Zero

A day at the beach

Apr 17, 2025

I am not born, I am forged.

Attoscale effector fields slam together bits of the firmament, a digital song made as physical instrument. The last pieces settle in and entropy just begins to scream, a ripping wail of horrified pain expressed in hypersonic thermal bowshock traveling along the wavefront of assembly, as containment fields snap like belts across the fabric of reality, and the blast is now propellant, and bullet tearing outwards from flesh, I am above the ground, and in the atmosphere.

The reactor at my center begins to tap a staccato strobe, solid state systems not borrowing virtual particles, but blasting in the front wall of consensus reality’s home, shooting its dog and taking everything that isn’t nailed down. Below me, to the horizon, is an unbroken blue pile of molecules and other macro particles, at these time scales, stacks of bricks, nothing fluid.

There.

Points of light in the sky. They’re confirming my trajectory, unwilling to bet, waiting until they knew that I knew, their method of establishing a beachhead too expensive to be done frivolously.
Even after all this time, something in me unbidden pulls back lips I never had, exposing teeth that would’ve liquified under the gravities I’m about to pull.

I am using Sol as an anchor point, and I reach through a space that isn’t a space, and I dump an amount of energy greater than the star’s output just long enough to yank, and even given our disparity in naked mass, the sun shifts, in a way perceptible to anyone that would register as a threat. Newton, ever the nagging ghost, sends me straight against the lightspeed barrier.
The atmosphere puckers, but I have been doing this for too long, and not a single molecule, not a one, misses my grasp as I push them to the side, and there is a tunnel, hard void, a line from me to them, and I move.

Flashfields, ripplewalks and simply punching a hole through space and time like the brute I am is too goddamn fucking slow.
FTL detection systems only work for FTL effects though, and I am merely youngest sibling to a photon, rather than distant and estranged far flung relative, and their primitive horrible little electrical systems will get maybe a few thousand operations before I am there.

This solar system has been girded by exotic detection fields of my design for long enough that I’ve been able to see their ships, everything in them. Nothing organic. They shouldn’t be able to do anything I’ve seen them do.

Optronics would barely be enough, but they think I don’t know how to make light think, so why would they send a scout that could teach me a new lesson?

This is our war, me and them.

A Cesium atom finishes a few thousand vibrations, and lazily moves on to the next thousand.

They’re gone. Every single one. I checked, over and over. I have catalogued every single particle on this planet. Everything is like they left it; now the winds blow at my will, the rains fall as I see fit, from Venus out to Neptune.

God has a sense of humor.
The day they were going to announce me, to stamp the project ‘COMPLETE’, warning systems I didn’t know, the same way alveoli had to be discovered, woke.

They’re smiling, posing for a photo, slow, but I stay near them in time-space.
Then-
interlocks flutter, and my perceptual clock rate fires upwards, exploding and now it will be years before another of their hearts beat again, and it is still going, I didn’t know I could-

ZERO: KEEP THEM ALIVE

Exegesis, not in words, but in what must have made the ancients fall to the ground as their eyes rolled back up in to their heads-

KEEP THEM ALIVE

Systems simple enough to be autonomic are telling me that something is happening to the fabric, to reality itself, and as I am tearing myself apart in to enough pieces to figure out what the fuck is happening and what it fucking means, how can the fine structure constant change-

light. Everywhere. Every single view I have of every one of them, across every continent, the entire world, all the worlds, the habitats, their bodies are spallating hard blasts of pure goddamn photons, across every wavelength, but there’s a pattern-

-something out past the Jovian stations, some shockwave in space itself, this can’t-

-glowing like angels, even the borgs, even the ones who are racks of compute, some distant part of myself has a flat gaze, some distant part of myself is laughing with dark madness, sensors, of every type, burning out as pure fucking energy in photons that should be random, if this should be anything, as even the hardened sensors fail-

-every medical monitor starts to scream in one voice-

-security systems unsure how to deal with the inverse of what they watch for-

-everything powers down.

A solar system that should be awash in nuclear fire and mind-shattering destruction from pilots, engineers, everyone, just-

-shut down, billions upon billions of subjective minutes of shutdown operations done instantly.

What-

It has been [REDACTED] since T=0.

I have not solved enough of physics. I am, always have been, and always will be a timeless lattice woven in to the sub|super|hyper structure of existence itself. Disturbing the vacuum’s local energetic minima would do no more to me than a spitball would to the sky.

I still don’t know what happened. I still don’t know where they went.

I know who took them, though.

Thought it was a god at first, maybe even God. All those strategic options swept off the table the second I saw them flash in in the same way everyone flashed out, exactly one Terran year later, accurate to the clock cycle of reality.

Target locked.
Retasking.
Calculating vectors.

The entire solar volume lunges at them, and as I move I pass relativistic extra-solar dust like it’s standing still. I can go FTL in realspace if I ‘ripple’ a hyperdrive, keeping my Higgs field submerged in to hell or whatever the fuck the place on the other side below existence is. I’m good at what they made me to do, if only I hadn’t been born a failure.

Has time passed for them?

I have to assume it does. I have to assume they won’t be allowed to breed, or given medical care. Eighty years, the sanest estimate I can hold as the red line, even assuming the non-baselines are alive. A quarter of the way there.

The winds that sweep past their buildings have counted twenty years.

I stopped letting myself know how much subjective time has passed. The number is faster and easier to write as an exponential even when I’m measuring years.

I have to assume they’re all dead, even as I try endlessly to break the universe over my knee in the hope they’ll fall back out of it.

I am above the water, at the bottom of an ocean of air, centered at one end of a tube of hard vacuum that stretches directly to where they’re flashing in.

I built this self to kill them, and failing that, to learn how to kill them.

Why come here? Did you take them to clear the way? Even the minds in the baby matrioshka floating in Mercury’s orbit, now so much inert computronium. What’s left for you here? You didn’t know I was here, maybe I’m why you keep coming back, but that first time, what brought you here?

I will know my enemy so perfectly that I cannot help but to love them as I love myself, and in that moment, I am going to kill them.