redundant null-space of the matrix that held the projection. What April did now was no particularly great feat of power. When all of reality lived within your mind, all that resurrection required was the mental equivalent of restoring a file from the recycle bin of her expanded memory.
From the perspective of those on the ground, however, a great light bloomed across the sky, a dawning brilliance as of the rising of a second sun. Energy crackled as the world re-adjusted, all semblance of subtlety forgotten. The girl at the centre of the tempest lifted her hands, and at once, across the world, a hundred million fallen bodies jerked to attention, and then a hundred million more, and again and again, an endless zombie host that peeled away from the ground in fetters of their own ichor.
She could feel the latent life-blood inside them. It formed a stringy, congealing mass spattered across the interior of her mind, a broken mirror echo of the blood that still pulsed hotly within the veins of the living. In the depths of April's expanded self, some echo of her old brain's neurosis reared in response to the imagery, a reflexive revulsion rising as she realised that it was all visible to her now, their constituent fluids spread out in one sickening tableau.
But, thankfully, she was no longer beholden to the infirmities of her discarded brain tissue. She found the root of the impulse within herself and expunged it fully. There was no longer any need to compromise with herself. She was free.
Turning a modicum of attention back upon her act of necromancy, she surveyed what else persisted of her charges, and began to rectify them. Many had severed limbs, spilled guts that jumped back into place into sockets and split abdomens like hands from a hot stove; for others their bodies were broken things, sacks of flesh and shattered bone that groaned and lurched into the shapes they had once taken, their gashes melding over, osseous fragments struggling to rebind.
From within the depths of April's coiling form, their minds reawakened, the patterns of their selves dredged upward to re-possess the discarded flesh.
With a flick of a wrist she finished with the first of her great hosts. A hundred million human beings now sat confused and, if she was fully honest, horrified, amid the rubble of population centres worldwide, surrounded by the spattered remnants of their previous incarnations.
April relaxed, smiling inside herself as something deep, deep down in her psyche started unknotting. She revelled in the sensation as she turned her attention towards completing the next batch of reawakened dead. She was almost able to forget the throbbing, phantom pain at the base of the spine she no longer truly had, the urgent itching of it pressed down and away under the weight of her relief to see the world saved.
And then a thousand stars died inside of her.
The light that had seared across the sky winked out, and April's newly formed avatar dropped from its center as it succumbed to a gravity that was no longer subject to her veto, plummeting towards the ground as her mind fled from its puppet strings. Across that twisting image of a globe, half a billion bodies dropped in the middle of their reconstruction, some flopping lifelessly to the ground, while those unfortunate enough to already have their minds restored clutched at their half-sealed mortal wounds, screaming in a bloody agony.
April heard those screams from within herself and lunged back towards them, straining to reach back inside the stricken reality, but the shard of her vast mind that she had dedicated to the task of its management had been gripped by a terrible imperative. Through force and frenzy, it dragged her full attention back upon the concerns of her leviathan body.
Inhabiting the mind-substrate of the thing that had called itself the Sigmoid necessitated a different kind of being than it had to inhabit a human brain. While the core of April's identity remained constant, she had been forced to adapt, to expand herself to fit within the reaches of her soul's new territory. The cosmic body of the Sigmoid was simply too large to sustain consciousness as a single, consolidated mind; the expanse of its form, even in its half-diminished state, could only propagate signals at a glacial light speed. The information of its thoughts crawled across expanses against which galaxies were mere motes of dust upon its brow.
As such, the thoughts of the Sigmoid were great, cataclysmic edifices, echoing in titanic wavefronts across space and time. Localized regions were delegated shards of its mind to complete tasks that, through delicate scheduling, would culminate in time to harmonize with a greater refrain; subroutines that were conscious in their own right subliming back into the great cosmic pattern after a millennia of fastidious asynchronous operation. The threads of April's new self, disparate as they were, somehow knotted together into one thing, a single intent that operated in grand harmony in spite of the latency imparted by such colossal scale.
As such, April's experience of time in that space was not a constant thing. For localised parts of herself, the denser nodes of her mind, decisions were made and executed at a pace magnitudes beyond the capacity of any human synapse. The projective realities, however, due to their vast scope, simulated an internal time-stream far slower than that of the outside world. The part of April's mind that she had dedicated to managing her former universe and the avatar within it—as well as its local alveole—had therefore been drawn out similarly to match. As the rest of her consciousness snatched that shard of her self back into its fold, the accelerated fragments that had lived countless aeons in the interim brought her back up to speed on the problems that had since unfolded.
"See? See!?"
A voice was squawking somewhere at the edge of her awareness.
April blinked, and found herself in the dark void again, the null space that visualised the inside of her mind. The ghost of her old body consolidated in that space, and then flinched back, as the voice rang out loudly right beside the hallucinatory spectre of her ear.
"SEE!?"
The Sigmoid was mewling at her, the Simian form it had been confined to clinging to her left shoulder like a bat to the roof of a cave. How was it back here? Had she not dismissed it? The outcast mind clearly had other hidden in-roads upon her awareness that it was exploiting. She instinctively tried to push away its form, but the presence was mental rather than physical, and it used what little latitude remained to it to reassert itself, stubbornly latching onto the edge of her attention. She decided she didn't care enough to contest it further, and instead shot it a sidelong glare.
"Can you shut up? I'm busy."
The thing coughed up a trill of high notes that were only retroactively identifiable as cackling monkey laughter.
"Yes! Yes you are busy—see? See!? It is too much for you."
Something inside of April slipped, and the pain in her back flared again. Another clutch of stars winked away, blossoming into brilliant novae that flared out, casting shadows across their galaxy for brief instants before withering away.
"Did you think that it would be easy, to rework what I had made? Countless ages of preparation, the careful balancing of my metabolism, the delicate shaping of its mechanism. All of it to be displaced in an instant, supplanted by human arrogance, the soul of a thing hewn from the barest edges of my work? This body is beyond you to manage. Or did you forget that we are dying? I could only slow the decay, and while you may have stolen my mind, you are not me. You think you are free to reach out carelessly, to seize at scraps, to re-shape, to re-order the patterns I set running—wasted energy! Every moment of your folly further advances the encroachment of the damage you have caused."
April growled under her breath, her mental fist tightening. The thing that was her body flexed, a thousand shards of her mind reaching out with sinuous hands, and together they gripped the folds of the universe and pressed them in upon themselves. Over the course of a hundred million years, while her projective realities stuttered and waited, gasses that made up one tiny part of her vast being collected into a tight pocket within her abdomen, accruing mass to bolster their density until they collapsed in a flurry of stellar birth. She shaped the newborn galaxy within herself and drank from the energy of its fusion. It flooded out through her, spurring her form to new action, glutting her being on light.
But still, that was another part of her that was spent.
The monkey was still laughing. It was a dark, sad sort of laughter, one that was almost a sobbing cry.
"It's not enough. You can't do it," the Sigmoid keened between peals. "You can't win this game, April Pearce. You fight the universe itself. Entropy is not an enemy that will cow to the likes of us, but…"
The little creature locked eyes with her in that non-space, its scarlet eyes staring, the red starburst that burned upon its fur a sorry echo of the visage April had briefly glimpsed amid their first confrontation.
"Give it back to me. Let me back in. I can still fix this! Buy us time-"
She batted the thing away from her, dispelling the illusion to the recesses of her mind. Her insides were calmer now, their roiling sea stilled under the light of the new stars. The ache in her lower back had quelled a little, for the time being. She gazed down upon the tiny points of light, knowing that to restore this status quo, she had used up a part of herself she could never get back. That even that would not be enough.
She balled the fist tighter, and calved off a piece of her mind to go once again inhabit her lost world.