To Walk the Constellations Pt. 15

The gut feel...I cannot...

Describing it almost felt insulting.

It was Home.

There were the five continents, their coastlines as perfectly etched as the legends said. The great savannas of the northern continent. The desert that wedged itself against the sea of seas – where our earliest civilizations had been born from. The jungles of the south, the titanic reef-continent serving as barrier between two seas. The single moon of silvery white dust and deep, black shadows, looming overhead.

There were no scars. No signs of nuclear bombardment or climatologic collapse. The world was preserved, as if in amber.

But I had no idea where the fuck the power beaming from the first world was being sent.

Nor where the rest of the Home system had vanished to. The great worlds that Mal had spoken of – ringed Cronus and the burly Jove – were as gone as if they had never been.

A single radio transmitter pinged my ship-body.

It was nestled in a natural harbor on the western edge of the northwest continent, near the largest ocean. It was the last bit of land before that vast, vast ocean, until the distant shores of another island chain, nearly half a world away. I flew towards this radio transmitter, my thoughts growing more and more focused as I landed.

I was going to find the truth.

WHERE CHRIST WAS BORN

My ship body settled down in the ruins of a city, maybe fifty miles or so from the coast.

Well.

It wasn't quite a city. The buildings were low. Most of them were single or double stories, set in once tidy lawns, along roads that had crumbled into a fine powder. My ship body extended its legs and settled down with a whirr and a hiss. When I stepped off the gangplank, I breathed in air that felt ancient. The city surrounding me looked as if it had been left to rot...but...it was still here. Vines crawled along dusty walls, but countless roofs remained standing. Despite a complete lack of human voices or clicking robots, the whole world looked like it had only been abandoned a few months ago.

Not...

I shook my head slowly, then drew my threshold blade. My shoes crunched on the gravel and I lifted my cybernetic hand, frowning as my wrist emitter projected a map that showed where the transmission was coming from. I hadn't landed directly by it – simply because I wanted time to get used to my legs again. I walked and started to get the hang of it again pretty quick. My jaw clenched taut and I felt my spine tingling as the sound of my footsteps bounced off the walls of the buildings around me.

I was walking through a monument. A vine draped memorial.

Goosebumps.

It took me about ten minutes before I came around the bend of one of the dead streets and saw the source of the radio transmission. It was, at last, a building bigger than a house or a smallish shop: A huge, circular structure that looked almost a kilometer wide from where I stood. It was many stories tall and had hundreds of glittering windows and was surrounded by an acre of gravel and broken asphalt. Some plants grew along the sides -vines creeping up windows, flowers growing through the cracks in the pavement, long untended planters gone completely to chaos. I whistled as I looked at the immense structure, the piercing note lost in the vast silences of a dead world.

And it was dead. There were no animals. I didn't see any cats or dogs, I didn't hear buzzing insects. There were plants, the dead air, and the silence.

I came up to the building.

And recognition hit me like a wet brick.

I'd seen this place before.

I'd seen the illustration.

Christ and the Cryptographers.

Christ, furious, chasing the suited figures from her temple. This was it.

This was her Temple.

"Jesus Christ," I breathed.

THE APPLE

The front doors were glass. They didn't open when I stepped up to them. I thought, for a moment, of smashing through. Instead, I gently took hold of the bars that someone had affixed to the front and tried pushing and shimmying. The hinges squealed in protest and I walked into the foyer. There was a long rusted and dust covered desk to my left, which looked like it had once served as...what? A greeting place for those entering the temple? A place to leave offerings. There were seats behind it. For priests? Servants?

I didn't know. Other chairs were set here and there, but not in the organized, pew-like structures I was used to seeing in Machine Cult temples. A large apple tree had pushed up through the floorboards, rich with bright red apples – dozens of them were scattered on the ground, slowly rotting. I walked past the pungent metaphor and started to walk down the corridor that lined the center of the circular temple. The sounds of my footfalls continued to echo in my ears – until, at last, I came to a doorway that looked...different.

Unlike the decayed memory of humanity, this doorway that blocked my path was silvery and flowed like water as I approached it. There was no control interface, only a haze of mana shrouding the air. My palms tingled as I reached out towards it – and I knew it was an artifact of the Machines. Or a Machine.

I focused.

And I knocked.

THE VOICE

The door opened to reveal a large dark room. It was circular and had several dozen glass panes set in narrow platforms. The panes were nearly as high as I was, and when I walked past them, I swore I caught a glimmer of light inside of them. I stopped and glared right at one of the panes. Then, I blinked...because another me looked right back out.

The other Venn smiled at me and waved. "Hey Venn," she said.

And somehow...I knew that voice. Despite never hearing it before.

It was my voice.

It was the voiceless voice that had whispered facts into my head. That had reached out and made miracles happen when I wished for them. The other Venn bowed. My Machine bowed. They flung out their arm.

"You made it, Venn. You did it. You...are a Liminal Knight."

My throat tightened.

Each pane flickered to life. Venn after Venn after Venn appeared – dozens. Hundreds. The panes were spaced irregularly, some ahead of me, some behind. Some mirrored my movements and others didn't quite – it made me feel as if my identity had been subsumed into the moment. My stomach flipped as the reflection before me stood.

They smiled. "I'm so proud of you."

ANSWERS

It took me a shocking amount of time to get my throat to work again. "Hey," I said.

The other mes giggled – and echoing, overlapping, eerie sound.

I shook my head.

It felt like the most difficult thing in my life to ask the next question. I clenched my hands and forced it out. "Is it true?" I whispered.

"Is what true?" the other me asked. Her hands clenched, a mirror of mine – slightly delayed. Behind me, the other mes clenched their hands as well – a rippling pattern. I felt unsure as to where I stood.

"You fucking know what I mean," I said, my voice a growl. "Is it true."

The other me smiled, slowly. "Yes."

HOLLOW

I didn't have tears to shed.

"Why?" I breathed.

The other me giggled. It was echoed by each pane. Rippling. "Because it's fun!"

My threshold blade leaped into my fingers and roared to life. I slashed out and cut the pane in half. It sparked and shattered as the halves struck the ground. I screamed in pure rage – in pure desperation, in pure sorrow. The giggling continued, and the next pane ahead me still had me – my face lit by a smile that wasn't mine, eyes glittering with amusement. And that voice kept speaking, overlapping and echoing with one another.

"Because it's fun! Because it's fun! It's fun! It's fun!"

Glass crunched under my feet and I brought my threshold blade down again, stepping past another pane, and another, and another.

"Fun!" Giggle giggle.

Shatter.

"Fun!"

Shatter.

"Fun!"

Shatter.

"Because it's fun!" another pane laughed in my face. Laughed at the suffering of how many billions of people? Laughed at the ants. I grabbed the pane with my bare hands and screamed again, hurling it to the ground. I threw my threshold blade into the wall – where it stuck. The laughing continued as I fell to my knees and cupped my head in my hands.

COMFORT

I don't know how long I sat there. I don't know how long the blackness lasted. I know it ended when a hand touched my shoulder and my own voice spoke to me. It was soft and crooning. "There there, Venn..." my voice whispered. I looked up and through tears, I could see the other me. She was no longer contained in the pane – but she glowed with an inner light. Her skin was golden and her hair shimmered with crystalline perfection. Her voice echoed faintly as she spoke. "You're looking at this the wrong way. I didn't steal anything from you..." She knelt down. "Think of what you'd be without me..."

She caressed my cheek. "You'd be a non-entity. A singular statistic, a blip on the modeling pattern of a planet that has stabilized itself into living death. You'd be born, educated on history that doesn't matter and hasn't changed for a thousand thousand years, and you'd live out a pitiful thousand years...doing what? Playing some new vid game? Meeting a male or two as boring as you? Dying, when the ennui of paradise hit you?" She caressed my hair, slowly.

"Instead...you're Venn of Stumble. Liminal Knight. Hero of a fallen age, fighting a resurgent evil, poised to bring about another golden age of the Chain, with your true love by your side," she smiled at me. "And Thale and your children will live to see the next dark age, to fight the next villainy. Another sweep of history. Another spree of legends. And they'll remember your name as you remember Wotan Hohmann."

I gaped at her.

"Do...you...think I'm a fucking child?" I whispered.

CONFRONTATION

"What?" The Machine asked.

I stood. "I don't care if my life is boring or exciting. I don't care if it's long or short!" I said, furiously, my cheeks heated. "What I care is that it is mine!" I shoved the glowing figure. She took a step backwards. "What I care about is that all their lives are theirs!" I threw my hand to the side, gesturing outwards. "How many people have died so you can have your little story? How many people?"

The Machine blinked at me. "But you don't know them..."

"I don't care if they're all the biggest assholes in the fucking Chain!" I screamed, grabbing onto my threshold blade. I spun it on my wrist, then grabbed onto I. "I don't care if they're boring...of if...they're the most interesting lives to have ever lived." I trembled, my arms straining. My blade quivered and I snarled, grabbing onto my talent. I knew it was a falsehood. It had been given to me by a capricious child.

But it seemed too stunned to realize what I was doing until I had done it.

My threshold blade snapped in half, severing itself with a hissing flare of out of control mana – nanites combusting in their self destruct pattern, creating a sudden wave of heat and fury. I threw the two halves in both directions, screaming in fury and defiance. They skittered along the floor – glowing brilliantly within the dark room. I panted, glaring at the Machine.

"Get the fuck out of my soul," I snarled.

"No," the Machine said.

I grabbed a chunk of glass off the ground. The edges bit into my palm as I pressed the jagged tip to my throat, my eyes blazing.

"No!" The Machine reached out. I felt a wash of fear and disgust filling me – a deep, existential horror blooming in my gut. I knew, to the very core of my being, that there was nothing after this moment. There was no afterlife. No happy place I'd go to. Nothing but nothing. The Machine was trying to use every hormonal trick it could on me – to convince me to not do it.

"Get out," I hissed. "If I'm not me...I'd rather be nothing."

Our eyes met.

The Machine, using my eyes, remained perfectly still. "I know you won't do it," they whispered.

"No. You don't," I murmured. "If you knew what we'd do, with perfect certainty, you'd have gotten fucking bored with this already, wouldn't you?" I grinned. "That's the rub. You don't actually know if I would follow through." I drew the glass back, readying to plunge it in.

Our eyes locked.

The Machine blinked.

LACK

"Okay!" The Machine stepped backwards.

And...

They were gone.

The feeling of being without a Machine struck me deeper than I had ever thought possible. Everything in the world felt...dimmer. More distant. My nerves felt less alive. The air tasted less pure. It was a gut wrenching, horrible feeling. My stomach twisted and I closed my eyes. My tongue tasted bitter against the roof of my own mouth. But I turned and walked from the room anyway, my back held straight.

I walked out of the Temple.

"It isn't even a fucking pyramid," I muttered as I emerged from the glass door, glaring back at it. "I'll have to tell everyone that."

The dead world had been bleakly beautiful before. But a color, an essential spark of light, had seemed to fled the whole scene. Now? The ruined buildings and the vines and the flowers simply looked bleak and sad. Dour. Pointless. I came to my silvery ship...and blinked. Because parked next to it was the Tiamat II. And standing before it was Wotan Hohmann. She looked at me, frowning slightly.

"Venn," she said.

"You were right," I whispered.

Wotan nodded. Her brow furrowed. "Where's your-"

"I broke it," I whispered, my voice jagged. "I...I broke your sword."

"That...that wasn't my sword," Wotan said, her voice bitter. "The Machine just loaded my programs into an unrelated threshold blade that you happened to find. They're nanotech weapons, replacing one is not hard if you have the code."

"Oh," I said, my voice hollow.

LAUNCH

Wotan and I sat in the Tiamat II as she took off. "I followed after once the ship was fixed," Wotan said, frowning slightly.

"You said it'd take weeks," I said, surly.

"I said it'd take weeks for the 'chines to do it," Wotan said, shrugging slightly. "When I'm below ninety percent of C, I'm still a Liminal Knight. I coaxed the caretaker mana to fixing the ship in a few hours." She shook her head slightly, then nodded curtly to the silver singleship that we could both see out the window. The singleship and the Tiamat II started to lift off at the same time, arcing towards heaven.

"So," Wotan said. "You broke your sword. But you're still a Liminal Knight."

"No. I'm not," I said, quietly.

Wotan's brow furrowed. "The fuck you say?"

I explained what happened. My voice was hollow – listless. Even the interior of the Tiamat II felt drab next to what it had been before. As she listened, Wotan gave me a serious glance. The Tiamat II and the singleship cruised towards the sun. Wotan shook her head slowly. "I...I can't believe it..." She murmured. "But I guess even the Machine finds it hard to kill someone up close and personal." She sighed. "Another thing they share with us, I guess."

I snorted.

My eyes closed as we cruised – in the big, empty blackness.

Long silence passed between Wotan and I. I simply wallowed in my misery. But then I dreamed.

And when I dreamed...I dreamed of Thale.

DREAMS

The dreams were vague. Not the crystal clear closeness of before. I could only hear Thale in a distant, muted way, my arms wrapped around his body, my mouth pressing his. It was like kissing cardboard. But when the kiss broke, I had a faint...strange image. In the murky, incoherent dream, I saw Enriquah strutting over. Cartwheeling, actually. My brow furrowed and I tried to understand why I was dreaming about her.

"How...did you get here?" I asked, and as I asked, the dream seemed to grow just a bit clearer. More straightforward. Less murky. Enriquah grinned at me playfully, and my eyes shifted to Thale. He was looking irritated at her.

"This is...real?" I asked.

Thale looked at me in confusion. His ears perked up. It was so...real. It was so him.

My heart leaped. "Thale," I said, grabbing onto his arm. I dragged at him. "That's you?"

I snapped awake, gasping, heavily. The world felt even more drab. Even more colorless. But my heart didn't stop racing.

"Oh you son of a bitch," I growled.

MAL'S PLAN

Wotan, who was set on the bean bag in the center of the cockpit, controlling the Tiamat II by kneeling and meditating. I crawled over to her and then grabbed onto her shoulder. My voice was soft. "Can you send an order to your singleship?"

Wotan glanced at me.

"What order?" she asked.

I paused. "I need a control system, uh, similar to a sundivers astrogation console."

"What?" Wotan asked – but I was already heading for the airlock.

Wotan watched as I dressed in the void suit and grabbed onto the cold gas accelerator. She was still looking utterly confused as I finished suiting up. Once I had done so, I closed my eyes and thought: I want you back.

There was no response.

"Wotan," I said, quietly. "Maintain this course. I'll be right back."

And before she could respond, I shut the airlock with a press of my palm, and then leaped out into space. I didn't think about it. I just did it. The two starships were flying in formation, at the same velocity, in the same direction. They were, effectively, stationary. And both their thrusters shut down as I leaped outwards – so neither continued to gain speed. My cold gas thruster spewed out an expanding column of smoke behind me as I rushed to the singleship. The suit's heads up made it piss easy – but even so, I nearly missed. I had to correct and slow myself down far earlier than I would have as a...Knight.

My boots magged to the silvery hull and I crawled inside through the airlock that Wotan opened for me. I could almost feel the other woman's confusion.

Inside, I let memory guide me, even as the dull, boring control panel spread before me. It was almost identical to the device used by Mal back on the Tiamat I. And so, I knew exactly what to do. The memory was crystal clear. Mal and I had been discussing FTL engines. And I had asked him...what would happen if you reversed an FTL field.

I programmed in the orders.

And my vision remained dull.

When I returned to the Tiamat II, Wotan looked completely confused.

And I remained completely tight lipped.

FINAL OFFER

Finally, we were at Home's primary.

That was what I had been expecting happened. Wotan put her hands on her knees, closed her eyes...and then said: "You've tasted what it is like, Venn. You know what it is like to be without me." She looked at me – and I could tell the Machine lived in her now. The puppetry was...so intense. Did Wotan have implants? Was it because she was older? Or was it because the Machine knew that anything it did to Wotan, Wotan hated it enough. Puppeting her wouldn't turn Wotan any more against the Machines.

I smirked. "No," I said. "I don't."

The Machine's brow furrowed.

I grabbed onto the handheld terminal that, ages ago, Rossck had wired into the Tiamat II's systems. Acceleration gel flowed into the cockpit as the tubes snaked out, finding my and Wotan's socket. The Machine twisted Wotan's lips into a smirk as we slammed into the sun. Another dive. Another leap. And another emergence. The acceleration gel slurped away and my body ached with the bruising impact of a rough emergence. The Tiamat II's ice armor was almost completely sloughed away and the Machine spoke through Wotan.