PREVIOUSLY:
[CURRENTLY]
Faster than even a mythical creature should be able to fly, even accounting for my orbital velocity, the… dragon, I guess, is gone over the horizon.
I have exactly enough time to start to be grateful that I at last have an opportunity to orient myself, mentally and physically, before all five of the ships enmeshed in a web of degenerate star matter alloy that is my self are yanked towards the surface of the planet.
As we move, I abruptly realize that passive scans, expecting the obvious and running at the absolute lowest priority, had somehow managed to miss the impossible.
Based on LIDAR returns, the planet I’m falling towards is about a hundred times Terra’s diameter, which is a whole new flavor of impossible. The planet should collapse under its own fucking weight, at this size, assuming the same density as Terra, this world should have a surface gravity of over 100g, yet somehow there were clouds in the sky, and before something grabbed the ships, we weren’t falling at a hundred gravities towards what couldn’t possibly have been Terra.
We hit the Exosphere, idly I tighten my grip on my strange prizes, re-task another part of myself to start gently aerobraking, I see a large lake in a forest, as good a place as any to come down, and a water landing means that anyone who doesn’t see me come down won’t be able to easily figure out where I landed.
Zero structured emissions from the world below me in the neutrino, radio, or other boson bands.
Whatever pulled the ships seems to have stopped now that the ships and my self are in the process of re-entering the atmosphere, and nothing contests my gentle steer towards the center of the gigantic lake I can see.
The faintest whisps of air pressure start slamming in to me. The Thermosphere comes and goes. The Mesosphere comes and goes. The atmosphere is now trying to scream, but the surfaces I’m presenting have geometries such that I’m not making a sound. Another few thousand years of this and the thermal load might be too much, though.
Around the middle of the Stratosphere, I flare, my entire body a few-molecule-thick parachute entombing five strange shuttles as a central under-slung bola, and my surface area increases at a factorial rate until my velocity drops below the speed of sound, and then with no fanfare I reform in to a bullet, before hitting the lake’s surface and slipping in to its depths without a ripple.
A fish has the bad luck to be centered in my path as I enter the water at hundreds of kilometers an hour, and it explodes, an ultra-fine gore cloud swirling in my wake.
Sorry, little guy.
[BEFORE]
I am in the airlock, waiting for the decon cycle to finish bathing me in enough radiation to flash-fry a granite boulder. On my shoulder blade, a fragment of meta-biology screams and flares incandescently as the decon cycle starts sweeping various neutron flavors.
Nasty little fucking things have the kind of semiotic camouflage that evades any sensor we’ve come up with. The current theory is they’re organic biological memetic payloads and actually hijack the qualia of the observer to delete themselves from perception, and do who knows what else. Our solution was just to have me and the other Sticks stand in an impervious box with so much standing energy that you can almost set your cup down in midair.
Thankfully, the perceptual-jacking trick is so they can deliver a payload of protein sequences that work as a universal zeroday for all nucleic acid life, which does jack and shit to me.
Some smartass nicknamed this species of xenos the Borg, after an old earth show, and it stuck for a time, because what are the odds that there’d be more than one eldritch and horribly advanced alien species that was at best indifferently hostile towards humanity?
1:1, for the record. Somewhere around a half-dozen, we switched to using the Hebrew alphabet. The first xenos we met, a race of deeply post-biological organic life, became Alef. A fragment of one of them was what made the mistake of trying to hitch a ride on me.
Bet was a Von Neumann swarm that seemed to take starlight as a personal insult, they weren’t anywhere near us yet but we had discovered them on telescopes. Watching them just eat stars reawakened Old Religion throughout the system. There was something amazing in seeing a being that would be a small-g god to baseline humans screaming about repentance and salvation. Unlike Alef, the Bet had never communicated with us, and we weren’t stupid enough to go and try waving at them.
Gimel was a race of sophont silicacious life. They liked to terraform planets in to worlds of flowing magma and sulfurous atmosphere. Their terraforming method consisted of nuclear carpet bombing, apparently it produced isotopes they considered snack food, and it was compatible with any planet that had an active core and mantle flow, which included all the planets humanity was compatible with as well.
We evacuated the colonies back to Sol after Gimel took Alpha Centauri.
First time we went clear-eyed in to a game theoretic lesson as a species. We still don’t know the exact death toll from detonating the star, but not a one of us regrets it.
Dalet was some kind of negative mass entity from hyperspace, which we think was drawn to us by discovering and using FTL. We still hold a yearly vigil for everyone on Ganymede, and the interdiction field keeps the tear where the moon used to be from filling the surrounding light minutes with screams.
Omnicidal insect hivemind.
Carnivorous nebula.
Zayin was the closest to humanity in body plan, but communicated through aqueous protein solutions, either aerosolized or, for high bandwidth, through contact.
We tried a single diplomatic mission.
Their ability to communicate through proteins was apparently augmented such that they could rip information out of an alien species’ mind, through enough contact and fluid transfer.
Retirement and a decade and the woman who was the first person to survive first contact still wasn’t right.
Everyone who had been celebrating finding life that wasn’t inherently ontologically toxic or inherently dangerous to baseline humanity froze, cheers dead in throat, and with silent sighs the war machine gently moved the bright-eyed optimists back behind the wire and got to work.
Chet was a living cognitively hazardous memeplex, and after the third viral outbreak humanity generally agreed on xenocide as the sane default position for the species.
The optimists used to hold a treasured if kooky position in society, dreaming of visitors coming in peace, but these days they’re just a memory from history lessons.
I imperceptibly shake off the maudlin introspection, and walk down the ship’s corridor, gravity finally restored now that we’d caught and killed what we were looking for.
[CURRENTLY]
At the bottom of a lake, I shift myself and the ships around until the first one I grabbed is centered in my mass.
Time to do that scan I’ve been putting off since before I fell out of the sky.
Around me the water glows as high-dimensional cerenkov radiation gently drips from my skin as photons are slammed back down in to 3space, the local metric serving as overworked traffic officer.
The ship is exactly what I thought it was, and yet somehow not at all what I thought it was. It’s like a primitive alien with no knowledge of space travel, much less computation, was shown imagery of a mid 21st lunar shuttle and told to make a replica.
Like a biologist’s wire mesh turkey.
I am starting to suspect I may be an idiot.
[BEFORE]
My boots click on the deck plating as I pace the living area of our quarters. The environs are spartan, functional, photographs scattered almost as afterthoughts, framed, sitting everywhere there’s enough area to be borrowed or stolen from the self-evident spartan purpose.
The door hisses open and she walks in, stopping a few steps in, kitchen to her left, the quarters mostly open except the adjoining bedroom separated by a door.
There’s the usual warmth in her eyes at seeing me, but slight worry, she knows my pacing.
“What?”
I grimace, “We should run away.”
She blinks, totally and utterly flat, “That’s not funny.”
“It’s the funniest goddamn joke I know, c’mon let’s run away, find a cozy little asteroid and while away the millenia screwing our brains out.”
Her lips tighten, in a crisp motion she turns to her left and walks in to the kitchen, grabbing a glass of water that is entirely emotional support.
She takes a sip.
“They’re not going to care that we’re stressed out and complaining, but you need to shut the fuck up-” I start to try to interject, and she doesn’t let me, “-ACTUALLY shut the FUCK up, and recognize that even if we could run away, even if we did, the problem wouldn’t fucking change. The fucking Mem won’t pass over the old retired couple.”
Like a pint, she shoots the remaining water, then places the now-empty cup down on the alloy counter with enough force that the flash-printed monocrystal creaks, somewhere outside of baseline hearing.
I am trying to not be angry. I know better than to think or say any of the things shouldering insistently at a door inside of my mind.
She sees something in my face, and the tension leaves her like a vented airlock.
Like she’s approaching a stray cat, she walks up to me, and puts her arms around me, and I slowly lean in to her, and I feel some weight I always forget I’m carrying leave me, just for a bit.
“I hate this,” I offer as a half-mutter in to the hair streaming down her shoulder.
“I’m sorry. I love you,” she reminds me.
“I love you too,” I admit, almost begrudgingly, “it’s not your fault.”
We end up sitting on the floor, my cheek still on her shoulder, and we just stay there for a while.
[CURRENTLY]
I drop all pretense of stealth and scan the four remaining ships, so much mass reduced down to twists of space time, every single planck of information extracted and catalogued. Anyone paying attention on hypercomm is gonna notice the flares, but, I’m starting to think I’ve been running around with a baited hook in my mouth this entire time anyways.
None of these ships could’ve ever flown under their own power. The magnetic fields in the reactor alone are a spaghetti mess that shouldn’t even work to produce basic fusion except it was.
Nothing would look out of place to a baseline, but I can see flux lines the same way baselines see the edges of shapes, and that was not a reactor, it’s an impossible explosive toy that looks like a reactor.
I get a sinking feeling, retract myself in to a point, start diving down through rock seeking somewhere deep and shielded so I can think.
I’m not myself, rather than being a mind stitched in to reality itself, I’m a mind stitched in to an impossible and for all intents and purposes truly indestructible physical framework, but, even still, I am less than what I was.
Because of that, the fact that I just leapt eagerly in to a trap hasn’t entirely dawned on me until right about now.
Wouldn’t you know it, that realization is the exact moment that yet the fuck again, I am ripped sideways through space, but now I’m pretty sure not time, but it’s different, and not as intense, and this isn’t like any FTL method I know of but it’s definitely FTL, the stars in the sky above me now tell me that I beat quasar signals here just a bit.
In front of me are three men and one woman. I detect nothing other than baseline humans which have the strange slight differences in basic physical constants as everything else in this weird fucking place.
“What the fuck,” the woman at the back of the short and wide triangle formation states, translation systems built for thinking rocks handling the language of what looks to be a baseline human with just a single simple sentence.
Under the open sky above a dirt road in a valley I’m being held in the air by absolutely no method I can understand.
Gravity is applying normally to me but it just isn’t happening. This is impossible down to the level of being difficult to even state in language, and trying to figure it out is giving me what I imagine a headache is.
“Disgusting abomination,” the man at the front, holding a wooden stick with its glowing end pointed at me, which I reluctantly accept has some relationship to my floating, says under his breath, before he raises his free hand and his glowing staff and apparently thus me as well, as I rise further above the dirt road. Like he’s in a stage play, declares “SHOW YOUR TRUE FORM, MONSTER!”
I’m on the verge of laughter before something seizes me, around what feels like should’ve been my cervical vertebrae, that I don’t have, and it twists and how does this hurt-
I blink my eyes, and look down at my hands.
I’m standing on the ground.
I’m wearing my body from training.
I’m still made of the same material, and it can do this, but I didn’t do it. I’m not something as trite as nanotechnology or any other primitive toy, I can’t be hacked, this is degenerate meta-matter akashically locked to my self, there is no possible way for even the most powerful psychic to unlink my volition from my me, we designed this after fighting the Mem, and yet it has happened.
This might be a problem.
[LATERALLY]
{online}
{sandbox initialized}
{loading known data}
{extrapolating}
{insufficient data}
{scans to military power}
{loading}
{insufficient resources}
{resources allocated}
{running}
Prophets were unsightly, wrinkly disheveled and disgusting as a rule, but when they spoke, only fools didn’t drop everything and take heed.
When the prophets said a threat would come from the great beyond, the high councils of the land convened, elected a higher council, and fired up the thinking engines.
One thing led to another, and now she, Inquisitor Deborah, was standing here in this miserable woodland, staring at what had just been some horrific shoggothic abomination of constantly splitting changing and growing masses, tendrils, looking at one moment like agonal breathing, at the next like a glinting puddle shattered and spread through the air.
Jim, the arrogant prick, greasy unwashed hair and beard framing his face like a halo, made a show of reverting the monster to its true form, for what else could it be except some kind of shape-shifter?
Except before them was what looked like a woman of indeterminate age, hair not grey, eyes heavy.
Deborah cast a scouring eye over the figure of the woman, feeling a fleeting sense of pity as someone like her wouldn’t be fed to one engine or another, no, she’d be used in other ways. The woman fidgeted with her hands almost as if she had heard Deborah’s internal monologue.
A deep part of her thanked the moon that she had the gift to be a Seeker, old habit suppressing the cold dread.
The woman’s eyes focused, as if she was just now seeing them for the first time.
Deborah’s instincts murmured in the back of her mind, and she cast her Sight upon the monster-now-woman, and she frowned.
A void. Not a lack of Talent, a void-
[CURRENTLY]
There’s a consistency to the alterations of the local metric. There’s an extra force here, but it isn’t anything I can describe with bosons or even the more exotic interactions undergirding subatomics. A meta-force?
I start trying to ‘poke’ the force in question, even in this body I can exert enough energy over a small enough volume to make things ring, resonate, to find values to sufficient decimal places, but nothing rings back where it shouldn’t, just that the tone is wrong.
For another instant, from everywhere and nowhere, I feel something watching, and like before it’s gone like a dream, internal backups failing checksum to my current cognition only on the memory of that feeling. I flag this as I finally let reality tell me I’ve forgotten and give up on the highspeed loop of rediscovery.
On a hunch, I start passively inferring if the fundamental constants are consistent in the world around me, and just like that, I find four human-shaped hotspots, the man at the front who I think was probably why I was levitating glowing like a cutting torch, the three behind him like bonfires, not in any emitted energy or emission I can measure, but in how their fundamental constants don’t match the environment around them even more than the environment doesn’t match me.
They should be exploding with more energy than a nuclear weapon, scouring the planet down to the lower mantle layers, likely even damaging the fabric of space time slightly. Something like this shouldn’t even be possible, at all, even hypothetically.
This is the kind of impossible that would call a code black across everyone, everywhere, immediately, and humanity would’ve bunkered all the way to the inner system, hardened the belt and everything outwards in to military matrioshka layers, throwing everything we could in to building guns that could build guns, not stopping until we figured out how the fuck even, and how to kill whoever was doing this very much.
We’re a stubborn family of species, but we do eventually learn.
The woman standing to the left and behind the man in front with the staff with the glowing orb on top does something, and her flux changes and I feel the flux immediately around me change as the sandboxed simulation of her lurches-
Absolutely fucking not.
I can’t even guess how they’re doing what they’re doing, fuck everything about being right here right now. Without thinking at all about what I’m about to do, I use every method at my disposal to increase the magnitude of the second order and higher derivatives of my position to the absolute highest value I possibly can.
Complex organic molecules that normally work as backup nano-scale fusion batteries shoot out of what would be pores on a baseline, only on surfaces such that their detonation will net out to the same vector as the multi-thousand-gravity warp field I’m about to run in naked atmosphere. I’d go higher, but I don’t want to do more than nuke the surrounding valley area, I still have no fucking idea where everyone went, so cracking the planet’s surface for a thousand miles in every direction wouldn’t be the best move. The complex clothing and social structure means they have some kind of organization, which I can and will find, so reducing the ones in front of me, which know where I am (here) and can do god fucking knows what to the forces of reality, to glowing ash, shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve been here for tens of minutes and I already fucking hate this place.
[LATERALLY]
-instantly the entire world is a screaming burning roaring infinite inferno of light, and Deborah’s autonomic spell reflexes kick in, containing and redirecting the explosion in to the best available area, the sky, and her mind churns with identification and analysation routines as the power of the blast horrifies her.
A magic user of this power should be shining like a star yet the thing that looks like a woman may as well be thin air, even as fire that could burn a hole through molten rock hammers her kinetic barrier, drawing her reserves to strip the momentum out of the heated-to-plasma atmosphere before the energetic normalization system even touches the scalded atoms.
If she were alone this would be a larger problem, but in front of her Jim folds his defensive systems under her control as to their right Bill and Charles synchronize to create a rapid-fire heavy artillery working.
In front of her, Jim ties his essence to the monsters, creating a pointer for the rest of them to unerringly target.
Deborah smiles slightly, the adrenaline of combat, the rush of power, a pleasant background hum as her mind mind splits off subsidiary homunculi to manage the spells that will let her capture this oddity.
If she’s lucky, this thing will turn out to be strong enough to kill Charles before they bring it to be Adjudicated.
[CURRENTLY]
The four people who are on the verge of becoming my captors, or worse, face-tank a naked warp field and a person-sized fusion drive torch.
This would be less of a problem had I gained any momentum, but, again, something is holding me in a way that every single sense I have, and I have dozens, is telling me simply does not exist and isn’t happening, aside from a variation in the universal constants in an envelope around me. Not in the air, no, that would be too simple, in the metric the air resides in.
A thousand effective gravities of acceleration and I have not moved a single millimeter that isn’t accounted for by the motion of the glowing staff the man, Jim, according to my translation system’s default settings, is keeping pointed at me. His lips are beginning to move, and the fact that any motion he’s making at all is visible to me at the speed I’m running means I’ve been blowing off what is definitionally a near-peer as I played research physicist a meter above a road that has what look like honest to fucking god cart tracks and hoof prints in its dirt.
This is definitely a problem.
This is magic. I don’t have a better word that wouldn’t also be wrong.
Spooky action at a distance that violates every single fucking law of physics I know, and I had thought I’d known all of them, and it’s happening because a guy is pointing a glowing stick at me.
Clearly they survived the ass-end of what should’ve been enough thrust equivalent to send me to somewhere near ten percent the speed of light, so, they have magic protecting them, too.
Of course they do.
Shit like this is why we quarantined Ganymede’s orbit.
Two seconds have passed, objective time. Bill and Charles appear to be waving glowing sticks, staffs, I concede, to create a gigantic spinning circle whose plane of orientation and center appear to be aimed at my center mass.
I have killed living thoughtforms, I have punched hyperspace entities in the fucking mouth, I am not dying, here, to fucking wizards.
I am ready to read the next instalment of this immediately, please and thank you.
You have mentioned how difficult it can be to receive constructive criticism, and I'm just some lady from the interwebs, but here's my two cents:
Clearly, you know how to write, and you do it well. (That almost shouldn't need to be said, but I'm sure you've also had the experience of looking through some "bestseller" and being appalled by the quality of the prose.) I personally really like the scene/time shifts, and your lyricism and refinement. Your prose is tight and robust.
I appreciate that you "show don't tell," but I suspect your chief complaint from a wider commercial audience could be something like "I don't really understand what the character is," or "I don't know what's happening." To be clear, there is a lot I don't understand either, but I trust the author [heh] will reveal more as the story unfolds.
And anyways the magic is in the not-understanding, the wondering, the liminal space between the words, the worlds, the mysterious nexus of creation and imagination. Please keep doing what you're doing! Do more of it!
Tl;Dr bro you got any more of them dopeass stories??
❤️